Steve & Me

by Terri Irwin

  “Absolutely. I’ll take care of everything,” came Steve’s reply.

  My heart was pounding as I drove up the coast again a few days later. There was the familiar little sign, the modest entrance. And here he was again, as large as life—six feet tall, broad shoulders, a big grin, and a warm and welcome handshake. Our first real touch.

  “Well, I’m back,” I said lamely.

  “Good on you, mate,” Steve said. I thought, I’ve got what on me?

  Right away, I was extremely self-conscious about a hurdle I felt that we had to get over. I wasn’t entirely sure about Steve’s marital status. I looked for a ring, but he didn’t wear one. That doesn’t mean anything, I told myself. He probably can’t wear one because of his work. I think he figured out what I was hinting at as I started asking him questions about his friends and family.

  He lived right there at the zoo, he told me, with his parents and his sister Mandy. His sister Joy was married and had moved away.

  I was trying to figure out how to say, “So, do you have a girlfriend?” when suddenly he volunteered the information.

  “Would you like to meet my girlfriend?” he asked.

  Ah, I felt my whole spirit sink into the ground. I was devastated. But I didn’t want to show that to Steve.

  I stood up straight and tall, smiled, and said, “Yes, I’d love to.”

  “Sue,” he called out. “Hey, Sue.”

  Bounding around the corner came this little brindle girl, Sui, his dog.

  “Here’s me girlfriend,” he said with a smile.

  This is it, I thought. There’s no turning back.

  We spent a wonderful weekend together. I worked alongside him at the zoo from sunup to sunset. During the day it was raking the entire zoo, gathering up the leaves, cleaning up every last bit of kangaroo poo, washing out lizard enclosures, keeping the snakes clean. But it was the croc work that was most exciting.

  The first afternoon of that visit, Steve took me in with the alligators. They came out of their ponds like sweet little puppies—puppies with big, sharp teeth and frog eyes. I didn’t know what to expect, but with Steve there, I felt a sense of confidence and security. The next thing I knew, I was feeding the alligators big pieces of meat, as if I’d done it all my life.

  That evening he put me up at the Glasshouse Mountains Motel, a few miles from the zoo. Steve was very chivalrous. I met his arents and had dinner with the whole family. I also got my first taste of Australian humor. That night at dinner, I poured myself what I thought was a nice glass of juice. The entire Irwin family sat quiet and straight-faced. As I took a big swig, it nearly choked me.

  That’s when I learned about cordial, which is supposed to be mixed with water. I had poured it full strength. We all had a good laugh.

  The next night Steve and I went to dinner in Caloundra, a nearby town. He took me to a resort that featured an all-you-can-eat buffet dinner—seafood banquet, my favorite. I loaded my plate high with prawns, crab, oysters, and everything I loved. I didn’t know it then, but Steve was a bit worried that I was going to eat more than he did.

  At one point a little piece of crab flicked onto the crook of my arm. I deftly reached down with my tongue and managed to grab it off my elbow and eat it. Suddenly I felt self-conscious. Steve was staring at me. He looked at me with such love in his eyes, and I thought, He’s going to say something wonderful.

  Steve leaned forward and said affectionately, “Gosh, you aren’t ladylike at all.” I burst out laughing. Apparently I’d done the right thing. I reflected back on my dad’s advice: No matter what, always be yourself. And it sure had worked.

  As we left the restaurant, Steve said, “You know, I smell ducks.”

  We walked outside, and sure enough, there was a flock of beautiful ducks bobbing around on a pond.

  “Steve, you are the most amazing bushman I’ve ever met,” I said.

  Of course, the resort and the pond had been there for years, and Steve had known about the ducks for just as long. “I smell ducks” was a Crocodile Dundee trick that had nevertheless worked its magic on this naive American girl.

  And then, suddenly, the weekend was over. Steve drove me back down to Brisbane. I had the biggest ache in my heart. I had fallen hard. As we said good-bye, he put his arms around me for the first time, and I felt all his strength and warmth in that embrace. But it was over. I was going back to my side of the world. I had no idea if I would ever see Steve Irwin again.

