Enslaved by Ducks (33 page)

Our turkey was nearly unconscious, barely clinging to life, and we did what little we could for her. Linda dabbed her head with Betadine. Using a syringe, I coaxed her beak open and got her to take a few swallows of water. Linda phoned Marge Chedrick, a DNR-accredited animal rescue volunteer whose residential backyard concealed recuperating geese, ducks, squirrels, chickens, a white peahen, and a one-winged blue heron, all behind a stockade fence. Marge suggested we hang a light bulb a foot or so above the bird for warmth during the night. “She’ll move away from it if she gets too warm,” she told us. But our turkey showed so little awareness of her surroundings, I doubted if she would be inconvenienced by anything as trivial as a sixty-watt lamp.

During dinner we picked at our plates while our parrots ate voraciously. Taking advantage of our subdued mood, Stanley Sue and Ollie lorded it over their shell-shocked owners by demanding one variety of food after another and throwing corn, toast, bits of enchilada, and tapioca pudding to the floor with exuberant wastefulness.

“One of the other turkeys had blood on her beak,” Linda told me, as Stanley Sue mimicked gagging when I presented her with a spoonful of pinto beans. “It was the same one who looked guilty about what happened.”

“Why would she attack another turkey?”

“They get real territorial this time of year. When they find a spot in their pen where they want to sit, you have to just about pick them up to make them move, especially if they lay an egg. Maybe she was sitting in a spot the other one wanted.”

“That would explain the turkey we lost last year,” I said, trying to wrest the spoon from Stanley Sue’s grasp. She had fastened her beak on the handle just below the bowl of the spoon and was doing her best to dump the beans on my pants. “Something really went after her, and it was probably the same turkey that pecked the one downstairs.”

“But why would a turkey sit still and get pecked to death? I still think there’s a firebug in the area and somebody burned her head.”

“But why would anyone bother to set just the head of a turkey on fire? She’s not burned anywhere else, if that’s what’s wrong with her. And why would she sit still for that, either?”

Only one thing seemed certain out of all of this. It was silly to keep referring to “the turkey in the basement” when we finally had a way of positively distinguishing her from the others. Being awarded a name under such dire circumstances didn’t constitute much of an honor, but at least whenever we referred to her from then on—posthumously or not—we would call her Hazel, the name Linda suggested.

Around 10:30
P.M
. we trooped downstairs for the final time that night to say our good-byes to Hazel. Her head felt hotter than ever when I brushed a finger pad against her face. I was tempted to give her another drink of water, but she was blissfully unconscious, and I didn’t want to awaken her to a world of pain. She raised her head slightly off the sheet when Linda draped a calico blouse over her body, then she sunk back into oblivion.

The next morning I lay in bed exhausted by a long, repetitive dream. Stanley Sue had escaped from a bamboo cage into a thickly forested version of our backyard. She kept flying within arm’s length before taking to the trees again whenever I approached too closely. As I tried to put the dream aside, Hazel’s injury came crashing back like a steel door blocking my release. At least, I thought,
the gravely injured turkey would have died quietly while we slept. In stocking feet I walked down the bare wood basement stairs for an official check on her status before delivering the news to Linda. But the poor bird was alive and breathing, making a watery noise resembling a drinking straw chasing liquid around the bottom of a glass. She had rotated a quarter of a turn during the night and had managed to throw off Linda’s blouse. Then I saw something else that made me turn and bound back upstairs.

“Linda!” I called from the living room. “Linda.” She was just getting out of bed. “Come down and look at this,” I told her.

“What?” Her voice was tinged with dread.

“Just come here and look,” I hollered, as I trotted back to the turkey.

As Linda stood warily at the bottom of the basement stairs, I held out an object at arm’s length. It was oval shaped, exaggeratedly pointed on one end. White, almost beige, and spattered with brown speckles. It was the egg that Hazel had laid during the night, in a totally unexpected affirmation of life. Upon hearing Linda’s delighted laugh, the turkey surprised us by struggling to her feet. I raised a water dish to her chest and urged her head down until her beak met water. She took a couple of swallows, then sank back to the floor.

