Enslaved by Ducks (34 page)

Linda described how she had discovered Hazel in her pen and the treatment we had given her so far. Dr. Fuller discounted the theory that a vandal had set her head on fire by explaining that her
injuries were consistent with a pecking attack by the other turkeys. “They were definitely going for her eyes,” he told her.

“Why would they hurt her like that?”

“Chickens and turkeys do strange things when they get upset. It could be that a hawk flew over their pen, causing them to panic, and they attacked her.”

“Or maybe a stranger scared them,” suggested Linda, a version of the firebug still dancing in her head.

I was relieved when Dr. Fuller suggested that he keep Hazel overnight to tube-feed her and give her a booster shot of antibiotics. The seriousness of her condition actually filled me with a peculiar confidence. Two years earlier, at the moment that I had walked away from the clinic leaving our goose Liza in Dr. Fuller’s care, I didn’t believe that she would die. This time, I didn’t believe that Hazel would survive. These opposite poles somehow seemed equivalent, and with a tremor of calm and no nagging expectations, I smiled at Linda, assured that we had finally done all that could be done.

When I returned to pick up Hazel on Tuesday afternoon, I found a changed bird in her place. She stood straight up in her recycling bin, head erect and turning from side-to-side as she tracked sounds in the examination room. Her nasal cavities barely whistled when she breathed. Dr. Fuller told me that the antibiotics from Dr. Colby had probably saved her life, but he wanted her on a different antibiotic for another ten days. “The good news is that I don’t see her sinus infection as being a significant problem now,” he told me. “But I’m afraid her long-term outlook isn’t good. She will probably never regain her eyesight, though we won’t know for sure until the scabs come off. The problem with birds is that they are so visually oriented toward their food, they don’t like to eat what they can’t see.”

“Couldn’t we learn to tube-feed her the way you did?” I asked.

“You could,” he answered hesitantly. “But if it comes down to that, you really have to ask yourself what kind of quality of life she’ll have. Under those circumstances, it may be best to euthanize her.”

Although I could hardly consider Dr. Fuller’s message upbeat, Hazel’s progress so delighted me that I sailed home above the rush hour traffic on a pair of turkey wings, buoyed by the realization that for the first time since her accident, she wasn’t in imminent danger of transitioning to the big roasting pan in the sky. Keeping her anchored in our world wouldn’t be an easy job, I knew, but I figured we had a grace period of a day or two before worrying about finding a way to get her to eat. From the condition of the bottom of the recycling bin by the time I pulled into our driveway, I could tell that the animal clinic had filled her with plenty of food. I had imagined that they would treat her to an exotic high-protein wonder formula, but according to Dr. Fuller they had given her the same scratch feed that we had fed her in the barn. Tube-feeding her the scratch feed had done the trick. In fact, it was like priming the pump.

S
HORTLY AFTER THE
homecoming fanfare wound down and we reinstalled Hazel in the basement, I presented her with the Pedialyte-and-rice-cereal mixture, gently lowering her head until her beak touched the liquid. She wouldn’t drink it. Without a hope of success, I grabbed the metal bowl containing her scratch feed, shook it to tantalize her ears with the seductive scrape of cracked corn and grains upon curved aluminum, and placed the bowl under her head. To my astonishment, she immediately pecked at the food. She raised her head to swallow and, not being able to see the bowl, lowered her head and pecked in a different spot, missing the bowl and forcing me to quickly shift the food to meet her beak.
Each time her head rose, I tried anticipating where it would land next time, so I could be there with the bowl. Popping the bowl back and forth provided a nice visual metaphor for the excitement I was feeling that our never-say-die turkey had cleared another serious hurdle.

“She ate feed from her dish!” I announced to Linda in the kitchen. “She ate the scratch feed,” I added for clarification, when Linda failed to perform handsprings on the linoleum.

“I know. She ate some for me a little while ago. She drank her Pedialyte, too.”

“But she
really
ate for me,” I told Linda, as my altruism turned to pettiness. “She ate so much, she didn’t have room for your Pedialyte. She really ate a lot.”

