Real Ponies Don't Go Oink!, page 2
Birding doesn’t even make good conversation. I went down for lunch with the guys at Kelly’s Bar & Grill, and casually mentioned that I spotted a red-shafted flicker in my backyard.
“Gripes!” Ed Riley said. “Not while I’m eating!”
“Boy, I hope you stomped that sucker,” Bart Slade growled. “Traipsing right through your backyard, was he? Probably one of them dopers. Dang dopers and preverts are takin’ over the world! What did this fella look like—short, tall, what, in case I catch him hanging around my place?”
“Short,” I said. “Real short. With a pointy nose.”
Actually, I’d just as soon the guys at Kelly’s didn’t know I’m a birder.
Even when I was a child my interest in birds didn’t receive much encouragement. “Hey, Ma, guess what!” I’d shout, running into the house. “The baby robins are starting to fly from their nest!”
“So? You expected they’d shinny down the tree trunk? Now go wash for supper.”
The first actual encouragement my birding ever received was from my wife, Bun. One birthday she gave me a book titled Field Guide to the Birds of North America. I rushed out with my field guide and tried to identify the first bird I saw, a little brown-and-gray chap. “Hey, no problem,” I said to myself. “I’ll just thumb through the book until I find a little brown-and-gray bird.” The book was half filled with little brown-and-gray kinds of birds, dozens and dozens of them, each differing from its fellows only by a speck of black, yellow, or white, a fat beak or a thin beak, a perky tail or a droopy tail. I immediately classified all these species as Drab Little Birds, and closed the book on them.
Excluding Drab Little Birds, I eventually got to know most of the species in our region of the country. Oh, occasionally I make an erroneous identification. Once, hiking with Bun along the river, I mistook an immature bald eagle for a spruce grouse. It was embarrassing. Who even expects a bald eagle to be immature? Anyway, I spotted this bird high up in a tree and made a snap identification of it for Bun, just to impress her.
“Spruce grouse,” I said, pointing.
At that moment the bird had the unmitigated gall to glide down over the river and snatch up a snack for lunch.
“I didn’t know grouse caught fish,” Bun said.
“Sometimes they do,” I explained. “It’s rare, though. Few people ever witness a grouse catching a fish with its talons. This is really a special experience, something I think we should share just between the two of us and never tell anyone else about.”
“I think I’ll tell.”
I try not to get personally involved with the birds I watch. Who wants a meaningful relationship with a bird, anyway? What can it lead to? Trouble, that’s what.
One summer a Drab Little Bird almost drove me crazy. While the river was down during the winter, I had buried concrete blocks in the sand with chains attached to them. I then hooked the chains to two-by-four boards so that when the water came back up the free ends of the chains would float to the surface. I planned to use the chains to anchor a classy new dock I intended to build.
The river rose in the spring, the boards floated the chains up with the rising water, and everything was ready for me to carefully craft a fine new dock. First, however, I had to take care of some complicated wiring problems in the innards of my boat. One morning I looked out the window and saw a Drab Little Bird bobbing about on one of my chain boards. He bobbed his tail up and down about twice a second, and with each bob he emitted a shrill sound, something like “Jeeet!” Although I had long before given up trying to identify Drab Little Birds, I guessed this fellow was a member of the dipper crowd, so named because of the constant dipping of the tail.
“Oh, he’s so cute,” Bun chirped. “Look at the way he dips up and down. It looks like he’s doing deep knee bends.”
I went out to undertake the nerve-fraying task of rewiring my boat, parked a short distance from the dipper’s board. “Jeeet jeeet jeeet jeeet,” went the little dipper. “Jeeet jeeet jeeet jeeet …” It is surprising how quickly continuous jeeet-jeeet-jeeeting can erode one’s sanity. When I could stand it no longer, I climbed out of the boat, selected a good throwing stone, and hurled it in the general direction of the dipper. He flew off to a rocky point and waited until I climbed back into the boat and immersed myself in its innards. Then he flew back to his board: Jeeet jeeet jeeet jeeet jeeet …
Every morning the dipper would arrive at the board, no doubt carrying a sack lunch, and begin his endless exercising and jeeet-jeeet-jeeeting. This bird was making a career out of driving me crazy. I started having nightmares in which he starred.