  Chapter Two

  Malina

  “Cougar cubs for sale.”

  Four words jumped out at me from the classified want ads in the Oregonian, a major newspaper in my home state of Oregon. It was 1986; I was twenty-two years old, living on my own, running a pilot car business I had inherited from my father.

  I turned the page, closed the paper, and went on with my day. But those four words continued to thrum in my mind, and no matter what I did, I just couldn’t seem to stop dwelling on them.

  Cougar cubs, I thought. That’s strange. How can that be possible or legal when we’ve got cougars living in the wild in Oregon? How can you buy and sell them like pets?

  I tried to put the thought out of my mind, but I couldn’t shake it. Finally I decided I had to drive up and check out the situation. The address was a residence in Hillsboro, a small suburb to the west of the city of Portland.

  The owner of the place came out to meet me as I parked my car—he was a reed-thin smoker, with aviator glasses and thinning hair. He kept a lot of exotics on the grounds, a few parrots and monkeys, but mostly different and unusual breeds of horses, ranging in size from miniature ponies to big draft Percherons.

  “I’m here to see the cougar cubs,” I said.

  “Only got one left,” he told me, and led me back into a garage. A small portable pet carrier sat pushed up against one wall of the garage. I peered inside. A baby cougar stared blankly back out at me. She looked about three months old and was absolutely bone thin. Her eyes were dull and lifeless.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” I whispered. She barely looked up. She had tried so hard to get out of the cage that she had rubbed a large patch of fur off her forehead.

  “What have you been feeding her?” I asked the owner. I detected the painful swelling of the joints that indicated rickets, the result of a poor or incorrect diet.

  “Chicken necks,” the owner said.

  “Surely you’ve fed her something else as well?” I asked. The man shrugged and pushed his aviator glasses up on his nose.

  “How much are you selling her for?”

  “Thirteen hundred,” he replied flatly.

  Thirteen hundred dollars. A lot of money for me to come up with. I nodded thoughtfully, as if I were weighing the price.

  “Well, thank you for showing her to me,” I said.

  I turned to leave, but I was so moved by that one little cougar that I knew I had to do something. I was a single woman living alone in a three-bedroom house in the suburbs. What on earth was I going to do with a baby cougar?

  Eugene, Oregon, is the “Emerald City,” beautifully situated at the end of the Willamette Valley. It’s an outdoorsy, friendly kind of place, perfect for a soccer-playing, horse-riding, cheerleading young student at the Eugene Christian School, which is what I was. My mom, Julia, was a teacher. I was the baby of the family and the last child left at home. My sister Bonnie lived with us until I was six weeks old, when she moved out and got married. I knew my sister Tricia better, since she didn’t get married until I was six. But for most of the time as I was growing up, I was well and truly entrenched as the only child.

  My father, Clarence, worked a variety of jobs when I was growing up in Eugene. A heavy-haul trucker was one of them. He also ran the pilot cars that preceded and followed extra-wide loads on the highway. Because of his jobs on the road, he came across a lot of wounded or orphaned wildlife, and from time to time he’d come home with one. I was always keen to help any of these rescued creatures.

  Driving his tr
uck one day, my dad saw a mother merganser duck that had been hit by a car. Her baby ducks were with her, running around frantically back and forth at the side of the highway.

  “Look,” he said to me when he arrived at home that evening. He opened his jacket to reveal a half-dozen little ducklings. He couldn’t stop with the big load when he first saw them, he said, but on the way back he managed to pull over and scoop up the few that he could find.

  “I figure owls got the rest,” he added.

  I was ecstatic. Merganser ducks have a sharp beak with a serrated edge, totally unlike the flat, shovel-like bills of a mallard duck. They’re fish-catchers, which we didn’t realize at the time. Merganser ducks also have funny little haircuts: The feathers on top of their heads flip up at the back. To my eight-year-old eyes, they were beautiful.

