Every morning when I leave my house, the next-door neighbor’s yard erupts with a flurry of feathers, flapping wings, a few squirrels darting for cover.
We all have our obsessions, and while mine includes the chickens in the
backyard, Marge’s involves feeding the local wildlife. She sends her husband
to the store to buy corn for the squirrels (whom she has named), and keeps
several bird feeders well stocked with seed. Her house cats, all seven
of them, love to watch this menagerie of life from the windowsills.
“Did you hear about Stumpie?” Marge huffed from her doorway one morning
as I kneed a bag of books into my passenger seat.
“Stumpie?” My breath rolled from my mouth and rode the November air. Marge seemed grave, but I wondered about whom. A name like Stumpie didn’t elicit somber tones in me. I grinned.
“My squirrel. The one with no tail. Someone ran over him.”
“Oh, wow.” I hid my grin quickly. I pictured Marge with a dustpan, scraping the little carcass from pavement, then burying it at the end of her dog run in the back yard. She shook her head and looked into the street, perhaps at the place Stumpie had been struck.
“Yeah, hit so hard that his eyeball popped out. Now who in God’s name would hit a squirrel that hard?”
A few mornings later, the phone rang and it was Marge’s voice on the other end.
“The hawk’s back,” she said, and I immediately walked to the sliding glass door to scan the trees and fence posts. My three hens huddled in their shelter, and I cozied to the fact that their only adversary at the moment was a biting wind. “It’s small and speckled.” Marge continued, apparently looking out her window as well.
I remembered the hawk that had visited my hens last fall and occasionally throughout the summer. I figured that it was a Cooper’s hawk, because it only came close enough to send a threatening bark at my birds before flying away. Though it could plausibly make a meal of my hens, its slight stature kept it in pursuit of smaller prey.
Eventually, I had stopped shivering at the thought of its talons sinking through red feathers and into the vulnerable flesh of my birds. I had taken down the drooping bundles of pantyhose and twine, hung to mimic crows and keep the hawk at bay. From corners of my yard, I had retrieved the splintered remains of pie tins that scattered after spending a few valiant months spinning at the end of a stake. Mirrors were brought to their rightful place inside.
But I let my garden grow a little wilder than usual to provide shelter from the hawk’s sharp eye. Nature seemed more equipped at husbandry than me. Any object that grazed the sky sent my hens flapping for cover, their necks outstretched and legs kicking out in front of them like little Russian dancers. From their hiding places, they would shriek role-call, creating quite a racket as they located each other and warned the rest of the neighborhood.
Apparently, the assembly of guests in Marge’s front yard had similar instincts. It was their stillness, however, that alerted her of peril.
“I mean, the yard just went silent,” she was saying, “and there I saw him, sitting there like he owned the place.”
“Hmmm,” I said, and told her the Cooper’s hawk was a bird-eater, that its presence only made sense. I pictured the hawk’s stony power, and marveled at the way predators could cast quiet or frenzy into a scene like rolling dice. By simply sitting and surveying with tilted head, or tensed muscle, they could make prey scatter, or hide, or shout warning. There was something about it that was, to me, exquisite and stunning.
Marge continued: “Here I spend all this money to feed the animals and this little bastard comes to eat my birds. Who does he think he is?”
We hung up, and I heard the faint slurry of cuss words as Marge huffed outside waving a broom. The bristle-tips didn’t reach the hawk’s regal perch, but the bird conceded, stretched its wings and sailed away.
Eventually, Marge’s yard would re-fill with life, and her guests would busy themselves eating, gathering, ruffling feathers against the wind, but always, always, watching. All of them, that is, except for Stumpie.
Copyright © 2007 Erin Tuttle. All rights reserved.