“I can’t stand that dip any longer,” I growled at Bun one morning. “I have yelled at him, put curses on him, and thrown rocks at him, and he still insists on driving me crazy. Now I’m going to take drastic measures.”
“You don’t mean …!”
“That’s exactly what I do mean. I’m going to build the dock! Then he won’t have his board to stand on anymore.”
I threw the dock together in two days, working with the furious energy that comes only from near-madness. The results weren’t pretty. Visitors who saw the finished dock often mistook it for a bridge that had been washed out in a flood, but they knew nothing about docks, or dippers either for that matter.
The dipper’s board was now gone, and he with it. Glorious silence filled the land. I had worried that the dipper might turn the dock into his own private gym, but the deck was apparently too high off the water to suit him, or perhaps he was afraid of the structure, as even some humans were.
“I miss that little bird,” Bun said one morning after the dock was completed.
“Me too,” I said. “Henh henh.”
“I really enjoyed watching him. He always seemed so cheerful, he made me happy, too.”
“Yeah yeah,” I said. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Before we discuss the topic of ‘what’s for breakfast,’” Bun replied, “I want you to promise you’ll do something for me.”
Old Harold Wizzel stopped by later in the morning and found me standing out in the river.
“Whatcha building?” Harold asked.
“A dipper board,” I said crankily. “What does it look like?”
“How come you building a dipper board?”
“Well, if you must know, Harold, it was either this or learn how to cook.”
“What’s a dipper, anyway?”
The dipper never returned to use his new board. “I think you must have offended him,” Bun said.
“Maybe,” I said. “I certainly hope so.”
My latest run-in with a bird occurred last winter. It was one of those nasty days full of wet and wind, and overcast with gloom. As I waited sullenly at my fourth stoplight in as many intersections, the faint notes of bird song penetrated my consciousness. I glared in the direction of the disturbance.
There in a stubby tree planted by the street department in its continuing effort to obstruct the view of converging drivers, a Drab Little Bird clung precariously to a wind-whipped branch, singing its heart out! I could not help but be moved by the sight. That little bird, wet, cold, and obviously miserable, had absolutely nothing to sing about, but still it sang. “Surely there is some lesson to be learned from this,” I said to myself, “other than the fact that this bird is either a fool or a lunatic.”
Alas, I was distracted from my reverie when the trucker behind me attempted to implode my eardrums with a blast from his air horn. In response, I thrashed wildly about the interior of my small sedan, almost impaling myself on the stick shift, for I know the keen disappointment truckers feel if the blast from their air horns doesn’t prompt some such energetic display from a victim. Retrieving my composure, along with my spectacles, which had handily hung up on the rearview mirror, I deduced the reason for the trucker’s impatience with me: the signal light had switched from red to green during my pondering of the lunatic bird.
Not to be outdone, the engine of my car decided to contribute to the occasion by expiring with a cough and a jerk, and then stubbornly refusing to be revived. The burly trucker, as seen through my rearview mirror, appeared on the verge of a meltdown, or so I judged from the steam issuing from around the band of his size-eight cowboy hat. Obviously, he assumed my continued delay at the green light was for the sole purpose of irritating him or even—heaven forbid!—teaching him some manners. It is this sort of innocent misunderstanding that can lead to the inconvenience of taking your nutrients through a tube in your arm. I wondered if it would help matters if I walked back and told the trucker about how I had been distracted by the little bird’s singing in the rain. He might get a kick out of it. Then again, maybe not. Luckily, at that moment my engine ignited, and I spurted to safety beneath the amber glow of the caution light. While he waited for the next green light, perhaps the trucker, too, would hear the brave little nutty bird and thereby have his mood transformed to the wonderful serenity of being one with nature. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
A Good Deed Goes Wrong
Some people thought Crazy Eddie Muldoon and I were to blame for breaking Rancid Crabtree’s leg. Oddly, the odorous and crotchety old woodsman himself was one of the people who thought this. He said as soon as he got off his crutches he intended to run Eddie and me down and whale the tar out of us. We weren’t too worried. We figured by the time Rancid got out of the cast he would have cooled off enough to see that the accident was really his own doing and no fault of ours. But before he got off his crutches, the little incident with the bobcat occurred, generally confusing matters even more. As Crazy Eddie observed at the time, you try to do a kind deed for a person, and it just gets you into more trouble. Anyway, here are the true facts about the entire mess.
