Fowl Weather

by Bob Tarte

  “It was my mom with an incredible story.”

  “I thought it might have been someone responding to my ad.”

  “Ad?” I immediately blanked out the conversation with my mom.

  For ordinary folks, the first batch of crocuses poking their heads above the cold ground signified the arrival of spring. For Linda, as soon as overnight temperatures struggled above freezing and the first few migratory birds straggled into our yard, it was time to start placing a barrage of classified ads in the local weekly newspaper for gardeners, barn cleaners, duck-pen gravel changers, rubbish haulers, and animal-enclosure builders—things she couldn’t do herself because of chronic back problems and I wouldn’t do out of chronic laziness. Linda’s ads addressed more esoteric topics, too. She sought people willing to drive her to her Grandville chiropractor, asked gardeners to share their “rare and beautiful perennials,” offered to pay for a dependable spot for finding morel mushrooms, and rather hopelessly solicited pet sitters for boisterous animals with complex morning, noon, and nighttime schedules.

  If I didn’t get stuck fielding endless phone calls from people who had misread the ads, I wound up having to meet a number of highly questionable respondents. When Linda advertised that she was available to do odd jobs for the elderly and housebound, teenage girls would call to apply for the nonexistent helper position. When Linda asked for volunteers to write letters on animal rights topics, a reader might phone to find out if we wanted a duck. And a person who sounded reasonable over the phone more often than not exhibited an ominous twitch or disturbing character trait in the flesh. One fellow who called about yanking three sick shrubs out of our front garden obviously didn’t have the strength to yank a fleck of lint off a sweater. He wheezed like a cracked boiler as he staggered around the yard to appraise the work, and merely talking while standing up seemed to tax his lung power. Linda finally told him we were just taking names at that moment, but if we didn’t call him for this job, we would probably use him for something else. I had an envelope that needed licking, but he left before I could suggest it.

  I brightened slightly at the thought of the ads. “Was one of them about Moobie?”

  “I’ve been running that one for three weeks. But I do have good news.”

  “You found a home for her?”

  “I found a master gardener,” she beamed. “He’s stopping by on Saturday to test our soil and tell me which plants would do best in which gardens.” A perplexed expression passed over her face, resembling the one that had just left mine. “There was something really odd about his telephone. I had to keep saying ‘over’ when I was done talking, and we couldn’t both talk at the same time. And I can’t call him back. If I want to get hold of him, I have to leave a message with the Just Around the Corner Bait Shop and Ammo Shack.”

  “That isn’t a good sign at all.”

  “He knows a lot about plants and soils. He’s a certified master gardener. But I didn’t understand something he said something about having strokes.”

  “He’s had a stroke?”

  “Not ‘a stroke.’ He said he has some strokes every day.” She thought for a moment. “I think the word he used was ‘numerous’ strokes. He said he has numerous strokes every day. He might have even said hundreds.”

  “Please don’t let him come here,” I begged. “Call the bait shop, and get us off the hook.”

  OUR CHARCOAL GREY bunny Bertie lay stock-still in his cage. “Bertie?” I said. “Bertie?” Sometimes when he slept flat on his side facing the wall, I couldn’t see him breathing. Because of his advanced age, this had started to unnerve me.

  “Bertie,” I called again, but he didn’t move. I bent down into a crouch. “Bertie, are you all right?” The instant I started to unlatch his cage door, he was up on all fours staring at me sideways, alert and ready to bolt from Bob the predator.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “Sorry. Go back to bed.”

  As I straightened with a groan, activity at the hummingbird feeder outside the window caught my eye. But hummingbirds weren’t humming around it. Our hummingbird feeder had turned into a yellow jacket feeder. Leaving Bertie to wend his way back to the Land of Nod, I slogged downstairs and through the basement door to watch wasps flying back and forth between their food source and a nest in the ground next to our house.

