Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature

by James A. Michener

  But as he waited deep in the bay for his new life, the results of the storm continued to make themselves felt, and now the water was so lacking in salt that he felt he must move south. He swam forcefully and purposefully, keeping to the eastern edge of the bay where the nutritive grasses produced the best plankton, and after a day he sensed the balance of the water to be more nearly normal.

  He was not given time to luxuriate in this newfound security of proper water and a solid shell, for urgings of a primordial character were assaulting him, and he forgot his own preoccupations in order to swim among the grasses, looking for sooks that had been bypassed in the earlier mating periods. These overlooked females, on their way south to spend the winter near the entrance of the bay, where fertile sooks traditionally prepared to lay their eggs, sent out frantic signals to whatever males might be in the vicinity, for this was the final period in which they could be fertilized.

  Jimmy, probing the marshes, detected such signals and swam with extraordinary energy into the weeds, from which a grateful sook came rushing at him. As soon as she saw that she had succeeded in attracting a male, she became tenderly passive and allowed him to turn her about with his claws and mount her from behind, forming with his many legs a kind of basket in which he would cradle her for the next three days.

  This was her time to moult, and Jimmy gave her a protection he had not enjoyed. Covering her completely, he could fend off any fishes that might attack or beat away any birds. Turtles, too, could be avoided, as well as otters, who loved to feed on shell-less crabs. For three days he would defend her, holding her gently as she went through her own difficult gyrations of moulting.

  When she succeeded in escaping from her old shell, she allowed Jimmy to cast it aside with his feet. She was now completely defenseless, a creature without a skeleton or any bony structure, and at this moment it became possible for the two crabs, he with a shell and she without, to engage in sex, an act that required six or seven hours.

  When it was completed he continued to cradle her gently for two days, until her new shell was formed. Only when he felt it secure beneath him did he release her, and then the two crabs separated, she to swim to the lower end of the bay to develop her fertilized eggs, he to the northerly areas to spend the winter in the deep.

  But in 1886 it was not to be as simple as that, for when the Susquehanna broke its banks, flooding the land on either side of the river for a distance of several miles, a terrible problem developed: the floodwaters upset privies, flushed out septic pools and cleaned out manure dumps, throwing into the swiftly moving waters of the river an incredible accumulation of sewage. In each town that the river inundated on its rampage south, it reamed out the sewage ponds until at the end, when it emptied into the Chesapeake, it was nothing but one mighty cloaca carrying with it enough poisons to contaminate the entire bay.

  The effect was worsened by the fact that in the big cities the river picked up huge quantities of industrial waste, especially the newly developed oils, which spread the poisons over the entire surface of the bay. Rarely had the Chesapeake been called upon to absorb such a concentration of lethal agents. It failed.

  From the mouth of the river to the mouth of the bay the entire body of water became infected with a dozen new poisons. Those oysters that managed to escape the silt did not escape the fatal germs, and that October all who ate the few oysters that were caught ran the risk of death, and many died. The bluefish were contaminated and typhoid spread where they were eaten. The crabs were sorely hit, their delicate flesh acting as veritable blotting paper to absorb the germs. In New York and Baltimore families that ate them died.

  The fishing industry in the Chesapeake was prostrated, and two years would pass before fresh waters from the Susquehanna and the Rappahannock and the James would flush out the bay and make it once more habitable for oysters and crabs.

  Jimmy, seeking refuge at the bottom of the bay, and his impregnated mate, heading south to breed her young, had conducted their mating in an eddy of water heavily infected by the sewage of this vast cesspool, and they, too, died.

  LUCIFER AND HEY-YOU

  The golden age of the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay came in that four-decade span from 1880 to 1920 when the rest of the nation allowed the marshy counties to sleep undisturbed. True, in these years the world experienced panic and wars, revolutions and contested elections, but these had almost no impact on the somnolent estuaries and secluded coves. Roads now connected the important towns situated at the heads of rivers, but they were narrow and dusty, and it took wagons days to cover what a speedy boat could negotiate in an hour. When roads paved with white oyster shells did arrive, at the end of this happy age, they were usually one-car width only and formed not a reasonable means of transportation but a lively invitation to suicide.

