Wildlife

WILDLIFE

1.
At some point in her life, my mother met a woman named Linda Kindler who was crazier than she was, so naturally my mother became her apprentice. Linda belonged to a small but potent demographic of stocky, blond lesbian ex-police officers. She had worked for nearly twenty years with the canine unit until her partner succumbed to a progressive hip-disorder and had to be put down. In her later years Linda founded the FairWeather Wildlife Rehabilitation Center which serviced most of Whatcom County and the nameless lands somewhat beyond.
FairWeather, like many wildlife rehabilitation centers, was funded out of pocket and limped along through the kind donations of strangers and the occasional government grant. FairWeather’s great specialty was the rehabilitation of raptors –birds of prey. As such, the FairWeather compound was littered with giant cages filled with hawks, eagles, owls and other birds with large talons and cruel, curved beaks.
Linda was legitimately crazy. She had long since decided that she hated people and had taken up, in perpetuity, with the animals under her care. As a consequence of living, more or less, strictly in the company of sick and wounded animals, she was eventually bitten by a diseased harbor seal that had been put under her care by a pair of visiting Korean tourists who had spotted the ailing beast whilst collecting interesting bits of driftwood on one of the local beaches. The seal’s bite infected Linda with a rare bacterial organism which affected her nervous system, slowly working it’s way up her arm and eventually into her brain.
Linda finally had the condition diagnosed and successfully treated with antibiotics but, to some extent, the damage had already been done and her brain, convinced it was still under attack by some bizarre, marauding organism, continued to slowly quarantine off sections of itself. This caused Linda to become more and more disassociated from the world around her and specifically, from her fellow man.
Linda’s awkwardness amongst humans came into sharp relief whenever she took her “educational” birds (animals that could never re-enter the wild) to various fairs and events in order to educate children. These events were obviously not very high on Linda’s “can’t wait to do” list but this educational component was often a prerequisite for many of the grants she received for the operation of FairWeather Wildlife.
With four large cages set up on the lawn and a throng of maybe 75-100 children seated cross-legged on the grass, Linda would walk back and forth in front of them like a drill sergeant, a large severe looking falcon standing stock still on her forearm, a little black blindfold strapped across it’s eyes.
“Hello, I’m Linda Kindler,” she’d say, “does anybody know what this is?” She’d ask, motioning to the falcon.
Perhaps a little red headed kid would raise his hand. Linda would not curtly at him.
“An eagle?”
Linda’s lip would curl. “No it is not an eagle, it is a falcon.” She would say, “But then again, I don’t really expect any of you to know what any of these bird are. That’s why I’m here. How many of you think this bird is pretty cute?”
Maybe half the kids would raise their hands.
“And how many of you wouldn’t mind having this bird for a pet?”
Damn near all the hands would go up at this. Many of them desperately so as if they were expecting this crazy woman to actually award the most fervent child, on the spot, with their very own bird of prey.
Linda’s disgust at this would be unmask-able. “Alright, and how much do you think this bird weighs?”
Various answers.
“This bird weighs five pounds,” she’d say, “and that’s nothing. The eagles back in the cage here weight 30 pounds at least. In order to take care of a bird like this, you have to hold them out on your arm as steady as you possibly can, for hours on end. If you think you’re up to it, try going home, filling up a gallon milk jug with water and holding it outright, perpendicular to your body –you know what perpendicular means? It means at a 90 degree angle. Do you know what a 90 degree angle is? Ask your parents or your teacher, that’s not my job. If you can hold that jug of milk at a 90 degree angle from your body for four hours, then maybe, just maybe you’re ready to start with some of the very small birds in our collection. But be careful, these birds are wild and if you move, even a little bit or show any sign of weakness whatsoever, they will become frightened and when these birds become frightened, they become violent and if one of these eagles gets violent, it can break your arm with its talons and rip your eyes right out of their sockets with it’s beak. An eagle could easily kill anybody in this room. It wouldn’t be hard at all. Any questions?”
A little pale girl would maybe raise her hand at this point. Linda would nod.
“Why’s he wearing a blindfold?” She’d ask in a timid voice.
Linda’s eyes would narrow. “So he doesn’t have to look at you.”

As Linda aged, as her seal damaged brain continued shutting off more and more sections of itself, she became crazier and crazier until soon only my mother, her trusted apprentice, could come anywhere near her without inciting some measure of ambient wrath.
In addition to the birds of prey, FairWeather wildlife accepted smaller birds and lesser mammals such as skunks, possums and raccoons. However, the crazier Linda got, the less volunteers she had. The less volunteers she had, the less she was able to tend to the mammals. The less she was able to tend to the mammals, the more the she turned to my mother for help. Soon it became obvious that FairWeather Wildlife was going to split in two. Linda would still handle the raptors and birds of prey, my mother would start her own wildlife rehabilitation center in our basement and tend to all the rest
I recall helping my mother move out some of the cages and supplies from FairWeather in order to transport them to their new location in our basement. I had actually only met Linda once or twice before, years earlier and had forgotten nearly everything about her except that my mother thought she was crazy. When a crazy person calls another person crazy without cracking a smile, you know you’re in for a treat.
I arrived at FairWeather and there was already a pile of equipment waiting for me in the driveway. Linda was nowhere to be seen. I glanced up at the house, the main building of the FairWeather Wildlife complex and saw a curtain quickly whip shut. I proceeded to load the equipment into the back of the truck. It only took fifteen minutes or so and I was about to leave but I figured I should probably go and thank Linda or at least verify that I was Susie Burnett’s son and not just some guy with a fetish for heat-lamps and raccoon cages who happened to be in the right place at the right time.
I walked up to the main house and rang the doorbell. At first there was no answer. Then a staticcy voice came through a little two way panel near the door.
“Who is it?” Said the voice.
“It’s Raven Burnett, I’m Susie Burnett’s son.”
Silence.
“Hello?” I asked.
A long sigh. “Alright, come on in.” The door buzzed and I turned the knob.
Inside the house was a long living room with framed paintings of various birds on either side -portraits really- of the sort one would might have of deceased family members, lining the hallway of an ancestral home. At the end of the room was a staircase and at the top of the staircase was a woman. She was wearing what appeared to be an elaborate African tribal ceremonial gown complete with a headdress inlayed with precious stones, seashells and copious amounts of feathers. Infact, the entire outfit was adorned with feathers. Infact, on closer examination it became quite obvious that this was, essentially, a bird costume, albeit an extremely intricate and, no doubt, very expensive one.
As Linda descended the stairs, she raised her arms out to the sides to reveal a sort of feathered web that stretched between her torso and forearms. Wings. As she turned to walk down the stairs, I could finally see the headdress in profile and a long, dark beak carved out of what looked to be some sort of wood, jutted out just above her forehead.
“Good afternoon Raven Burnett,” boomed Linda, “and welcome to FairWeather Wildlife. I am Linda. Do you like my wings?”
I answered that yes I did, stammered that in fact, I was crazy about the whole place. Linda smiled mysteriously, finally reaching the bottom of the staircase and standing, in all her insane glory before me, wings outstretched, her head arched back slightly, the beak of her headdress upturned, facing the sky.
“So am I,” she said looking at me very, very seriously. “So am I.”


