Enslaved by Ducks (12 page)

As Stanley Sue became more relaxed in our household, she spent less of her free time on top of her cage, devoting her exercise hours to harassing Bertha, opening and banging shut floor-level cupboard doors, and energetically gouging our baseboards. While Howard ignored Stanley Sue, he considered her dish fair game. The varied shapes and sizes of the parrot seed mixture proved so irresistible, he was willing to risk the larger bird’s wrath. Every week or so, I’d walk into the room to find a tattletale faun-colored tail feather on the floor of Stanley Sue’s cage, while Howard nursed his wounded ego on a chair back across the room. Because Stanley Sue had never shown aggressiveness toward anyone but the bunny, and even that was mostly bluff, we hadn’t realized we were putting Howard’s life in danger.

I learned about Stanley Sue’s temper the day I arrived home after a grueling five hours at the office and was going through my usual afternoon’s routine in anticipation of my nap. I took Bertha outside and plopped her in her backyard pen. Indoors, I popped the latch on Chester’s cage, liberated the parakeets, and then opened Howard’s door. I could see him ruminating on how best to take advantage of this unexpected stroke of fortune. I said hello to Stanley Sue, fruitlessly repeating the desired answer, “Hi, Bob, hi, Bob,” in hopes she would start talking again. Swinging open the door to her cage, I trundled off to the bedroom, where I upset a snoozing Penny by turning back the bedspread. Oh, what a strength-sapping half-day I’d had writing training materials for
office-seating dealers. I closed the shades, shut my eyes, and slid into blissful unawareness.

Though I’m so light a sleeper, a falling dewdrop could disturb me, I heard no indication that anything was out of sorts. The only bird who might have alerted me to Stanley Sue’s attack on Howard was Howard himself, and his vocabulary was inadequate for the task. While the parrots, parakeets, and even the canary had peeps, chirps, and squawks with which to signify a broad emotional spectrum, Howard was capable of emitting only a surprised laugh that indicated he was on the make and a boastful hooting that asserted his magnificent presence. I know of no other bird in nature limited to just two sounds, and marvel that two are sufficient for social interactions among doves. Maybe other ringnecks can glean vast quantities of information from these unvarying calls. If so, I wish an in-the-know dove had pecked me on the forehead and led me into the dining room before Howard ended up on the bottom of Stanley Sue’s cage, his back torn open and smeared with blood.

“Oh, baby, baby, what’s happened to you?” I moaned, certain he was dead or on the verge of death. Shouting for Linda, who had just walked in the door. I gingerly picked up Howard and carried him into the bathroom. His eyes were open but cloudy. He barely moved as I held him. “Stanley got him,” I managed to say. “I think she must have cornered him in her cage.”

Linda uncapped a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and antibacterial Betadine, which we kept on hand for emergencies. I could hardly watch as she daubed the wound with a cotton ball. “I don’t think it’s as bad as it first looked,” she reassured me, as she cleaned him up. “It doesn’t seem to be too deep.” Still the silver dollar–size abrasion between his tail and wings was bad enough. If the pain was too great or if the wound became infected, he wouldn’t last the night.

Linda rushed Howard to Dr. Carlotti, a country vet who ran a small practice from his farm a few miles from us. I stayed home, trying not to strangle Stanley Sue. Instead, I inflicted on her the worst punishment I could think of. I put her in her cage and took away her bell, the bell that functioned as her proxy voice. It was the bell she rang whenever she wanted out of her cage, whenever she wanted some attention, whenever she wanted something to eat, whenever something in the house disturbed her, or whenever she was just plain moody. Taking her bell was as serious as slapping a prisoner in solitary confinement. In the three years we had owned Stanley, I had only taken her bell away twice: once when she had bitten me for no apparent reason, and once when she had bitten Linda without asking my permission.

Within an hour I relented. “Here’s your bell back,” I sighed, realizing that Stanley hadn’t been at fault for attacking a rival who had invaded her territory and stolen her food. She had simply followed her wild nature. I was to blame for Howard’s injury. I had seen the signs of trouble but naively assumed nothing worse would happen than plucked tail feathers, because that wouldn’t be nice, and Stanley Sue was a nice bird.

