The pet ducks kept on disappearing, usually in the early morning hours. The first time it happened, I was all torn up at the thought of the two male pekin ducks murdered in the early morning hours in the fall. I imagined they must have been at the front of the pack, defending the females, the only evidence left being a few feathers. The Tractor Supply Store sells ducklings in the middle of the sales floor in the springtime, in a pen under red heat lamps, next to the chick pen, only sold in unsexed sets of six. My mother bought a set as soon as she moved into the house in the Berkshire Mountains, marking her transition to a “year-rounder.” The house is on a steep hill, and driving up the driveway feels like navigating a boat to shore.
“No Neighbors!” my mother boasts. She was tired of the city she grew up in. No more “no parking”, no more miserable downstairs apartment neighbors hitting their ceiling with the back of a broom.
I was up there with her, while my dad reluctantly did his pre-retirement in the city. He wasn’t done, but had to figure out how to be. I completed college in video conferences online, and my mother lavished in the pace of her new environment. In her once summer home, she installed WiFi, and together we assembled a prefabricated duck coop behind the house.
The second time a duck perished, a year later, I had graduated college, and moved away, back to the city. This time, it was one of my parent’s large poodles who grabbed one of their brown so-called “Indian Runner” ducks by the neck playfully, or maybe instinctually. My parents didn’t mention it to me until I visited and saw the shallow grave next to the coop, with an epitaph on a rock painted in leftover house paint lamenting, “SHIRLEY - INNOCENT.”
The blood-thirsty poodles were nothing like the small dogs we’d had in dog generations prior, apartment dogs, dogs you walk just around the block in Brooklyn. It only made sense that the next generation of dogs would traverse the mountainside properly, and protect the home, and the ducks. So they got two big poodles, one gorgeous tall “royal standard” from a breeder, the other shorter but hard-muscled, rescued from a condemned hoarder house down the road. I learned that the voraciously clever poodle breed was bred to be waterfowl retrievers at one point in time. Hunters would go out with their guns, and the long nosed poodle would go and get em’.
With dogs in tow, my parents toured me around the slow development of making their woods “lived in”. In the front of the house and down the hillside, my dad cut trails with his leatherman and an electric weed cutter. He marked trees with leftover house paint, put decapitated stuffed animal heads from the dogs’ toys on bare branches to mark the way down the hill, around the stream, or toward the big beaver ponds. He recreated a strict routine of his previous working life with daily laps around the pond, where he regularly kicked pieces of the invasive beaver dams out from the pond’s edges and down the stream. He also picked flat scrap wood from the local garbage transfer station, to put on the back of his newly purchased ATV to drop across the streams.
As we walked down his trails, he highlighted trees interlocking each other where he dreamt of wedging a treehouse. The dogs ran ahead of us, criss-crossing, they disappeared into the thicket off trail, and I called out to them anxiously. They’re not the type of dog to follow commands, or always be anxiously looking up at you for “what’s next”. They did as they pleased, and the sound of angry scolding or desperate calls for them only invigorated them, it pushed them further into the wild. My father assured me they always come back- and they do, eventually, they passed my legs carrying a waterlogged branch, and they nearly knocked me over enthusiastically. A walk like that happens daily, whether I’m there calling out for them or not.
Sometimes I go out alone. I wander out to get out of the house and make my time at my parents home in the woods feel well done, not wasted or ungracious– some real time in nature, with just my phone and often the wrong shoes. I stumble out there a bit listlessly. I don't know the names of the trees, and I keep forgetting the essential details from a very interesting book I read in college on the “cultural history” of mosses. The woods often feel empty, or like I’m the only thing there. There’s just tangle and texture, and brownness and greenness. I feel that I’m just passing through a crowd, getting to somewhere else. In the warm weather on one of these walks I sat along the stream and looked for some odd life to pass by, but it seemed mostly empty in my impatience..
I downloaded an app or two that does picture analysis of plants and fungi. It scours databases and logs photos with its suggested identifications. When I used it for the first time in the summertime I thought, finally, this would make the trails feel worth it, or make me feel connected to this place. With an excess of knowledge I could begin to learn, take advantage of this stuff. I crouched down on the ground on the trail and held my phone out in between myself a little living thing or two. After searching for a data connection, the app told me a few things, the most common results are the easiest to memorize through repetition.
Now I could tell you- This is definitely a deer mushroom on some wood waste, it doesn’t taste very good and it's everywhere, like deer. In the autumn there’s pretty orange ones that could be one of five different species, I’d have to check, if you wanted to know the names.
The app issues warnings against using its technology to figure out if something in the woods is edible. I snapped a few pictures of a wide patch of curling fern sprouts, their spiral growth pattern so relatable and easily poetic. One of the poodles heard or smelled me on the paths alone and came to find me, and anxiously herded me back to the house, as if I was lost. I go back and take a nap, under a window with no coverings, only exposed to the exuberant green of familiar birch trees behind the house.
In that direction is a steep uphill incline, in the winter, the birch tree trunks blur together into gray matter as they get further back from my sight. I don’t know what’s in the brambles, beyond the brambles, or over the horizon of the mountainside, but sometimes you can maybe hear the whirring of car engines and trains, the sound streaming its way down the mountainside from a Massachusetts state route. It is the stage direction I imagined the ducks’ predators would enter from. I pictured them picking up speed galloping down the hillside, sliding on patches of ice towards the duck coop in the back of the house. Or maybe stalking down, balancing paws on boulders, crinkling the leaves. In the summer it was too easy to slip in and out of the thicket. My parents installed red blinking lights to mimic the eyes of predators on the fence posts around the coop. Later, after another attack, they include bright motion-activated lights, and a siren. There were only 2 ducks left to defend.
“You’ll hear it in the night, it's only 30 seconds long so don’t worry,” my dad said over coffee upon my next visit after the siren installation. It was after that comment that he hinted that my mom wanted to get alpacas; that they had seen a couple own some on a small hilly ranch in one of the sprawling towns in the county. They were so soft and so chill.
“But you don’t have a ranch, or a field! Just a tiny backyard with some ducks. That can’t be a good idea,” I complained anxiously.
“They’d like to climb the trails,” He laughs and my mother changes the subject. I looked at them in shocked half breath, and decided I will just have to suggest slowly over text, phone calls, and visits, the ways that might not be a good idea. I would probably use endless online research, the excesses of information available to convince someone that what they’re thinking may not be a good plan, or how to make it a better one. Sometimes there's too much information, or you realize that doing something the correct way is often the least-cost effective, the most effort would be put into force the right conditions, to try and get the best expected outcomes, based on the majority of online users' experiences with the real world.
From my bedroom window, each morning I hear the ducks waking up, quacking, waiting for the automatic door to trigger at 6 A.M. to let them out into their fenced in wet dirt and their plastic pool of hose water. In the night, from my room, I press an ear against the screen in the window, then play audio clips off my phone of different animals to match up what I hear. A few times I identified packs of coyotes in the distance, like disembodied human-like whines and screams. I most often identified the barred owl’s call, common in the Northeast. When a friend or a boyfriend visits me with my family, I teach them to listen for it too. The barred owl is repetitive and unexpectedly loud, its rhythm mnemonically described by naturalists as sounding like the phrase: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?
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