  There was, of course, occasional excitement, but it rarely came from the outside world. A black male servant was accused of assaulting a white woman, and a lynching party (composed mainly of Turlocks and Cavenys) broke into the jail with the intention of stringing the accused from an oak tree, but Judge Hathaway Steed proposed to have no such blot on his jurisdiction; armed only with a family pistol, he confronted the mob and ordered it to disperse.

  The Eastern Shore baseball league, composed of six natural rivals, including Easton, Crisfield, Chestertown and Patamoke, flourished and became notorious for having produced Home Run Baker, who would hit in one year the unheard-of total of twelve round-trippers. A luxurious ferryboat left Baltimore every Saturday and Sunday at seven-thirty in the morning to transport day-trippers to a slip at Claiborne, where the throngs would leave the ship and crowd into the cars of the Baltimore, Chesapeake and Atlantic Railroad for a two-hour race across the peninsula to Ocean City on the Atlantic. At four-forty-five in the afternoon the railroad cars would refill, the train would chug its way back to Claiborne, passengers would reboard the ferry and arrive back at Baltimore at ten-thirty at night—all for one dollar and fifty cents.

  One of the adventures that caused the most excitement occurred in 1887, when a ship commanded by Captain Thomas Lightfoot, a troublemaker if there ever was one, docked at Patamoke with its cargo of ice sawed from the freshwater ponds of Labrador. When the sawdust had been washed away, and the blue-green cakes were stored in icehouses along the riverfront, Captain Lightfoot produced an object that was to cause as much long-lasting trouble as the golden apple that Paris was required to award to the most beautiful goddess.

  ‘I’ve somethin’ extra for you,’ Lightfoot announced as he directed one of his black stevedores to fetch the item from below. ‘Before it appears I wish to inform you that it is for sale, ten dollars cash.’

  A moment later the stevedore appeared on deck leading by a leash one of the most handsome dogs ever seen in Maryland. He was jet-black, sturdy in his front quarters, sleek and powerful in his hind, with a face so intelligent that it seemed he might speak at any moment. His movements were quick, his dark eyes following every development nearby, yet his disposition appeared so equable that he seemed always about to smile.

  ‘He’s called a Labrador,’ Lightfoot said. ‘Finest huntin’ dog ever developed.’

  ‘He’s what?’ Jake Turlock snapped.

  ‘Best huntin’ dog known.’

  ‘Can’t touch a Chesapeake retriever,’ Turlock said, referring to the husky red dog bred especially for bay purposes.

  ‘This dog,’ said Lightfoot, ‘will take your Chesapeake and teach him his ABC’s.’

  ‘That dog ain’t worth a damn,’ Turlock said. ‘Too stocky up front.’ But there was something about this new animal that captivated Tim Caveny, whose red Chesapeake had just died without ever fulfilling the promise he had shown as a pup—‘Fine in the water and persistent in trackin’ downed birds, but not too bright. Downright stupid, if you ask me.’ This new black dog displayed a visible intelligence that gave every sign of further development, and Caveny announced, ‘I’d like to see him.’

  Captain Lightfoot, susp
ecting that in Caveny he had found his pigeon, turned the Labrador loose, and with an almost psychic understanding that his future lay with this Irishman, the dog ran to Caveny, leaned against his leg and nuzzled his hand.

  It was an omen. Tim’s heart was lost, and he said, ‘I’ll take him.’

  ‘Mr. Caveny, you just bought the best Labrador ever bred.’ With grandiloquent gestures the captain turned the animal over to his new owner. The dog, sensing that he had found a permanent master, stayed close to Tim, licking his hand and looking up with dark eyes overflowing with affection.

  Tim paid the ten dollars, then reached down and patted his new hunting companion. ‘Come on, Lucifer,’ he said.

  ‘That’s a hell of a name for a dog,’ Turlock growled.

  ‘He’s black, ain’t he?’

  ‘If he’s black, call him Blackie.’

  ‘He’s Old Testament black,’ Tim said. And to Captain Lightfoot’s surprise, he recited: ‘ “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” ’ Turning his back to the others, he stooped over the dog, ruffled his head and said in a low voice, ‘You’ll be up in the morning, Lucifer, early, early.’

