Lambsquarters

by Barbara McLean

  I find solutions though, am ever innovative. The cat food now sits in an old diaper pail with a fitted lid wedged by its own handle. But the pail can’t sit on the floor. Instead, I suspend it from the ceiling, hang it on a stretched-out coat hanger from a spike in the beam. I bump into the pail and have to detach it each day to feed the pusses. I have to explain it to visitors, this white pail embossed with a golden nursery lambkin that has the nose of a dog and the eyes of a rag doll, swaying in the middle of the room.

  Other feeds are more difficult to protect: the oats in bags and bins, powdered molasses, laying mash. I feel like a locksmith some mornings breaking the bonds of the tinned and bungeed feed as the rooster crows, the hens squawk, the sheep bleat with impatience for their breakfast. And so I resort to the trap.

  For years we had just the odd invader, and a borrowed neighbour’s trap would do. We’d use it once, transport the offender to barren land in the next township and let it go. But we’ve become, I believe, the great raccoon repository for the province. The rural Rocky dump. City coons have come calling in slick summer suits in recent years, delivered in traps from the wilds of Etobicoke and Scarborough, Rosedale and Forest Hill. I’ve purchased a trap of my own.

  But if, as I suspect, these are swaggering city slickers, plantigrade on pavement as well as turf, they are also trap-wise by now. I picture them working my barn in pairs, one holding the door of the cage while the other ventures in after the marshmallow. Sometimes perhaps one goes it alone with a ballet step, a hind foot elevating the spring-door for eventual exit while the front hand extracts the bait. It can take days to catch one. I find the barn cycloned, cans tipped, grain spread, cat bowls toppled. And the trap tripped and empty. No bait, no coon.

  Squirrels are easier prey. One March I transplanted an entire colony of red squirrels in a week’s trapping. Peanut butter was their bait. They walke d right in—to their immediate regret and unending protest. Local folklore has it that a squirrel must be moved at least nine miles away and across a river. I sent them in all possible directions in this multi-streamed county. The great squirrel diaspora. They will be telling their grandrodents of it now and for ages to come. But they’ve stayed away. Made room for an infestation of chipmunks who live in the ground at the base of the squirrel-den cedar trees and pop their heads out of nowhere like periscopes, dodging dogs, tempting fate.

  Chippies run along the six-lane highways of the rail fence, the dog in pursuit, changing lanes faster and with less warning than a black Trans Am. More than once, I’ve found one trapped in the top of a hollow log, the dog on hind legs sniffing her doggy breath into the hole, prepared to park there for as long as it takes. But rarely are chipmunks caught. In the barn their luck lessens with the feline hunters, and more than once I’ve found nothing but a tail lying on the feed room floor or draped over a cat bowl.

  But coons outflank cats. And most dogs too. There are legends about farm dogs dispatching masked strangers, and I’ve seen young coons shaken by their necks to their death. But an adult coon scares most dogs. Even coon dogs stop at treeing, satisfied with their role of finding and directing, but leaving the dirty work to the guns.

  I can’t kill a coon myself. I see them waddle away from their mess, amble up the stairs to the mow if I visit the barn of an evening. Easy prey if I were armed. But I can’t do it. My father taught me to shoot a rifle when I was twelve. We shot targets and tin cans, and I got pretty good, shouldering the butt, setting the sights, easing the trigger. But I don’t use a gun here. Wouldn’t think of it. Can’t do it.

  Coons have anthropomorphous behaviours that make them difficult to hate. Their feet have five fancy toes, their hands five nimble fingers. Inquisitive and daring, they are thoughtful with their food, washing fish in a river, examining morsels, turning and investigating each tidbit before eating. The raccoon’s English name is distilled from a Native word, derived from the Algonquian family of languages, variously recorded as arakun, or arocoune, arathkone, aroughcun, rahaugcums, rarowcun meaning “he (or she) who scratches with his (or her) hands.” In French it’s raton laveur: “young rat washer,” “young rat who washes.” The raccoon’s walk is as delicate as its wash—hunched, like a daddy-long-legs planted high and round.

  One spring evening I saw a coon sitting on an unused chimney on the house. A nest. (Confirmed later by a climb with a flashlight, which illuminated five pairs of small eyes shining up through the dark.) I looked roofward on that first spotting; she looked down. No fear. As if she knew her safety was assured by her batch of babies. Bold, she ambled over the gables, nibbled on the wooden windows, scratched at the shiplap. And when asked not to, she merely stared, considered, and crept away.

