Enslaved by Ducks (14 page)

Wearing a buckskin fringed jacket, Joan swept in with a beer in one hand and a large pet carrier in the other—a much larger pet carrier than I had anticipated.

“Didn’t you say, ‘a poor little duck?’” I asked her. She dismissed me with the joyful laugh of an older sister not only relieving herself of a burden, but also putting that burden onto her brother.

“Let’s see her!” Linda cried.

“Come on out, duck,” commanded Joan, setting the carrier on the workroom floor and stepping back behind us to enjoy the fun.

“I think the duck needs room,” I explained as an excuse to step behind Joan. A serpentlike neck capped with a salt-and-pepper head emerged from the open door. As the Muscovy regarded us, a crest of sparse feathers atop her skull shot up like a quiver of arrows. As I regarded the Muscovy, I was morbidly transfixed by a fleshy red mask that extended from the base of her upper beak to encircle both wild eyes. She drew herself out of the carrier, raising her head to its normal height, doubling her dimensions to my expectations. This was a formidable duck. Populations of escaped Muscovies have established themselves in parks across America and in the Falcon Dam region of Texas, prompting an entry in
Peterson’s Field Guide to Eastern Birds
, which calls the species, “a clumsy, black, goose-like duck.” The
National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America
describes the Muscovy as “bulky.” Our duck was twice as large as a female Mallard and far more massive from her chest to the flat, wide tail that wiggled nervously as her head tilted and swiveled to appraise us from various directions.

“Hah!” laughed my sister. “That’s one grateful-looking duck.”

“She looks annoyed to me,” I answered, calculating the height of the plastic gate behind me in relation to the angle of my tensed body.

If the staff at
National Geographic
was correct about the “bulky” epithet, Roger Tory Peterson was even more on the mark with the “clumsy.” Fearlessly approaching the duck, Linda set out a ceramic soup bowl of water. Then, in charming innocence, I watched her scoop out and into another bowl a mixture of cracked corn and grains—known as scratch feed—from the first bag of hundreds and hundreds of bags I was destined to eventually lug into the basement.
She set the bowl on the floor next to the water. Rather than scarf up the food as expected, the duck ran underneath the wooden workbench, turned around, ran through the bowls of food and water, knocking them over, and hid in an especially dark area beneath the aluminum workbench. Linda dutifully cleaned up the scattered grain, spread another week’s worth of newspapers on top of the spilled water, and replaced the cereal bowls with more substantial, less unstable plastic buckets.

Before bedtime, the two of us crept downstairs to dowse the lights, only to find the Muscovy dunking her head in the water, splashing the room and ruining a second helping of scratch feed.

“We’ll have to buy a pool for the barn,” Linda announced.

“A pool?”

“A plastic wading pool. I saw some up at the dime store.”

“They’ve got them at the hardware store, too. Half price. End of summer sale.”

Linda shook her head. “Those are with the stupid Ninja Turtle patterns. I don’t like the way they look.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I volunteered to carry the Muscovy, which Linda had named Daphne, to the barn while Linda cleaned up the disaster area that had formerly been our workroom.

“Be careful,” she cautioned me, when I bent over to pick up the duck.

“Do you think she’ll bite?”

“It’s her wings you need to be careful of,” she warned, relating the story of how a goose had almost knocked her out with a pinion to the jaw years ago.

I encircled the duck with both arms, clutching her tightly to my chest, but aside from managing a couple of energy bursts that gave me an indication of her strength, she didn’t put up a struggle. Once
I was inside the barn, the thought struck me that I was actually using the building for its intended purpose. Previously I had viewed the barn the same way a visitor to Italy might view the ruins of Pompeii—as a relic of a lost way of life. Surveying the architecture of cow stanchions and smaller pens had never failed to fill me with a grateful superiority to the agrarian beings who had come before me. Now I was one of them.

