Not That You Asked (9780307822215) (33 page)

I don't want to join these organizations or get their voluminous literature depicting the horrors of the leg-hold trap. I'm on the side of the people fighting cruelty to animals. I wish they were more effective. Maybe they ought to direct their campaigns against women who wear furs instead of against the trappers.

The men who make their living catching and killing animals are a tough lot. They think of their trade as a manly one and they've become inured to hard death. They're used to seeing animals that have been tortured or starved to death in their traps.

The way to make sure fewer animals are caught in traps is to discourage people from buying and wearing fur coats. The anticruelty organizations might try having some of their members follow fur-wearing women and men with signs reading,
THIS ANIMAL DIED A HORRIBLE DEATH
.

The fear of being the object of public scorn would discourage most people from going out in their fox, raccoon or mink coats.

Anyone who eats animals, as I regularly do, is on shaky ground talking about cruelty to animals. But, like most people, I don't associate the food on my plate with the animal on the hoof or the bird on the wing. My attitude toward steak is the same as a woman's attitude toward a fur coat—the animal and the coat do not seem related. The steel trap or the slaughterhouse do not occur to either of us.

We all look for ways not to worry. We don't worry about mink coats because the thirty or so minks that go into making a coat are raised on what they euphemistically call “ranches.” The mink live for that one purpose. If they weren't valuable for their fur, they would never have been bred to life in the first place. We meat-eaters say that about cattle. It's weak. The ranches the mink live on are not to be confused with the kind of ranch President Reagan owns either.

These wild little animals are kept in tiny, filthy cages for all their brief lives because their skins are most valuable if they are unblemished. The mink are often drowned or suffocated when their time comes to become a coat. Even this is a little better than being caught in a leg trap.

Civilization's effort to become more civilized sometimes seems like
a losing battle. How any society treats its animals is an indication of the degree of its civility. During our stewardship of earth's civilization, we ought not pamper our pets with vitamin-enriched dog food on one hand and close our eyes to the fur stripped from the animals caught in steel traps on the other.

Yesterday morning I had orange juice, toast, marmalade, two scrambled eggs and coffee.

After breakfast I headed for the shop in back of the house. It was pouring rain and, like always, I'd left my umbrella in the back of the car and my raincoat in the shop. There are a lot of trees between the house and the shop and I had old clothes on, so I made a run for it.

There's a cement pad in front of the door of the shop and a wooden sill on top of the six-inch step. The sill overhangs the cement by three inches. As I ran toward the door, there was a little flutter on the ground. It startled me briefly until I saw what it was. It was a small black bird and it half hopped and half flew into the bushes in back. I don't want to lie to you and give you the name of the bird because I don't know what it was. Lots of birds look like sparrows to me.

I didn't think much about it. It seemed as though it was probably a baby bird that hadn't learned to fly yet. There are a lot of nesting birds around. One purple martin chose the hanging plant on the side porch as a place to lay three eggs. Unfortunately, the hinges are gone on the screen door in front and we've been using the side door for going in and out. The bird obviously laid the eggs during the week we were away, when there was no traffic, and must regret it now. We all know how difficult it is to choose the right home.

About an hour after I first saw the little bird outside the shop, I went out and looked for her again. Under the wooden sill I saw what I hadn't seen before. It was one lone, baby blue egg. Suddenly I got the whole picture and felt terrible about having scared the bird away. It must have been the mother who had laid the egg there in desperation during the night. I suspect her nest must have been flooded out and the overhang of the doorstep was an emergency haven.

I got an old piece of towel and moved the egg onto it. After gently wrapping it, I took the bundle to the house and put the towel with the
egg in a strainer over a lamp in the living room. With my hand, I tried to test for a spot that would have come closest to the warmth of a real mother bird's body. This is something about which I have no real knowledge, never having spent any time under a bird's body.

