Enslaved by Ducks (18 page)

Chloe, as we named the newcomer, won quick acceptance from Daphne and Peggy. Watching her splash around the plastic swimming pool, probe the mud in a freshly watered flower garden with enthusiastic stabs of her beak, or race across the yard flapping her wings in mindless joy reminded me why I subjected myself to the bother of keeping ducks. My worst moods seldom survived watching the trio tool through the grass like wind-up toys as they pursued some obscure goal that apparently evaporated just as they reached it with a disappointed breaking of ranks. None of our rabbits had impressed me with its cerebral intensity, but the lowliest of them was a savant compared to the brightest quacker. A fence was too abstract an object for a duck to comprehend with any degree of reliability. When agitated, she might suddenly disregard the solidity of wire mesh inches from her breast and try to strain her plump body through the holes. But I had to admire our ducks’ powers of observation. They would freeze en masse in the middle of the yard, cocking an eye toward the heavens. Looking up, I wouldn’t be able to see anything at first, but if I strained my eyes
to vein-bursting extremes, I could just make out the dust speck of a bird of prey soaring hundreds of feet above the ground.

Despite a voice as boisterous as Martha’s, bland brown Chloe was the demure female of the trio. As far as any duck could be said to be delicate, mild-mannered Chloe carried off the feat by balancing her waddle with an airy sense of poise. Much to my dismay, she would also later prove to be a diligent if unwed mother when we added abstinence-disdaining male Khakis to the flock.

The Internet had just gone mainstream, and I was upstairs engaged in important on-line activities, when I heard Linda calling from the yard.

“Something’s wrong with Chloe,” she told me, as I joined her in the pen. “She can’t walk. She can’t even stand up.” It was a rare June day in Michigan; the sun was shining unobstructed by slabs of clouds, and gusty breezes swept deliciously through waggling trees. Unfortunately, on such fine days we hadn’t yet learned to put a rock in front of the duck-pen door to prevent it from slamming upon an entering or exiting duck, which was what apparently had happened to poor Chloe. We waited until the next morning, hoping for improvement. When none was evident, I took her to Dr. Hedley, the robust veterinarian who had correctly treated Stanley’s groin injury with a no-nonsense regimen of intensive non-treatment. After examining Chloe’s leg and then x-raying the bone, he prescribed around-the-clock nontreatment for her, too.

“The femur is broken,” he said and frowned, setting down the kitty carrier that was fast becoming our duck transport of choice. The tip of an olive-colored bill poked through the carrier-door grate. Chloe was calm. I was the ruffled one. “The break occurred at the top of the bone about as close to her abdomen as you could possibly get. That would make the bone very difficult to pin, since there’s almost nothing to pin it.” He deftly pantomimed a broken
femur and an ineffectual pin with his thumb and index fingers as he spoke. “We could anesthetize her and try exploratory surgery to see if something else could be done, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Number one, ducks don’t do well with anesthesia. Number two, they can be slow recovering from surgery.”

“What’s the alternative?” I asked, feeling about as useful as the pin.

“Do nothing. Let nature take its course. Give the bone a chance to heal on its own.”

“Does she need a splint or something?”

“I thought of taping her leg. But because of where the break is situated, I would have to wrap the tape all the way around her body underneath her wings, and that would make a great big mess. There’s a much better solution if you have a small cage at home. It needs to be large enough so that she could stand up if she’s able to, but small enough to confine her movements and keep her from thrashing around.”

I remembered the rabbit cage that had most recently housed the demon ducklings and nodded. From somewhere down the hall, a parrot’s squawk complained about whatever indignity it was undergoing. Chloe shifted around a little in her carrier, but otherwise didn’t make a peep. This was fortunate. The parrot was loud enough, but if Chloe had let loose her braying quack inside the examination room, Dr. Hedley and I would have both been forced to communicate with the world by note pad for the next couple of days.

“If we can keep her relatively still for about three weeks, there’s a ninety-percent chance that the broken bone pieces will knit back together. Now, they may not knit together in the right alignment, and she could end up pigeon-toed.” His outstretched hands demonstrated this consequence. “But unless the misalignment is
serious, it shouldn’t be a problem for the bird. We had a similar case with a Maribou stork that got a foot tangled in a rope, and we caged him and let him heal on his own. He hobbles a little when he walks, but he regained full use of the broken leg.”

