Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature

by James A. Michener

  ‘They came from Mexico.’

  ‘One hell of a lot from Mexico—wetbacks, boll weevils—’

  ‘A follower of the great Audubon first recorded them in Texas, down along the Rio Grande, in 1854. They had reached San Antonio by 1880, Austin by 1914, Jefferson in the east by 1945. They were slower reaching our dryer area. They were reported in Dallas in 1953, but they didn’t reach us till this year. Remarkable March.’

  ‘Should have kept them in Mexico,’ Rusk said, fingering his box of shells.

  ‘They’re in Florida too. Three pairs escaped from a zoo in 1922. And people transported them as pets. They liked Florida, so now they move east from Texas and west from Florida. They’ll occupy the entire Gulf area before this century is out.’

  ‘They aren’t going to occupy my place much longer,’ Ransom said, and that was the beginning of the hilarious adventure, because Mr. Kramer persuaded him, almost tearfully, not to shoot the armadillos but to keep them away from the bowling green by building protection around it. ‘These are unique creatures,’ he said, ‘relics of the past, and they do an infinite amount of good.’

  The first thing Rusk did was to enclose his wife’s resodded bowling green within a stout, tennis-court-type fence, but two nights after it was in place, at considerable expense, the bowling green was chewed up again, and when Mr. Kramer was consulted he showed the Rusks how the world’s foremost excavators had simply burrowed under the fence to get at the succulent roots.

  ‘What you have to do is dig a footing around your green, six feet deep, and fill it with concrete. Sink your fence poles in that.’

  ‘Do you know how much that would cost?’

  ‘They tell me you have the money,’ Kramer said easily, and so the fence was taken down, backhoes were brought in, and the deep trench was dug, enclosing the green. Then trucks dumped a huge amount of cement into the gaping holes, and the fence was reerected. Eight feet into the air, six feet underground, and the armadillos were boxed off.

  But four days after the job was finished, Fleurette Rusk let out another wail, and when Ransom ran to her room, he bellowed: ‘Is it those damned armadillos again?’ It was, and when he and Mr. Kramer studied the new disaster the situation became clear, as the enthusiastic naturalist explained: ‘Look at that hole! Ransom, they dug right under the concrete barrier and up the other side. Probably took them half an hour, no more.’

  The scientific manner in which Kramer diagnosed the case, and the obvious pleasure he took in the engineering skills of his armadillos, infuriated Rusk, and once more he threatened to shoot his tormentors, but Kramer prevailed upon him to try one more experiment: ‘What we must do, Ransom, is drive a palisade below the concrete footing.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’

  ‘Simple, you get a hydraulic ram and it drives down metal stakes. Twenty feet deep. But they’ll have to be close together.’

  When this job was completed, Rusk calculated that he had $218,000 invested in that bowling green, but to his grim satisfaction, the sunken palisade did stop the predators he had named Lady Macbeth and Her Four Witches. The spikes of the palisade went too deep for her to risk a hole so far below the surface.

  But she was not stopped for long, because one morning Ransom was summoned by a new scream: ‘Ransom, look at those scoundrels!’ and when he looked, he saw that the mother, frustrated by the palisade, but still hungry for the tender grass roots, had succeeded in climbing her side of the fence, straight up, and then descending straight down, and she was in the process of teaching her daughters to do the same.

  For some minutes Rusk stood at the window, watching the odd procession of armadillos climbing up his expensive fence, and when one daughter repeatedly fell back, unable to learn, he broke into laughter.

  ‘I don’t see what’s so funny,’ his wife cried, and he explained: ‘Look at the dumb little creature. She can’t use her front claws to hold on to the cross wires,’ and his wife exploded: ‘You seem to be cheering her on,’ and it suddenly became clear to Rusk that he was doing just that. He was reacting to his wife’s constant nagging: ‘Don’t wear that big cowboy hat in winter, makes you look like a real hick.’ ‘Don’t wear those boots to a dance, makes you look real Texan.’ She had a score of other don’ts, and now Ransom realized that in this fight of Fleurette versus the lady armadillos, he was cheering for the animals.