When I followed Linda back to the barn later that afternoon, we were surprised to find Daphne perched on top of a wooden stanchion four feet off the ground. “My chickens used to roost in trees every night,” Linda told me, adding to my storehouse of information I could never use. As she spun the plastic pool into the duck’s part of the barn, I attached a hose to an all-season hydrant that had waited its entire life near the middle door of the barn for this very moment. The duck watched with disinterest as we filled the blandly blue non–Ninja Turtle pool, then flapped heavily to the cement floor when I wandered over to check the progress of the water. Linda’s gleeful smile faded as the moments ticked by without the portable pond attracting Daphne. Linda opened the waist-high gate to urge the duck to take to water, but almost instantly this act evolved into Linda’s chasing the duck around the pen and in and out of the pool. Of the gallons of water displaced by Daphne’s plunges, the majority was absorbed by Linda’s aqua dress.

“At least she knows where the pool is now,” I pointed out.

A couple of hours later, we checked on the duck again. The floor was dry, the pool unused, her food uneaten. “She’s not happy in here,” Linda decided. “She needs an outdoor pen.”

I didn’t like the way this was going at all. “We’ll let her run around the backyard during the day and put her in the barn at night.”

“Who’s going to catch her and carry her back and forth?” That
gave me pause. “And what if a dog got in our yard during the day? A large dog like a German shepherd dog could jump right over our fence and kill her.”

Other than the dogless family that lived behind us on the river, our nearest neighbor was almost a mile away. “And where might this German shepherd dog come from?”

“We can use Binky’s old pen. We’ll hire a handyman to fix it up. Unless you want to do it yourself,” she added.

“A handyman,” I sputtered in thickening despair, envisioning an otherwise unemployable eccentric with a prison record and hair sprouting from his ears.

In the main, my fears seemed to ring true. After Linda placed an ad in the local shopping newspaper, we were deluged with disconcerting phone calls. A gravelly voiced man wanted to know the name of our business and what kind of benefits we offered. A fellow who was friendly with the bottle wondered if we could offer him night work. Three people were confused as to why they had called our number, two were abusive when I explained we wanted a duck pen, and another phoned to hone his English-language skills. Anyone remotely qualified wouldn’t touch a job so small. “Let me see that ad,” I demanded, convinced that Linda must have written a wildly misleading description of a Mackinaw Bridge–scale project, but her prose was on the nose. Just as we were giving up, a chipper and plain-spoken fellow named Dell asked to come over and look at the job, surprised us by showing up, and then shocked us by quoting a reasonable price.

I learned fast to stay out of Dell’s way. It wasn’t that his attitude was unfriendly. He spoke to me with a pleasant singsong delivery I accepted as his natural voice until I heard him engaged in clipped dialogue with his son. An ex-missionary in his early sixties who had spent years among the Yanomami people in Venezuela, Dell
had seen a little of everything in life, but nothing as ridiculous as this fish-out-of-water city boy and his duck-pampering wife. “Sure, we can fix it so that the snow won’t pile up on top of the pen and cause it to collapse,” he responded exuberantly. “Of course, we wouldn’t expect too much snow to accumulate on top of a wiremesh roof, now would we, Bob?” His excessively affable tone suggested that he was talking to an idiot for whom everything had to be clearly laid out in the most positive terms possible. “Can we put a latch on the door?” he exclaimed so forcefully on another occasion, mocking a question I had asked, that I took a startled step backward, nearly knocking down the fencing he had tentatively tacked in place. “Sure, we’ll put a latch on her. You bet we’ll do that, Bob. But how about if we wait until we put the door up first?”

Once the door was hung, in a mistaken attempt to ingratiate myself, I complimented him on how well it fit. “That’s fantastic,” I simpered. “You can hardly see a sliver of daylight between the door and the frame when the door is closed.”

“Cut it out, Bob,” he growled, with only a trace of a smile.

Though Dell and I stood on opposite sides of the personality fence, he got along famously with Linda, apparently recognizing a fellow generous-hearted soul who was forced to put up with me. He complimented her on the morning glories climbing the side of our house in the brisk fall weather. He talked effusively about his family, joked about retiring to a warmer climate, and told stories about his missionary days in South America. Even after his tools were neatly put away and his son waited silently in the truck, Dell stood chatting with Linda in front of our open basement door, never once answering a question with a quip like, “Where does this kind of wood come from? I don’t know, Bob. I think it comes from a tree.”

