Fowl Weather (26 page)

A few days later he phoned with the results. Walter had a malignant tumor on his leg, and because the growth lacked clearly defined boundaries, surgery could be long and difficult. “And even then, I wouldn't know with absolute certainty that I'd removed it all,” he told Linda. “The other factor to consider is that it might already have invaded the bone.”

“He's an old rabbit. I'd rather not put him through surgery,” said Linda. “It would probably be too much for him.”

“I think you might be right,” he told her. “And this could turn out to be a slow-growing tumor.”

“So he might outlast the cancer?”

“It's a possibility.”

Contributing to our decision to let Walter live out his time in peace was the fact that another vet had removed two noncancerous tumors a year earlier, and the experience had stressed him to the point where he had barely eaten for several days. “Walter could do fine for quite a while,” Linda said.

We didn't obsess too long about his condition. A fresh disaster sloshed in the following weekend when my old college friend Michael visited me. Sitting in the living room, we had just finished listening to bits of a CD by the Oratorio Society of Minnesota, of which he was a member. Michael was patiently pronouncing composer Kodály's name for me for about the fourteenth time when a flurry of wings and parrot squawks interrupted my Hungarian-language lesson. I ran into the dining room as Stanley Sue flew from Howard's cage and landed on the countertop.

To keep Howard and Stanley Sue apart when one or the other bird was loose, we put a towel on top of the captive bird's cage to prevent sneak attacks from above or below. I had never considered the possibility that the parrot would fight the dove through the bars while clinging to the side of his cage, but this is exactly what had happened. Howard's foot had been bloodied, and he tilted his head as if in pain.

He didn't seem badly hurt, but to be on the safe side I took him to Dr. Fuller's office the next day. “His neck is lacerated under the feathers,” he said. “He needs to be anesthetized right away and the wound sutured, but that isn't what worries me the most. See the marks on his beak?”

Popping on my glasses and focusing closely, I noticed a couple of indentations halfway between the tip of the beak and his head. “Is that serious?”

“His beak isn't like a parrot's bill, which is made of a hard substance not unlike your fingernails. Howard's beak is composed of soft tissue with blood circulation, and with an injury like this, there is a danger that the beak could actually fall off.” Our vet had the gift of making the most extraordinary statements sound so commonplace, it was as if he said them on a daily basis.

As I struggled with this unfortunate snippet of information, Dr. Fuller cupped Howard expertly in his hand in a sort of kung fu grip that I could never duplicate no matter how many times he had demonstrated it. He disappeared to his surgery with the bird, leaving me to baste in worry on my own. It shocked me that in less than five seconds, Stanley Sue had succeeded in slashing Howard's neck, upbraiding his leg, and putting the vise grip on his bill, even with her beak restricted by the bars. Equally amazing was the fact that a defenseless dove would be so bold as to challenge a powerful parrot. I could only explain their ongoing rivalry
as the age-old contest of determining supremacy over the flock. I took it as an insult that neither bird viewed me as a contender.

When Dr. Fuller finally returned to the examination room and gently placed the groggy dove into our pet carrier, I noticed that his normally clean-shaven face sported a Vandyke beard. Combined with his wire-rimmed glasses, the facial hair lent him the appearance of a psychoanalyst. I wondered if I might ask him to prescribe some Zoloft to get me through the week. He hadn't been out of the room long enough to grow the whiskers; I'd been so fixated on Howard during my visit, I must have let his new Vandyke fly right by me.

“His neck stitched up very well. I don't think it will be a problem.”

“So how will I know when he's out of danger with his beak?”

“You have to get him to eat something,” the beard told me. “His beak is probably too tender for seeds. You should try him on something soft. I'm going to send you home with some powdered food that you can mix with water and manually feed him if necessary. Do you know how to do a tube-feeding?”

Seldom would a visit to the vet's office be described as a pleasant experience, but I felt worse about this one by the minute. “Do you mean sticking a tube down his throat into his crop and force-feeding him?” Linda's friend LuAnn needed to do this twice a day with her blind dove Snowdrop, who could not eat on her own. I had watched the tube-feeding once, and it looked miserable for both parties involved.