  In an overhang beneath our dining room was a small pile of decaying wood left over from my feeble attempts to harvest logs a full ten years earlier. Armed with a terrifyingly loud and, in my hands, dangerous twelve-inch chain saw, I had left no deadfall in our woods intact—unless the trees involved were larger than saplings, lay more than a few steps from the backyard fence, or their sawn products might challenge the loose musculature of my arms, shoulders, back, or demi-chest. The glorified sticks that eventually formed a pathetic hump against the house didn’t even make good kindling for our woodstove. They went up as quickly as matches and burned about as long. Scraps of plywood abandoned in the barn by the former owners of the house worked much better. Once we began accumulating pet birds, I had my excuse to stop accumulating twigs. Wood smoke interfered with avian breathing passages as surely as exercise interfered with my lifestyle. So I left what remained of the pile to rot and form a habitat for ants. But without informing the ants, the yellow jackets had moved in.

  I took down the feeder to rinse it off. One of the wasps buzzed around my head, grew bored with the uninspired scenery, and returned to the burrow. A few more streamed out, but they were more concerned with foraging than with sightseeing at Mount Bobmore. Gingerly I edged toward the woodpile and nudged one of the sticks with my boot. A couple of dozen yellow jackets shot out to investigate. I jumped back, brandishing the hummingbird feeder in self-defense. Although I hadn’t laid bare much of their lair, I could see that a significant hive hid just below the surface. This was bad news, considering that the water spigot we used for duck-pen chores in temperate weather—and to water Linda’s countless vegetable, flower, herb, and woodchuck-buffet gardens—was right above their nest.

  Under normal circumstances, Linda would place a classified ad, and within a week a swarm of cranks would phone asking if we had honey for sale. But there was no time to lose. Linda had to find a crank right away. A display ad in the local paper depicted a cartoon termite and wasp with maniacal grins chasing a person half their size. “Pest Problems? Ask an Expert,” urged the headline. Linda dialed the number in the ad instead.

  “I’m in the process of ripping down a guy’s wall right now,” grunted Mark the pest-control expert from his cell phone. “I won’t be able to get over there for a while.”

  “One thing,” said Linda. “Can you move the nest without hurting the bees?”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “I don’t want the yellow jackets killed. I just want them moved, if possible.”

  “We don’t do that, ma’am. I wouldn’t know how to do it. It’s far too dangerous.”

  “How about if you came in the morning when they weren’t moving around much because of the cold?” Linda asked. “Couldn’t you just scoop them up while they were sleepy and move them out into our field?”

  “Cold has no effect on yellow jackets,” he said.

  “How come they’re so subdued in the morning when it’s cold?”

  “Cold has no effect,” he repeated. “It’s the dew. The morning dew gets their wings wet, and they can’t fly around as well.”

  “He said what?” I asked Linda when she recounted the conversation. “He actually said it was the dew?”

  “Well, anyway, he’s coming tomorrow sometime, he thought. He was kind of vague about everything—except about the cold having no effect on them. It might not even be tomorrow. But he said we’re on his list.”

  Later that evening, temperatures had fallen enough that I figured the well known “dew effect” would make the yellow jackets comparatively inactive. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to indulge in the classic mistake of prodding a wasp net with a broomstick.
I decided that I could easily get back inside the basement before the sluggish squatters drew a collective bead on me, and I needed to see how difficult it might be to dislodge them.

  I made sure that our cat Agnes was safely indoors. After switching on the floodlight, I crept outdoors stealthily enough to guarantee that any yellow jacket sentinels playing cards close to the surface wouldn’t hear my footfalls. Then, with a sudden but by no means certain movement, I thrust a broomstick under several of the sticks, pushed my end down in lever fashion, dislodged the crumbling wood, and confronted a formidable buzzing hoard.

  I ducked into the basement in time to hear the tick, tick, tick of hundreds of angry yellow jacket bodies pounding on the metal door and insisting I come outside and fight like a man. I heard the same sound, only louder, as I hurried up the basement stairs into the dining room. The yellow jackets had massed against the picture window. The scene resembled a horrifying take on a nature documentary with a close-up view inside a honeycomb, but these weren’t amiable bees preparing little packets of ambrosia for their keeper. These were miniature cogs in a coordinated killing machine bent on stinging me into oblivion. I started worrying whether a mere pane of glass could withstand their fury. Surely by acting altogether they could lift the entire window out of its frame, fly it to a soft landing on the grass, and launch themselves at me unimpeded. As my nerves sagged against the yellow jackets’ steady hammering, Stanley Sue startled me by clicking on the bars of her cage with her beak, then erupting into a full-fledged squawk.