During our Christmas vacation from third grade, Eddie and I built a toboggan run up on the mountain behind Rancid’s shack. The design of our run was based on one we had seen in newsreels at the Pandora Theater the Saturday before. The two runs were almost identical, except ours was steeper and faster than the one in the newsreel, and went over and under logs and had brush on both sides of it, and at least one of the turns was much sharper, and if you didn’t make that turn you would be shot off into space and sail for some time over the valley looking down at the tiny cows and cars beneath you, and this in turn might elevate your anxiety to a dangerous level. So you wanted to be sure to make that sharp curve.
We built the first part of the run on an old logging road that zigzagged down the mountain. We tramped up and down the road the distance of two switchbacks, packing down the snow into a track slightly wider than the width of our sled. The grade on the switchbacks was modest, but sufficient to build up a fair head of speed in a sled by the time it and its driver reached the curve at the end of the second switchback. Then came the good part. Instead of curving the track onto the next switchback, we funneled it over the edge of the road into an old skid trail.
The skid trail had been gouged into the mountains by old-time loggers dragging logs down it. In fact, it was so steep they probably didn’t have to drag the logs but merely had to roll them into it and let them shoot to the bottom of the mountain. Erosion had cut the trail down to bare rock, which was now coated with ice, making it even better for a toboggan run. When we were building up our curved bank to funnel the track into the skid trail, Eddie slipped and nearly shot down the run with nothing but his body, and would have if he hadn’t managed to grab a small tree and pull himself back up.
“Wow!” he said. “This is going to be good!”
At the bottom end, the skid trail intersected with the next switchback of the road. This was where the toboggan driver would shoot off into space if he failed to make the turn onto the switchback. Fortunately, there was a high bank on the downhill side of the road, only slightly offset from the track. The driver would have to be alert enough to steer toward the high bank, which would sweep the sled up and around and then redirect it back down onto the switchback. This was the last switchback and it provided a straightaway that, at the bottom, merged with the Sand Creek road. The straightaway was quite steep, so the toboggan driver wouldn’t have to worry about his speed diminishing any when he hit this last stretch. He could then glide to a gradual stop on the Sand Creek road, which was seldom traveled during winter, and even then only by old Mrs. Swisher, who drove to church on it each Sunday. We completed the track on a Friday, and planned to make our first test run on Saturday.
The next morning, Crazy Eddie and I were dragging my sled past Rancid’s shack on our way up to test our toboggan run and were arguing about who got to go down it first.
“Listen, Eddie, it’s my sled!” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right,” he replied. “That’s why you should get to be first to test the run.”
“No sirree,” I said. “I should be the one who gets to choose who goes first, and I choose you.”
About then Rancid stuck his head out the door of his shack. “What you boys up to now?” he hollered at us. “Some kinder monkey bidness, no doubt. Ah ain’t never seen no younguns what could get into more trouble than you two.”
“We built a toboggan run up on the mountain, just like in the newsreel, Rancid. It’s fast, too.”
“Hold up a sec,” he said, putting on his coat. “Ah better go check this out. You fool half-pints probably invented some new way to kill yersevs.”
Half an hour later, we stood at the start of the toboggan run, all of us still puffing great clouds of vapor from the climb up the trail.