Stepping back from anthropomorphizing our pets while still feeling close to them was always difficult. It took me years to accept the fact that animals don’t act according to human standards of generosity and forgiveness—which I seldom followed, either. We could teach them certain behaviors we considered appropriate, but we couldn’t override the instincts that had allowed their species to survive for thousands of years. When mixing potentially incompatible pets, the best we could do was provide an environment that kept the chances for serious conflict near zero. For every lovey-dovey Howard-and-Reggie relationship, there could just as easily be a Howard and Stanley Sue.

Linda returned from the vet, and I could tell from her mood that Howard’s injury wasn’t life threatening. She even smiled as she showed me the celluloid “Elizabethan collar” that Dr. Carlotti had fashioned for him. “The doctor gave him a shot of Baytril and said Howard would probably be okay if we can keep him from picking at himself. But he doesn’t like that thing on his neck at all.” No longer in shock, Howard twisted his head in one direction then the other, unable to believe he was encumbered with the plastic cone contraption.

“We could put a ruffle on it. Make him look more like a clown,” I said.

“The trick will be getting him to eat. I don’t know if he can eat from his dish with the collar on, and we can’t take it off him for two weeks.”

During the first days of his recovery, Howard was glum. He sat motionless on his perch, legs folded beneath him to allow his abdomen to help support his weight. For much of the time, he kept his eyes closed, as if putting himself into a yogic healing trance, never uttering a sound, not even a single “om.” Linda performed the hard work of keeping his wound clean, though I took over some of the care once the injury became less evil looking. My role primarily consisted of hovering over Howard’s cage and making encouraging noises, then clucking accusingly at Stanley Sue. I cajoled him to eat by wiggling homemade bread under his beak until he pecked at it purely out of exasperation. After a few days, he graduated to spray millet, a cluster of dried seeds that I attached to his bars with a wooden clothespin. Once he’d had his fill of such lackluster fare, he mastered balancing the weight of his collar well enough to lower his head and root through his dish. By the end of the first week, he was once again shoveling seeds in all directions and had recovered his appetite for hooting.

Dr. Carlotti had told Linda that the patch on Howard’s back might never grow feathers again, or that feathers might only pop up here and there after his next molt. “Reggie won’t like that,” I complained. “It won’t give him anything to grab on to.” But within ten days, we could no longer see the rapidly healing wound through the feather shafts that sprouted up thicker than tattoos on a teenager’s shoulder. As Howard’s health improved, he grew restless in his cage. Collar or no collar, we decided to let him exercise. Owing to the peculiar aerodynamic qualities of the plastic cone, however, when he flapped his wings in an attempt to fly forward, he sailed backward across the room, startling the parakeets, who had never experienced so serious a violation of avian flight bylaws.

Linda and I had assumed that as long as we kept Stanley Sue’s door closed when Howard was at large, we could eliminate future fights. But once our ringneck had returned to full fettle with a luxuriously feathered back, he immediately tried to stage a rematch, armed with no more impressive weapon than his own foolishness. Having two birds that needed separate out-of-cage time added to the complexity of pet-keeping. It was also a harbinger. Within a year, we would find ourselves juggling three rabbits who couldn’t share a single room without engaging in fur-shredding melees. More complexity meant more scheduling, which meant more of my free time flew out the window.

As early as I can remember, I have always nursed a special contempt for people who make surrogate children of their pets. They’re the people who dress their animals in small plaid suits, bring them along on dinner dates, and spend sleepless nights worrying that an isolated cough is the first sign of a dreaded virus. Though I hadn’t done any of these, I knew that as soon as I had uttered the word “baby” when finding Howard hurt in Stanley Sue’s cage, I had unwittingly crossed an emotional threshold.

But at least my affection was no longer unrequited. Along with his grudge against Stanley Sue, Howard had emerged from his disaster with a new appreciation for us. His heart still belonged to Reggie. But when he wasn’t chasing the parakeets around the dining room, stealing seed from their dishes, or dreaming of vengeance against Stanley Sue, he might unexpectedly land upon my shoulder, bow and hoot in my direction, and tenderly chatter his beak against my cheek. The fact that this invariably happened during dinner, when I had a piece of bread in hand, I chalked up to mere coincidence.