  “What’s the matter, Stanley?” Linda called from the living room.

  “I’m taking care of her,” I called back, hurriedly plying the parrot with a peanut, which, for once, she graciously accepted.

  Desperate to hide the evidence of my folly, I raced down to the basement and snapped off the floodlights. The resulting silhouette of writhing wasps was muted against the outdoor gloom, and from the living room the ominous buzzing sounded like our refrigerator motor.

  “You weren’t planning on going outside for any reason, were you?” I asked Linda casually.

  “Why, do you need something?”

  “Oh, no, no,” I told her. “It’s much too dark and unseasonably cold to be outdoors. But when did you say that pest-control guy was coming?”

  “He’s calling us tomorrow. But don’t forget that tomorrow the lady is coming to see about taking Moonbeam.”

  In the flurry of wings and my fear of stings, the good news about Moobie had slipped my mind. “That’s great,” I told her. Linda shot me a questioning glance when I added, “Make sure she uses the front door, okay?”

  THE HOLE IN THE ground baffled me. The yellow jacket nest had been there the previous night. Now it was completely gone. A few disoriented wasps crawled disconsolately around the rim of what had once been their burrow, but only a gaping crater remained. They hadn’t abandoned their nest. The nest had abandoned them. I couldn’t find a trace of the grey papery material to prove it had ever existed, and neither could the wasps.

  Linda and I determined that some animal must have stolen the nest after my broomstick excavation had unearthed its northern hemisphere. To figure out which animal might have been responsible—and to quell potential blather about the return of the mystery primate—my wife phoned Grand Rapids wildlife expert Amy Martoni, whom she inevitably referred to as Mrs. Martini.

  “Mrs. Martini said that it was probably raccoons,” Linda said as we stared at the hollowed-out burrow. One wasp wandered down to the bottom, then returned to the top to confer with another family member, presumably about their hive-owner’s insurance. “The thick coat protects them from getting stung, though they might get a few stings on their noses. But she said raccoons would have eaten the yellow jackets.”

  “What did you call her when you talked to her?”

  Linda paused a beat. “Mrs. Martoni. What else would I call her? She said it could have been a skunk, but raccoons were more likely to have dragged the whole thing off.”

  Raccoons made sense to me. They had eaten three of our ducks in the past, which proved their carnivorous tendency. And any animal that didn’t mind dining on garbage would probably consider wasps a delicacy. “Did you phone the pest-control guy and tell him not to come? Tell him that the yellow jackets drowned in dew overnight.”

  “He wasn’t there, but I left a message. And Shelley will be here any minute to see about taking Moonbeam.”

  “Speaking of pests.”

  Our great white cat wasn’t overjoyed to meet her prospective owner. As soon as the young woman breezed in towing her towheaded three-year-old daughter, Moobie made tracks for the bedroom.

  “Oh, what a pretty cat,” said Shelley as Moobie’s tail disappeared through the doorway. “I’ve always dreamed of having a white cat.” The heavyset Shelley had a baby face that made her the little girl’s twin. But Emily bore a serious expression beyond her years, while Shelley’s smile was cherubic. Mom seemed like a good match for Moobie.

  “She’s got one green eye and one blue eye,” I pointed out.

  “Kitty!” cried Emily.

  Our house wasn’t exactly child-friendly. That realization hit me like a hornet sting as the girl scampered into the dining room, where Stanley Sue and Dusty waited with open beaks for small, chubby fingers to poke through their cage bars. But Emily put the African grey parrots on the defensive. Stanley Sue jumped off her perch with a worried flutter of wings, sending Dusty and all the caged birds flailing in a similar fashion, except imperturbable Howard, who cocked his head for a better view of the action. The breeze from the combined feather power blew sheets of newspaper that Linda had cut to fit various cage trays from the top of the refrigerator. Fortunately, Emily headed directly for the rabbits rather than the hookbills. She tried reaching the snoozing Bertie through the wire grid, but her hand wouldn’t fit. When I brought out the bunny for her to pet, she whimpered and hid behind her mother’s legs.

