Fowl Weather

by Bob Tarte

  “I think you might be right,” he told her. “And this could turn out to be a slow-growing tumor.”

  “So he might outlast the cancer?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  Contributing to our decision to let Walter live out his time in peace was the fact that another vet had removed two noncancerous tumors a year earlier, and the experience had stressed him to the point where he had barely eaten for several days. “Walter could do fine for quite a while,” Linda said.

  We didn’t obsess too long about his condition. A fresh disaster sloshed in the following weekend when my old college friend Michael visited me. Sitting in the living room, we had just finished listening to bits of a CD by the Oratorio Society of Minnesota, of which he was a member. Michael was patiently pronouncing composer Kodály’s name for me for about the fourteenth time when a flurry of wings and parrot squawks interrupted my Hungarian-language lesson. I ran into the dining room as Stanley Sue flew from Howard’s cage and landed on the countertop.

  To keep Howard and Stanley Sue apart when one or the other bird was loose, we put a towel on top of the captive bird’s cage to prevent sneak attacks from above or below. I had never considered the possibility that the parrot would fight the dove through the bars while clinging to the side of his cage, but this is exactly what had happened. Howard’s foot had been bloodied, and he tilted his head as if in pain.

  He didn’t seem badly hurt, but to be on the safe side I took him to Dr. Fuller’s office the next day. “His neck is lacerated under the feathers,” he said. “He needs to be anesthetized right away and the wound sutured, but that isn’t what worries me the most. See the marks on his beak?”

  Popping on my glasses and focusing closely, I noticed a couple of indentations halfway between the tip of the beak and his head. “Is that serious?”

  “His beak isn’t like a parrot’s bill, which is made of a hard substance not unlike your fingernails. Howard’s beak is composed of soft tissue with blood circulation, and with an injury like this, there is a danger that the beak could actually fall off.” Our vet had the gift of making the most extraordinary statements sound so commonplace, it was as if he said them on a daily basis.

  As I struggled with this unfortunate snippet of information, Dr. Fuller cupped Howard expertly in his hand in a sort of kung fu grip that I could never duplicate no matter how many times he had demonstrated it. He disappeared to his surgery with the bird, leaving me to baste in worry on my own. It shocked me that in less than five seconds, Stanley Sue had succeeded in slashing Howard’s neck, upbraiding his leg, and putting the vise grip on his bill, even with her beak restricted by the bars. Equally amazing was the fact that a defenseless dove would be so bold as to challenge a powerful parrot. I could only explain their ongoing rivalry as the age-old contest of determining supremacy over the flock. I took it as an insult that neither bird viewed me as a contender.

  When Dr. Fuller finally returned to the examination room and gently placed the groggy dove into our pet carrier, I noticed that his normally clean-shaven face sported a Vandyke beard. Combined with his wire-rimmed glasses, the facial hair lent him the appearance of a psychoanalyst. I wondered if I might ask him to prescribe some Zoloft to get me through the week. He hadn’t been out of the room long enough to grow the whiskers; I’d been so fixated on Howard during my visit, I must have let his new Vandyke fly right by me.

  “His neck stitched up very well. I don’t think it will be a problem.”

  “So how will I know when he’s out of danger with his beak?”

  “You have to get him to eat something,” the beard told me. “His beak is probably too tender for seeds. You should try him on something soft. I’m going to send you home with some powdered food that you can mix with water and manually feed him if necessary. Do you know how to do a tube-feeding?”

  Seldom would a visit to the vet’s office be described as a pleasant experience, but I felt worse about this one by the minute. “Do you mean sticking a tube down his throat into his crop and force-feeding him?” Linda’s friend LuAnn needed to do this twice a day with her blind dove Snowdrop, who could not eat on her own. I had watched the tube-feeding once, and it looked miserable for both parties involved.

  “I can show you how to do it.”

  “How about we wait until it’s absolutely necessary? I can bring him back tomorrow afternoon if I don’t see any evidence that he’s eating.”

  “That’s fine,” said Dr. Fuller. “But we shouldn’t wait longer than that. It’s critical that he start receiving nutrition as soon as possible.”

