Authors: Bob Tarte
That’s when Linda and I abandoned our roles as surrogate hen and drake and surrendered the ducklings to their peers. While Linda was still disinfecting the porch, we heard Martha’s clamorous quacking and the beat of wings against the plastic swimming pool. Instead of adopting the ducklings, the three adults pursued them without pause. Peggy led the attack against her own kind with vigor. By the time I reached them, their yellow down feathers were damp and flecked with mud, but they preferred a beating to the safety of my arms. We put the pair inside the bunny cage, but the adults still managed to get to them. Peggy poked her beak through the wire from the front while Martha harassed them from the back. Before we could intervene, they had bloodied the smaller duckling’s wing. Grabbing a length of chicken wire fence, I made a double-thickness ring around the babies. That finally ended the assaults.
“You’d think we had some endangered species out here,” I complained
to Linda. “We’ve got the ducklings inside a cage, inside a fence, inside a pen, inside a fenced-in yard. The last passenger pigeon in America was never this well protected.”
As the call ducks grew, we put aside the bunny pen while enlarging and reinforcing the ring of fencing. Whenever we let the adults out of the pen, we put the ring out in the yard around them, thereby allowing the youngsters to peck at the grass unmolested. The attacks had taken their toll, however. The female developed a condition known as slipped wing, in which the tips of both wings jutted outward rather than hugging her body, caused by a combination of stress and poor nutrition. Mrs. Dorflinger had told Linda to feed the babies the same food as the adults, but we learned too late from the folks at the Lowell feed mill that ducklings need a special vitamin-and-mineral supplement. At least the visual clue allowed us to tell the female, Wing Ding, apart from her brother, Blabby.
The siblings didn’t forget the treatment they had received from Daphne, Martha, and Peggy. Once they grew to adult size by the middle of the summer, we released them with the others in the yard, hoping they could finally defend themselves. Defense wasn’t the issue. Within seconds the young call ducks had begun chasing the other ducks, snapping at their tails and wings and forcing us to return them to the chicken-wire jail. Repeatedly we tried peacefully integrating them with the established flock, but the newcomers were incorrigible hellions.
We couldn’t in good conscience keep the pair imprisoned in a small enclosure any longer, and we couldn’t release them into the duck community on their own recognizance. The solution was to find them another home.
When Linda called Dorflinger’s to ask if they might take the youngsters back, Mrs. Dorflinger replied that she already had
enough call ducks, and would Linda like to buy a couple more? Rupert Murdoch, however, agreed to take them off our hands even after Linda stipulated that he couldn’t sell them.
“That’s how I got the last batch of call ducks,” he told. “Some people gave them to me because they wouldn’t leave their great big Embden geese alone. I think you ended up with one of them.” That, of course, was Peggy, whose virtues soon became apparent as our duck population shifted again.
Prior to the day that the duck pen door was left un-latched, the potential danger to our ducks had been purely anecdotal. “We’ve heard that raccoons eat ducks,” Linda ventured, during a visit to Rupert Murdoch’s farm.
“They don’t bother me,” Rupert declared as a procession of his geese marched by.
“Raccoons don’t eat ducks?” I asked.
“Not when you keep a dog around to scare off the raccoons. Get out of there!” he shouted to a goat that had joined the parade and was worrying the tail feathers of the last goose in line. “Some of your dogs will chase down a duck, and if they don’t learn, you’ve got to get rid of the dog. Especially if it’s a hound.”
“So you haven’t lost any ducks to raccoons?” I tried again.
“We’ve had problems with owls. There’s nothing an owl likes better than a duckling. An owl can smell a duckling from miles away, and you’ve got to keep them inside your barn until they’re too big for an owl. Even that won’t necessarily stop the owl. We had an owl come around and eat just the heads off a few of our full-grown
ducks. He didn’t touch the rest of the duck, he just ate off the head.”
“Aye-yi-yi!” exclaimed Linda. “What did you do?”
“I waited outside in the yard all night, and when the owl came down, I shot him.”
“But you haven’t had trouble with raccoons,” I prompted.
“If I ever do, I’ll shoot them.”
