Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  The news from Richmond Park turned dire. When Linda called Lesley for an update the following Monday, she learned that the pond was almost completely frozen over. A few adventuresome children had begun skating on the thickest ice around the edges, frightening the birds into retreating to the bushes until after dark, when they returned to their tiny dwindling patch of slushy surface water. “In a day or two,” Lesley said, “there won’t be any water left.” Linda barely slept that night. Around 4:00 A.M. I awoke to blearily notice light leaking through the crack of the closed bedroom door. I found Linda on the couch. “I’ve been up since two,” she told me. “I can’t stop thinking about that duck.”

  After work the next day, I took my boots off on the porch rather than stomping off the snow on the mat in the living room and quietly set them on the floor. I opened the front door gently enough to avoid triggering the oversize jingle bells still tied to the door-knob and shut it with the same care. I expected my exhausted wife to be in the throes of a ferocious afternoon nap. Instead she whooshed in from the kitchen enveloped by a beatific glow. “Bruce just called!” she cried. “He caught Richie last night. The Canadian got away. It turned out he could fly.”

  “He caught Richie?” I marveled. “How?”

  “Bruce had a net of some kind,” she told me, though presumably not the two-person pond-wide variety. “He was able to get right out onto the ice and snuck up on them when they were sleeping. The Canadian flew away, but get this. When he took Richie to the animal shelter, it turned out that they already had a Canadian goose, so they put Richie in the same pen with the Canadian, and he feels right at home. It’s a miracle from the Lord!”

  “What’ll happen to him?”

  “They’ve got to decide at the animal shelter. We might get him, so keep your fingers crossed.”

  RICHIE STAYED AT the shelter for just over a week while the staff veterinarian evaluated his health. After passing the treadmill test with flying colors and promising to watch his cholesterol levels, he was first unleashed on an area farmer who occasionally took in orphaned animals. But Richie turned out to be one duck too many for his flock once his penchant for fighting with other males emerged. We agreed to take him and try housing him with our females, figuring that a large White Pekin couldn’t mate with our smaller Khaki Campbell females any more successfully than Walter could sire another rabbit with Bertie. We did wonder whether a feral duck accustomed to the unfettered grandeur of Richmond Park pond would adapt well to drab captivity. His most recent interactions with humans had consisted of them chasing him with or without a net, and we worried that he might not tolerate us performing duck-pen chores at close quarters, especially when one of us could conceivably be singing “Camptown Races” as she worked.

  Richie’s impressive gooselike stature and radiant white plumage immediately intimidated both our hens and drakes when we introduced him to the girls’ side of the pen. Stewart and Trevor muttered dire threats from the safety of the opposite side of the wire. The females danced away whenever the behemoth took an awkward step in their direction. The girls’ nervousness infected the geese, who maintained a respectful distance even though they stood a full head taller than the puzzled newcomer. As the day wore on and important matters such as quacking incessantly for ice-free swimming pool water supplanted lesser concerns, the girls came around to blandly regarding Richie as just another duck. For his part, Richie decided that while freedom had its place, bountiful females and plentiful food were what he really wanted in life.

  With a dollop of trepidation, we released Richie and the girls into the forty-inch-high snow pack that covered our backyard while we changed their water and replenished their scratch feed. Instead of bolting for the perimeter fence at the sight of Linda dragging out a hose from the basement, Richie dutifully stayed close to the girls as they paddled through the powder and obediently followed them back into the enclosure when their exercise time and our tolerance for frigid wind blasts mutually expired. He meshed so easily with our other ducks, I wondered if he hadn’t been pining for a stable home environment during his seemingly carefree months at Richmond Park.

  “What was he even doing there?”

  “He can’t fly,” Linda said. “He couldn’t have gotten there himself, so somebody probably dumped him.”

  That meant we were building a community of waterfowl misfits.