Even with helping tend a cat, seven birds, and a rabbit, I was able to call most of the day my own. Breakfast was admittedly intense. Ollie and Stanley Sue insisted we hand-feed them portions of whatever Linda and I were eating. Penny, Bertha, Howard, the parakeets, and the canary each required individual servings rather than graciously sharing a communal bowl of cornflakes. They also each demanded a change of water and, once again, they wanted it in separate bowls. In the afternoon, juggling various out-of-cage times for the birds and the bunny, Bertha, nibbled away at more of our time. And Ollie still launched occasional wall-penetrating fits of attention-seeking throughout the day, though the companionship of the parakeets had blunted his vigor.

Dinner meant a repeat of parrot food-flinging antics followed by floor and ceiling cleaning. After dinner, once the parakeets and canaries had been cajoled into returning to their cages via handclaps and verbal threats, Stanley Sue demanded a half-hour of coddling with head scratches and exaggerated praises. Bertha then got her
own romp through the house and a hide-and-seek-style roundup later. Finally, all six animal cages required covering at staggered beddy-bye times, and Stanley required peanuts at frequent intervals to curtail bouts of bell-ringing. Despite all this, and even though the day really wasn’t my own after all, I still maintained the fiction that the animals were merely peripheral to my life. Needless to say, this fiction was soon to dry up and blow away.

Howard’s injury had spurred us into a flurry of home-nursing, but our efforts were meager compared to the long struggle we soon faced with Bertha the rabbit. After surviving a harsh winter stripping evergreen foliage from the Howell’s treasured shrubs, she adjusted nicely to the cushy conditions inside our house. Even though she retained a wild streak from her months on her own outdoors, her independence manifested itself as impishness rather than insolence, the quality Binky had taken as his trademark. She hid from us but never resented being found. Her guinea pig size made her an expert at wriggling into the most hopelessly obscure portions of our house geography, including a crack between the living room couch and wall so narrow it might thwart a chubby mouse. To keep her more visibly entertained, I found a long, narrow box that once held a Try and Put Me Together–brand CD rack and filled it with crumpled newspapers. Bertha could structure an entire evening around shooting in and out of the box to rearrange the papers or eject them with her back feet according to her whim.

A doglike good-naturedness was her strongest point. Here was a rabbit who would not only sit upon our laps and enjoy petting but would also lick us to show appreciation—and not so obsessively as to suggest mindlessness. But her mood could abruptly change once we plopped her outside in her pen. A female John Henry, she dug and tunneled furiously in the sand, though without obvious escape attempts in the works. Her ability to tear around the pen in furious circles put Binky’s circumnavigation to
shame, and I often kept an eye on the troposphere directly above our house for fear that she might generate a deadly funnel cloud. This ferocity was safely channeled as long as I left her to herself. But if I tried curtailing her fun too early, she might fling herself at my legs, snapping her teeth in crazed toy terrier fashion. I’d be forced to retreat to the house empty-handed, convinced that George Howell’s thick leather gloves weren’t such a bad idea.

“She misses running wild,” Linda insisted. “Can’t we just let her run loose in the backyard? The yard’s fenced in.”

“It’s considered fenced in for anything larger than a beagle,” I told her. “But Bertha would be out of there in a second. She could slip through the wires anywhere without even mussing a whisker.”

“Couldn’t you reinforce the fence somehow? Put in chicken wire along the bottom?”

“All around the yard?” I gasped. Our backyard was a healthy fifty feet deep and eighty feet wide. “Do you have any idea how much work that would be? That’s absolutely not going to happen,” I told her, ignorant that the chuckling gods had already ordained exactly this to happen.

The third week of spring, just three months after George had brought Bertha to our door, her appetite suddenly took a dive. As Linda and I sat at the breakfast table wondering what the problem was, we watched Bertha groom herself in front of the refrigerator. Each time she tried to rise on her haunches with her front legs off the floor, she lost her balance and nearly toppled over. We whisked Bertha to see Dr. Colby the next day. Dr. Colby determined that during her life outdoors in the Howell’s neighborhood, Bertha had picked up a nasty parasite that was blooming in her bloodstream and making her too sick to eat. He gave her a shot of parasite killer plus a vitamin injection to perk her up. Within a few days she seemed back to her old self.