The Farm in the Green Mountains

by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer

  She stayed constantly with her parents and became a special creature. Sometimes when I went through the chicken houses in the evening to see that everything was in order, Lisettchen would flutter down from her sleeping perch on a rafter, sit on my shoulder or on the edge of a feed bucket, and wait for the tidbit I had for her.

  When she had received her piece of stale white bread, two or three shreds of raw meat, or some coarsely ground corn, she would fly, with her bill still full, back to her parents. Annoyed at being disturbed, they took the rest of her treat out of her bill and pecked at her a little.

  Below the Bantams’ rafters was the pen of the white Muscovy ducks, those shy, mute birds who can’t quack or gabble and only rarely make a noise that sounds something like the sounds made by a deaf mute.

  Among the Muscovies there were three with names: besides Gussy and Emma there was the drake Emil, who had grown as big as a goose. Emil was quarrelsome, strong, and pugnacious and was glad to take on the ganders.

  It was good for him that our wolfhound kept track of the poultry yard and not only drove away foxes, skunks, martens, and weasels, but also plunged bravely in between fighting animals and separated the combatants, not without pulling out a few of their tail feathers.

  This intervention in their battles was the more important because the others were with reason afraid of the white gander, who often came flying at them, pursued them, and bit them vigorously in the tail feathers.

  This white gander was probably the most difficult creature we had in the poultry yard.

  He was large, strong, crafty, hot-tempered, and he gazed maliciously out of his bright blue eyes.

  We called him Hermann, and the white goose that came with him Thusnelda. Both were Emdens, while the other geese were all gray Toulouse geese.

  The little white duck that Hermann brought with him we called Herminchen.

  Herminchen joined the three lake ducks we had been given. The big fat one was a Peking like Herminchen, and the other two were pretty brown and white Indian river ducks.

  We named the river ducks Solvejg and Eleonora. We couldn’t find a name for the fat one and didn’t really want to because she promised to be a tender roast.

  We named our animals, not by whim and fancy, but rather because the animals themselves forced us to give them certain names by their appearance, behavior, or some turn of fate.

  Whoever had a name, however, could no longer be sold, butchered, or eaten and had the chance of dying a natural death.

  The named ones seemed to understand this privilege with time. We could see their growing trust, which led on the one hand to an unusual tameness and affection, or on the other to a solid, dependable hatred, like that which the duck Gussy or the gander Hermann had for us.

  The nameless ones, in contrast, never gave up entirely their fidgety, anxious behavior, since they probably sensed that their lives would end sooner or later under the knife.

  The fat duck with the yellow beak escaped this fate because she acquired a name in time, even though it was not from us.

  It happened this way: one Sunday some farm folks we didn’t know came by our pond. They stopped their auto, and the woman stepped out and stood on the bank.

  I was not far from the pond and watched the strangers and wondered what they wanted. Now the woman went quite close to the water, put her hands up to her mouth like a megaphone, and called with a loud voice: “Ssu-sie, Ssu-sie.” Then our fat little duck separated herself from the flock of swimming geese and ducks and made her way over to the bank, constantly nodding her head. She waddled up to the woman and stopped in front of her. The woman had meanwhile noticed me and motioned me to come to her. “That is Susie,” the woman said to me. “Look, she still knows me.” She pointed to the duck, who was waddling around her, quacking and quacking.

  “That was my Susie,” the woman continued. “I brought her up. She was the most obstinate animal on the whole farm—that’s why she became my favorite. Isn’t she stubborn?” she asked me, beaming. I nodded my agreement vigorously and with conviction.

  “Later we gave up keeping ducks, and I had to send her to the lake,” she said, “and I have been looking for her a long time since she was missing from there. And today I said, ‘Bill, we want to go and see if Susie has found a good place.’ ” I urged “Bill” to get out of the truck and to come with his wife to see the shed where her Susie lived.

  “A good shed, a big pond,” said the farmer’s wife approvingly, and then they said goodbye.

  When they had left, Zuck and Winnetou appeared and asked who the strangers were.

  “Susie’s parents,” I explained and pointed to the fat duck with the air of making an introduction, “and this is Susie.”

  Susie was evidently pleased to be called by name, but that didn’t make her at all more eager for company or less stubborn.

  Susie, Eleonora, Solvejg, and Hermine lived together day and night, and with them lived Hermann, the gander.

  Hermine had brought him into this circle of ducks, and what happened after that no one could really explain.

  The four ducks would not be separated from Hermann. They waddled in front or in back of him, or they stood around him in an admiring circle.

  For his part, Hermann had developed such a deep and obvious passion for the four that he left the herd of geese and the white goose Thusnelda and lived with the four ducks in bondage and depravity.

  Of course we stopped him from spending the night with them as well, but it took real circus tricks to separate him from the ducks in the evening.

  Every evening between five and seven o’clock, depending on the time of year, we heard an excited quacking and gabbling from the direction of the shed, mixed with the trumpeting of the gander. Immediately two of us had to stop whatever we were doing and run to the shed, for if we ignored this homecoming call, the four ducks and their Hermann would turn right around and disappear to spend the night in the open and make us worry for fear a fox would carry them off.