  But as a good sport he did telephone Mr. Kramer and ask: ‘Those crazy armadillos can climb the fence. What do we do?’ Mr. Kramer noted the significant difference; always before it had been ‘those damned armadillos’ or worse. When a man started calling them crazy, he was beginning to fall in love with them.

  ‘Tell you what, Ransom. We call in the fence people and have them add a projection around the upper edge, so that when the armadillos reach the top of the fence, they’ll run into the screen curving back at them and fall off.’

  ‘Will it hurt them?’

  ‘Six weeks ago you wanted to shoot them. Now you ask if it’ll hurt them. Ransom, you’re learning.’

  ‘You know, Kramer, everything you advise me to do costs money.’

  ‘You have it to spend.’

  So the fence builders were brought in, and yes, they could bring a flange out parallel to the ground that no armadillo could negotiate, and when this was done Rusk would sit on his porch at night with a powerful beam flashlight and watch as the mother tried to climb the fence, with her daughters trailing, and he would break into audible laughter as the determined little creatures clawed their way to the top, encountered the barrier, and tumbled back to earth. Again and again they tried, and always they fell back. Ransom Rusk had defeated the armadillos, at a total cost of $238,000.

  ‘What are you guffawing at in the dark?’ Fleurette demanded, and he said, ‘At the armadillos trying to get into your bowling green.’

  ‘You should have shot them months ago,’ she snapped, and he replied, ‘They’re trying so hard, I was thinking about going down and letting them in.’

  ‘You do,’ she said, ‘and I’m walking out.’

  JIMMY THE CRAB

  The worst storms to hit the Chesapeake Bay are the hurricanes that generate in the southeast, over the Atlantic Ocean. There they twist and turn, building power and lifting from the waves enormous quantities of water that they carry north in turbulent clouds.

  They first hit Cape Charles, at the southern end of the Eastern Shore, then explode ferociously over the waters of the bay, driving crabbers and oystermen to shore. Their winds, often reaching a fierce ninety miles an hour, whip the shallow waters of the Chesapeake into waves so violent that any small boat runs a good risk of being capsized.

  In late August of 1886 such a hurricane collected its force just south of Norfolk, but instead of devastating the bay, it leapfrogged far to the north, depositing in the Susquehanna Valley an incredible fall of rain. In less than a day, nineteen inches tell on certain parts of Pennsylvania. Harrisburg felt the lash as its waterfront homes were submerged; Sunbury was inundated; poor Wilkes-Barre watched the dark waters engulf its jetties; and even Towanda, far to the north, was swamped by raging floods from streams that a day earlier had been mere trickles.

  From a thousand such rivulets the great flood accumulated, and as it crested on its way south to the Chesapeake, it inundated small towns and endangered large cities. On it came, a devastating onslaught of angry water, twisting and probing into every depression. Past Harrisburg it swept, and Columbia, and over small villages near the border of Pennsylvania. Finally, in northern Maryland it exploded with destructive fury into the body of the Chesapeake, raising the headwaters of that considerable bay four or five feet.

  For three days the storm continued, producing strange and arbitrary results. Norfolk was bypassed completely: merely a heavy rain. Crisfield had no problems: a slow rain of no significance. But the great bay itself was nearly destroyed: it came close to being drowned by the floods cascading down from the north. It lay strangling in its own water.
/>   To understand what was happening, one must visualize the bay as carefully structured in three distinct dimensions. From north to south the waters of the bay were meticulously graduated according to their salt content, and any alteration of this salinity was fraught with peril. At Havre de Grace, where the Susquehanna River debouched into the bay, there should have been in autumn three parts of salt per thousand; there was none. On the oyster beds near Devon Island there ought to have been fifteen parts per thousand to keep the shellfish healthy; there were two. And at the crabbing beds farther south the crustaceans were accustomed to nineteen parts; they had to contend with less than six. All living things in the bay were imperiled, for the great flood had altered the bases of their existence. The protection provided by salt water was being denied them, and if relief did not come quickly, millions upon millions of bay creatures were going to die.