Clearly, the placid world of the plastic duck pond possessed a violent flip side that we knew nothing about. Not until the morning we woke up to hear Peggy’s rasping voice just below our bedroom window. “The ducks are out!” Linda cried. She was outside in the half-darkness rounding them up before I was even out of bed, and she was back inside before I had a chance to throw on my clothes. She was as upset as I had ever seen her. “Something got Martha,” she sobbed. The shades were still drawn. Light filtered in from the living room along with the sound of fluttering wings from one of the caged birds in the dining room. “It’s all my fault. I should have checked the pen when I put them back yesterday.”
A familiar numbness passed through me, a prickling sensation like the nearness of heat, a disembodying calm that often carried me past the first stages of a bad event. “It’s not your fault,” I told her, as I worked the buttons of a shirt. “We’re both responsible for checking the pen. These things sometimes happen.”
“It’s my fault.” She stood stiff and shivering. “Part of her is down by the fence. Another part of her is on the back deck.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I told her. But I couldn’t think of a worse way to start the morning.
At the bottom of the hill, I found a hollow thing with feathers, a thing I didn’t recognize as having once been our duck. Its black and grey plumage was more like a crude charcoal sketch of Martha than any aspect of Martha herself. It wasn’t simply that the life had
been taken from her. What was left of her was literally hollow. On the worn rectangle of cement just outside the basement door, I found an internal organ that looked too large to ever fit inside the hollow thing. I put my eyes on it just long enough to scoop it up onto the flat blade of a snow shovel and carry it down the hill for reunification with the feathered part. I sobbed as I buried both pieces, but the sobs felt forced as the abruptness of the incident and the dregs of sleep drearily circled one another. I hadn’t been close to Martha. The ducks were cozy with one other, not with us. But I had failed the most basic responsibility of keeping an animal safe, and the mistake had no remedy.
Linda squeezed a prayer through her tears. “Dear Lord, please tell Martha that we’re sorry. Tell her that we miss her. And we hope she’s with Simon and Binky in a wonderful place with lots of other ducks. Tell her that we love her, and please protect our other pets.”
“If she’s with Binky,” I told Linda, clutching her hand, “I wouldn’t necessarily call it a wonderful place.”
Linda thought that a dog had taken Martha, but I disagreed. Since Martha had apparently been killed for food, a raccoon was the likelier suspect. The only dogs within a mile of us were fat and happy individuals that might have killed a duck for sport, but not for food. And a dog that killed for sport probably would not have stopped at attacking a single flightless duck. It would have gone after our entire flock. There were certainly enough resident raccoons to do the deed, but in spite of my suspicions, I continued leaving table scraps near the bird feeder for our nocturnal visitors. Especially after losing Martha, I saw logic in keeping their stomachs filled. I also refused to believe that the bird feeder raccoons would bite the duck that belonged to the hand that fed them. The killer had to be an outsider, I surmised, a rogue raccoon that didn’t benefit from our largesse. After all, by eating our food, the bird
feeder raccoons had entered into a social contract with us that prohibited them from attacking our pets. I imagined they had the intelligence to understand our tacit deal, and the stories I had heard about raccoons supported my belief.
S
IX YEARS BEFORE
we met, Linda had briefly lived in a roughhewn rental house near the northern Michigan town of Pierson. One November evening while she was washing dishes, she heard a scuffling against the outside wall and decided to investigate. The door felt heavy when she opened it, almost as if she were pushing against a mound of snow, and the latch was difficult to turn. As the door swung open, she confronted a full-grown female raccoon hanging from the doorknob by both arms. Taking little notice of Linda, the animal dropped to the floor and sauntered through the kitchen into the living room where Linda’s eleven-year-old son, Erin, sat on a throw rug, engrossed in
The Dukes of Hazzard
. As Linda watched in horror, the raccoon reached for Erin’s head, but only to begin carefully grooming the boy’s blond hair.
Early the next morning, Linda called her landlady to report the strange behavior of the raccoon and ask her what she might know about it. “I was afraid the raccoon was going to hurt Erin, so I threw a blanket over her and put her outside, but she kept getting back into the house somehow,” Linda told Mrs. Handleman. “I must have put her out three times before I figured out how she was doing it. You know that hole in the bathroom floor? She was getting in through there. I had to block it off with an old board I found in the garage and stick a rock on top of it that we’ve been using to prop up the woodstove pipe. After that, she left us alone.”