  Working late in my loft, catching the last of a June day that streaked orange tongues of sunfire on my desk, I was aware of a presence. There are small Gothic windows on each side of the loft, which open on our shingled lean-to roofs. On the east side was the coon. Standing on the shakes, her hands gently pressed against the screen, she was peering in with myopic nocturnal eyes. Her belly was that of a nursing mother. Six teats, pink, erect, with matted fur around them, pressed flat by suckling babies who would be full now and sleeping in their own lofty nest. She stared hard at me. Mother to mother. She dared me to evict her.

  For six weeks she tried my patience. And ate my house. I thought perhaps she chewed the wood for its savour, so I put blocks of salt on the ground at her entrance, a low point straight under the sunroom roof, which she climbed down slowly every evening, peering through skylights and windows on her way. The tenant nodding to the landlord. I yelled at her, lobbed a football in her vicinity, threatened, pleaded and cajoled. She stared with big black eyes and went on chewing. Ignored the salt. On hot evenings the babies appeared, lined up along the upmost edge of the chimney bricks, stretched languidly and slept. Caught the cool breezes from the west. Like lodgers in undershirts, swilling beer on city porches, belching, oblivious to neighbourly decorum. I don’t know if they played on the skylights while they lived here. I’ve heard they use them for slides in the rain. A water park for the wild.

  Finally they all came down for a move to larger quarters, for an introduction to barn raids and cornfield parties. Things calmed down for a time. No further gnawing of house wood, no terrorized cats, no grain upset, no early corn torn in the garden. The raccoon family must have headed off to the woods, the streams, the lush cornfields in the distance. Grass is greener.

  But by midsummer they were back. With a vengeance. With a grievance. And nothing could keep them out of the garbage cans of feed, the sealed bags of grain, the leftovers of feline kibble. Every morning the barn was a mess of flung containers, spilled metal mouths spewing forth onto dirty concrete, muddied and manged by ring-tailed critters. Out came the trap. Marshmallows disappeared as fast as I could set them as bait, and almost no one was caught. Occasionally I’d get one. Hunched in the trap, looking deceptively small and sweet, but heavy as heartache to lift and smelling rank and musky and vile. I put the trap on newspapers in the back of the station wagon, opened all the windows and headed out to someplace that needed coons. Across a river. Nine miles of scent glands to freedom. Freedom from and freedom to. Each time thinking the problem was solved. Each time having a few days’ grace before the next attack.

  But then the raccoons crossed the line. They tore open the chicken pen. Pulled back the wire with deft hands. Woke me with the squawking screams of panicking poultry and made off with two of my buff Brahma beauties, prizewinning hens just into their lay.

  Worse than wolves, the vermin took more than they needed. They were greedy, relentless, violent. And when I spied a great large male asleep in the Russet apple tree in broad daylight, I called a friend who has a gun. She came. All my pacifist ideals blanched as she shot him out of the tree, finished him off (“they don’t die pretty”) and left me with the carcass, already attracting flies, dead on its back, bloating.

  I hauled it onto the trailer behind the tractor, drove it to t
he back of the farm and dumped it before the kids got home from school. Body disposal. Unworthy of the coroner who would be sure to find it and determine the cause of death as acute lead poisoning. To the head. Raccoon patriarch. Paterfamilias. Dead on his back.

  There are hard choices on farms some days. If you have livestock, you will have deadstock. But that raccoon has been my only kill. My neighbours would be horrified to know that I trap coons and let them go: I contribute to the menace. But I’ve discovered peanuts. If they’re wedged into the very inside edge of the trap, the beasts have to go right in to reach them. Peanuts will not be coaxed or rolled like marshmallows. Peanuts stand their ground. They get their man. They get my coons.

  All is quiet now. Christmas coons den down, sleep in soggy skins rank with the odour of the unkempt. Matted and dozy, they appear on warm days but do little harm before burrowing back into fouled and fousty hollow trees. But like butterflies fresh from their chrysalises, raccoons will emerge when the days start to get longer. Sleek and crisp, their masks saucy come-ons, their tails like those of lemurs, they’ll start the cycle again. Females will mate with handsome males, find my barn, investigate my chimneys, drop their young and feed on whatever they can steal. And we will continue our game of cat and mouse, trap and trick, and for the most part, we will co-exist.