Later in the morning I did see the mother bird again. She was hopping around in the woods nearby. The temperature was way down around 60 and it was still raining heavily. Obviously, I needed a veterinarian specializing in ornithology. Should I go get the egg from its warm place over the lamp and put it back down on the cold cement in the hope that the mother would find the egg again? Though even if she did, there was no way she could hatch it and nourish it there until it could fly. For one thing, I'd be going in and out of my shop ten times a day, right over her. On the other hand, what if, by some wild chance, I did exactly the right thing with the egg and it hatches? What do I do then? Do I fly away and come back with flies or worms or whatever it is little birds eat?

It made me feel ill at ease all day. I knew the mother bird was out there and I knew that little chick was in there but I had no idea how to get the two together. There's an old nest under the eaves of the garage but birds don't go to old nests and she'd never have found the egg there anyway.

It kind of ruined my day. Every time I looked out, I thought about it. I'm no great bird lover but there was something poignant about the situation. It was such a tiny problem in my life and yet I was absolutely helpless.

When I went to bed last night, I left the light on for the blue egg in the towel. How long does it take for a bird's egg to get to be a bird, anyway?

For breakfast today, I had toast, marmalade and coffee. No egg.

It's strange that Nature isn't nicer. It sure deals in a lot of death. The animals around our summer place don't have much of a life and what they do have doesn't last that long. The flowers don't have it much better, with either too much or too little rain, too much or too little sun and always a killer weed after them.

During July, I saw so much of the chipmunks that I got to know
them apart. When I left the door of the shop open while I was working, the chippies would come and go past the door. I always spoke to them.

About a month ago I saw a cat around our place. I don't know whose cat it is—we're more than a quarter of a mile from the nearest neighbor—but the cat often was hanging around when I got up in the morning.

There has been a marked drop-off in the activity of mice in our kitchen since I first saw the cat. I imagine it has had something to do with the fact that I now can leave a bag of cookies on the shelf in the pantry at night and not have them nibbled during the night.

I noticed too, though, that I no longer saw my good friends the chipmunks passing my door or disappearing down their holes, and I was angered by the thought that the cat was killing the chippies.

This morning at about 6:15, there was a strange cat noise up by the shop as I was dressing. It wasn't the sound of a cat fight. It was a mournful wail. I didn't think much of it. I don't know cat sounds.

At 9:30 I was loading the car for the trip home. Margie went up to the shop looking for a checkbook I thought I'd left there. She came back with her hand to her mouth and a ghastly look in her face.

“Someone's killed a kitten up there,” she said. “It looks as though its throat was slit.”

I had seen the familiar cat in the area within the past ten minutes so I didn't think it was her.

“Kitten?” I asked.

“It's not real small but it looks young. It's terrible. We'll have to get a shovel and bury it.”

I went down to the house for some things I wanted to load into the car, putting off the dreaded job. When I finally started up for the shop, I saw the old cat lurking by the far corner of it. The shop is surrounded by woods and brush.

The cat just looked at me and, as I got closer, I saw a furry object at its feet. She had dragged the dead kitten toward the woods and must have stopped when she saw me coming. You'd think the cat would know I wouldn't hurt her.

It seemed apparent that the cat who'd been killing birds, chipmunks and mice must have been the kitten's mother. She must have been the one who let out the sad, plaintive wail when she found her young one dead.

It was hard to know how to feel.

What killed the kitten? Its throat must have been slit with a sharp claw during the night. Could a raccoon catch and kill a cat? Why would
it? Whatever killed the cat had no intention of eating it, as a fox might have.

Did the mother cat recognize the irony of her kitten's death right where she'd been killing chipmunks? If the cat was capable of grief over the death of her own, why was she not capable of understanding how sad it might be for the mother of a young chipmunk she'd mauled to death?

It was apparent we wouldn't have to bury the dead kitten, and I finally drove off. Going down the long dirt road, headed for the country road, I passed a row of maple trees. Several of the smaller trees had been overrun by wild grape, an eastern version of kudzu, the scourge of the South. Wild grape wraps itself around tree trunks, climbs the tree and pulls down its branches in a vicious stranglehold. Its mission killing trees in the big picture of nature is no clearer to me than the cat's mission killing birds, chipmunks and mice or the mysterious killer's mission in killing the cat's kitten.