Some of Linda’s success with Dell came from a natural-born
ability to talk that she had honed to a fine sheen through unflagging exercise. She would talk to anyone anywhere, as I learned early in our relationship. On a trip through Michigan’s “thumb region,” we visited the Lake Huron town of Grindstone City, which in the early 1900s had been a bustling millstone-manufacturing center. A friend of mine had enticed me there with a surreal photograph of a beach littered with massive defective grindstones dumped at the last minute while being loaded on a ship. “The whole town is like that,” he had insisted. “You’ll see grindstones everywhere,” but we saw none at all. Nonplussed, Linda marched to the door of the first house she saw. Five minutes later we were sitting on a porch swing poring over a Grindstone City scrapbook with an elderly woman as loquacious as my wife.

But that was merely a warm-up. Years later on a bird-watching jaunt to Ontario’s Point Pelee National Park, we overnighted in the tomato-producing town of Leamington. Deciding to take a walk after dinner, we trundled down a one-block street in back of our motel. The outing was uneventful until Linda noticed a woman tending a garden. A full half hour later, we broke free of her backyard pond and ceramic frog collection only to encounter another woman with a hose and a patch of flowers. Two doors down and twenty minutes later, a young couple en route to their house from their station wagon was waylaid by my wife. Finally, with most of the block still stretching before us, I told Linda, “I’m sure several families have called the police by now to tell them about the suspicious characters casing their neighborhood.” Though our Canadian vacation had included visits to spectacular waterfalls, charming zoos, a historic basilica, and a whale-watching cruise, Linda would refer to the Leamington walk as “almost the best part of the trip.”

Three days after starting the job, Dell closed his toolbox for the last time, and I shamed myself by studying Daphne’s new home. I
had originally based Binky’s pen around the leftover structure of a rectangular play area and sandbox. To transform the cozy rabbit pen into a raccoon-proof villa for Daphne, Dell had merely planted a few posts in the ground to extend the walls toward our back fence, covered the sides and top with wire, and added a wooden door. Even with my nonexistent construction skills, I should have been able to do the same. Little did I realize that our duck population was destined to outgrow the pen.

Once we transferred her from the gloomy interior of the barn to the fresh air and hazy sunshine of her pen, Daphne was a changed duck. She showed her appreciation by consuming great quantities of the scratch feed she had previously ignored. But the swimming pool went untouched. Neophytes to waterfowl, we didn’t know that Muscovies shared neither water pool nor gene pool with American domestic ducks that trace their roots to the common mallard. Unlike the Mallard derivatives, whose lives revolve around the pond, the tropical-born, marsh-dwelling Muscovies have comparatively underdeveloped oil glands and aren’t very waterproof. Consequently, they are poorly adapted to swimming. Because we were ignorant of these facts, Daphne’s failure to take advantage of the local pool facilities struck Linda as a wrong that demanded righting, a failure of nurturing whose blame we had inherited.

“She needs a little friend to show her how to swim,” Linda told me.

“You showed her pretty well a couple of days ago.”

“Ducks are very social. They aren’t happy by themselves.”

“Then,” I heard myself tell my wife as if through another person’s ears, “we’d better get her another duck.” In truth, I couldn’t think of a single reason not to. Having already bought the proposition that one duck was no trouble at all to keep, no trouble times two still equaled zero bother. How could it be otherwise? The ducks would live outdoors rather than gnaw at our woodwork, eat when
stirred by hunger rather than dominate our meals, and wander our yard unsupervised rather than require complicated, coordinated periods of freedom.

With ruthless efficiency, Linda located a source for a companion duck in the person of a farmer a few miles north with the remarkable name of Rupert Murdoch. On the evidence, I decided that he probably wasn’t the infamous media mogul. Though his house was in no worse shape than ours and of similar vintage, the matchstick barn barely hung together, and the denuded yard of hard-packed mud boasted indescribable clutter. Duck pens claimed the area, but these were nothing like the roomy, open-air living quarters that delighted Daphne. The two dozen or so wooden-sided, side-by-side, four-by-six-foot pens each contained a flock of ducks or a gaggle of geese of heretofore undreamed of breeds. “That’s a black and white Cayuga,” the elderly Rupert Murdoch drawled, elongating the word “Cayuga” into poetry at odds with the squalor. “That one’s a Blue Swede,” though it appeared neither blue nor Swedish.