  Our main misfit, Hector, accompanied Linda on a late-winter visit to Dr. Fuller, who delivered the bad news that the growth on the Muscovy’s back was an inoperable tumor rooted to his spine. I took the information in stride, figuring that any negative consequences loomed far off in the future. The previous winter, Dr. Fuller had x-rayed our friendly female parakeet, Rossy, and discovered a tumor tucked inside the recesses of an air sac that was responsible for her intermittent breathing difficulties. Sometimes in the evenings when she grew tired, her tail flicked with every breath and she wheezed loudly enough that we could hear her in the next room. Still, she remained active and happy for a full year. On her last day of life, she flew to my shoulder as usual during dinner, snuggled against my neck, and pecked at a scrap of bread, weak but apparently otherwise untroubled. If Rossy could survive for months carrying an insidious tumor deep inside a vital respiratory organ, then Hector’s external tumor didn’t strike me as immediately life threatening.

  His freezing to the ground earlier in the winter had apparently been an omen, however. He began to stumble and move around more slowly. One spring morning shortly after the lavender crocuses had replaced the last patches of ice on the ground, the girls streamed out of their pen to nibble greedily at the damp backyard dirt. When Hector didn’t follow at his usual diffident distance, Linda discovered her favorite duck stranded inside the pen, unable to stand up. By tensing his wings and using them as crutches, he managed a degree of locomotion across the gravel floor but not enough to get him anywhere. The hot pride in his yellow eyes dared Linda to feel sorry for him, and he thrashed unhappily when she picked him up and carried him into the house. We commandeered Walter’s fenced-in enclosure in the basement, wrapped straw around a sheet for use as a bed, and kept Hector as comfortable as possible. He disliked being indoors and might have tolerated the porch with better humor, but Linda worried that it was too cold for him.

  Linda’s friend LuAnne brought over a small laminated picture of St. Francis of Assisi with a prayer to the saint printed on the back—we called them “holy cards” when I attended Blessed Sacrament School—and hung it on a ribbon over the convalescent’s pen. “It’s been blessed by Father Andresiak,” she told Linda. “I brought a bottle of holy water, too.” While Linda held Hector in her lap, LuAnne looped a rosary around the duck’s neck, sprinkled him with the holy water, and prayed with my wife for his recovery. As always, Hector loved receiving attention from Linda, though I suspected that LuAnne’s Catholic rituals perplexed a duck whose disdain for water had always ruled out baptism.

  Despite their prayers, Hector grew alarmingly weak over the next few days and finally stopped eating his scratch feed. I wrestled with the question of whether we should euthanize him, while Linda held firm to her belief that as long as he didn’t appear to be suffering, he should be allowed to live out his final hours. I knew she was right, because Linda made sure that Hector’s last impression was of her love for him. If any duck died happily, that Muscovy did. While I went to work as usual, Linda spent a large part of the morning with Hector. “I could tell by the look in his eye that he wasn’t going to make it through the day,” Linda told me later. She placed him outside so he could enjoy the sun. When he tried to flap his wings and acted agitated, she picked him up and he calmed right down. “I sat back down and held him for a while,” she told me. “He gave a shudder, and I knew that he was dying then.”

  I was incredibly touched by Linda’s dedication to an animal that most other people would simply have ignored, if you could ignore a duck who was busy calculating the most auspicious angle for latching on to your leg with his beak.
We were comforted by our friends, especially Linda’s friend Deanne and our pet-sitter Betty MacKay. The previous fall, while we were on vacation, Betty’s husband, Wayne, could hardly believe his wife’s description of our hissing, panting duck and had come over to our house to see the beast for himself. He had immediately hit it off with Hector, Betty had told us, and had gotten a kick out of the way the Muscovy followed him around the yard. When Linda phoned Betty to break the news that Hector had died, Betty paused. “I sure hate to have to tell Wayne,” she said. “He was just crazy about him.” I can’t think of another duck who had as many admirers as our twenty-five-cent Hector, and I just hope that the next world is solid enough for him to bite.

  Other backyard developments helped distract us from grieving too much for Hector. Our Richmond Park duck, Richie, entered the spirit of spring full throttle and began pestering the females. We tried talking Stewart and Trevor into sharing their space with the newcomer. Though they reluctantly agreed to give the lad a break, they failed to factor in their own elevated hormone levels. Feather tugging fights erupted within minutes of Richie’s entry to their pen. “They’ll sort it out and be best buddies pretty quick,” I predicted. Instead, tempers flared to such an extent that interloper Richie hung back near the feed dish while the Khaki Campbell brothers duked it out between themselves. The fights disturbed the females next door, who lodged a formal complaint with their landlords by boisterously honking and quacking their disapproval. The only remedy was returning Richie to the harem in which we figured he was effectively a eunuch. To be on the safe side, we zealously discarded the females’ eggs as a surefire method of birth control. The last thing we needed was yet another duck.