In the days that followed, I tried imagining a system that would allow Hazel to feed herself, but there didn’t seem to be a substitute for the handheld metal bowl. I mentioned one idea to Linda. “What if we build her a long, narrow pen out in the barn that barely gives her room to turn around. But she’d have plenty of space to walk up and down.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Along both sides running the entire length of the pen, there would be a trough full of scratch feed. And that way, she could peck almost anywhere and never miss her feed dish. What do you think?”

“What’s she going to do about water?” Linda asked.

“I don’t know.” I considered the problem. “We could flood the barn.”

Even if my inspiration wasn’t up to snuff, my motivation was solid. After all, a turkey didn’t exactly make the ideal house pet. Linda kept the washer and dryer running almost constantly in an attempt to keep up with the number of clean sheets we needed for
her bedding. Still, it took far less effort to gather up a sheet and shake off the turkey poop than it did hosing down, scrubbing, and disinfecting the cement floor every twenty minutes. We tried spreading straw inside her pen, but it continually needed changing and tended to scatter throughout the basement, cling to the bottom of our feet, and appear on the living room rug. No matter how hard Linda worked keeping Hazel’s quarters clean, a turkey smell pervaded the basement and occasionally invaded the upstairs, and that strong, sour odor made me long for the comparative perfume of the duck pen.

On the first sunny day after Hazel’s strength had returned, Linda decided we should put her outdoors in the bunny pen where she couldn’t wander off or run into anything that might hurt her. “A little while in the fresh air will do her good,” she said.

Lowell only gets around sixty days of cloudless sunshine a year, and the sky was such an oceanic shade of blue, I could imagine the dome of stars huddled behind it waiting jealously for night to fall. The birds were unusually silent in the trees. The titmice, cardinals, orioles, and song sparrows were too dazzled by the gorgeous afternoon to sing. I set Hazel down in the grass, wishing that she could enjoy her surroundings as much as I was. But the scab that enveloped her head and hid her damaged eyes sealed her in a total eclipse. She took a few steps forward and lurched to the left until her wing pressed against the fence. She raised her neck and cocked her head. The wisp of a breeze carried the scent of our freshly cut lawn to her nostrils, along with the bacterial decay of the evaporating pond just down the hill. She twittered nervously.

“You okay?” I asked her.

She erupted in a string of piercing yips. Everything was quiet, and then she started barking again. Maybe being outdoors was upsetting her after weeks of security in our basement. I was about to
bring her back into the house until it hit me what was going on. She was calling to our other turkeys. If Linda hadn’t found Hazel in the barn shortly after her injury, and if it hadn’t been for our subsequent struggles giving her the medicine, food, water, and all of the other treatment she desperately needed, she would have died. Despite this, Hazel’s feelings for us didn’t run particularly deep. We barely existed in her world, because her world was her flock. Unleashing another volley of barks, she called again to our other turkeys, the very same turkeys that had nearly pecked her to death. I was horrified. From the opposite end of our property, a turkey answered her. Hazel called back with unbridled passion. I walked into the house and shut the door.

While Hazel continued to improve, the scab on her head was stubbornly slow to heal. Rather than crumbling away in patches, the sheath of thick, dead skin began to loosen around her chin like a hood that had been unlaced. One afternoon as I was feeding her, I noticed that I didn’t have to move the dish around as much as usual. She pecked her food with surprising accuracy while I held the bowl in place. Crouching on my hands and knees, I peered up into the gap between the clinging scab and the left side of her face and thought I saw an animated glint. I ran upstairs and grabbed a small pair of kitchen scissors. Holding her head as best as I could, I cut an arc of dead skin from the bottom of the scab, then another, then another, until a naked eye surrounded by pink flesh looked back at me. I drew my hand toward it. She pulled her head away. I picked up the bowl of scratch feed and out of sheer habit shook it. She blinked and regarded it blandly.

Hazel could definitely see.

The orbital tissue was misshapen and her eyelid drooped, but the eye itself worked fine. The scab on the right side of her head—the side that had been more severely injured than the left—hadn’t
loosened enough for me to risk a trim. But one good eye was fine. No, one good eye was great. One good eye made all the difference between a turkey we would have to wait on hand and foot and a turkey that could live a nice life on her own. And a good eye it truly was. I sat down on the basement floor beside her, marveling at its beauty and amazed by the fact that an event involving a turkey somehow added up to one of the happiest days I could remember. I definitely needed to get out of the house more often.

