Enslaved by Ducks (19 page)

“I can just see Peggy protecting Chloe,” Linda told me, after we had calmed down a bit. “She probably tried to chase him off while Chloe and Daphne ran away. She wasn’t afraid of anything. That’s exactly what she would do.”

I missed Peggy more than I ever expected to miss a duck and turned my sorrow into rage against the raccoon. Whenever I saw him on top of the milk house, I tore outside and chased him off with a broom. Whacking the handle against the side of the roof from ground level, I scared him into jumping down, then ran to the back of the shed and threatened to pummel him with the broom head as he made a beeline for the back fence. His agility and my essential cowardice saved us both from harm. After a few of these chases, upon hearing the angry slam of the basement door, he would climb out of broom range up the hackberry tree overhanging the milk house. I peppered him with a hail of pebbles as he clung forlornly to the trunk. I sprayed him with jets of water from the backyard hose. I hollered at him until my throat hurt, “Kill my favorite duck, will you?” and “You’re not welcome here anymore!” The raccoon just wouldn’t take the hint. Staring down at me with a slightly perplexed air, he bided his time until I stalked back
into the house, then resumed his usual seat at out rooftop cafe. Nothing I did had any effect.

“I’m just glad I don’t own a gun,” I said to Linda. Otherwise, of course, I might have shot myself in the foot.

I had trouble sleeping, sick about losing Peggy and obsessed with ridding our property of every last marauding raccoon. The following Saturday, on my weekly visit to the feed store, I asked the owner, Ted, if he sold live traps large enough to catch a raccoon. He had exactly the model I needed. The cardboard box even featured fanciful artwork of a captured raccoon whose wide eyes indicated he was anxious to make a fresh start at a remote location.

“You won’t go wrong with this one,” Ted said. “I use one of them myself.”

“Is it tricky letting them go?” I asked. “I’ve read about people getting their leg chewed on by an animal they’ve just released.”

“I don’t release them,” he said with an insinuating squint. “I take care of them.”

The irony of using live traps to lure animals to their doom not only was lost on Ted, but it also escaped the trap manufacturer. Bait-and-capture instructions were provided, but not a word from the Humane Live Animal Trap, Inc., literature mentioned how to spring the raccoon. In fact, the pictured list of features referred to the Quick-Release Rear Hatch with Easy Slide-Out Bolt under the heading of Bait Insertion Door, though the door was clearly designed for the animal’s escape. The whole procedure seemed so ominous from the raccoon’s perspective, I shook the empty cardboard box to make sure I hadn’t overlooked an included Humane Gutting Knife.

Once I had mastered the art of prying open the spring-loaded door and securing it to a hook that set the trigger without the door snapping shut and breaking my fingers, the trap was easy to use. Just before the raccoon’s usual afternoon arrival, I positioned the
primed and ready contraption underneath our bird feeder. Tipping open the rear escape hatch, I inserted pungent bait—week-old tofu stir fry plus a dollop of canned cat food—then slid in the Easy Slide-out Bolt. I barely made it back indoors before the raccoon sauntered into the neighborhood’s newest miniature diner and found himself clapped behind bars.

I hated to make him spend a couple of hours in the trap, but I wanted to wait for nightfall to release the raccoon, not wanting to be seen releasing a raccoon. Stealth definitely required a trade-off. Darkness put me at a disadvantage with a nocturnal creature accustomed to biting and clawing in inky blackness, so I compensated by packing a flashlight and protecting my hands with leather gloves so thick and stiff I couldn’t operate the flashlight. I swaddled my torso in a knee-length down jacket, stuck my feet into hiking boots the size of file-cabinet drawers, and pulled on a stocking cap to guard against a desperate lunge for my hair. After I was fully suited up, the full scope of the heat-generating ability of the human body hit me. I wasn’t especially mobile inside my portable sauna, but at least my captive wouldn’t be grabbing free samples of my flesh.

The caged raccoon’s huddled posture and offended look tempted me to let him go on the spot. I stiffened my resolve. “Sorry, but you’ve got to find a new place to live,” I explained, picking up the carrier. “Don’t worry, you’re all right.” The centrally located handle put trap and trap carrier wildly off balance as the animal scuttled from one end to the other. I wrestled the oscillating apparatus into the trunk of my Camry, tuned the radio to a suitably dramatic piece of classical music, and took a back road into Lowell.