  POULTRY PODIATRY

  THE CHILDREN ARE ON HOLIDAY, and the chickens, like the residents of Cairo who go to Alexandria for the season, are in their summer residence. In Egypt, Cleopatra’s home lies underwater, drowned in time and washed away in memories, which only surface in the odd flash of gold. Here, the chickens’ Cairo is submerged, awash from a leaking water bowl, making chicken-shit soup in the barn. The coop has been reinforced since the coon capers, Fort-Knoxed to protect my hens and their gilded eggs, and the raccoons have retreated from the echoing blast of the neighbour’s rifle. But a leak has formed a silent and sudden spring on the floor, and the chickens have been removed to higher ground, to a cooler place, to their Alexandria.

  As they strutted around their winter residence with its flooded floor, their feet gathered balls of hardened guano, big as eggs. Clogs. The chickens could step dance. Each day they were more heavily shod, higher booted, platformed, pattened and stilettoed. Some feet looked tidy as riding boots, others messy, laces dragging, tongues hanging out. The latter being the sort of chicken who would carry its wallet on a chain from belt loop to pocket. These chickens clicked when they walked with their tap shoes and beat out a tattoo in the nesting box, an ostinato.

  The clogged feet might have been a trick, like prisoners feigning disease. Or a decoy setting me up for a surprise. A Trojan horse. I tried to ignore their clunking claws. I waited for the warming window sun to bake their boots off, for the waters to part, for someone to fix the leak, for a miracle. I shamefully put off dealing with the megafeet until it approached cruelty to poultry. Finally I was compelled to take action.

  My daughter, though she is not a hen lover, pitched in and helped me catch them and perfect pullet podiatry. We grimly gathered our tools: secateurs and penknives, screwdrivers and scissors. The day was warm, with the promise of summer, the threat of languor, the possibility of malaria breeding in that swampy floor. The hens needed the cooling breezes of the coast, the dry security of an outdoor run.

  There is no literature on chicken pedicures. Debeaking, caponizing, sexing, inseminating, banding, plucking, roasting and fricasseeing all have their established techniques. Chicken housing and raising and butchering can be learned from books. Even chicken glasses are in the literature: putting little redlensed spectacles over their eyeballs will stop cannibalism. You can read up on that. But not foot problems. Chickens aren’t generally caught in floods (unlike turkeys, which are legendary for not coming in out of the rain). They high-step and strut. And scratch.

  Chickens are usually fed from hoppers that are raised to beak level and filled from above. The feed elevated from the floor mess stays clean, dry, wholesome. But chickens love ground food. They’d rather scratch the dirt, peck a piece of cracked corn, scratch some more, uncover a bit of barley, turn around, bend from the wishbone, tail in the air, and scratch—left-right-left, peck a piece, right-left-right. Barn hens, even those running loose, get few pecking chances. Cement is adamantine. It just doesn’t yield to the debeaked bill, doesn’t conceal or cover grains and fibres. Outside hens pick a scratch patch and attack it the way cedar waxwings strip a currant bush. They strut and scratch, bend and turn, peck and nod until every speck of food is gone.

  As a child I had a chicken toy, a pecking toy, coloured red and yellow and apple green. It was made of wood and string and had a red-handled square paddle. At each corner stood a little yellow hen and underneath were four separate strings, which met at a red ball hanging below. If I started the ball swinging, the chickens would bob and peck at the paddle, painted green as grass, and alternately connect their beaks with the yolk-coloured specks of grain. I spent hours feeding those hens, preparing for my undisclosed farming future. But they didn’t have feet. They were pegged to the board, to the strings. No scratching; no chiropody.

  But these birds are real. Their feet were as rock-hard as a gangster’s on his last trip down the river. With our mining tools ready, we stuffed a bird headfirst into an old boot to hold her still, contain her beak and wings, so that we could gain access to her feet. The first hen was very badly off. She’d met with some string, caught it around both feet, pulled and pulled until it was noose-tight and she wound up hobbled. Two toes were so badly covered with muck they were stuck together. I cut them a little too close, adding to the confusion and mess. But my anaesthetist bravely stuck it out—two women running the farm—it had to be done.

