Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  “Bob won’t let us have any more rabbits,” Linda said.

  “The poor guy sits out in a cage in the barn all by himself.”

  Faster than the eye could register it, Linda wrote down the telephone number of the rabbit owner. As if swept in on a tide of history, I found myself the following Saturday walking into a barn owned by Tam and Steve’s neighbor, Judy. I had spent the morning rehearsing any number of excuses in my mind why we couldn’t possibly take a third male rabbit, but I found myself laughing out loud when I laid eyes on Walter. As soon as he saw us, he hopped into the battered cardboard box that Judy told us was his favorite spot to hide. Hiding didn’t equal concealment, however. He couldn’t quite squeeze his entire body into the shadow of the carton. Compared to Bertie and Rollo, Walter was huge, a Checker Giant mix, tipping the scales at just over eight pounds. Despite the epic proportions of his rump and haunches, his head appeared comically oversize, and his jet-black eyes topped with an exuberant thatch of eyelashes added an irresistible element of pathos.

  “He’s beautiful,” Linda beamed.

  Beautiful and silly. After a minute or two, Walter determined that we didn’t represent enough of a threat to discourage him from abandoning his shelter for the feed dish. This gave me the opportunity to step back and attempt to take in his whimsical magnificence. It was as if a careless breeder had spilled a can of grey paint on the back and head of a pure white rabbit, and the paint had fanned out in symmetrical patterns on his right and left sides like ink on blotting paper. Before deciding to take him home, we tested to see if he would allow us to hold him without squirming and kicking. He failed, but the test was moot. No person of sound mind would pick up and cuddle an eight-pound rabbit, and neither would we. When Linda set him down on top of his large wood-and-wire cage and started petting him, however, he immediately hunkered down in anticipation of a prolonged spate of pleasure. That earned him a passing grade.

  Received wisdom in rabbit circles speaks of bonding that can occur between rabbits of vastly different sizes. While bunny brothers Bertie and Rollo fought voraciously on the few occasions that they shared a room without benefit of a wire grid between them, we held faint hopes that Walter and Bertie or Walter and Rollo might buddy up and simplify our lives. As it turned out, Walter showed no trace of aggression toward Bertie. He liked Bertie. No, he loved him. Eagerly and incessantly, he tried mating with the rabbit that was a mere one-third his size. Bertie was invisible beneath Walter’s bulk, and we marveled that he hadn’t suffocated before we could reach them amid the tangle of dining-room table and chair legs.

  Burdened with three rabbits that required constant separation, I created a triad of fencing loops in the basement anchored to a central pillar. Outdoors, I subdivided one of the rabbit runs, leaving the largest of the three for our Checker Giant. On temperate days, the boys enjoyed a romp in the fresh air during the afternoon and a romp in the moldy basement air after dinner. Then Walter was free to explore the kitchen while Bertie gnawed up the living room and placid Rollo sat upon my lap for an hour of television (his choice of program). Next, we would catch Bertie and return him to his cage in the dining room, allowing Rollo his turn desecrating the living room furnishings. After twenty minutes or so, we retired Rollo to his cage for the night and removed the board between the dining room and living room so that Walter could blunder in and rub his chin on every object in view, scent-marking them until the next day when the entire wearying process would begin all over again.

  As if simple logistics didn’t keep us busy enough with the rabbits, we discovered that Bertie suffered from a malocclusion, a condition in which the teeth do not meet properly but overlap in bucktooth or underbite fashion. Though dental defects are cute as can be on waifish supermodels, they’re potentially lethal to a rabbit, whose teeth grow more than a quarter-inch a week. Unchecked, Bertie’s upper incisors would curl in on themselves like a party blower, while his lower incisors would ultimately pierce the roof of his closed mouth, though he’d be unable to eat long before that occurred. An unhelpful book I found on dwarf-rabbit varieties, written by a German expert, recommended euthanizing any bunnies with tooth problems, but this struck me as counterproductive. Instead, Linda would haul Bertie into the bathroom about once a week, wrap him in a towel, and pry open his mouth while I clipped his teeth.