Rancid stared at the little track going down the first switchback. It didn’t look nearly so impressive this morning. “Shoot,” he said, chuckling. “You call this a toboggan run? Ah cain’t believe Ah clumb all the way up hyar to see this piddlin’ little trail in the snow. Ah must hev been outta maw mind. Gimme thet sled. The least you can do is let me ride back to the bottom of the mountain on it.”
I handed over the sled. Rancid plopped down on it, sitting upright with his long legs sticking way out in front, his coat completely concealing the sled beneath him.
“It might be dangerous, Mr. Crabtree,” Eddie warned.
“Dangerous!” Rancid said. “Eddie, Ah ‘spect Ah never told you, but Ah used to be a professional bobsledder, jist like you see in the movies. Racin’ Rancid they use to call me.”
“Gee,” I said. “I didn’t know that.” I figured that he must have been a professional bobsledder right after being a fighter pilot and before he became a big-game hunter in Africa or about the same time he was a champion prizefighter.
“Yep,” Rancid said, poking a wad of chewing tobacco into his cheek. “Now gimme a shove off.”
He glided slowly away toward the first curve, gradually picking up speed. He called back to us as he went around the curve. “Ah hate to tell you this, boys, but your bobsled track ain’t steep enough even to give a feller a decent ride.”
We were disappointed in the professional bobsledder’s assessment of our run but thought his opinion of it might improve later on. Sure enough, the next time we heard him yell was about when we thought he should hit the funnel into the skid trail:
“GOL-DAAAAAAA-A-A-A-a-a-n-n-n-n-g-g-g-g!”
“I think he liked the skid-trail section,” Eddie said.
“Yeah,” I said. “He sounded excited.”
So that is how Rancid broke his leg. He said later he didn’t know when, where, or how he broke his leg, or even that he had, because his mind was so occupied with other matters, among which was whaling the tar out of Eddie and me at the first opportunity.
The only eyewitness other than Rancid was old Mrs. Swisher, who was a little daft anyway and really couldn’t be relied on for an accurate observation. “I got a little mixed up,” she related, “and thinking it was Sunday instead of Saturday, I started driving to town to go to church. As always, I was especially nervous going by that dreadful Rancid Crabtree’s shack, because he’s in cahoots with the devil. Well, I’m driving along real careful minding my own business when all of sudden that fool Crabtree zooms right by me, just flying he was, about a foot in the air, going like the wind. I just caught a glimpse of his face, he was going so fast, and I’m sorry I did, because it had such a hideous expression on it you can’t even imagine! The thought of it has kept me awake nights ever since. And he’s holding this little green tree in one hand, torn right out by the roots it was. I bet the tree had something to do with one of those devilish rites of his. Well, he shot off down Sand Creek Hill, and I thought he might be laying in ambush for me up ahead, so I turned right around and went home, and it was a good thing I did, too, because then I remembered it was Saturday instead of Sunday.”
Naturally, nobody took daft old Mrs. Swisher’s account seriously, although Eddie and I did recover my sled at the bottom of Sand Creek Hill, where it had shot off over the bank and landed on the frozen creek. Sprayed out in front of it was what we first thought to be blood but then discovered was nothing more interesting than tobacco juice.
A couple of Saturdays later, Eddie and I were walking along the highway pulling my sled, the runners of which were somewhat splayed out but still worked. We had been trying to come up with an idea for making amends with Rancid, when we saw a furry shape lying on the highway. Both of us had fine roadkill collections and this specimen looked exceptional.
“It’s mine,” I said as we rushed forward. “You got the last one.”
“No sirree,” Eddie said. “I remember. You got that nice flattened toad last fall and … Hey, what is this, anyway?”
“My gosh, it’s a bobcat. Feel it. It must have just been killed. It’s still warm. Look, it’s got a bit of blood on its head where the car hit it, but otherwise it’s in great shape. Well, I’d better take my bobcat home. Maybe I’ll stuff it.”
“No you won’t,” Eddie said. “I’m gonna take it home and stuff it.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “I know what. We’ll give it to Rancid. He can skin it and sell the hide. Then he won’t be mad at us anymore. What do you say, Eddie?”