“I can show you how to do it.”

“How about we wait until it's absolutely necessary? I can bring him back tomorrow afternoon if I don't see any evidence that he's eating.”

“That's fine,” said Dr. Fuller. “But we shouldn't wait longer
than that. It's critical that he start receiving nutrition as soon as possible.”

I brought Howard home in a mood so bleak, not even a glance at Walter cheered me. Howard and Ollie were the two birds that had been with us the longest, and I couldn't imagine life without him fluttering clumsily around the dining room and hooting with puffed-up dignity at the parakeets, who ignored him.

Recalling that spaghetti was his favorite dinner food, I made a quick trip to the supermarket and brought home a frozen blob of pasta. Dusty, Stanley Sue, and Ollie loved noodles, too, and grudgingly allowed Linda and me to set aside a heated dollop for ourselves. I prepared the spaghetti for Howard in the traditional manner. Donning high-magnification glasses and equipping myself with a precision saw, I pressed several noodles together on my plate and cut them into rice-size pieces. I distributed them on the countertop next to Ollie's cage. Then I let Howard loose.

In a moment of high drama, Linda and I stopped eating and slowed our heartbeats as the newly sutured Howard landed on the Formica. Spying his favorite food, he bobbled toward it, but didn't eat at once.

“Maybe the countertop's too hard,” I told Linda. “Maybe we should sprinkle the spaghetti on a wet sponge.”

I needn't have worried. Within seconds Howard began wolfing down the noodles, whacking the countertop with greedy strikes of his beak like a woodpecker trying his luck on aluminum siding. Moments later, he assumed his usual spot inside Ollie's cage while Ollie dined on top in the equivalent of a café setting. Raking his beak through the small parrot's dish, Howard scattered a hundred seeds on the floor for every one he popped into his mouth. Usually Linda fussed about the mess, but this time she praised him profusely: “Good boy, Howard.”

The next day I revisited my stash of wire-mesh fencing in the barn. Stapling it to strips of wood, I constructed a gawky enclosure that slipped over his hanging cage and, similar to the barrier on the bunny cages, barred Stanley's beak from entry. It was probably the first cage for a cage that I had ever built.

W
E SHOULD HAVE
run more fencing around the backyard to keep Eileen out, but it would have been like trying to hold water back with a sieve. Kate had given us her okay on the phone for Lulu to move to luxury accommodations with Eileen's newfound friend Henrietta. But I hadn't expected my old schoolmate to simply show up one Saturday morning. For reasons as mysterious as those that had brought her to us in the first place, Eileen had left our orbit to the extent that she didn't care to greet us or ask for our help. Kate had accompanied her and turned to wave enthusiastically in the direction of the dining room, though I doubted she could see me crouched behind Dusty's cage.

Eileen gestured impatiently for Kate to join her inside the duck pen, then stepped back as the realization hit her that she had no idea how to handle anything with feathers. The general stood aside and waved her arms at Lulu's pleasant owner, who lifted and snuggled her beautiful white duck. She paused to make sure that Eileen had latched the pen door, then followed her at a march toward our driveway.

That afternoon I hauled a cage into the backyard, set it on top of the milk house, and gave Roswitha's pigeon her freedom as Linda urged her on. Without a second's hesitation, the bird flew off, circled the yard, and landed on the peak of the barn roof. Throughout the day, she maintained her post like a weather vane that had come to life. As evening began to fall, she still remained, and we worried that her months in captivity might have robbed
her of the instincts to fend for herself. Holding her cage above my head, I walked toward the barn calling for her.

“Pigeon! Pigeon! You can come back inside if you want.”

After a few moments she flapped her wings and left the roof. It was just dark enough that hawks wouldn't be a problem, and far too light for tussles with owls as she flew over the remaining flood-water in the woods, heading home to rejoin her flock—soaring above and flapping away from the troubles that had found us.

Howard recovered from his life-threatening injuries with his usual nonchalance, and the tumor on Walter's leg didn't seem to have progressed. My mom puttered along without further setbacks, the new geese coexisted swimmingly with their peers, and Eileen hadn't reared her topknotted head in days. Eager to take advantage of this rare interval of tranquillity, Linda said, “Couldn't we get out of town for a weekend?”