  So there stood the four ducks and Hermann in front of the shed, clamoring for admittance.

  Now we divided the work this way: One of us had to open the door, drive the ducks quickly into their pen, and slam the door shut again in front of Hermann’s beak.

  Hermann had to be held in check until the ducks had been locked in their pen. Then the door was opened a second time, and Hermann was driven out of his arena into his cage like an angry tiger. Where the passageway led past the duck pen, Hermann behaved like a madman, and it was hard work to force him to go into the goose pen. Without the broom we could not have controlled Hermann, who was wild and dangerous. In fact, the broom often played an important role in driving the animals home, in separating fighters, and in self-defense.

  They were all afraid of the broom: the fowl, the dogs, the cats, all the animals except the goats, who even went so far as to nibble at the broom straw.

  It was not that we beat the animals with the broom, or even touched them.

  We just had to hold the broom in front of us, like a witch who is ready to mount her broomstick to ride to the Blocksberg, and the animals scattered and took to flight in the desired direction.

  Even the hair on the cats began to stand on end, and they arched their backs and started to spit when the stubbly face of the broom approached them. It seemed almost like a magical fear of the witchly attributes that made the animals run away.

  It was not only important to bring the animals into the safety of the sheds at night, but the biggest part of the task was to arrange them according to their natural order and to direct their unnatural inclinations in natural paths. That is, we aimed to put the ganders with the geese, the drakes with the ducks, and to erase at night the line they drew through our calculations by day. For this purpose a beautiful Canadian drake, Goesta, was put with the ducks. Now you might assume that it would be an easy job to bring Goesta into the pen with the four ducks. Goesta had been interested from the first day in the white Muscovies and had gotten i
nto a serious battle with the Muscovy drake Emil about it several times. But the handsome Goesta found no favor with the four ducks—every evening they greeted him with shrill insults that sounded like the scolding of old maids.

  Goesta would first look at the four with evident disgust. Then he would drive them away from the feed trough to have the feed for himself. When he was full he swung himself up onto his sleeping perch and paid no attention to the angry ducks, who only quieted down when they heard the loud, longing cry of Hermann from the goose pen.

  In the goose pen was a gray gander, who got along amazingly well with Hermann, probably because he had noticed that Hermann wasn’t interested in the geese. Then there were still three gray geese and the abandoned Thusnelda. Thusnelda was absolutely true to Hermann, and when she was once attacked by a young gray gander in an unmistakable way, she knocked out one eye of her unhappy suitor.

  These emotional complications and confusions, these tangled relationships among the animals, struck many uninvolved observers as most puzzling and amusing. In the first year we didn’t even suspect ourselves the extent of the consequences.

  It was just our luck that Thusnelda was the best and most dependable brood goose, and Solvejg as well as Eleonora turned out to be the most attentive mothers.

  When their time came, they built themselves nests, laid their eggs in them, and began at the proper interval to brood devotedly.

  When this happened the first time, we could not imagine that the spinsterish ducks and the scorned Thusnelda were sitting on nothing but infertile eggs out of which no young thing would come.

  Eleonora showed us what that meant.

  Eleonora settled herself on ten eggs and brooded. She brooded with truly fanatic devotion, and we had trouble driving her off every evening to take a little break, eat her food in peace, wash herself in the water bowl, and afterwards move about a little. Usually she gulped down quickly a bit of the feed we had specially prepared for her, ran to the water bowl and sprinkled her belly feathers, filled her beak with water after a few hasty sips, ran back to the nest and carefully sprinkled the eggs one by one after turning them tenderly with her beak. This sprinkling softens the shells and makes it easier for the ducklings to break through when they hatch. Eleonora was a duck mother who took care of everything, from proper treatment of the egg shells to even distribution of brooding warmth. For this purpose she had upholstered her nest with the finest breast feathers.

  There she sat for twenty-eight days and waited for the tapping and knocking in her eggs.

  We waited with her, but nothing stirred or moved and everything remained still as death in her nest.

  Eleonora began to grow visibly thinner and to decline. We let her sit five days more, but when we came into the shed on the thirty-third brooding day, we were met by a terrible stench.

  We found Eleonora the picture of total insanity, rolling her eggs out of the nest and tearing it to pieces. The half-open eggs showed no trace of a young duck, or even of an embryo. They were filled with a greenish yolk-like liquid, whose pestilential smell was far worse than rotten eggs.

  We picked up Eleonora and held her fast, although she struggled wildly to return to her dirty nest, and we washed her breast and belly feathers, which were stuck together with the green putrefaction from the broken eggs. We carried her to the pond to finish her purifying bath.

  For several days she tried day and night to return to her nest, but we had removed and burnt it, cleaned up everything, and locked the door tightly.

  In spite of the danger from predatory animals, we left her on the pond for three nights to keep her away from the empty nest and the company of the others.

  Several times in the night we heard her quacking piteously in front of the shed door, asking to get in, and the others answering from inside.

  Then she went back again, swam in great circles around the dead trees that rose out of the pond, and as she dove into the cool water, washed her feathers, and began to beat her wings with new strength, she seemed to separate herself farther and farther from her despair and the deep madness that had overcome her.

