For a Handful of Feathers

by Jim Harrison

  The ten-acre pond I inherited with the farm had been built in the fifties and, as far as ponds go, it was a good one, with a number of big bass and bream, catfish and shiners, crawfish and turtles. The problem was that no one had fished it in years and most of the bass were stunted from being restricted to a small area, like fish in an overcrowded aquarium. One solution was to catch and keep all the small bass with old, odd-looking skulls, but more tempting was to make the pond bigger. We did both. Bill caught 673 fish and I studied the possibility of raising the existing dam by nine feet, which would throw water over twenty additional acres of land, turning a puddle into a measurable piece of water.

  For days Bill and Charley and I “shot” the basins with a surveyor’s transit to determine how high the water would rise. We walked through bulrushes, pond weeds, thornbushes, and over decayed tree trunks, calling out numbers glimpsed through a monolense, planting flags and sidestepping snakes. We flagged the perimeter of the lake and studied the value of the trees that would have to be timbered, the cost of moving the dirt, the fuel to propel the machinery, the yards of cement, the PVC pipes, the couplings, and, when it was all said and laid out, I was left with a choice: to apply for permits or not.

  The water would fill a hardwood bottom that I wanted to clear-cut before raising the dam. Florida law requires a permit to build a dam and another one to touch anything resembling a swamp. The permit to raise the existing foundation would have to come from the Northwest Florida Water Management District, an agency of the state that regulates the use of every single drop of water in its jurisdiction, right down to the laying of a drainpipe on private property. The permit to clear-cut the hardwoods would have to come from the Soil Conservation Bureau, but because there were springs in the bottom and a certain amount of backed-up water, it was going to be a tough permit to obtain for ecological reasons.

  The fact that I would alter one ecosystem for another, trade five acres of swamp for thirty acres of water (which would result in the same amount of shoreline swamp), that I would gain as well as lose species in the process, that if anything I was adding life instead of draining it was not going to matter. Government agencies, in which science and bureaucracy compete in an unholy marriage of rules and arrogance, are not receptive to common sense. I abide by the law most of the time but draw the line when I’m ordered to do something I feel is corrupt or stupid. Life is too short. The choice was simple: Screw the permits.

  Two days later, three cars, two flatbed trucks, and seven men with a dozen handheld saws of varied length and weight pulled into the farm. The timber crew—no more legal than I was—brought along water, food, girlie magazines for the lunch breaks, toilet paper for the obvious, and a short, squat, tree-stalking machine called a clipper that looked like an upside-down hockey net made of steel. It was a frightening demon on huge rubber tires, swinging an obscene steel trunk with band saws incorporated into its circular claw, which clamped around the base of trees and, while the machine hugged the trunk, sawed through the tree’s heart with its teeth. A very strange and efficient piece of steel I have since run from in my dreams.

  The trucks piled with hardwoods rolled from the farm to the Georgia border for a solid week, leaving behind what all timber crews leave behind: treetops, dangling bark, jagged stumps, gutted earth, human dung, pop cans, desolation, and the tangible proof of a dead woodlot. I have done business with lumber companies on two continents and have yet to deal with one that has the integrity of an insurance company. They differ only in the species they gouge, which in this case was my hardwoods. I cashed a small check and prayed I hadn’t made a big mistake.

  Charley moved the Gert sisters into position, and for the next four months I watched more dirt being moved than I had ever seen moved in my life. When it was time I rented a pan, and timed it going back and forth over the five-hundred-foot dam, shaving off a thin skin of clay from one shoulder of the slope, dropping it on the dam, shearing off a second slice on the other slope, and back again. The dam ate fifteen thousand cubic feet of red dirt at the rate of thirteen cubic yards every six minutes. Talk about a yawn.

  Red dust followed the machinery on dry days and red clay squirted up between our toes on wet ones. On those days little Gert expressed a desire to slip sideways into the pond, so every time it rained for half an hour, work stopped for the day. Conversations centered themselves with bottomless stupidity on the weather. Eventually I gave up blaming God and took to drinking early on rainy days. We also talked about denunciations and fines and, like birds, kept our eyes cocked at the sky for danger in the shape of spotter planes.