Two obstacles prevented us from flinging ourselves into the car and hurling it toward Grindstone City, Michigan; Wawa, Ontario; or another chunk of vacation paradise. The foremost problem was Linda's ailing back. Her creaky lumbar discs went on strike if she stood in one place or sat too long—a condition that would have proved fatal to a sedentary stick like myself. Lying on the back seat of the car during brief jaunts helped keep Linda's spinal contractions at bay, but she couldn't stay supine for a several-hour drive. My cramped Ford Focus didn't exactly offer the comforts of a queen-size bed, let alone a faux-sheepskin rug on the living room floor. She might as well have tried to stretch out inside my
mother's bread drawer between a bundle of hoarded paper bags and a hidden purse. But Linda had hatched an idea that might improve her transportability—the inimitable Stinky—and we awaited the chance to test it out.

That left us with the second problem: finding a pet sitter. We'd had a few excellent sitters over the years, but Betty had moved away, Teresa had grown busy with her family, and Sarah had fallen victim to post-traumatic stress syndrome from a relentless series of chores that included singing a night-night song to Ollie. We had no choice but to seek out innocent blood for Victor's beak, and that meant placing an ad in the local weekly newspaper. Plenty of college-age girls always applied. They never failed to impress us with their enthusiasm and imperturbability during the interview process, and seldom failed to disappoint us with their lackluster performance on the job.

A few summers ago, just before we had walked out of the door for a trip to Pennsylvania Dutch country, Linda had told college student Tippi, “Make sure to cover the birds at night, like we talked about before. The covers are in the hall closet, and I wrote down which ones go over which cage.”

“I won't forget,” she assured Linda. “I even remember what you said about the two black covers for Stanley Sue.”

Upon our return a week later, as I attempted to regale Tippi with tales of technology-shunning Amish ringing up quilt sales on state-of-the-art LCD-screen cash registers, Linda glanced in the closet and noticed that the pile of cage covers lay exactly as she had left them. Tippi hadn't so much as unfolded a single cover, when she should have used them to conceal the fact that she hadn't cleaned the cages either. A check of the upstairs answering machine explained her laxness. “I'm on my way over right now,” began numerous messages from her boyfriend, alternating with
plaintive calls from her parents, asking, “Tippi, why haven't we heard from you?”

Another young pet sitter, Missy, worked as a veterinary assistant and had grown up on a farm with countless indoor and outdoor critters. Her attentiveness when Linda introduced her to the pets encouraged us, as did the questions that she asked about their care. But on the scorching July weekend when we visited the Upper Peninsula, only a propitious visit from Linda's friend LuAnn saved our birds and rabbits from cooking in the giant pressure cooker of our house. “She didn't have enough common sense to switch on the air conditioner,” LuAnn said later. “I had to do it for her.” These and other incidents involving the justifiably maligned youth of America compelled Linda to target older and presumably more dependable sitters instead. But they proved difficult to find.

A
S BEFITTED THE
zenith of spring, Linda's flowers popped out of the ground in abundance, and her annual crop of classified ads on assorted subjects blossomed in the
Lowell Ledger.
Her solicitation of a pet sitter didn't seem to invite confusion. “Wanted: experienced person to care for our pet birds, rabbits, and cats while we are on vacation. Must be an animal lover.” A few folks with the credentials of having once petted though never owned a dog were among the first wave of callers, along with a gruff-voiced man who charmed Linda with the admission that, yes, he guessed he could feed and water a few pets if we paid him enough.

Although we had decided to disregard calls from college students, we repeatedly played back the message from a young woman who assured us that she would love to have the job, provided that we picked her up and drove her back to her dorm each day, because she didn't own a car. “I guess we could lend her mine, since we're apparently vacationing within walking distance
of home,” I told Linda. We also received the typical call from a doting mom who didn't want her nine-year-old to miss the chance to learn about animals. “Might as well practice on ours,” I muttered. “Too bad we don't have an actual guinea pig.”