“Maybe she’s going to be okay,” Linda suggested, though we both knew Hazel’s chances for survival were almost nil. The black scab that covered her entire head had sealed up her eyes, except for two small openings that expelled a milky substance. Using cotton balls, we carefully dabbed her eye slits dry without holding any hope for the damaged tissue behind them. I could see that she was totally blind. She couldn’t even detect the light from the bare bulb I waved in front of her. More immediately alarming was the sound from her nasal cavity indicating she had come down with a respiratory infection.
The infection could kill her within a day or two unless we treated her with an antibiotic; that was usually the way it went with birds. Unfortunately, it was Saturday, and Dr. Fuller’s practice was closed, as was Dr. Carlotti’s.

But Linda got an answer when she phoned Dr. Colby, the vet who had treated Bertha. The receptionist balked at the idea of the doctor seeing or even discussing a turkey. “Dr. Colby just doesn’t have any time this morning,” she told Linda. “I’m very sorry about your turkey, but there’s nothing we can do for you.”

As I sat frowning into my oatmeal, a drastic change overtook me. Shucking my well-studied philosophy of life, I decided to take action for once, and confrontational action at that. “She may not be willing to see Hazel,” I told Linda. “I wouldn’t want to move her anyway. But she’s going to give us an antibiotic.” The fact that a turkey, of all our animals, had motivated me to assert myself was one of those ironies that I just had to accept. But I found it impossible not to fight for Hazel. She exhibited a will to live that I lacked on the sunniest, Zoloft-inflated day, and the least I could do was cop the chemicals she needed.

I fumed all the way to Colby’s Animal Clinic, barely hearing NPR’s
Weekend Edition with Scott Simon
over the drone of my interior monologue, as I practiced what I was going to tell the vet. The steep green hills, winding curves, and rain-filled air conspired with a construction crew setting up orange traffic cones to keep me from organizing my thoughts. The best opener I could come up with—“Exactly why is a common meat-production turkey any less deserving of your care than an AKC registered pure-bred champion Jack Russell terrier?”—seemed to lack the proper sting. But striking a tone of justifiable outrage was what really mattered, I told myself.

Just past the village of Hubbs, I overshot the gravel road that led
to Colby’s Animal Clinic, turned around in a convenience store parking lot, crossed a culvert bridge barely longer than my car was wide, and navigated the brush-choked driveway to a boxy farmhouse on the edge of a horse pasture. A side door marked
CLINIC
opened straight into a vestibule, where a knee-high accordion gate blocked me from continuing into the family’s laundry room. A handwritten sign directed clinic visitors sharply to the right and down a precipitous flight of stairs.

Except for the college-age receptionist who had taken Linda’s phone call, I was the only person in the pine-paneled waiting area when I presented myself unannounced. If only to spare herself prolonged contact with a man demanding medicine for his pet turkey, the receptionist raised the hinged section of the front counter and ushered me inside the sole examination room.

Before I had a chance to inventory the glass display case packed with Beanie Baby animals, I heard the scrape of footsteps behind the wall as Dr. Colby came through the door from the adjoining lab. “What can I do for you today?” she asked with politeness, smoothly concealing her annoyance.

I faced her with rising indignation and mental fingers poised to clutch a rational argument as I suddenly found myself fighting back tears. I lost further ground as I struggled with the truth that the emotional outpouring wasn’t in defense of the grey parrot whose head I had rubbed each night for years, the green parrot who snuggled against my neck in between bites to my shirt collar, the cats that rolled on my carpeted floor or cement slab as I bounced baby talk off them, the dove who loved to perch upon my head and coo at me, the fat black rabbit who sat on my lap licking my hand when I wasn’t petting him, or even the goose Linda and I had nursed through a deadly illness on the porch—but of a turkey that until two days ago I couldn’t have picked out of our group of
three.

“It’s about our turkey,” I answered, my voice starting to crack.

“I’m sorry,” she told me in a way that suggested she regretted my visit more than my turkey’s ill health.

“She’s been injured. Either pecked very badly by the other turkeys, or someone burned her head.”

“I see.”

“That’s okay,” I stammered stupidly. “It’s her respiratory infection I’m worried about. If we don’t get her on antibiotics, I’m afraid she’ll die.”