  Initially I used a tool designed for trimming dog toenails, abandoned it for human toenail clippers that didn’t fit the contours of rabbit dental anatomy much better, then, upon advice from Dr. Fuller, settled on the smallest pair of wire cutters I could find. The trick was to quickly truncate the teeth in two or three clips before Bertie decided to clamp his mouth shut. If I took off too little of the tooth at the wrong angle, I ended up sculpting knife-point fangs and creating an attack rabbit. If I took off too much at a single clip, I risked the stomach-turning consequence of splintering his teeth down to the gumline. Apart from causing eating difficulties, splintering an upper incisor could also inflame the rabbit’s tear duct and even lead to pasteurella, a potentially lethal bacterial infection. When done correctly, the amputation apparently hurt Bertie less than it did me. Rabbits’ teeth lack the nerve endings that ours have and more closely resemble thick versions of our fingernails, but the procedure never failed to set my own teeth on edge.

  Meanwhile, backyard lodging became a few feathers less crowded when I unexpectedly found a home for our pugnacious greenheads. For weeks at a time, the Khaki Campbell–mallard hybrids shared the same pool with their Khaki Campbell father and uncle without a single incident of domestic abuse. But proximity to the females in the adjacent pen would suddenly send duck testosterone levels soaring, forcing us to confine the youngsters to the inevitable wire loop in order to give Stewart and Trevor respite from pecks, bites, and wing-flapping. I carped about the situation on an Internet poultry newsgroup, for some reason populated mainly by English farmers. Average Americans were probably too busy trimming rabbit teeth to spend much time on-line. Richard and Jeri Pellston not only sympathized with our excess-duck problem, but also offered to take the greenheads off our hands. Remarkably, they lived in Michigan. Though their home was near the tip of the “thumb” region, clear across the Michigan “palm” from us, Richard’s job as a database consultant occasionally took him to, of all places, Lowell.

  “We got a couple hens. Two Barred Rocks and a Rhode Island Red,” Richard told me in an e-mail that made me wonder how much the ability to count figured into his government job. With heartbreaking innocence he added, “We want to try some ducks.”

  After promising to build a raccoon-proof pen complete with a non–Ninja Turtle plastic swimming pool, he and Jeri showed up on a late July afternoon when the weeds in our yard were at the peak of ripeness. I thought of them as weeds, but Richard begged to differ. Shortly after stepping out of a shock absorber–challenged station wagon that cleared the ground by as much as a few millimeters, he immediately started stabbing greenery with his cane. “That’s lamb’s-quarter,” he pointed out. “You can cook it or shred it in a salad.” Jeri nodded in agreement. “That’s pokeweed over there.”

  “I love the purple berries it gets in the fall,” Linda told them.

  “I like to eat it. You ever heard of poke salad?”

  “I’ve heard the song ‘Poke Salad Annie,’” I offered, though Richard was fifteen years too young to recall the song.

  “They eat it down South,” said Linda.

  “I eat it,” he repeated, as he hobbled across the yard two steps ahead of us. His sparse brush of a chin beard and truculent tone, which I interpreted as shyness, suggested he could spend an afternoon grazing an overgrown meadow in goaty bliss. “I bet you’ve got all kinds of edibles out here,” he marveled.

  “You are keeping the ducks as pets?” Linda ventured.

  Richard turned his head in surprise.

  “You’re not planning on eating them?” I clarified.

  “We might breed them,” Jeri answered, “But we would never kill a du
ck. We don’t eat our chickens, either.”

  “We eat chicken,” Richard explained with a burst of gusto. “We just don’t eat our chickens.”

  With his battered military jacket and wide-wale corduroy pants with whole sections of cord worn away, Richard didn’t strike me as particularly fastidious. But his first comment about the greenheads voiced an aesthetic concern. “What’s the mark on that one’s beak? It looks like his beak’s peeling.” Sure enough, if you studied the duck with microscopic intensity, a fleck at the edge of his upper bill disclosed a darker shade of olive than the rest of his beak.

  I shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. The Khaki Campbells get that, too.” Either Stewart or Trevor—we had no idea which twin duck was which—betrayed a similar nearly imperceptible cosmetic flaw. “There’s a thin layer of tissue that coats their beaks, and sometimes it gets worn away,” I bluffed.

  “So it will grow back,” he frowned.

  I shrugged again. “I don’t see why not. It’s never gotten any worse.”