  Because ducks cannot crossbreed with geese, we never bothered to examine Liza and Hailey’s nests of infertile eggs, and that was our mistake. We permitted the two sisters their motherhood fantasies and let them each enjoy their nests. We only took away their eggs if one broke and interfered with the natural perfume of the pen—or if the geese grew obsessive about their nests and refused to leave them even to eat. Liza was getting close to this point when she started clinging to her nest with unusual vigor. We saw so little of her that I started to fear she might be having an aspergillosis flare-up.

  “Liza?” As I bent down and peered into the doghouse, I confronted her thatch of white tail feathers. “Liza, are you okay?” I touched her between her shoulders. A soft double honk answered me from the shadows, but she showed no sign of budging. “Come on, you need to get some fresh air,” I told her, as I pressed my hands around her body and eased her through the portal, being careful not to bump her head as she extended her neck and shot me a surprised look. Once I set her on the gravel floor, she tooted indignantly and for a moment seemed poised to pop back into the doghouse. At the sound of an answering honk from her sister out in the yard, she changed her mind and trundled through the duck-pen door. As I followed her, I thought I heard a tiny unfamiliar voice. I stopped and surveyed the trees around the pen and the dense thicket of thorny bushes that leaned over the back fence in hopes of snagging me. I prided myself on knowing the songs, call notes, and squawks of two dozen or so species of birds that visited our property throughout the year and wondered if an exotic warbler was about to reveal itself. But when the briefly detected peeping didn’t recur, I put it out of my mind.

  The next day Liza stayed behind once more while Hailey and the ducks fanned out across the lawn. Deciding it was probably time for her eggs to disappear, I urged her off her nest with a few encouraging words and a firm two-handed grab. After I had pulled her out of the doghouse, I was shocked to find a black and yellow puff of fluff racing back and forth and cheeping for the goose. I immediately let go of Liza. I could hardly have been more surprised if Howard, our dove, had laid an egg himself. Back inside the house, as I nursed a cup of coffee and tried to figure out how Liza had ended up with a baby, I remembered that just before Liza had taken possession of the doghouse, Marybelle had occupied it for a few days. Hidden among Liza’s baseball-size eggs had obviously lurked the fertilized product of an unholy tryst between Richie and our brown duck.

  Too excited by the notion of a goose rearing a duckling to fade into my usual midafternoon nap, I planted myself in the living room, where I could keep an eye peeled for Linda’s return from a housecleaning job as I scanned the pages of Entertainment Weekly in vain for any dish about Pat Sajak and Vanna White. When my wife’s station wagon finally lurched into the driveway, I rushed to her door and greeted her with a malicious grin.

  “What?” Linda demanded. “What’s going on?”

  Grinning wider, I crooked my finger. “There’s a surprise for you out back.” Dropping her purse and keys on the front seat, Linda followed me out to the duck pen and gasped when I reached into Liza’s doghouse and presented her with a squirming, buggy-eyed duckling with enormous black feet and stubby gesticulating wings.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Linda squealed. “Where did that come from?”

  “Liza hatched it,” I told her. “She’s the surrogate mother. Richie’s the father.”

  “Is that your baby, Liza?” Linda asked the goose and got a happy honk in return.

  I wouldn’t have dared grab a duckling from a mother duck, but either Liza trusted me, or she knew that she was merely acting as a nanny. She didn’t try to bite me as Chloe once had and guarded the little one from the other females more with her sheer bulk than with any aggressive behavior.

  Timmy, as Linda named him, definitely needed guarding and stuck close to the goose both in and out of the pen. Female ducks may be fanatical protectors of their own brood, but their maternal instincts do not extend to other ducklings. Any time Timmy stepped too far out of Liza’s shadow and a female was in nipping distance, he was in danger of receiving an unkindly poke from a beak. I thought that Marybelle might recognize the duckling as her own and volunteer as baby-sitter, but she was as ornery with him as the others.