  “What a sweet little girl,” said Linda. “Do you like animals, honey?” Emily tightened her arms around Shelley’s denim-clad thigh.

  “Most of the time,” said Shelley. “Well, we don’t really know. She can identify ‘cat,’ ‘dog,’ ‘cow,’ and ‘bear’ in her favorite picture book.”

  “Kitty,” complained Emily with a scowl when Agnes made a rare appearance in the bird room, requesting an immediate exit outdoors. Dusty gave me the evil eye as the aluminum door slammed shut, as if to say, “Is there no limit to what I’m expected to put up with in this house?”

  “Let’s go look at Moobie.”

  Linda’s suggestion took root immediately with Emily, who had determined from their fleeting encounter that Moobie was utterly innocuous, even compared to a grapefruit-size bunny. As the girl ran back into the living room I remembered the glass figurines on the coffee table, a bowl of candy, and other temptations. But she bypassed these and tore upstairs to a minefield of CDs, books, outdated computer peripherals, a folk harp, and other detritus strewn everywhere that was easily stepped on and more easily tripped over. I had forgotten about Penny until a hiss from the grey cat in the guest bedroom sent Emily wailing and retreating downstairs.

  “Penny,” I said, sprinting up to the second floor to comfort the cat, who growled at me.

  “Oh, dear,” lamented Linda as Emily’s howling hit high gear.

  Moobie’s frame of mind wasn’t much better. Back downstairs, I found her in our bedroom closet, hiding behind an old suitcase that held single socks pining forlornly for their mates. When I picked up Moobie, she twisted her body in a fashion that no other animal could ever duplicate. Her front legs jerked stiffly to the right as her back legs jerked stiffly to the left, then vice versa as her head waggled back and forth. The spasms proved remarkably effective. She slid from my grasp just as I reached the living room. For a large land mammal, she was remarkably adept at avoiding Emily’s lunge. Within seconds, she had discovered a new hiding place deeper inside the closet.

  “Don’t chase
the kitty,” Shelley told her.

  “Oh, dear,” Linda repeated.

  “I think she’d be fine with us,” said Shelley. “We live in a small trailer.”

  “With lots of closets?” I asked hopefully.

  “We’re just writing down names at the moment,” said Linda. I found myself nodding in agreement.

  “I probably shouldn’t take her today, anyway.”

  I shook my head. “She seems a little upset. So does Emily.” The child had started crying again.

  “I want to see the kitty!”

  “We’ll get back to you,” promised Linda.

  THE BUMBLEBEE ROLLED into our driveway. Linda started calling it that right away. Henry, the master gardener, drove a dented yellow car of uncertain foreign origin and age with a black stripe across the sides and an orange rubber ball impaled on each of two antennae. One aerial served a nonfunctioning AM/FM radio. The other put Henry in touch with the world via a two-meter ham rig that allowed him to make completely free though highly inconvenient phone calls.

  “I’m on my way over. Over,” he’d told Linda from the supermarket parking lot minutes before his arrival. “I had to buy a camera first. Over.”

  I hid inside the house, peeping through the curtains, as Linda conducted Henry around the yard. She moved expansively from flower bed to flower bed, her red braids flapping as she gestured toward the plants while Martin followed unsteadily, as if walking were a hobby that he had just taken up. When he stepped into the middle of the largest front-yard bed and pointed at a patch of greenery, Linda waved her arms until he lifted his left tennis shoe and retreated to the lawn. Bending down, she tried propping up a squashed Oriental poppy.

  Henry lagged behind, making entries in a spiral notebook that he’d extracted from a bulging envelope. Each time he finished recording an observation, he meticulously clipped the pen to his shirt pocket, then wiggled the pad until he managed to wedge it back inside the envelope. His slowness may have exasperated Linda, but it gave me an opportunity to pick the best vantage point for witnessing the same maddening procedures repeated in different sections of the yard. Linda would stiffen as he delivered a judgment on her floral aesthetics and walked into a grouping to demonstrate his point. Next would come the trampled flower, the attempted resuscitation by Linda, and the master gardener’s notations regarding the plants that had so far survived his visit.