Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul (13 page)

After supper one evening, I took him out to the meadow for exercise. We had walked about 100 yards into the knee-high grass when a barn swallow, skimming for insects in the fading light, buzzed Jerry’s head. Jerry stood transfixed. After a moment, he chased the swallow. The bird flew low, zigzagging back and forth, teasing and playing, driving Jerry into an exhilarated frenzy of running. The bird led him down to the pond and back along the meadow fence, as though daring him to follow. Then it vanished high in the sky. Jerry stood looking after it for a while and then ran to me panting, as full of himself as I’d ever seen him.

In the days that followed, I noticed that his interest in hunting faded as his enthusiasm for running grew. He would just take off through the grass, fast as a wild thing. I knew when he’d scented quail because he’d give a little cock of his head as he passed them. He knew what he was supposed to do; he just didn’t do it. When he’d finally come back, exhausted and red-eyed, he’d lie on the ground with an expression of such doggy contentment that I had a hard time bawling him out.

I started again from the beginning. For a few minutes he would listen solemnly. Then he’d steal the bandanna from my back pocket and race across the meadow, nose into the wind, legs pumping hard. Running was a kind of glory for him. Despite my intense desire to train him well, I began to feel a strange sense of joy when he ran.

I had never failed with a dog before, but I was surely failing now. When September came, I finally had to tell Dad that this bird dog wouldn’t hunt. “Well, that ties it,” he said. “We’ll have to neuter him and pass him off to someone in town for a pet. A dog that won’t do what he’s born to do is sure not worth much.”

I was afraid being a house dog would kill Jerry’s spirit. The next day, I had a long talk with Jerry under the oak tree. “This running thing is gonna get you locked up,” I said. “Can’t you just get on the birds and then run?” He raised his eyes to my voice, looking out from under his lids in the way he did when he was shamed. Now I felt sad. I lay back and he lay down next to me, his head on my chest. As I scratched his ears, I closed my eyes and thought desperately about both our problems.

Early the next Saturday, Dad took Jerry out to see for himself what the dog could do. At first, Jerry worked the field like a pro. Dad looked at me oddly, as if I’d fooled him about Jerry.

At that very moment the dog took off.

“What in hell is that dog doing?”

“Running,” I said. “He likes to run.”

And Jerry ran. He ran along the fence row, then jumped it, his lean body an amazing arc. He ran as though running were all ease and grace, as though it made him a part of the field, the light, the air.

“That’s not a hunting dog, that’s a deer!” my father said. As I stood watching my dog fail the most important test of his life, Dad put his hand on my shoulder. “We’ve got to face it—he’s not going to measure up.”

The next day I packed for school, then walked out to the kennel to say good-bye to Jerry. He wasn’t there. I wondered if Dad had already taken him to town. The thought that I had failed us both made me miserable. But when I went into the house, to my great relief Dad was in his chair near the fireplace, reading, with Jerry asleep at his feet.

As I entered, my father closed his book and looked directly at me. “Son, I know this dog doesn’t do what he should,” he said, “but what he does do is something grand. Lifts a man’s spirits to see him go.” He continued to look at me steadily. For a moment I felt he could see into my very heart. “What makes any living thing worth the time of day,” Dad went on, “is that it is what it is—and knows it. Knows it in its bones.”

I took a solid breath. “Dad,” I said, “I don’t think I can do medicine.” He lowered his eyes, as though he heard at last what he dreaded to hear. His expression was so sad, I thought my heart would break. But when he looked at me again, it was with a regard I hadn’t seen before.

“I know that,” he said solemnly. “What really convinced me was when I watched you with this no-account mutt. You should’ve seen your face when he went off running.” Imagining his intense disappointment, I felt close to tears. I wished I had it in me to do what would make him happy. “Dad,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

He looked at me sharply. “Son, of course I’m disappointed that you’re not going to be a doctor. But I’m not disappointed in
you.