  Satisfied that the greenheads had a reasonable shot at attaining perfection, he agreed to take the pair, though Linda insisted on further assurances that the ducks would be housed properly, kept as pets, and spared a seasoning with savory herbs. Richard leaned thoughtfully on his cane and supervised while Linda and I packed the greenheads into a cardboard box and loosely sealed it with the obligatory duct tape. Jeri opened the tailgate of their cluttered station wagon and managed to clear a few square feet of space by rearranging a dozen or so heavy cartons containing dot-matrix computer printouts presumably brimming with confidential government data. Just as the couple was about to drive off, Richard smiled at us for the first time. “Maybe we’ll stop by again next time we’re in town,” he told us. “Maybe we could have a cookout.”

  The pair did prove good on their word to take good care of the greenheads. Within a week, Richard e-mailed me a photo of the ducks frolicking in a floral-print wading pool inside a high-walled chicken-wire pen.

  TILLIE THE PIGEON had witnessed the greenheads’ exit from her perch on the chimney strut. She seemed fully dependent upon the scratch feed we tossed onto the roof of the milk house each day, and as summer gave way to a chilly, windy fall, we wondered how she would cope with the coming snow. Hiding in a pile of scrap lumber in the barn was a crudely made wooden box that looked as if it had a full year of life still ahead of it. One of the small children of the former owners of our house had apparently cobbled it together with a native carpentry skill that I could admire but never duplicate. Taking exceptional care not to stress the workmanship, I looped a rope through a handy knothole in the most reliably solid slat and slowly hoisted the box to the gently sloping roof above our dining room, positioning it just under Tillie’s favorite roosting spot.

  “I hope she’s smart enough to use it once the weather gets cold,” I told Linda. Our visiting pigeon turned out to be even smarter. When the first blustery day arrived, Tillie was nowhere to be found. Judging that a good thing had reached its logical end, she apparently flew off to petition for readmittance to her flock.

  Not all departures from our bird community were happy. One fall afternoon, Linda called me out to the barn to try and help one of our turkeys that was thrashing in pain on the concrete floor. By the time we got back to her, she was already dead. “Some animal chewed up her wing,” Linda said, and we also discovered wounds on the bird’s right side. There was no indication an animal had climbed over or burrowed under the five-foot-high fence, and the other three turkeys appeared as unruffled as ever. We couldn’t figure out what had happened, unless a hawk had been bold enough to swoop into the enclosure. But a raptor was usually far too wary to enter the relative confinement of an outdoor pen except under circumstances of extreme hunger, and in that case a hawk wouldn’t waste its time on prey too large to carry away.

  Puzzling over the unexpected death of our turkey kept us occupied off and on as a snowy fall blew into a frigid winter. We certainly had sufficient time to mull the mystery over, since we were no longer visiting pet shops, answering the phone, shopping for food, or glancing out our windows for fear that another addition to the circus would land at our feet. But I couldn’t avoid my job; in early January I received an e-mail at the office from my sister Joan, which set a flurry of events in motion.

  “MY GIRLFRIEND B.J. IS SEEING A BIG WHITE DUCK AT RICHMOND PARK SWIMMING IN A LITTLE CIRCLE OF WATER THAT HASN’T FROZEN YET,” Joan wrote me before her discovery of the caps lock key. “B.J. DOESN’T THINK THE DUCK CAN FLY. HER NEIGHBORS NEAR THE PARK ARE WORRIED THE DUCK DOESN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO EAT.”

  Little comprehending the force I was about to unleash, I casually mentioned the e-mail to Linda over dinner. “From Joan’s description, it sounds like a White Pekin, and she said a Canada goose that also doesn’t seem to be able to fly is keeping it company.”

  “It’s going to get really cold this week,” said Linda, with alarm in her voice. Her fork hung in midair between her plate and mouth. “What’s B.J.’s phone number?”

  “How should I know? I’ve never even laid eyes on her. Anyway,” I added irritably, “I don’t trust people who go by initials.”

  “That’s not true. How about M.C.? My mom’s friend named M.C. is an awfully nice lady.”