The old station wagon is in intensive care. I'm not sure it's going to pull through this time.

Last Saturday I started out the driveway and heard an unfamiliar heavy, grinding noise. Over the years, during the time I've put 118,000 miles on it, my 1977 Ford Country Squire has made a lot of noises, each with its own meaning. This was different. It was no pebble in a hubcap.

I eased it into the Five Mile River Garage just a mile from the house and left it to be checked over.

Later in the day I dropped back and my worst fears were confirmed. It had a broken axle.

I talked with Malcolm in hushed tones about whether Old Faithful should be put out of the way or kept alive by heroic measures. If I gave him the thumbs up, the car would need surgery. Thumbs down, it would be gone from my life forever. Malcolm told me that first he'd have to operate to make sure there was no serious damage to the gears. If they were OK he could realign the axle itself and weld the axle casing.

I couldn't bear to see the car that had given me such good service
for twelve years be put down so I gave him the go-ahead. The axle is being welded this week.

When a car has a problem, we're all inclined to think of a new one. We're looking for an excuse to buy a new car. It doesn't take much and car loans come easy. Even a dead battery can get you thinking the car isn't worth keeping. Buying a new car is the ultimate in recreational shopping and most of us do it a lot more often than necessary. The urge to buy a car is a disease for which they ought to develop a shot.

The idea of looking around for a new car appealed to me but as I stood there thinking about delivering the death blow to the station wagon, I knew I couldn't do it.

What would happen to my old car? It was only worth a few hundred dollars before the axle broke. It's not a wreck but there are the inevitable dents and scratches on it. You can't do anything about the people who open car doors and hit yours with the sharp edge of theirs in the supermarket parking lot. And there are other signs of use. After all, I did back into that high loading dock. I did catch the corner of the garage turning around in the driveway that day several years ago. That truck did skid into me on the cobblestone pavement down on Canal Street the day before Christmas in 1981. So the car has been through the wars. No prospective buyer could look at my station wagon and be fooled into thinking it had led a pampered life. It looks all of its 118,000 miles.

If I had decided to abandon the car, I know what would have happened. Malcolm would have towed it to the car scavengers, where they'd dump it out in the yard with all the others, occasionally stripping it of a door hinge here or a generator there. Malcolm probably couldn't get any more from the people at the car-parts dump than it would cost him to tow it there.

All that makes it even harder for me to abandon. I like it. I know it's silly to feel affection for any inanimate object but I'd hate to see that car get into the hands of someone who was going to abuse it or chop it up for spare parts.

My station wagon is being fixed now and I hope everything comes out OK. It's good to have a car you don't worry about denting. The wagon was always the one that got left out in the rain and snow. If there was a dirty job to be done, I did it in the wagon. I saved my good car because I wanted the good car to last. I've had three good cars since I bought the wagon. The wagon, mistreatment and all, has outlasted the cars I pampered.

When I get it back, the first thing I'm going to do is give it a nice
full tank of high-octane gas, some clean, fresh oil and a warm bath. I want the wagon to know that it's loved.

There is no doubt in my mind that dogs have more good qualities and fewer bad qualities than people. They behave in an honorable way without the benefit of religion, too.

My high opinion of dogs in general was reinforced the other night by my annual visit to the Westminster Dog Show. There were 129 different breeds at the show, and backstage with the owners and trainers I must have talked to a hundred dogs of 50 different breeds. There were only three dogs I hesitated to reach out and pat without asking for the advice or permission of their owners first. They were (1) a mean-looking Doberman pinscher whose owner said he was a pussy cat, (2) a huge red Chow, known officially as a “Chow Chow” and (3) an alert German shepherd sitting at attention in his stall with a superior look on his face.