  Lightfoot then startled the crowd by producing three other dogs of this new breed, one male and two females, and these, too, he sold to the hunters of Patamoke, assuring each purchaser: ‘They can smell ducks, and they’ve never been known to lose a cripple.’

  ‘To me they look like horse manure,’ Jake Turlock said.

  ‘They what?’ Caveny demanded.

  ‘I said,’ Turlock repeated, ‘that your black dog looks like a horse turd.’

  Slowly Tim handed the leash he had been holding to a bystander. Then with a mighty swipe, he knocked Turlock to the wet and salty boards of the wharf. The waterman stumbled in trying to regain his footing, and while he was off-balance Caveny saw a chance to deliver an uppercut that almost knocked him into the water. Never one to allow a fallen foe an even chance, Caveny leaped across the planking and kicked the waterman in his left armpit, lifting him well into the air. This was a mistake, because when Turlock landed, his hand fell upon some lumber stacked for loading onto Captain Lightfoot’s ship, and after he had quickly tested three or four clubs he found one to his liking, and with it delivered such a blow to the Irishman’s head that the new owner of the Labrador staggered back and fell into the Choptank.

  In this way the feud between Tim Caveny, owner of a black Labrador, and Jake Turlock, owner of a red Chesapeake, began.

  The first test of the two dogs came in the autumn of 1888 at the dove shoot on the farm of old Lyman Steed, who had spent his long life running one of the Refuge plantations and had now retired to a stretch of land near Patamoke.

  Nineteen first-class hunters of the area convened at regular intervals during the dove season to shoot this most interesting of the small game birds—gentlemen like Lyman Steed, middle-class shopkeepers and rough watermen like Jake Turlock and Tim Caveny. A dove shoot was one of the most republican forms of sport so far devised. Here a man’s worth was determined by two criteria: the way he fired his gun and how he managed his dog.

  Each hunter was allowed to bring one dog to the shoot, and the animal had to be well trained, because the birds came charging in at low altitude, swerved and dodged in unbelievable confusion and, on the lucky occasions when they were hit, fell maliciously in unpredictable spots. If there was a swamp nearby, as on the Steed farm, the doves would fall there. If there were brambles, the dying doves seemed to seek them out, and the only practical way for a hunter to retrieve his dove, if he hit one, was to have a dog trained to leap forward when he saw a dove fall from the sky and find it no matter where it dropped. The dog must also lift the fallen bird gently in its teeth, carry it without bruising it against thorns, and drop it at the feet of its master. A dove hunt was more a test of dog than of master.

  Jake Turlock had a well-trained beast, a large, surly red-haired Chesapeake, specially bred to work the icy waters of the bay in fall and winter. These dogs were unusual in that they grew a double matting of hair and produced an extra supply of oil to lubricate it. They could swim all day, loved to dive into the water for a fallen goose and were particularly skilled in breaking their way through thin ice. Like most of his breed, Jake’s Chesapeake had a vile temper and would allow himself to be worked only by his master. Every other gunner in the field was his enemy and their dogs were beneath his contempt, but he was kept obedient by Jake’s stern cry: ‘Hey-You, heel!’

  His name was Hey-You. Jake had started calling him that when he first arrived at the Turlock shack, a fractious, bounding pup giving no evidence that he could ever be trained. In fact, Jack had thought so little of him that he delayed giving him a proper name. ‘Hey-You! Get the dove!’ The pup would look quizzical, wait, consider whether he wanted to obey or not, then leap off when Jake kicked him.

  So during his useless youth he was plain ‘Hey-You, into the water for the goose!’ But at the age of three, after many kicks and bufferings, he suddenly developed into a marvelous hunting dog, a raider like his master, a rough-and-tumble uncivilized beast who seemed made for the Chesapeake. ‘Hey-You! Go way down and fetch the dove!’ So when this red-haired dog swaggered onto the dove field that October day, he was recognized as one of the best ever trained in the Patamoke area.

  Lucifer, Tim Caveny’s Labrador, was an unknown quantity, for he had never before participated in a dove shoot; furthermore he had been trained in a manner quite different from the way Hey-You had been treated. ‘My children were raised with love,’ the Irishman said, ‘and my dog was trained the same way.’ From the moment Lucifer came down off Captain Lightfoot’s ice ship, he had known nothing but love.