The older woman chuckled. “Oh, you must have had a visit from Jackie.”
“Jackie? Who’s Jackie?”
“Jackie was one of our favorite houseguests,” Mrs. Handleman explained. “She must have dropped by to say hello. She was probably looking for my husband.”
Jackie’s saga began years earlier, when the Handlemans had been enjoying a country breakfast of freshly laid eggs and store-bought bread. As he was spreading margarine on his toast, Mr. Handleman experienced the unnerving sensation that someone was watching him. It wasn’t the children, who were too involved in an argument over whose turn it was to chop the firewood to give their beleaguered father more than a glance. Unable to shrug off the spied-upon feeling, he glanced up at the ceiling to find a raccoon peering down at the breakfast table through a baseball-size hole in the plaster and lath. Rather than shoo the animal away, Mr. Handleman stood up and handed it his toast. From then on, Jackie was fed at every meal. Jackie repaid the favor by emerging through the bathroom-floor hole to introduce the Handleman family to the family she had been raising between the walls. Her cubs grew so tame that a young male adopted the Handleman beagle as his protégé, leading Mickey on daylong adventures in the woods that left the dog wet and panting by dinnertime but unmolested by raccoon tooth or claw.
As impressive as this account was all by its lonesome, I had even more evidence that raccoons were inherently civilized sorts. When my brother-in-law, Jack, was a child, his family had taken in an orphaned raccoon named Raffles who sat on the couch with the kids and plucked popcorn from a bowl. A cousin of mine in Houston kept a dish of canned cat food on the kitchen floor for a raccoon that slipped in through the kitty door each night, ate his fill, and left without a single breach of etiquette. A Canadian TV program profiled a Toronto woman who opened the patio sliders to her living room each night to ply a full dozen well-behaved raccoons with
treats. Because raccoons easily form close relationships with people, and because they have cute faces and handlike paws, I romanticized these semimysterious nighttime visitors as the next best thing to elves. Once they had been properly habituated to humans, the most mischievous and unschooled raccoons were no more threatening to our ducks than overweight squirrels.
After losing Martha, Peggy and Daphne needed another little friend, according to Linda. Thus I found myself in Rupert Murdoch’s backyard watching Linda orbit his double row of duck pens like the electron of a waterfowl atom. Though Rupert had as many ducks as ever, she immediately disqualified the majority from consideration. Linda didn’t want to bring home a rerun of the breeds we had already owned, which eliminated call ducks, black and white Cayugas, Muscovies, and Blue Swedes, nor would she consider the Indian Runner duck that had captured my soul. Male ducks were also out of the question, since we didn’t trust Daphne and Peggy’s ability to remain celibate. That narrowed the choices to either a Bali duck, which resembled an Indian Runner duck with a feather pompom on its head, or a drab brown Khaki Campbell female that undoubtedly compensated for her plainness with a great personality and wonderful sense of humor. After caroming from pen to pen to make sure no potential alternatives concealed themselves behind a feed dish, Linda finally gave a Khaki the nod.
“The Khaki Campbell is considered a show duck, you know,” Rupert apologized, as he transferred the female to a plastic cat carrier we had brought with us in place of the usual cardboard box. “I’ll have to charge you ten dollars for her.”
After a modest fashion, the Khaki female was attractive. The soft nobility of her face was complemented by eyes set high up on a narrow skull, giving her an air of royal inbreeding, while a close examination of the feathers on her back revealed unexpected flecks
of golden brown. Nevertheless, by no stretch of the imagination could this plain brown wrapper of a waterfowl be gilded with the label of show duck, and I told Rupert Murdoch so. “I don’t think ten dollars is too much to spend on a duck, but I sure don’t see anything showy about her,” I said.
“The females are nothing special,” Rupert admitted, as if he were breaking the first law of duck husbandry by owning up to this obvious fact. “The drakes are the show pieces. Handsomest things you ever saw. I’m just sorry I don’t have any here to prove it. But you get yourself a Khaki Campbell drake as a mate, and this little hen will produce a male you could show in any fair.” On the way back home with our new duck, I prayed that I’d be spared such a fate.