“Think about what you tried to do with Jerry,” he said. “You expected him to be the hunter you trained him to be. But he just isn’t. How do you feel about that?”

I looked at Jerry asleep, his paws twitching. He seemed to be running even in his dreams. “I thought I’d failed for a while,” I said. “But when I watched him run and saw how he loves it, I guess I thought that was a good enough thing.”

“It
is
a good thing,” my father said. He looked at me keenly. “Now we’ll just wait to see how
you
run.”

He slapped me on the shoulder, said good night and left me. At that moment I understood my father as I never had before, and the love I felt for him seemed to fill the room. I sat down next to Jerry and scratched him between his shoulder blades. “I wonder how I’ll run too,” I whispered to him. “I sure do.”

Jerry lifted his head just slightly, licked my hand, stretched his legs, and then went back to the joyful place of his dreams.

W. W. Meade

Summer of the Raccoons

If I’d had my way, the story would have ended that day where it began—on the sixth hole at Stony Brook.

“What was that bawling?” my wife, Shirley, asked, interrupting me in mid-swing. Without another word she marched into a mucky undergrowth and re-emerged carrying something alive.

“
Rrrit, rrit, rrit,
” it screamed.

“It’s an orphaned raccoon,” she said, gently stroking a mud-matted ball of gray fur.

“Its mother is probably ten yards away, has rabies and is about to attack,” I scolded.

“No, it’s alone and starving—that’s why the little thing is out of its nest. Here, take it,” she ordered. “I think there’s another baby over there.”

In a minute she returned with a squalling bookend—just as mud-encrusted and emaciated as the first. She wrapped the two complaining ingrates in her sweater. I knew that look. We were going to have two more mouths to feed.

“Just remember,” I declared, “they’re your bundles to look after.” But of all the family proclamations I have made over the years, none was wider off the mark.

When, like Shirley and me, you have four children, you don’t think much about empty nests. You don’t think the noisy, exuberant procession of kids and their friends will ever end. But the bedrooms will someday empty, the hot bath water will miraculously return, and the sounds that make a family will echo only in the scrapbook of your mind.

Shirley and I had gone through the parting ritual with Laraine and Steve and Christopher. Now there was only Daniel, who was chafing to trade his room at home for a pad at Penn State. So I was looking forward to my share of a little peace and quiet—not raccoons.

“What do you feed baby raccoons?” I asked the game protector over the phone the next morning. We had cleaned them up, made them a bed in a box of rags, added a ticking clock in the hope it would calm them, found old baby bottles in the basement, fed them warm milk and got them to sleep, all without floorwalking the first night.

However, they revived and began their machine-gun chant shortly after Shirley had run out the door, heading for classes. In anticipation of a soon-to-be empty nest, she had gone back to college to get a master’s degree so she could teach.

Meanwhile, I had my own work to do—various publishing projects that I handle from home. As the only child remaining with us, Daniel was my potential raccoon-relief man. Or so I hoped.

“Whose bright idea was this?” he asked with the tart tongue of a teenager.

“Your mother thought you needed something more to earn your allowance,” I cracked. “Will you heat some milk for them?”

“Sorry, I’m late for school,” he called over his shoulder. He and I were at that awkward testing stage, somewhere between my flagging authority and his rush for independence.

The major problem with trying to feed the raccoons was one of flow. Milk was flowing out of the bottle too fast and through the kits the same way.

“Thinner milk and less corn syrup,” the wildlife man suggested, adding that he would send along a brochure for raising them. “The object,” he coached, “is to take care of them until they can go back to the woods and take care of themselves.”

“I’ll do anything I can to make that happen,” I assured him. “They’re about eight ounces each”—I had weighed them on my postage scale. “They’ll be old enough to be on their own in a couple more weeks, right?”

“Not quite,” he said. “Come fall, if all goes well, they’ll be ready.”

I’ll strangle them before then,
I said under my breath. I prepared a new formula and tried it on one. The kit coughed and sputtered like a clogged carburetor. The hole in the nipple was too big.