My first choice for release on the Grand River was nixed by necking teens in a station wagon certain to be unnerved by the Michelin Man. I crossed the river and chose an access road alongside the railroad tracks. Nervous and cooking inside my protective suit, I set the trap on the ground, aimed it toward a shallow woods
on the riverbank, whisked the bolt from the escape hatch, and flopped back into the driver’s seat, slamming the door behind me.

The raccoon did not budge.

Breathing hard, I cautiously left the car again and lifted the escape hatch with a screwdriver to demonstrate that nothing but a hinge impeded his departure. “You’re free,” I urged him. “You can go now. Go on!” He hid his head. The third time I raised the hatch, this animal—that I had never seen move faster than a lumbering trot—issued a menacing snort that sent me flailing backward and streaked into the trees faster than my eye could imprint.

Over the next two weeks, I trapped four more raccoons and released them at the same spot on the river. I congratulated myself, until I stepped outside the basement door one night just before bedtime to call our cat and saw another three raccoons beneath the feeder. I caught these as well, but more still came. They were as plentiful as mice. In fact, the snarl of successive raccoon shifts punching in throughout the night woke me up over the course of the summer.

The following August, Linda’s friend Deanne was having dinner with us when a fat raccoon in search of a canapé wandered into the trap. The sun wouldn’t set for another couple of hours, but Deanne was eager to witness the animal’s joyous moment of freedom. I had never let a raccoon go in daylight. It just seemed to go against the catch-and-release lifestyle. But because my release spot was sheltered from prying human eyes, I agreed to show off my wildlife skills for our guest. Despite a voracious mosquito population near the river and a feisty raccoon that growled at me with uncharacteristic savagery, the liberation went off without a hitch. But just before we drove away, Deanne pointed to a break in the wall of trees that stood between the railroad tracks and the river and asked me, “Isn’t that someone’s driveway? I’m sure I see a house back
there.”

“Oh, no, nobody lives out here,” I insisted. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

Linda pressed her head against the glass. “I see someone’s house. It’s yellow. And there’s a red car in the driveway.”

“There can’t be,” I whined, turning around on the access road as quickly and quietly as possible. “I would have noticed someone living here.”

“We’d better get out of here,” Linda urged. “Someone might come out with a gun. They’re probably looking for you.”

Her warning was surely excessive. Or maybe it wasn’t. In the fifteen months since Peggy had died, I had dropped off at least thirteen raccoons on those people’s doorstep. That’s thirteen raccoons added to the local raccoon population—thirteen raccoons bitter about having been caught in a trap.

The realization of what I had done filled me with terrible guilt. It also increased my paranoia. Now, after dark, whenever a car grinds to a halt on the shoulder in front of our house, I no longer assume it’s an innocent passerby stopping to check a map. Instead, I’m certain that some sneak with an animal problem is dumping raccoons on our property. And come to think of it, that’s probably how we got so many of them in the first place.

Jacob Lestermeyer was going on and on about the pharisee next door as he led us from one farm building to another in search of the mystery duck. We started in a sprawling barn with a baffling maze of pens and cubbyholes. We rooted through squads of protesting hens, eyeballed nervous ducks resting on ancient straw bedding as hard-packed as driveway dirt, combed a food-storage room cluttered with spilled feed sacks, and slowed to admire dozens of day-old pheasant chicks trickling in and out of the heat circle cast by a brood lamp. Out the back door, we dodged a pygmy goat with a taste for shirt buttons in an otherwise deserted chicken coop, craned our necks behind a two-tiered wall of rabbit cages, stuck our heads into a shed so gloomy, Big-foot could have lurked inside unnoticed, and collectively lifted one end of an overturned wooden cart that hadn’t rolled anywhere on its spoked wheels since long before our host’s beard had gone grey.

“The last time I saw her, she was under here.”

Lestermeyer grunted from the exertion of twisting his thick body into the proper angle to peer beneath the cart while still helping
to hold it up. “No, excuse me, that’s our ducklings.” Balls of yellow fluff flowed toward the shadows. An outburst of peeps was muffled as we eased the upended vehicle back to the ground.

“What kind of babies are they?” Linda beamed.

“I hope the pharisee didn’t get his hands on her,” he muttered.