  I brought Howard home in a mood so bleak, not even a glance at Walter cheered me. Howard and Ollie were the two birds that had been with us the longest, and I couldn’t imagine life without him fluttering clumsily around the dining room and hooting with puffed-up dignity at the parakeets, who ignored him.

  Recalling that spaghetti was his favorite dinner food, I made a quick trip to the supermarket and brought home a frozen blob of pasta. Dusty, Stanley Sue, and Ollie loved noodles, too, and grudgingly allowed Linda and me to set aside a heated dollop for ourselves. I prepared the spaghetti for Howard in the traditional manner. Donning high-magnification glasses and equipping myself with a precision saw, I pressed several noodles together on my plate and cut them into rice-size pieces. I distributed them on the countertop next to Ollie’s cage. Then I let Howard loose.

  In a moment of high drama, Linda and I stopped eating and slowed our heartbeats as the newly sutured Howard landed on the Formica. Spying his favorite food, he bobbled toward it, but didn’t eat at once.

  “Maybe the countertop’s too hard,” I told Linda. “Maybe we should sprinkle the spaghetti on a wet sponge.”

  I needn’t have worried. Within seconds Howard began wolfing down the noodles, whacking the countertop with greedy strikes of his beak like a woodpecker trying his luck on aluminum siding. Moments later, he assumed his usual spot inside Ollie’s cage while Ollie dined on top in the equivalent of a café setting. Raking his beak through the small parrot’s dish, Howard scattered a hundred seeds on the floor for every one he popped into his mouth. Usually Linda fussed about the mess, but this time she praised him profusely: “Good boy, Howard.”

  The next day I revisited my stash of wire-mesh fencing in the barn. Stapling it to strips of wood, I constructed a gawky enclosure that slipped over his hanging cage and, similar to the barrier on the bunny cages, barred Stanley’s beak from entry. It was probably the first cage for a cage that I had ever built.

  WE SHOULD HAVE run more fencing around the backyard to keep Eileen out, but it would have been like trying to hold water back with a sieve. Kate had given us her okay on the phone for Lulu to move to luxury accommodations with Eileen’s newfound friend Henrietta. But I hadn’t expected my old schoolmate to simply show up one Saturday morning. For reasons as mysterious as those that had brought her to us in the first place, Eileen had left our orbit to the extent that she didn’t care to greet us or ask for our help. Kate had accompanied her and turned to wave enthusiastically in the direction of the dining room, though I doubted she could see me crouched behind Dusty’s cage.

  Eileen gestured impatiently for Kate to join her inside the duck pen, then stepped back as the realization hit her that she had no idea how to handle anything with feathers. The general stood aside and waved her arms at Lulu’s pleasant owner, who lifted and snuggled her beautiful white duck. She paused to make sure that Eileen had latched the pen door, then followed her at a march toward our driveway.

  That afternoon I hauled a cage into the backyard, set it on top of the milk house, and gave Roswitha’s pigeon her freedom as Linda urged her on. Without a second’s hesitation, the bird flew off, circled the yard, and landed on the peak of the barn roof. Throughout the day, she maintained her post like a weather vane that had come to life. As evening began to fall, she still remained, and we worried that her months in captivity might have robbed her of the instincts to fend for herself. Hol
ding her cage above my head, I walked toward the barn calling for her.

  “Pigeon! Pigeon! You can come back inside if you want.”

  After a few moments she flapped her wings and left the roof. It was just dark enough that hawks wouldn’t be a problem, and far too light for tussles with owls as she flew over the remaining flood-water in the woods, heading home to rejoin her flock—soaring above and flapping away from the troubles that had found us.

  CHAPTER 11

  Travels with Stinky

  Howard recovered from his life-threatening injuries with his usual nonchalance, and the tumor on Walter’s leg didn’t seem to have progressed. My mom puttered along without further setbacks, the new geese coexisted swimmingly with their peers, and Eileen hadn’t reared her topknotted head in days. Eager to take advantage of this rare interval of tranquillity, Linda said, “Couldn’t we get out of town for a weekend?”