  I didn’t blame Marybelle for failing to recognize Timmy. Within a couple of weeks, he shot up out of pecking range until he stood only a tad shorter than his dad. By no stretch of the imagination did his coloration resemble either of his parents. His blotchy black and yellow down covering had yielded to jet-black adult plumage, with splotches of pure white on his breast. His feet, legs, and bill were also black, in contrast to Richie’s orange and Marybelle’s olive brown accessories. We had seen a duck like Timmy at Jacob Lester-meyer’s farm and wondered where he had come from, since none of the other petting zoo/meat department ducks were black. Now we knew that black-and-white was the hallmark of a White Pekin–Khaki Campbell domestic mallard mix.

  It didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But it seemed all of a piece with the complicated comings and goings of a year in which we had found and released a dove, given away a pair of Khaki Campbell mallard males, taken in a rabbit, lost a turkey to a mysterious animal attack, lost our parakeet Rossy and Muscovy Hector to cancer, gained a White Pekin duck, and ended up with a mixed-up duckling that had been brought up by a goose. In days gone by, if anyone had asked me if I owned any pets, I could readily rattle off their names. To answer that same question now, I would have to excuse myself, find a pen and sheet of paper, sit by myself for several minutes, and try to sort the problem out.

  CHAPTER 13

  Hazel Eyes

  It hardly seemed that a mere eight years separated my love-hate relationship with Binky from my embrace of all manner of feathered creatures and a few furred ones. I had gone from railing at a rabbit who hid placidly on the other side of a plasterboard wall to barely raising my eyes from a joke in Reader’s Digest to mumble to Linda, “It sound’s like Stanley’s chewing up the cupboard door again.” Where our pets were concerned, chaos just didn’t bother me the way it used to. The ceaseless demands of Ollie had long ago raised my threshold for tolerating noise and property destruction, while matching wits with bunnies, doves, and ducks had taught me the foolhardiness of trying to exert my will upon even the most se
emingly innocuous creature. In the end, the intensive bother of dawn-to-dusk animal care had become so deeply embedded in my daily routine that from time to time it all felt like coasting.

  And along the way, I had lost a good deal of the squeamishness that had dogged me since earliest childhood, when I had chickened out of fishing out of revulsion at having to touch a worm. When I was a teenager, a mouse nibbling on an issue of Playboy hidden behind my dresser had kept me awake in terror until I had finally collapsed in exhausted sleep, or possibly fainted. In my thirties I’d used a pencil to transfer a clammy washcloth from the bottom of the bathtub to the laundry basket, lest I contract the smorgasbord of bacteria, mold, and mildew it had cultivated overnight. Nursing animals through sickness eventually sent most of my fussy phobias packing. My résumé included squirting anti-fungal medicine down a goose’s throat; draining bunny abscesses; swabbing Betadine on the torn-up back of a ring-neck dove blind-sided by our parrot; massaging the bright yellow oil gland above a Muscovy duck’s rump; clipping bird wings, nails, and parrot beaks; trimming rabbit teeth; plus administering assorted injections, nasal drops, eyewashes, ear medicine, and antibiotics. Bathroom humor still made me blush, but assisting with animals’ bodily functions had become second nature, as I routinely picked up, sponged off, and sprayed away animal droppings of all sizes and shapes.

  It was tempting to credit the Zoloft with these attitude adjustments, but its effectiveness muffling the chattering of my nerves was dwindling over time. A sick pet was often enough to bring on the morning shakes. And occasionally I would wake up in the middle of the night and begin worrying about the animals in general. What was I doing with so many of them? Why did we keep taking in new ones? Three rabbits, two cats, three parakeets, a dove, two parrots, three turkeys, two geese, a canary, and nine ducks at last count were just about what Noah had started with, and he never brought his animals into the house. Once I started fretting about the pets, I would lie awake for an hour or more trying to shut off a deluge of nagging concerns that in full light of day seldom seemed serious. After a few months of this, I suggested to Dr. Rick that I might need a slight boost in my Zoloft. Rather than lecturing me again on the questionable long-term effects of the drug, he surprised me by immediately agreeing.