“You don’t want to put her with the other turkeys,” Dr. Fuller told Linda when she phoned him a week later. I had finally succeeded in cutting away a section of the scab on the right side of Hazel’s face, uncovering the remnant of an eye that seemed to respond vaguely to light, but was useless for resolving objects. “A turkey that’s blind in one eye is susceptible to further injury,” Dr. Fuller warned. “You want to keep her by herself.” That had been our thinking, too. I sectioned off a separate pen for Hazel in the middle of our barn leading to an outdoor pen of her own, adding two more entries to my fencing résumé. Just like our three bunnies, who couldn’t bear to share the same room but cuddled through the bars of their cages, Hazel would often sit close to the fence while her sisters parked themselves nearby on the other side of the wire.

It took me weeks before I could walk down to the basement without expecting to find Hazel on her blanket in the bunny pen. Although caring for her had involved an impressive amount of work—most of which I was thankful Linda had undertaken—I still missed Hazel’s presence in the house. I missed the way she would stand up when she heard our footsteps on the stairs and occasionally talk back to us with soft warbling sounds. I missed her enthusiastic stabs at her bowl of scratch feed. I missed the turkey feathers I carried to work on the seat of my pants. And I missed the quizzical eyebrows of the men who delivered our water-softener
salt. Because I found myself missing Hazel, I visited her in the barn, and she still enjoyed it when I held her bowl while she ate. It was the least I could do. Linda and I may have provided the care she needed at a crucial time, with important help from Drs. Fuller and Colby, but Hazel alone had supplied the courage and patience that had pulled her through.

One afternoon about two months after we had moved Hazel from our basement to her new pen, Linda found one of the other two turkeys dead on the barn floor. She lay sprawled on the cement with her wings outstretched, suggesting she had leaped from the stanchion rail, missed the cushioning straw, hit the floor wrong, and died on the spot. That left us with only Hazel and one other turkey. That turkey needed a name, and because Linda identified her as the bird with blood on her beak the day of Hazel’s injury—and also because we figured she was behind the fatal attack on our other turkey the previous fall—I dubbed her Lizzie. Lizzie Borden. Considering the suffering that Lizzie had caused Hazel, I made a feeble effort to dislike her, but even that didn’t last.

I was lying in bed listening to an early evening rerun of Art Bell’s “Coast to Coast” paranormal-topics radio talk show when I heard something that I couldn’t believe. Art’s guest was a ghost hunter from Pennsylvania who was playing back voices of the dead he had recorded at haunted houses, cemeteries, and Civil War battlefields. During a commercial break, I yawned and turned down the volume only to hear Linda on the telephone in the living room.

“Sure, we’d love to raise some baby starlings for you,” she said. “We’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.”

Hardly trusting my ears, I scrambled out of bed and thudded into the next room, where I found Linda stretched out on the rug. Because of her worsening back problems, she rarely used furniture any longer except when she was eating or sleeping. Waving my arms, I managed to catch her eye as she unhitched her head from the receiver to tell me, “Guess what, sweetie? Marge Chedrick has seven baby starlings, and she’s going to let us raise them for her!”

I shook my head so hard the vertebrae in my neck popped. “Tell her we have to talk about this first.”

Linda nodded at the phone. “Tomorrow afternoon? Do we need to bring anything?”

“Another husband,” I muttered, as I scuttled in defeat back to my world of powerless disembodied entities.

In truth, I was a weak man with a weakness for starlings ever since seeing a newly molted adult up close at a pet-bird show. In contrast to the undistinguished black-and-brown birds of city lawns that are frequently lumped with squirrels, rats, and high school children as unavoidable urban pests, the European starling in his snappiest attire is an engaging dandy. His plumage resembles an outlandish costume made of cloisonné, from his black flight and tail feathers encircled by ocher borders to his white-tipped breast feathers, brown-speckled back, iridescent shoulder coverts with a hint of green, and white-flecked brown and black head. “People keep asking me what kind of bird he is,” the woman we met at the bird show told us. “They think he’s some kind of imported exotic. They’re like, ‘What?’ when I tell them he’s your run-of-the-mill starling.”