  “Then call M.C. and ask her for B.J.’s number,” I suggested. I didn’t like where this was going, and I didn’t like where I knew I was going. Two hours later, after we had put the animals to bed, warmed the car up to hockey-rink specs, and driven twenty miles to Richmond Park on the west side of Grand Rapids, I stood shivering in eight-degree air with a wind chill of minus twenty under a bank of floodlights that crisply illuminated each flake of blowing snow, making me even colder. The few diehards still in the park were surrendering to the darkness and the steadily falling temperature. Parents and smiling children with glowing, wind-burned faces towed toboggans behind them as they trudged toward the parking lot. A mother and a tiny girl paused to watch Linda as she paced the edge of the frozen pond searching for a way to reach the duck and goose that swam unconcerned a few dogsled lengths away. The weather didn’t bother them a bit.

  “Do you think I can walk out on the ice?” Linda asked.

  “God, no!” I told her. “Not if there’s still a thawed spot in the middle.”

  “I threw a branch out on the ice and it didn’t crack.”

  “I think you weigh a little more than a branch,” I said, surprised my ears hadn’t cracked and tinkled to the ground.

  “I wish I had a net,” Linda lamented. “If I had a wide enough net, and a person on each side of the pond held one end, and a third person shooed them out of the water, we could probably catch them.” Her eyes darted up the slope of the sledding hill and down again to the parking lot as if someone in his haste might have accidentally dropped precisely the net we needed in the snow. “How about if I crawl out on the ice on my stomach?”

  “I wouldn’t do that, either.”

  “I’ll just crawl out a little ways.”

  “Let me remind you that I can’t swim, and I especially can’t swim in really cold water.” I hugged myself tighter, even considering the possibility of my shivering flesh coming in contact with anything wet. “If you start to drown, you’re on your own.”

  “Hold on to my ankles, then,” she told me, as she got down on her knees and leaned twin purple mittens upon the ice. Startled by her intrusion or simply rattled by the inexplicable sight of a well-bundled hominid on all fours, the white duck and the Canada goose fled with flapping wings to the far side of the frozen pond.

  “They’ll be okay,” I told her, as we stood staring into the floodlit gloom of swirling snow. Eventually the duck and goose began sidling toward their water sanctuary, convinced that they must have experienced a winter hallucination. I was sorry for the birds, even though they didn’t seem particularly vulnerable at the moment. But Linda was probably right that once the pond completely iced over, without the ability to fly, they wou
ld be at the mercy of stray neighborhood children and boisterous dogs. We were peculiarly helpless to help them. Far from feeling defeated by the futility of the situation, I was beginning to experience a faint glow of happiness as I recalled the comfort of the beckoning living room couch. We retreated to the relative warmth of the car and slid on icy roads in the direction of home.

  Linda didn’t give up on the Richmond Park duck. She had started calling him Richie. Through B.J. she learned the phone number of a woman named Lesley who lived near the pond and had tried to catch the duck. When she wasn’t plotting strategy with Lesley, Linda was conspiring with energetic animal-shelter employee Bruce, whom Lesley spoke to almost daily about the icebound duck and goose. Bruce had made two after-midnight attempts to sneak up on the birds, in addition to a number of daylight pursuits. During her own visits to the pond, Linda enlisted the aid of gamboling grade-school-age kids, who leapt at the chance to chase the waterfowl without incurring a frown or swat from an adult. But the birds always eluded capture.

  Linda’s worries about Richie and his friend increased as temperatures plummeted. I devoted a tiny corner of my mind to the Richmond waterfowl, but our own ducks and geese were my immediate concern. One Saturday morning when I waddled out to the pen swaddled in sweaters and a ski parka, all of the birds except Hector trotted out into the snow. Although he hissed and snapped his beak, Hector was rooted to one spot, unable to walk away. Like our first Muscovy, Daphne, his feathers didn’t repel water as efficiently as the other ducks’, and after splashing himself from the bucket the previous evening and failing to shed the water, he had ended up frozen to the ground. Only a few feathers imprisoned him, and I managed to quickly free him with a couple of deft tugs. When Linda “defrosted” him with a hair dryer, she noticed an odd lump of flesh the diameter of her thumbnail protruding from the middle of his back. “We’d better have that looked at,” she said. “It’s some sort of growth that might need to be cut off.”