  The mountain of clay grew slowly, gradually, one inch at a time, until one day and a thousand mishaps later the new dam towered over the original pond, 15 feet wide at the top, 90 at the base, and 535 feet long. As a precaution against rainstorms and erosion we seeded the mastodon with grass, covered it with hay, and dressed it in sheets of old sun-bleached muslin, remnants of the shade-tobacco days.

  Eighteen Months Later

  The house I use as an office sits on the water’s edge, at the juncture of the old pond and the one we raised out of the swamp. I am waiting for the water to fill up the pond for the second time, and as it does it feels like the bottom of the world is rising up to meet me. Last year the pond filled up in one month, the wettest January in memory. It was a beautiful sight, particularly as the water stopped rising exactly where we had planted the high-water flags, half a year earlier.

  But in March a small leak sprung on the far side of the water-logged edifice where an original culvert had been poorly cemented, and although the leak was little more than a stain on the clay, when it began to grow it reminded me of stitches snapping on a wound. The fact of the matter is that we screwed up. To save a few hundred dollars I chose to pour cement on the existing pipe instead of having Gerty dig and pull it out of the dam. As it turned out, penny-wise and pound foolish.

  A week later the rains came again, hard, and at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night the wet spot suddenly delaminated. Bill called: “If we don’t cut her now, she’ll be gone by morning.”

  Gerty shook and belched under the lights, her steel claw digging in, loosening the packed clay and forking it into her bucket with the same cantankerous tenacity she had exhibited the summer before. A portable generator threw light on the advancing waters and the deepening chasm and backlit a thin jet of silvery hydraulic fluid that squirted out of one of Gerty’s sunburned hoses when she strained. At four in the morning the pond squeezed itself through a ten-foot-wide opening and tore into the swamp with irrepressible finality.

  Twenty hours later the beautiful expanse of dark water that Charley created was down to its original depth. I was back to square one, with a leak to fix and the Northwest Florida Water Management District on my back. The spillage had run half a mile down a dense, hardwood creek bottom before crossing the county blacktop road under a cement bridge. The clay-colored water escaped into my neighbor’s woods and headed for the Oklockonee River, already disfigured from a saturated water table. The Water Management Office, informed of an unnatural discharge, followed the muddy water back to its source and officially stopped the repairs; not for raising the dam by nine feet—something they either didn’t know about or chose not to pursue—but for liberating the pond without their permission. The fact that we cut the dam during a storm, in the middle of the night on a weekend, was neither here nor there.

  The structure would have to be rebuilt according to modern specs, which meant four-to-one slopes, yards of cement and steel sunk into the trouble area, a drain system, a ninety-foot spillway, months of waiting for permits, administrative costs, surveys, judgments, engineers imposed by the government, fines, and decrees. The circle was completed when, tens of thousands of dollars later, I asked what the official orders would have been had I reached someone by phone in the middle of that rainy Florida night. The answer was “Just what you did.”

  Having spent eleven years in boarding school I react poorly to
orders, but as I hadn’t asked for a permit to raise the dam—much less queried the environmental agency about clear-cutting the swamp—I tiptoed through the bureaucratic china store by shutting up and eating six months of crow.

  V

  The green smell of July in Tallahassee serves as a reminder to those in wildlife management that green smells aren’t finite and that the end of the planting season for bobwhites (and every other grain-eating species) is at hand. Crops such as corn and Egyptian wheat are already in the ground and in normal years will produce hard seeds through the first half of January; in wet years that same grain will sour before Christmas. The longest-lasting and most reliable crop I use is Sorghum NK 300 (another nonnative plant shipped from Africa), planted the second week of July—about as late as we dare stretch it in northern Florida without running into an early freeze. We plant long strips (two hundred by fifteen feet) next to the plum trees and parallel to the planted pines and bicolored Lespedeza, offering an intense diversity of cover, food, and edges according to the formula of food adjoining escape cover equals minimum exposure to predation. The worst thing I can do for my tenants is to grow small, isolated food plots, which will in no time be known as accipiter corner, a quail-McNugget repository for raptors, a death row for bobwhite quail. Bill throws an occasional ninety-degree turn in the food patches and plants in long, lazy curves, which mathematically promote edges. It takes eight pounds of sorghum per plot, which we fertilize two weeks later and let the sun do the rest.