  When the storm broke, there existed on a small subterranean shelf at the western edge of Devon Island a congregation of oysters that had fastened themselves securely to the solid bottom. Here some of the largest and tastiest oysters of the bay had produced their generations, while the minute spat (young oysters) drifted back and forth with the slow currents until they fastened to the bottom to develop the shells in which they would grow during the years of their existence.

  Along this shelf, well known to watermen, oysters had thrived during all the generations watermen had tonged the bay; no matter how many bushels of large oysters were lifted from this location, others replaced them. This was a shelf that could be depended upon.

  In its original stages the flood from the Susquehanna did not affect these oysters. True, the salinity of all the water dropped, but at the depth at which they lived the loss did not, in these first days, imperil them. But there was another aspect of the flood that did. The Susquehanna, as it swept down from New York, picked up an astonishing burden of fine silt; for example, a house along the riverbank in Harrisburg might be inundated for only seven hours, but when the owners returned they would find in their second-floor bedrooms six inches of silt. How could it possibly have got there? Well, each cubic centimeter of seeping brown water carried its burden of almost invisible dust lifted from the farms of New York and Pennsylvania, and it was this dust, suspended in water, that was left behind.

  The silt that fell in the bedroom of a butcher in Harrisburg could, when it dried, be swept away, but the silt that fell on a bed of oysters could not.

  Down it came, silently, insidiously and very slowly. In four days more silt fell than in the previous sixty years. The entire Choptank was chocolate-colored from the turbulent mud, but as soon as the waters began to calm themselves, their burden of silt was released and it fell persistently and inescapably onto the oysters.

  At first it was no more than a film such as the propellers of the evening ferry might have deposited on any night. Such an amount caused no problem and might even bring with it plankton to feed the oysters. But this thin film was followed by a perceptible thickness, and then by more, until the oysters became agitated within their heavy shells. The spat, of course, were long since strangled. A whole oncoming generation of oysters had been suffocated.

  Still the fine silt drifted down, an interminable rain of desolation. The bottom of the Choptank was covered with the gray-brown deposit; whole grains were so minute that the resulting mud seemed more like cement, except that it did not harden—it merely smothered everything on which it fell; pressing down with fingers so delicate, its weight could not be felt until the moment it had occupied every space with a subtle force more terrible than a tower of stone.

  The oysters could have withstood a similar intrusion of sand; then the particles would have been so coarse that water could continue to circulate and plankton be obtained. Submersion of even a month was tolerable, for in time the sand would wash away, leaving the shellfish no worse for their experience. But the flood-swept silt was another matter, and on the tenth day after the flood, when the brown waters bore their heaviest burden of mud, even the mature oysters began to die. No lively water was reaching them, no plankton. They were entombed in a dreadful cascade of silt and they could not propel themselves to a new location or to a new level. Secured to their shelf, they had to rely on passing tides that would wash the silt away. But none came.

  On the twelfth day the waters of the Chesapeake reached their maximum muddiness; silt from midland Pennsylvania was coming down now, in a final burst of destruction, and when it reached the relatively calm waters of the Choptank, it broke loose from its carrying waters and filtered slowly down to the bed of the river. This was the final blow. The oysters were already submerged under two inches of silt; now three more piled on, and one by one the infinitely rich beds were covered by an impenetrable mud. The oysters perished in their shells.

  In time—say, a year and a half—the currents of the Choptank would eat away the mud and once more reveal the shelf upon which untold generations of new oysters would flourish. The shells of the dead oysters would be there, gnarled and craggy and inviting to the young spat that would be looking for a ledge to grab hold of. The spat would find a home; the nourishing plankton would drift by; the oyster beds would exist once mere, but for now they were obliterated in the silt of the great storm.