I understood that Dr. Hedley was referring to his consultation at a zoo. He never made direct reference to the zoo. It was always a “we had to sandpaper the teeth of a Komodo dragon last week” sort of mention that took it for granted I knew about his specialized patients. If this was a form of bragging, it never bothered me.

“Put her cage out with the other ducks so that her environment is familiar and she isn’t unnecessarily stressed. After three weeks you can try letting her out. If her leg is going to heal, it will have healed by that point. If not, we’ll take it from there.” Then, instead of rushing off to see another client, he answered my questions about the pileated woodpecker houses he was still building up north, described the various visitors to his backyard bird feeder, and just generally made me happy that Chloe and I had such an exuberant personification of animal well-being in our corner.

As we transferred Chloe to the bunny cage, Linda reminded me of how Daphne and Peggy had managed to peck the call duck ducklings through the bars. Birds just could not resist ferreting out weakness in their flock and trying to drive off underlings, presumably to ensure the survival of the group. Dominance was another issue that led to bullying. Howard and Stanley continued to jockey for power in our dining room, no matter how close an eye we kept on them. We talked about encircling Chloe’s cage with the ring of fencing that had protected the ducklings, but the fence proved unnecessary. As soon as I placed the cage in a corner of the duck pen, Peggy plunked herself in front of it and would not let Daphne get anywhere close. She did her best to menace us, too, forcing us to shoo her away whenever we wanted to give Chloe food or water.

Altruism in animals is unusual. I’ve read books about extraordinary pets like Philip Gonzalez’s
The Dog Who Rescues Cats: The True Story of Ginny
, which chronicles a pooch whose goal in life is finding injured or abandoned cats and convincing her big-hearted owner to take them home. But you expect a certain degree of heroism in dogs that you don’t expect in other pets. Otherwise, Saint Bernard might be the name for a gargantuan breed of helpful rabbit, fire stations could use a speckled goose as mascot, and Lassie might signal danger by meowing strenuously. Talk to anyone who spends hours a day around animals, from farmers to zookeepers to misguided individuals like myself. They’ll probably express admiration for their charges. They probably won’t ever describe them as motivated by selflessness. But Peggy was an exception.

Peggy always relished her periods of freedom from the pen, when she could search the yard for worms, exotic varieties of mud, and other delicacies too refined for human tastes. During the weeks that Chloe was confined to her cage, Peggy barely budged from sentry duty. Once in a while, succumbing to Daphne’s forlorn squeaks or the call of a luscious puddle after a heavy rain, she might briefly join the Muscovy for a jaunt across the lawn. But these outings were rare. Her place was at the convalescing patient’s bedside, where her raspy voice offered occasional quiet mutterings of encouragement. “How’s that drumstick today?” she might quack, in an attempt to cheer up the brown duck. “Your food looks good, but the grub’s much better in the garden.”

When three weeks passed and we could finally release an increasingly restless Chloe, Peggy seemed to anticipate the moment of liberation as much as we did. She darted around my feet as Linda kneeled down on the dampish straw of the duck pen, reached through the door of the bunny cage, and gently placed Chloe on the floor beside her. Chloe didn’t keep us in suspense. Her
chubby body immediately popped up on a pair of working legs that propelled her out into the yard. Wobbling significantly but still maintaining her balance, she moved with surprising speed toward an alluring patch of weeds, followed closely by Peggy, who, for perhaps the only time in her life, let Chloe take the lead.

I was still thrilled at Chloe’s recovery when I held her in my arms at Dr. Hedley’s office a couple of days later. He shared my joy, but his face grew tight as his fingers probed the length of her leg, carefully working her limb in every direction like a video-game joystick. Chloe’s face, in contrast, was unperturbed, wearing the same look of mild forbearance that a duck acquires almost as soon as it lurches out of the egg.

“Do you mind if I take another X ray?” he asked. “I won’t charge you for it. I just want to satisfy my own curiosity.”

He was visibly more relaxed when he returned with Chloe, though my stomach clenched when he explained that the bone hadn’t actually knitted back together at all. “The femur is still broken, just as I had thought. But she’ll still do fine.”

“If the leg is broken, how can she possibly walk?”

“The muscles in her leg are supporting the broken bone. Ducks are incredibly lightweight for their size, and their muscles are quite strong, as you would know if you ever tried to handle a large bird that wasn’t this cooperative.”