  The boot made a poor container. It held the bird, but she couldn’t breathe properly, was terrified, claustrophobic perhaps, compressed. So we improvised with the chicken catcher—a piece of number nine wire, the farmer’s friend, with a catching loop at one end and a hanging hook at the other. After snagging a bird around the ankle (do chickens have ankles?) we hung her from the rafters, upside down, wings awry, beak on a dangle, feet up and exposed, ready for the clippers. We could have used a jackhammer.

  One by one the chickens emerged clean-toed and ready for their new pen. We worked together, my daughter and I, to convert the old outhouse by the drive-shed into a chicken hut with straw, a roost, a laying box and a fenced yard. Small, but attractive. We used chicken wire, tent pegs (for my girl is a master camper, an ingenious builder, a brilliant strategist), an old metal pole as a post, popped into the ground with the sledgehammer fuelled by strong teenaged muscles bronzed by summer sun.

  The sheep worried the fence and the chickens got out. The sheep got in. The new pup, Sydney, an Australian shepherd desperate to work, caught the chickens, one by one, and held them down until one or the other of us, called by the indignant squawking of the hens, came and made the release. The chickens were ruffled and somewhat defeathered, but fine.

  We needed reinforcements. We dragged extra wooden hurdles over from the stable and pounded in stronger posts. We diverted the sheep to a distant field, and now the chickens are settling in. They’re laying again, growing new feathers after their moult, redefining their pecking order. The hobbled chicken is alone in the old pen; she was cannibalized so badly there was a hole the size of a quarter in her back, pooled with blood. I dared not let her out. But she too is better. With the water turned off, the floor is dry. I just give her a drink in an old bread pan, a little feed each day, and now she is back on her lay. Two eggs in the past two days. And feathers have grown on her back, camouflaging, if not healing, the wound. At first they were just quills, like a porcupine’s, clear and thick and thorny, but then the shafts grew fuzz on the ends, like the soft edges of fine paper on a closed fan. Now the feathers are like velvet chestnut-coloured scales layering down her back. Rudimentary, but beautiful. She struts, she clucks, she lays. And soon, I hope, she will be able to join her mates, hold her own, find h
er place and still survive. And soon, I hope, we will clean out her pen, fix the leak and redecorate the winter residence. We’ll remove the holland cloths, dust off the pictures, add fresh flowers. The chickens will be able to walk across the barnyard, scratching as they go, and strut into the warm dry land of Cairo for the winter. They will bed down in golden straw ripened by Ra himself.

  HECTOR

  NOW THAT THE DOMESTIC birds are debrogued, debooted, unlaced and running footloose through the long grass, my eyes turn to the wild fowl once again. All started well this year. The bluebirds, who succeeded with a late nesting last summer, arrived together, paired. They scouted, preened, surveyed, tested one box and another, then departed in a storm. It was a late spring, the latest I could ever remember. They retreated for a couple of weeks to warmer winds, where they could forage, rest, exchange billets-doux.

  When they returned they seemed dubious of the renovated box, which was stately on its post and subdued in its grey PVC pest-protector. Though nothing was going to shinny up and attack this year’s fledglings, the would-be parents were not co-operating. Were not moving in.

  Twice I emptied the box of tree swallow bedding. The invaders, beautiful in their shimmering deep-green Italian suits with stark white shirt fronts, are dive-bombers. They frequently argue about property rights. I am prepared to share; they clearly are not. So I discourage them as neighbours. They build extravagant nests, works of art piled with large feathers like eighteenth-century court chapeaux. Tree swallows are classy in their iridescent formal dress, but a bit overstated, meretricious.

  Bluebirds, while breathtakingly beautiful and stunningly bright, balance visual display with a sweet demeanour, a gentle reserve, a commitment to collaboration and communal living. They share. But not with tree swallows. Instead of fighting, my cerulean pair retreated to a distant box on the fencerow, down the sheep lane, past the Alexandrian chicken coop, the drive-shed and the old log house. I checked the box one day, seeing the bluebirds nearby, and found the nest crafted. The next time I looked there were three perfect blue eggs, and the time after that there were five. Birds don’t sit until their clutch is complete. The eggs remain dormant until the female begins incubation. Then the eggs develop together. She laid. She sat. They hatched.