  But something was wrong. We kept trying to feed them grain, but they weren’t taking it. The ducklings became sick and listless. My dad was frustrated. It looked as though he had saved the babies just to have them die in our care.

  But finally, after Mom did some research on the little guys, she figured it out. “Fish,” she said. “They eat fish.”

  We had a small stream, which we called a slough, that ran behind our house. Our nickname for it was “the Amazon.” Our Amazon wasn’t full of piranha, but minnows, small fingerlings that were gray and under an inch or two long. I’d help my dad catch a couple hundred every day, and the ducklings ate them with relish. I also went out with my dad at night to catch fat, juicy night crawlers to supplement their diet.

  It was comical to watch the tiny little merganser ducks as they grabbed a half-foot-long night crawler to try to down it. Though the duckling was determined to swallow the night crawler, the worm was equally determined not to be swallowed. The night crawler wiggled ferociously, in a way that would force the duckling to completely contort its whole body. The duck wriggled and writhed, the worm writhed and struggled, and finally the duck would win and sit there happily with a full crop. It was the funniest sight.

  That small flock of mergansers was so special to me because we didn’t have any pets. They knew me, they would come up to me when I called, and they would nuzzle me with their tiny beaks. I wanted to keep them forever. But I had to learn an important lesson about wildlife. My dad used my room as an example.

  “Look around,” he said. In my bedroom was everything that I loved—my nice soft bed, my favorite toys, and great big sunny windows. I loved my room.

  “I want you to imagine something,” said my dad. “Imagine if you could never leave this room. We’d bring in all your favorite food, and maybe you could have a TV and radio in here, but you still couldn’t ever leave. Would you be happy?”

  I knew what he was getting at. “Maybe for a little while,” I replied.

  “For a little while,” he repeated.

  We introduced the ducks back into the wild. Afterward, I thought about how it all made sense to me. No matter how nice the place is where you live, you need to experience life and the world.

  It wouldn’t be long before I’d learn another lesson that was a real turning point. I saw a dog scrounging around in the school parking lot, a dirty and scrawny mutt that had evidently been on his own for a while. Some of the kids and I shared a bit of food with the dog at recess. By the time classes were starting again we had befriended the poor thing.

  I suddenly felt an unusual responsibility toward the stray. I didn’t feel it was enough just to give it something to eat and say that I’d helped it, and then move on. I needed to make sure that dog was in a safe place.

  “We’ve got to do something to help,” I said to my teacher.

  “The school’s already called animal control,” my teacher explained. She assured me that if the owners were looking for the stray, they would have the best chance of finding it through animal control.

  I was stubborn. “But after a period of time, if the dog isn’t claimed, they’ll put it to sleep, right?”

  My teacher nodded reluctantly. “I suppose.”

  “So that’s not good enough.”

  My teacher sighed, giving me an I-haven’t-got-time-for-this look. “There aren’t really any other options, Terri.”

  And that was that. What happened to the stray dog, I’ll never know. But with the fierce determination of a child to right injustice, I resolved that when I grew up, I would no longer turn a blind eye and walk past a problem. I would stop and fix it. I remember that episode very clearly as a defining moment in my life.

  Neither the stray dog nor the ducklings were huge events, just minor incidents in the life of a young girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest. But they formed two vital threads in the fabric of who I am today: When you help an animal, do your absolute best to make sure you don’t harm it at the same time, and Never walk past a problem with an animal—fix it.

  These were the lessons I remembered when I encountered a sick, emaciated cougar in a plastic pet cage.

  I started by contacting the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. “Is it legal to keep a cougar?” I asked. It turned out that it was perfectly legal, provided the animal was born in captivity.

  “Once they are in captivity,” said the voice on the other end of the line, “they no longer fall under the jurisdiction of the Fish and Wildlife Department. They become the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Agriculture.”

  The bureaucrat’s favorite strategy: Pass a problem on down the line.