I grimaced. “Won’t that hurt her to have the loose bone end spearing her muscle?”

“The muscles grip a large enough section of the bone to act as kind of a shock absorber,” he explained, capping the fingers of his left hand with his cupped right hand in another of his dexterous broken-bone pantomimes. “ I don’t think she’s experiencing too much discomfort, or she simply wouldn’t walk at all. A few years ago we had a condition similar to this with another kind of bird—”

“A flamingo,” I suggested, anticipating an anecdote about a zoo.

“Oh, good heavens, no,” he chuckled. “Where on earth would I get my hands on a flamingo? No, it was a Magellanic penguin, the kind you see swimming off the South African coast. We never thought this little guy would ever walk again, but despite a break not unlike your duck’s, he did very well for himself.”

Dr. Hedley turned out to be right about Chloe. Her leg supported her throughout the summer, and when winter came she kept vertical as successfully as any South African penguin, Magellanic or otherwise. Thanks to her wide feet—the same clumsy boats I had laughed at during temperate months—the ice that sent me sprawling headlong down the hill barely troubled her at all, nor did the six inches of snow that fell one night shortly after Christmas. Buoyed by the fluff, all three ducks half-walked, half-swam away from their pen, kicking their legs to toboggan across the yard, leaving tattletale trenches behind them. But with no seasonal treats to forage for except varied flavors of slush, they only sledded as far as the closest patch of sun, basking contentedly while I wrestled miserably with the usual pushbroom, hose, and shovel.

W
HEN SPRING FINALLY
wormed its way loose from the beak of a fierce Michigan winter, a familiar visitor made his first appearance. While other raccoons played the part of stylish partygoers by waiting for darkness before dropping by, a young male favored us with his presence in the late afternoon. As early as five o’clock, we would find him on the flat roof of the milk house just outside our dining room window eating seeds I had flung up there for juncos, cardinals, and jays that would not use the hanging feeder. As we ate dinner, he scrounged whatever the birds had left behind. Soon he was joining us for breakfast, too, showing up at a sunlit hour when other self-respecting nocturnal creatures had
long since retreated to their hidey-holes or closed the lids of their coffins.

Under normal conditions, I simply ignored the raccoon population, but this was anything but a normal spring. Raccoons and possums usually poked around our feeder as a lazy alternative to scavenging natural foods. But an uncharacteristically dry April and May evaporated a swamp that should have squirted out mosquitoes by the millions. The lack of rain also squelched other insects and early-blooming weeds that in past years our animal residents had plucked from nature’s big buffet. Conditions were so desperate that bug- and berry-loving Baltimore orioles were reduced to eating our sunflower seeds. We had never seen that before. Linda split an orange in half and skewered it on the end of the bird feeder support pole. A male and female oriole pecked the fruit down to the pulp within hours. Soon she began putting out two orange halves each day. Since the raccoon’s survival prospects seemed dire, I decided to share leftovers of Linda’s tortilla-chip-crumb-and-potato-water casserole (“I never made that,” she claims), skillet-fried tofu shapes, faux-tuna Tuno burgers, and failed bread-machine experiments.

While I trusted a human-habituated raccoon to steer clear of our ducks, we still took the precaution of keeping the girls inside their pen until the sun was high in the sky. Early mornings and late afternoons were off-limits, no matter how loudly Chloe quacked for freedom. We also double-checked the pen door latches at night to avoid a repeat of the attack on Martha. We were vigilant. We just weren’t vigilant enough.

I was at work when I received an anguished call from Linda. She had waited until midmorning to let the ducks out, heard a commotion twenty minutes later, and found a frightened Daphne and Chloe wandering more aimlessly than usual. Peggy was missing. A trail of small white feathers leading to the back fence told a tale with a terrible ending.

Too upset to do anything else, I drove home from work and spent several pointless minutes calling for a duck we knew couldn’t possibly come home. We didn’t even find anything we could bury, though I stopped short of searching beyond the black raspberry bushes for the kind of grisly remains that Martha had left behind. I didn’t want to remember Peggy like that. I wanted to remember her brimming with an intensity of life far out of proportion to her size, a lioness inhabiting the body of a twelve-inch-tall duck. There was no question in either of our minds that our daylight raccoon had extended his usual visiting hours for a meal on the wing. And Linda had no doubt that slow-moving Chloe was his intended target and that Peggy had intervened to save her life.