  His glossy coat was kept nourished by a daily supply of fat from the Caveny table, and his nails were trimmed. In return he gave the Caveny family his complete affection. ‘I believe that dog would lay down his life for me,’ Mrs. Caveny told her neighbors, for when she fed him he always looked up at her with his great black eyes and rubbed against her hand. A peddler came to the door one day unexpectedly and in a frightening manner; Lucifer’s hackles rose, and he leaned forward tensely, waiting for a sign. Startled at seeing the man, Mrs. Caveny emitted a short gasp, whereupon Lucifer shot like a thunderbolt for the man’s throat.

  ‘Down, Lucifer!’ she cried and he stopped almost in midair.

  But whether he could discipline himself to retrieve doves was another matter. Jake Turlock predicted widely, ‘The stupid Irishman has spoiled his dog, if’n he was any good to begin with.’ Other hunters who had trained their beasts more in the Turlock tradition agreed, adding, ‘He ain’t gonna get much out of that what-you-call-it Labrador.’

  But Caveny persisted, talking to Lucifer in sweet Irish phrases, trying to convince the animal that glory awaited him on the dove field. ‘Luke, you and me will get more doves than this town ever seen. Luke, when I say “Fetch the dove!” you’re to go direct to the spot you think it fell. Then run out in wider and wider circles.’ Whether the dog would do this was uncertain, but Tim had tried with all his guile to get the animal in a frame of mind conducive to success. Now, as he led him to Lyman Steed’s farm, he prayed that his lessons had been in the right direction, but when he turned the last corner and saw the other eighteen men with their Chesapeakes awaiting him, eager to see what he had accomplished with this strange dog, his heart fluttered and he felt dizzy.

  Pulling gently on the rope attached to the dog’s collar, he brought him back, kneeled beside him and whispered in his lilting brogue, ‘Lucifer, you and me is on trial. They’re all watchin’ us.’ He stroked the dog’s glistening neck and said, ‘At my heel constantly, little fellow. You don’t move till I fire. And when I do, Luke, for the love of a merciful God, find that dove. Soft mouth, Luke, soft mouth and drop him at my toes, like you do with the rag dolls.’

  As if he knew what his master was saying, Luke turned and looked at Tim impatiently, as if to say, I know my job—I’m a Labrador. />
  The field contained about twenty acres and had recently been harvested, so that it provided a large, flat, completely open area, but it was surrounded by a marsh on one side, a large blackberry bramble on another, and a grove of loblollies covering a thicket of underbrush on a third. The doves would sweep in over the loblollies, drop low, hear gunfire and veer back over the brambles. The placement of gunners was an art reserved for Judge Hathaway Steed, who hunted in an expensive Harris tweed jacket imported from London.

  The judge had been a hunter all his life, raised Chesapeakes and sold them to his friends. He had acquired much better intuition concerning doves than he had of the law, and now he proposed to place his eighteen subordinates strategically, about sixty yards apart and in a pattern that pretty well covered the perimeter of the field. Toward the end of his assignments he came to Tim Caveny. ‘You there, with the what-you-call-it dog.’

  ‘Labrador,’ Caveny said, tipping his hat respectfully, as his father had done in the old country when the squire spoke.

  ‘Since we can’t be sure a dog like that can hunt …’

  ‘He can hunt.’

  The judge ignored this. ‘Take that corner,’ he said, and Tim wanted to complain that doves rarely came to that corner, but since he was on trial he kept his mouth shut, but he was most unhappy when he saw Jake Turlock receive one of the best positions.

  Then everyone stopped talking, for down the road edging the field came a carriage driven by a black man. On the seat beside him sat a very old gentleman with a shotgun across his knees. This was Lyman Steed, owner of the field. He was eighty-seven years old and so frail that a stranger would have wondered how he could lift a gun, let alone shoot it. Behind him, eyes and ears alert, rode a large red Chesapeake.

  The carriage came to a halt close to where Hathaway Steed was allocating the spots, and the black driver descended, unfolded a canvas chair and lifted the old man down into it. ‘Where do we sit today?’ Steed asked in a high, quavering voice.