“So, why do you call him the pharisee, again?” I asked, uncertain if I had missed the explanation.

He stopped and straightened a pair of glasses that somehow fit around a globular nose. “Because he can quote the letter of the law as fine as the Devil can quote scripture. Had the cops over here twice last week.”

“The cops?” asked Linda. He was too angry to answer at once. As we followed him up a rise in back of the barn, a raw ditch of a miniature lake snapped into view, a great gouge of earth resembling the scar a meteor might have left behind. An excited stream of water from an angled pipe fed the long and narrow, apparently bottomless pit. Blazing reflected sunlight all but hid the score of ducks that paddled far out in the middle.

“Our geese make too much noise,” he snarled. “They wake him in the morning. I told the cops I’ve lived here thirty years. You don’t put up a house beside a petting zoo if you want to live the life of Riley. You see the sign out front that says ‘Lestermeyer’s Petting Zoo’? You can see it clean from the intersection. It wasn’t any surprise.”

“It’s the only way we found our way here,” I told him. “The house numbers don’t make any sense. They go up for a while, then they go down for a while, then they go up again.”

He nodded happily. “‘Lestermeyer’s Petting Zoo.’ The pharisee erects his temple next door then complains that Noah got here first. There’s your duck, out there.”

We shielded out eyes but couldn’t see a thing. “What does she look like?” Linda asked. “If she’s a Khaki Campbell, or call duck,
or black and white Cayuga, or Blue Swede, or Muscovy, we don’t want one. We could have gotten one from Mr. Murdoch, but we didn’t want to let him know some of the other ducks he sold us are dead.”

“Raccoons,” I added.

“We don’t want an Indian Runner duck, either,” Linda said.

“We couldn’t get her out of there, anyway,” Lestermeyer told us, waving an arm toward the pond. “Not until they go back to the barn on their own about the time it gets dark.”

“Hours from now,” I explained.

“Mr. Murdoch doesn’t have anything we want right now. We like his ducks, but we want something different.”

“Raccoons,” pondered Lestermeyer. “We get skunks after our chicken eggs.”

“Let’s look around,” I urged Linda. “There must be another duck here you’d like.”

“How about a Rouen,” he suggested. “A Rouen,” he repeated in response to our blank expressions. “The drakes have got green heads exactly like your mallards.”

“A Rouen is a domestic mallard.”

“We can’t have boys,” Linda lamented. “My husband doesn’t want any babies.”

“No ducklings, either,” I clarified.

“There’s a female Rouen out there,” he told us, as he squinted into the blinding glare.

“She won’t come out until it gets dark,” I said.

“I’ll get her,” he promised. As he walked to the nearest shore of his backyard ocean—a hardened lip of dirt sprinkled with wiry sprigs of grass—three ducks swam toward him, matching his rate of travel. The Rouen hen accompanying a pair of males resembled a slightly larger, fatter version of a female mallard. She quacked
briefly and vigorously when Lestermeyer grabbed her, but I missed the miraculous moment of capture; I was transfixed by a vision of mythological proportions. A one-eared goat with a purple scarf tied around her neck appeared from the rise behind Lestermeyer’s barn, followed by four auricularly intact goats so evenly spaced in single-file procession, all five might have been connected by identical invisible lengths of chain. Though I was close enough to nudge any one of them, their slitted eyes didn’t register my presence as they swept along a goat-width path that rounded a rail-fenced pony pen. Just their twitching tails moved unsynchronized. It was the only example of order I had witnessed since arriving at Lestermeyer’s Petting Zoo, and the sight took my breath away. I turned to share the moment with Linda, but she hadn’t noticed them.

“I’m not very impressed by the way girl mallards look,” she said, as Lestermeyer grappled with the wing-flapping female, and I feared another search for the mystery duck loomed. But the Rouen revealed sublime color variations when he brought her close to us. Her tan head was streaked with brown, and a thick black stripe interrupted the flow of orange across her bill. Her back was jeweled with glowing shades of brown—each feather exploded in a sunburst of gold against a raw-umber background. Her breast was creamy chestnut. Her folded wings disclosed a band of electric blue bordered by the purest white. Her tail was white. Her feet were as orange as Peggy’s, and she shared Chloe’s inappropriately noble bearing, along with a boisterous voice sure to harmonize with the Khaki Campbell’s quacks during my extensive stretches in bed.