  After this disaster we learned what we must do, and we set out to correct nature.

  First we acquired a candling apparatus, and as the brooding time approached again we gathered the eggs of all the ducks and geese and left them for a week in the cellar.

  Meanwhile I wrote to the different farms that had advertised in our farm paper: “Hatching eggs from Toulouse, Emden, Chinese and African geese, and Muscovy, Rouen, and Indian river ducks.”

  Usually we received the answer: “Dear friends, unfortunately I am unable to send you hatching eggs since all my geese and ducks are already sitting, but I can send you some when they are hatched . . .”

  Sometimes there were eggs.

  After eight days we brought the eggs that our fowl had laid out of the cellar, darkened the kitchen, and tested them one after the other on the candling apparatus. This was a square tin box with an electric bulb in it. On the upper side of the box a hole had been cut and lined with rubber. We set the eggs on this and turned on the light and could look into every part of the lighted egg to search for the dark spot that meant that the egg had been fertilized.

  The unfertilized eggs were used for cooking. We took the eggs for hatching back to the sheds.

  The guaranteed eggs we put in the nests of Thusnelda, Eleonora, and Solvejg, exchanging them secretly with the empty, unproductive eggs they had laid.

  The chickens were no problem.

  We had little brooding houses for them, one for each hen mother. They came already assembled from Sears and Roebuck and looked like tiny doghouses.

  Usually the brooding hens needed only a day to get used to their new quarters and caused little trouble.

  The geese had two big brooding houses near the pond and usually used them for this purpose. The ducks, on the other hand, couldn’t decide whether they wanted to be domesticated or wild birds and nested under stone walls, in the cellars of old barns, in rain barrels, and in holes in the ground, and we had a great deal of trouble finding them and moving them carefully with their nests into the security of the duck shed.

  Such moving never succeeded with Gussy, because we could never find her. Some of the other Muscovy ducks we had to leave where they were because by the time we found them it was too late for moving. Then we watched anxiously for the appearance of the ducklings, which we had to protect immediately against fox and weasel.

  Once one of the Muscovy duck mothers succeeded in hiding her new family from us. She led them immediately after birth out of a hole in the ground to the pond. There six of the eleven perished, and we were only just able to rescue the rest from the water in time.

  The difficulty with domestic animals is that, no matter how wild they act, they have lost a large part of the instinct that they doubtless had when they were still untamed wild animals. They let themselves be tamed, trading their freedom for housing and care, an apparent but temporary security, and left it to their caretakers to watch over their life, their health, and their activities.

  We had to take care day and night that they did not eat too much, wrong or even poisonous things, and that they didn’t drive their young into the water too early. We had to deal with their various illnesses, with which they could not cope themselves. In short, watching over and caring for the animals consisted primarily in protecting them from their own mistakes and putting a timely barrier in the way of their dangerous inclinations.

  Among our errant ones was even Thusnelda, to whom it occurred about the end of April, when it was still very cold and there was much snow on the ground, to build her nest under the little corncrib that stood on six legs and was used to dry the corn.

  The fowl, who were let out of the sheds summer and winter, had often gone under this corncrib, so that we paid no particular notice and only discovered Thusnelda’s completed nest too late.

  Since she was a particularly difficult “case,” we didn’t dare move
her, but had to build a whole shed around her to protect her from cold and snow, and we set up a watch to keep foxes, skunks, and weasels away from her.

  In the evening we had the dogs run around the corncrib and sniff through everything looking for small predators, so that the air and ground around the goose Thusnelda was filled with the wolf smell of the dogs. We expected that this frightening fragrance would give Thusnelda some protection.

  My bedroom was right across from the corncrib, and in that brooding month I ran down to the barn in the middle of the night innumerable times because I thought that I had heard a noise.

  Then I lit up every corner with the flashlight, last of all the nest itself where Thusnelda was sitting on her eggs, which came from Harwich, Massachusetts. She looked at me angrily with her stupid blue eyes, as if I had disturbed her rest, not she mine.

  When her goslings hatched, four yellow-green, strong, incredibly small geese, Hermann suddenly and unexpectedly turned up, rushed at the goslings, and before I could get a broom he was close to the nest.

  I was sure that there would now be a battle with Thusnelda, and in it all the newborn geese would be trampled and pecked to death. I stood there with that helpless feeling of despair with which you watch the hail fall from heaven and destroy the harvest.

  Then something entirely unexpected happened.

  Thusnelda did not defend herself, nor did she try to defend her babies or to take them under her wings. The four little puff balls on their too-long legs chirped at the big bird, and Hermann laid his head to one side and looked at them with that heavenly blue glance that he usually saved for Herminchen. The whole thing was a misunderstanding.

  It was a misunderstanding first of all on my part, since I had believed that Hermann would act like most ganders, drakes, and even roosters who sometimes show murderous intent toward young animals, even when they are their own sons and daughters.

  On the other hand Hermann also had a misunderstanding. Unpredictable as he was, he went from one extreme to the other and without transition became a devoted family man, even though he was not at all the father of these geese who came from Massachusetts.