  Another resident of the Chesapeake was also severely affected by the hurricane of 1886, but he was better able to cope with the disaster, for he could move and, by taking precautions, adjust to the altered circumstances. He was Jimmy, who bore the time-honored Chesapeake name for the male blue crab, that delicious crustacean upon which so much of the wealth of the bay depended.

  While the storm lay off Norfolk, gathering speed and water, Jimmy, resting in the grassy waters at the edge of Turlock Marsh, perceived that a radical change in the atmosphere was about to occur. And it would probably arrive at the worst possible moment for him. How could he know these two facts? He was exceedingly sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure or any other factors that affected the waters of the bay. If a storm of unusual force was developing, he would be made aware of it by the sharp drop in barometric pressure and would prepare to take those protective measures that had rescued him in the past. Also, he knew intuitively when he must climb painfully out of his old shell, which was made of inert matter that could not grow in size as he grew. He had to discard it and prepare himself for the construction of a new shell better fitted to his increased body size. The time for such a moult was at hand.

  When the storm broke, and no great body of water fell on the Choptank, Jimmy felt no signals that a crisis was at hand, so he prepared to shed his old shell, an intricate process that might consume as long as four hours of painful wrestling and contortion. But before he could begin the moult, he became aware of a frightening change in the bay. The water level was rising. The salinity was diminishing. And when these two phenomena continued, and indeed accelerated, he became uncomfortable.

  During any moult, which might take place three or four times a year as he increased in size, he preferred some secure place like the Turlock Marsh, but if it was going to be flooded with fresh water, it could prove a death trap rather than a refuge, so he began swimming strongly out toward the deep center of the bay.

  A mature crab like Jimmy could swim at a speed of nearly a mile an hour, so he felt safe, but as he cleared Devon Island and was hit by the rush of saltless water, he felt driven to swim with frenetic energy to protect himself. He would not drop dead in the first flush of fresh water, and he could adjust to surprising variations in salinity for brief periods, but to exist in the way for which his body had been constructed, he needed water with a proper salt content.

  But moving into the deeper water meant that he would lose the protection of the marsh for his critical moulting. He would have to go through this complex maneuvering out in the bay, where he would be largely defenseless. But he had no other option.

  The silt posed no insurmountable problem. It obscured his vision, to be sure, but it did not settle on him or pin him
to the bottom, as it did the oysters. He could flip his many legs and swim clear, so that he was not yet in danger at this stage of the flood, but he sensed that he had to swim down toward the ocean to find the salinity necessary for his survival.

  These matters assumed little importance in view of the crucial one at hand. Swimming easily to the bottom of the bay, he found a sandy area, a place he would never have considered for a moult in normal times, and there began his gyrations. First he had to break the seal along the edge of his shell, and he did this by contracting and expanding his body, forcing water through his system and building up a considerable hydraulic pressure that slowly forced the shell apart, not conspicuously, but far enough for the difficult part of the moult to proceed.

  Now he began the slow and almost agonizing business of withdrawing his boneless legs from their protective covering and manipulating them so that they protruded from the slight opening. With wrenching movements he dislodged the main portion of his body, thrusting it toward the opening, which now widened under pressure from the legs. He had no skeleton, of course, so that he could contort and compress his body into whatever shape was most effective, but he did continue to generate hydraulic pressures through various parts of his body so that the shell was forced apart.

  Three hours and twenty minutes after he started this bizarre procedure, he swam free of the old shell and was now adrift in the deep waters of the bay, totally without protection. He had no bony structure in any part of his body, no covering thicker than the sheerest tissue paper, no capacity for self-defense except a much-slowed ability to swim. Any fish that chanced to come his way could gobble him at a gulp; if he had been in shallower water, any bird could have taken him. In these fateful hours all he could do was hide.

  And yet, even at his most defenseless moment his new armor was beginning to form. Eighty minutes after the moult he would have a paper-thin covering. After three hours he would have the beginning of a solid shell. And in five hours he would be a hard-shelled crab once more, and would remain that way until his next moult.