  Two obstacles prevented us from flinging ourselves into the car and hurling it toward Grindstone City, Michigan; Wawa, Ontario; or another chunk of vacation paradise. The foremost problem was Linda’s ailing back. Her creaky lumbar discs went on strike if she stood in one place or sat too long—a condition that would have proved fatal to a sedentary stick like myself. Lying on the back seat of the car during brief jaunts helped keep Linda’s spinal contractions at bay, but she couldn’t stay supine for a several-hour drive. My cramped Ford Focus didn’t exactly offer the comforts of a queen-size bed, let alone a faux-sheepskin rug on the living room floor. She might as well have tried to stretch out inside my mother’s bread drawer between a bundle of hoarded paper bags and a hidden purse. But Linda had hatched an idea that might improve her transportability—the inimitable Stinky—and we awaited the chance to test it out.

  That left us with the second problem: finding a pet sitter. We’d had a few excellent sitters over the years, but Betty had moved away, Teresa had grown busy with her family, and Sarah had fallen victim to post-traumatic stress syndrome from a relentless series of chores that included singing a night-night song to Ollie. We had no choice but to seek out innocent blood for Victor’s beak, and that meant placing an ad in the local weekly newspaper. Plenty of college-age girls always applied. They never failed to impress us with their enthusiasm and imperturbability during the interview process, and seldom failed to disappoint us with their lackluster performance on the job.

  A few summers ago, just before we had walked out of the door for a trip to Pennsylvania Dutch country, Linda had told college student Tippi, “Make sure to cover the birds at night, like we talked about before. The covers are in the hall closet, and I wrote down which ones go over which cage.”

  “I won’t forget,” she assured Linda. “I even remember what you said about the two black covers for Stanley Sue.”

  Upon our return a week later, as I attempted to regale Tippi with tales of technology-shunning Amish ringing up quilt sales on state-of-the-art LCD-screen cash registers, Linda glanced in the closet and noticed that the pile of cage covers lay exactly as she had left them. Tippi hadn’t so much as unfolded a single cover, when she should have used them to conceal the fact that she hadn’t cleaned the cages either. A check of the upstairs answering machine explained her laxness. “I’m on my way over right now,” began numerous messages from her boyfriend, alternating with plaintive calls from her parents, asking, “Tippi, why haven’t we heard from you?”

  Another young pet sitter, Missy, worked as a veterinary assistant and had grown up on a farm with countless indoor and outdoor critters. Her attentiveness when Linda introduced her to the pets encouraged us, as did the questions that she asked about their care. But on the scorching July weekend when we visited the Upper Peninsula, only a propitious visit from Linda’s friend LuAnn saved our birds and rabbits from cooking in the giant pressure cooker of our house. “She didn’t have enough common sense to switch on the air conditioner,” LuAnn said later. “I had to do it for her.” These and other incidents involving the justifiably maligned youth of America compelled Linda to target older and presumably more dependable sitters instead. But they proved difficult to find.

  AS BEFITTED THE zenith of spring, Linda’s flowers popped out of the ground in abundance, and her annual crop of classified ads on assorted subjects blossomed in the Lowell Ledger. Her solicitation of a pet sitter didn’t seem to invite confusion. “Wanted: experienced person to care for our pet birds, rabbits, and cats while we are on vacation. Must be an animal lover.” A few folks with the credentials of having once petted though never owned a dog were among the first wave of callers, along with a gruff-voiced man who charmed Linda with the admission that, yes, he guessed he could feed and water a few pets if we paid him enough.

  Although we had decided to disregard calls from college students, we repeatedly played back the message from a young woman who assured us that she would love to have the job, provided that we picked her up and drove her back to her dorm each day, because she didn’t own a car. “I guess we could lend her mine, since we’re apparently vacationing within walking distance of home,” I told Linda. We also received the typical call from a doting mom who didn’t want her nine-year-old to miss the chance to learn about animals. “Might as well practice on ours,” I muttered. “Too bad we don’t have an actual guinea pig.”