  It was common a few years ago to partially cut the trunk of oak trees until they lay on the ground, leaving a section of the trunk connected so that the sap would keep flowing to the leaves. The quail felt safe under the fallen branches and the hawks used the nearest tree as a stooping scaffold. In France I once watched a buzzard visit a covey of eleven gray partridge in a twenty-acre alfalfa field every afternoon. Two weeks later it had eaten every single bird. I don’t doubt that, given the same particulars, a Cooper would emulate his European cousin.

  Bobwhite quail eat as many as fifty thousand insects a year, reason enough to sow brown-top millet, which attracts all the bugs a quail could wish for. However, as brown-top is expensive, and because the natural propagation of life and natural food in the Southeast is so rich in the summer and fall, I don’t use millet as extensively as some with deeper pockets. Also, when the fledgling bald eagles scream down from inside their nests at my bird dogs and the frost and rain have beaten the life out of the natural food and cover—in other words, when help is really needed—the brown-top has long since passed.

  The actual numbers of food plots and additional cover can be broken down into a series of equations that take into account the resolve of the owner and the weight of his wallet. I plant forty strips of sorghum, half a dozen one-acre cornfields, two big cornfields used as dove fields, and three one-acre plots in the woods, on which I experiment with either Kobe Lespedeza or Egyptian wheat and this year buckwheat—I would like to find a grain with which to replace corn, but so far haven’t found one.

  The list of commercial quail food is long and keeps growing longer every year. Most of it is designer bird food. Expensive and wasteful, the motto of our time. Corn, sorghum, soybeans, and brown-top millet can handle 90 percent of any additional food needs a bobwhite could have. I go overboard on food because I like food, and because I am a glutton I feed tens of thousands of nongame birds with the vigor I feed my human friends. Last year my quail were so fat they self-basted under the duress of applied heat.

  One day I will try alternating crops, such as planting winter wheat, Egyptian wheat, and buckwheat all in the same year, as sort of a wheat festival. My ultimate objective is to abandon all annual crops and rely on the perennial plants such as partridge peas, protective cover that has already been planted, rotation burns, and extensive spring disking to carry a natural quail population. I am interested to see how the birds will react and what it will do to the population. But for now I enjoy watching the corn and sorghum dry and grow old and tawny in time with the broom sedge and gum trees. A matter of taste.

  VI

  By the end of August there is something frantic about the unanswered calls of the bobwhite quail. What was meant to be a season of promise and glory has slowly disintegrated into a jeremiad, an admission of failure. Indecent bachelor whistles have become mournful wails, acknowledging among other things an imminent shrinking of gonads. If I shoot that bird next winter it will not be as flavorful as the quail that has known the spasms of ecstasy. At the very least, rapture darkens the heart. Therefore, following one bit of idiotic insight with another, I might as well explain the Mexican quail controversy.

  Almost everywhere in the South exist swamp quail, birds that have adapted to gloomier surroundings and are darker in plumage for living in such places. Because dark objects look smaller than light ones, and because swamp birds always fly back to the safety of darkness, they appear smaller and seem to fly faster than their peers living on higher ground.

  The locals refer to these little creatures as Mexican quail (Colinus virginianus texanus), and say things about them like, “Before they introduced them Mexicans you never saw a quail light in a tree,” or, “Them Mexican quail are nothing but roadrunners. They taught our partridge bad habits.” In point of fact, a deal was made with the Mexican government to purchase between three and four hundred thousand texanus quail. They were carefully distributed throughout our southern and central states, and a percentage of the imported birds survived and bred with Colinus virginianus, but, contrary to popular belief, the Mexican quail were paler, not darker in color than our native species, and the purchase was made between 1910 and 1930. In quail terms, sixty-plus generations ago; in human terms it would be like blaming ethnic cleansing on King Arthur’s crusaders.