Maybe I could feed them better with a doll’s bottle,
I concluded, and set out to find one. At a toy store, I found some miniature bottles, one of which was attached to a specially plumbed doll named Betsy Wetsy. “My Betsys are wetsy enough,” I told the clerk—declining doll and diapers, but taking the bottle.

Back home, I tried feeding the raccoons again. Miracle of miracles, they sucked contentedly and fell asleep. (Only twelve more weeks to September, I counted down.)

During the next month and a half I functioned faithfully as day-care nanny for Bonnie and Clyde, named for their bandit-like masks. The kits apparently considered me their mother. When I held them at feeding time, they still spoke in the same scratchy voice, but now it was a contented hum. The only time they may have perceived me to be an impostor came when they climbed on my shoulders, parted my hair and pawed in vain for a nipple.

Before long the kits graduated to cereal and bananas. When they became more active, our back-yard birdbath became an instant attraction. Bonnie, the extrovert of the two, ladled the water worshipfully with her paws like a priest conducting a baptism. Clyde followed suit, but cautiously, as if the water might be combustible. Next Bonnie discovered the joy of food and water together, and thereafter every morsel had to be dipped before being eaten.

By July the kits weighed about three pounds. I built a screened-in cage and moved them outdoors. When they had adjusted well to their new quarters, Daniel suggested we free them to explore the woods and forage for food.

“I don’t want them to get lost or hurt out there,” I said, sounding more like a mother hen than a surrogate father raccoon.

“They should get used to being on their own,” Daniel insisted. We left their door ajar so they could wander during the day. At night, we called them home by banging together their food bowls. They came out of the woods at a gallop.

Still, I was afraid we might be rushing their initiation to the wild. One windy afternoon while Daniel and I were playing catch in the back yard, I spotted Bonnie, twenty feet off the ground, precariously tightrope-walking the bouncing branches of a mulberry tree. She had eaten her fill of berries and was trying to get down, or so I thought.

“Be careful, babe,” I called, running to the tree. “Quick, Dan, get a ladder!”

“Let her go,” he said calmly. “She’s on an adventure. Don’t spoil her fun.” And he was on the money. When I returned later, she was snoozing serenely in the mulberry’s cradling arms.

However, the raccoons did get into trouble one night when they let themselves out of their cage with those dexterous forepaws. Shirley and I were awakened at 2 A.M. by a horrendous scream.

“What was that?” I asked, bolting upright.

“The raccoons?” she wondered.

“They’re in trouble!” Tossing off the covers, I grabbed a flashlight and ran outside in my skivvies.

As I came around the south side of the house, I heard something rattle the eaves and jump into the maple tree. Next, I got jumped. First by Bonnie, landing on my shoulder, then by her brother, shinnying up my leg. Circling my neck, they jabbered their excitement: “
Rrrrit, rrrit, rrrit!
”

“It’s okay, I’ve got ya, you’re safe,” I said, cuddling them in my arms. Apparently a wild raccoon, defending its territory, had attacked Clyde. He had a bloody shoulder that didn’t appear serious; Bonnie was fine.

July gave way to August, and August to September. Soon the days were getting shorter, and the raccoons were six-pound butterballs. I was fascinated by their creativity and intelligence. One evening after I banged their food bowls together, there was no reply. When I reported anxiously at the breakfast table that they hadn’t come in the night before, Daniel laughed at my concern.

“Now we’ll see if you’re as good a teacher as a mother raccoon.”

“I already know the answer,” I said. “By the way, what time did you get in last night?”

“About midnight,” he answered.

“Your eyes say later.”

“I’m not a baby anymore,” he shot back.

Outside, I beckoned the raccoons again, and this time they reported: effervescent Bonnie in a flat-out sprint, Clyde in a tagalong amble.

Near the end of September they were missing a week, and I suggested to Shirley that they were probably gone for good.