Looking at me steadily, Dr. Colby asked, “And what would you like me to do for you?” as if I’d ventured into the tire center in the middle of town by mistake. I reminded myself that this was the same vet who wouldn’t let us have deworming pills for our cats unless we brought in a section of the worm. Either she suspected us of hoarding deworming pills, or she was collecting feline tapeworm segments for mysterious purposes of her own.

“I’d like to get an antibiotic for my turkey.”

“How much does she weigh?”

While I thought about it, I looked down at her arm. A fresh scratch joined a myriad of hairline scars revealed by the fluorescent light. “Well, she’s big. Turkey-size big.”

She nodded wearily, turning her back to reach for a bottle of medicine. “It’s important that I get an estimate of weight in order to calculate the dosage.”

Comparing Hazel to a sack of black oil sunflower seed, I told her, “More than twenty-five pounds, less than thirty.”

“So between twenty-six and twenty-nine pounds, you think. I’ll prepare a broad-spectrum antibiotic to give her orally twice a day—if you can do that,” she said with a questioning look.

“I did this,” I sniffed, glumly basking in my minor triumph.

As I waited for my prescription in the aptly named waiting room, I saw no hint of the flurry of patients that had supposedly prevented me from bringing in the turkey. One woman breached the steep stairs to inquire about boarding rates for her Lhasa apso and was speedily dispatched with a rate card.

The receptionist handed me the antibiotic and uttered a phrase that she undoubtedly had never used before: “I hope your turkey feels better soon.” I almost gave her the phone number of Matty the pharmacist at Park Hills Drug Store so that the two of them could commiserate, but I beat a hasty retreat instead.

Hazel certainly didn’t feel good about taking her medicine. The procedure was fairly straightforward. Get the bird’s beak open, then carefully push the syringe down her throat and into her crop to administer the antibiotic. We’d had previous experience dosing Liza. But Hazel weighed more than twice as much as Liza, wielded wings that could knock us across the room, and possessed a formidable beak that was already well acquainted with our flesh. Even in her weakened state, she had little difficulty dragging me around her basement pen as I hung on for dear life. When I tried pressing her down into a sitting position using both hands, I ended up splayed on the floor. Linda helped by bracing herself against a hefty support pillar and clutching the turkey to her body while I applied my feeble musculature to restraining Hazel’s head and working the syringe between her mandibles. We soon learned to mix the powdered antibiotic with as little liquid as possible, since one shot was literally all we got each session. Though she proved to be an expert in passive resistance, she never once pecked, nipped, bit, clawed, or otherwise throttled us. I wondered if she understood our intentions despite the discomfort they inflicted.

Successfully administering the antibiotics solved one problem. But Hazel hadn’t eaten a speck of food since her injury. She needed
sustenance to fight off her respiratory infection, but offering her scratch feed was out of the question when she couldn’t see to peck at her dish. Since she would occasionally, with coaxing, drink water, our strategy was to concoct a nourishing liquid of some sort. My efforts at mixing water and scratch feed created a grainy sludge of no interest to anyone except a bricklayer. Acting on Marge Chedrick’s suggestion, Linda picked up a powdered rice cereal for infants along with Pedialyte, an electrolyte-packed liquid, in the “Baby” section of the supermarket. (A “Turkey” section was strangely absent.) Hazel drank a smidgen of the watery gruel, but she wouldn’t slurp up enough to fill her stomach. Hazel had to go to the veterinarian. I called in sick, feigning a nonspecific stomach ailment and sparing my coworkers the particulars of my increasingly eccentric existence. No way would Hazel fit in our goose carrier, so we set her inside a curbside recycling bin that apparently had a poor effect on her morale. Hazel’s head was just about the same size as Stanley Sue’s, and the brain inside her thicker skull was no larger than an acorn. Keeping tabs on the geographical location of the various feathers and appendages attached to her massive body left her precious little cranial activity to waste on reason and common sense. Despite this mental handicap and her blindness, she still recognized the insult of being conveyed via a trash receptacle. By the time we lugged her into Dr. Fuller’s clinic, Hazel’s neck hung limply and she showed little interest in staying conscious. Her depression was contagious. No sooner had Dr. Fuller swept into the examination room to relish his first ever turkey patient than the wind was expelled from his lungs by her distressing state.