  By August, 90 percent of the bobwhite quail on the farm are busy following their parents, pushing pinfeathers, hunting grasshoppers, and sipping dew. The remaining 20 percent are either mourning the passing of their libido or are doggedly renesting for the umpteenth time in the hopes of rearing a late brood, young ones that will bear on opening day the unattractive sobriquet of “squealers.”

  VII

  All the red-winged blackbirds are gone to the mountains, where it’s cool. The morning glory vines have shimmied every cornstalk and planted pine and fencerow on the farm, embracing without prejudice one and all, overwhelming the undercarriage of nature while flaunting strings of languorous pastel flowers. The exception to this riot of polite colors is the tiny scarlet morning glory, a tulip-shaped flower that jumps out of the weeds like a redhead at a Primitive Baptist prayer meeting.

  Waterfalls of kudzu yield to gravity like a woman’s hair. Someone once said that if New England is a woman’s brains, the South is her belly.

  Green darters, dragonflies the size of hummingbirds, rise out of the pond and roar about, terrorizing the rest of the insect world. My friend in Alabama shoots mosquito hawks with .22-caliber ratshot. Cicadas wearing an extra layer drone through the heavy breath of summer looking for the right pine tree to grasp and shed a shell. Old-timers feed the ground shells to their coon dogs to make them better tree dogs. Pine trees hit by lightning rot in a month. Yellow butterflies huddle face-to-face in the middle of dirt roads and scatter in the air like flower petals. Bullbats (nighthawks, order of goatsuckers) dive at insects with gaping mouths; the air growls when they pull up short of the ground. The Mississippi and swallowtail kites replace the bullbats. They too swoop from tremendous heights at the locusts that flush ahead of the tractor. The grasshoppers are as big as my thumb and the kites catch them in their talons, inches from my face. When the birds have reached altitude they raise both talons to their chin and eat the grasshoppers in midair, stalling their wings in the process.

  White rain rushes across the water. Raindrops the size of marbles dimple the pond. In June eleven woodies fell out of the duck box in front of my studio. There are only three left, not counting the hen. A late afternoon rain break under th
e toolshed in August. It rained on the first day of dog days last year and, just as the saying goes, it went on to rain for forty days. This year, however, there hasn’t been a shower on the farm since June, and the sun hides behind a permanent heat haze. The clay is so hard that in places the fields have split in two. No one has seen dew on the grass in weeks.

  Charley has been pushing dirt. Bill has been watering the trees—sawtooth oaks, sycamores, Lombardy poplars: thirty-three in all—that we planted this winter. He waters by hand, out of fifty-gallon drums lashed to the trailer, and a five-gallon bucket. I promise to buy him a water wagon. He drinks coffee, nods at the rain that finished his job, and prods absentmindedly into the small round holes in the clay outside the shed with a piece of grass, to tickle the doodlebugs. He looks tired from toting all that water, but if I say so he’ll deny it. Age may have pulled some weight off his frame, but in his head Bill is as strong as he was when he was twenty. The only time I ever raised my voice in the eight years I’ve known him was to force liquids down his throat one burning summer afternoon while he was pouring cement behind the dam. The temperature was one hundred degrees, and there was as much color in his face as there was wind at the bottom of the twenty-eight-foot structure. He obliged me because I am his boss, but he wasn’t happy about it and for months afterward insisted he had been fine and was aware of his capacities. That may be, but he hasn’t accepted the wearisome implications of time yet.

  Charley points to a purple beetle, laughs, and slaps his leg. A hard-shelled purple turd-tumbler has reared up on its gnarled hindquarters, churning the dusty clay, pushing and herding a dog shit large enough to die under. Charley said, “Damn if that ain’t a lot of tumbling.”