  Linda rigorously screened the applicants that made it past the answering machine by subjecting them to a concise series of questions over the course of an hour-long phone call. The first person to survive this trial by endurance seemed ideal when she showed up at our door with a well-behaved scarlet macaw balanced on her wrist. “Ozzie loves everybody,” she informed us with an accent that, using my vast knowledge of The Crocodile Hunter television show, I immediately placed within the northern Queensland region of Australia.

  “Actually, I’m from New Zealand,” Doreen said with a toss of her hair.

  I had never held a macaw before, and as Ozzie stepped onto my arm and affectionately rubbed a head the size of Tasmania on my sleeve, I wanted to hire her on the spot. Linda seemed reluctant to surrender the keys to our front door, however. After a few minutes of baby-talk with the bright red pterodactyl, I realized that Doreen’s avian passion pretty much limited itself to her winged creature. While she politely glanced at our parrots, parakeets, dove, and canary, her attention always boomeranged backed to Ozzie.

  “Dusty is a real talker,” Linda began.

  “Say ‘Hello, there,’ Ozzie,” Doreen told the bird.

  “But he’s not exactly what you’d call cuddly.”

  “Watch this,” said Doreen, taking Ozzie from me. “Let’s play rock-a-bye baby.” Flipping him upside down, she cradled his back in her palm while his legs stuck up straight in the air. She sang a short lullaby worthy of Ollie’s night-night hat bedtime song. Then, upon announcing, “Upsy daisy,” she tossed the macaw in the air, caught the still inverted bird in her opposite hand, and twisted him right side up without ruffling a single feather. None of our birds would ever have tolerated such acrobatics, though Dusty had once dangled headfirst from the top of my boot while trying to fillet my foot.

  Once she had returned Ozzie to a spacious cage in her SUV and accompanied us to the barn, Doreen’s powers of concentration improved. She commented favorably upon hens Tina and Buffy, recognized the aggressiveness lurking behind Victor’s tail wagging. All of this boded well. But there was just one hitch. Shod in a pair of immaculate calf-high Italian leather boots, she planted each foot with obvious misgivings as she navigated the debris-strewn barn floor. When she lifted the water pail to fill it from the hydrant per Linda’s instructions, she didn’t engage the full length of her fingers in the task, as though she wished to limit her exposure to the phalanges while sparing the far more susceptible metacarpals.

  “I think she’d be fine for looking in on the animals while we’re visiting my mom for the day,” Linda told me after Doreen and Ozzie had taken flight. “But she wouldn’t be good if we were gone overnight. She’s a little too fastidious fo
r working out in the barn, and she can barely tear herself away from that bird of hers for even a second.”

  An older man named Harry who had once been a farmer squeaked through Linda’s telephone interview on the basis of his charitable works. He liked ducks and rabbits, he told her, and used to keep them. He’d also owned a couple of parrots, though he seemed vague about the details. Although his voice suggested advanced age and thus frailty even greater than mine, he spoke of having recently returned from West Virginia, where he’d been repairing flood-damaged homes with other members of his church. Linda suggested that he stop by to meet our animals. “He sounds like a nice Christian man,” she told me.

  Two days later Harry phoned to say that he had just finished visiting a friend at the office of the lumber company two miles up the road from us and was on his way right over. Linda and I stood in the living room, peering out the window for his vehicle. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. At the half-hour mark, Linda phoned the office.

  “Harry?” laughed the woman on the other end. “He’s still standing here talking.”

  A few minutes later we met a grizzled soul sporting a red baseball cap and a glint in his eye that warned of an endless repository of stories. “I’ll show you the pen behind the barn,” Linda told him. Before we had walked half the distance, his non-Italian leather boots sank roots into the ground as he paused beside our pine tree. “I used to have a bunch of rabbits when I was a kid,” he began, and as he licked his lips to prime the pump of reminiscence, I could hear the woody tendrils burrowing deeper. “One day I woke up, and ten of them were dead. I called the vet, and he said that they probably caught some disease from a rat, and a few more might die. I lost eight more of them that day.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Linda as she took a step toward the barn that did not earn reciprocation from Harry. “We’re crazy about our Walter and Rudy. They live in the dining room if you want to see them later.”