  I called the USDA and eventually found that there was only a single official, Dr. Overton, who was in charge of all of northern California and the entire 97,000 square miles of Oregon. His jurisdiction included every wild animal in captivity, from circus animals and roadside zoos to aquariums and even backyard pets.

  I described the baby cougar’s situation to him.

  “The best we could do for the animal,” he told me, “is to issue a warning and check up on her in a few months.”

  “In a few days, much less a few months, that cougar will be dead,” I said.

  “I apologize,” Dr. Overton said. “I don’t have any other options.”

  I felt bad for him, and I shared his frustration at being stretched so thin. The problem was bigger than both of us, and I hadn’t even been aware of it. It reminded me of what my teacher had said about the stray dog. Back then, I swore that if there were no other options, then I would be the option. Now I was an adult with the opportunity to fix the glitch in this system.

  I drove back up to Hillsboro, laid my money down, and took possession of one very sick, very pitiful cougar, pet pack and all.

  As I pulled out of the parking lot, the man in the aviator glasses walked alongside my car, shouting advice. “You can tie her in the backyard like a dog. And they’re really good with children. They’re not destructive in a house. You can just bring them in and out, like you would treat a pet.”

  Right. A new pet. I thought about that as I drove the hundred miles south from Portland to Eugene, the baby cougar crying pitifully in her cage in the backseat.

  My very first hurdle was that I already had a pet, a dog named Shasta who I dearly loved. I’d gotten her three years before, during a “Beachcombing Days” celebration near my parents’ cabin on the Oregon coast. There was a little girl and her hippie mother, and they had a wagonload of puppies.

  “They’re free or they’re two dollars,” the young girl said as I walked past her.

  I laughed out loud, and I don’t know what came over me, but I gave her two dollars for a reddish brown puppy, a Border collie–golden retriever–Rhodesian ridgeback mix. I was drinking a soda pop called Shasta at the time, and I loved Mount Shasta, the majestic peak near the Oregon-California border.

  Shasta the dog was most perturbed when I showed up at “her” house with a baby cougar. But she settled down after a few days, and the two had a sort of uneasy truce.

  I still had to deal with the overwhelming feeling of “Now what am I going to do?” The baby cougar stayed i
n the garage. I played with her in the backyard and rolled around with her in the house. After a few days of eating good food, she started coming around and immediately began acting like a cougar. This turned out to be both good and bad.

  Her greatest joy and favorite game was hiding until my back was turned. Then she’d pounce ferociously and grapple me around the backs of my legs. Cougars are superb stalk-and-ambush predators. Her cub-level version of it was a cute enough trick, unless I happened to be sitting down, not paying attention.

  When I was doing paperwork, watching TV, or reclining in any sort of seated position, she would sneak up on me very quietly with her big, soft, padded feet on the carpet. I would never hear her coming. She would leap through the air and land on my back, grabbing the back of my neck with her jaws, pretending I was a wild white-tailed deer.

  She would clamp down on me, refusing to let go, with a guttural growl coming out between her clenched teeth. The whole process left me rather unsettled. I never knew when I was going to be pounced on. I reflected on Aviator-Man’s idea of having a cougar as a house pet and wondered how many people he had endangered. Sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, being roommates just isn’t going to pan out.

  I began doing more thorough and appropriate research. I learned that in spite of the fact that scores of wild animals were in the pet trade, no official regulations existed for housing a cougar. Several governmental agencies had opinions. The Department of Fish and Wildlife decided they had jurisdiction because a cougar was a native Oregonian animal. The USDA felt it had jurisdiction because I had the animal in captivity. The local county animal authorities also wanted to get involved. Everyone seemed to have their best guess as to what might be required. In the end, I figured it would be best to go along with the strictest guidelines.

  I needed to build a four-hundred-square-foot enclosure, with a curbed concrete-slab floor six inches thick. The fence needed to be five-gauge cyclone fencing. I contacted several building companies and discovered that no manufacturer had made five-gauge cyclone fencing since World War II.