2. THE WILDLIFE CENTER

In the years to come, my Mother’s Wildlife Rehabilitation Center would come to be known as “The Nisqually Wildlife Center” after the large and somewhat awkward Ferry Boat pilot house that had been grafted to the front of our living room on a mad whim. The Wildlife Center was opened directly below the Nisqually pilot house, in the basement.
The basement was essentially a large, concrete cube. It was dingy and hot and was speared through by countless 2 X 4s that acted as support struts to keep the immense weight of the Nisqually Pilot house from caving in and crushing all the cute baby birds and squirrels.
The center itself was divided into three rooms. The main room housed all the cages, the operating table, the incubator and all the various supplies such as medicines, clean linens and food. In the far back left there was the “kitchen” which housed a washer and drier, a dishwasher, a sink, a refrigerator, microwave and a prep table.
During the first couple of years things went swimmingly. As my mother was not nearly as crazy as Linda had been, we had no shortage of volunteers. It was during this time also that my parents cleaned out the old shack that was connected to the chicken coop, chased out the rats that had been nesting there and began renting the place out to gullible and needy 18 year olds. The first pair to bite were a kindly couple named Candace and Guthrie.
Candace and Guthrie soon began shouldering a great many of the burdens associated with maintaining the Wildlife Center and the surrounding farm.
Over the years, the Wildlife Center saw many creatures come and go. As is the sobering reality of wildlife rehabilitation, most cases, unfortunately, were hopeless, unsaveable. People would often drop off animals that had been hit by cars and were nearly dead on arrival. They would do this mostly out of guilt, fully knowing that the animal would not make it, but desperately needing to know that they, at least, had done their part. We’d get our share of hysterical housewives as well, women who had absolutely nothing to do with their lives once all the day’s chores had been done. For them the day a bird hit their window and was knocked unconscious was a momentous occasion.
These women would bring the wounded birds in themselves, housed in shoe-boxes with little bird feeders, water fountains and beds. Many would keep detailed journals of when and what the bird had eaten (if anything) since it’s arrival. My parents would be patient with these women, pleasant but careful not to unleash their pent up store of no-doubt boundless enthusiasm or worse: to unintentionally kindle a friendship.
After dropping the birds off, these women would call everyday to check on the progress and would sound legitimately crushed when we inevitably told them that the bird had died.
I can only imagine that these poor, bored women would then go back to their pretty little homes, go back to polishing their large bay windows until they were absolutely spotless and all but invisible. Then they would pour themselves some tea (or perhaps a white wine spritzer) and drink it with their little white hands latched across their laps while they sat on their immaculate sofas, waiting, waiting for another “thump” to sound.

3. RIZZO

Occasionally we would receive abandoned animals –wild animal babies whose mothers had been killed either by cars, hunters or other animals but were, apart from being half starved, completely healthy. These were always the fun animals as they were mostly too young to be terrified of human beings and, since there was usually nothing physically wrong with them, had the highest chance for survival and eventual release back into the wild.
One year we received a tiny, baby raccoon whose mother had abandoned him. She had probably been hit by a car and the woman who brought him in had heard him crying from a stump in her back yard and had gone to investigate. We named him Rizzo after an hirsute New York plumber we had known.
Rizzo had what my mother referred to as a “Big Personality.” In fact, Rizzo was mischief made flesh, the norse god Loki descended to earth and placed within a adorable furry little husk.
When Rizzo wasn’t eating, he was destroying things. That is what raccoons do: they destroy things. If ever a mascot was needed for hyper-active and anti-social children, a raccoon would be it. Raccoons never stop moving. Their entire life is one long gesture culminating in a collapse. As long as a raccoon is still alive, however, it will fidget, upend, ferret-out, tear-apart, beat, eat, smell, bite, scratch, kick, throw or strangle anything in its vicinity.
Setting Rizzo out on the veranda was endlessly entertaining as he would make his way across the yard using the most dangerous and hap-hazard of routes. Raccoons, despite their semi-arboreal nature, are anything but graceful and they seem to have no knowledge or respect for gravity. Rizzo would fall off fences, misgauge jumps, and climb objects that could not support his weight. The only thing that kept him from rather severe damage was my mother who ran along one step ahead of him like a personal trainer, ready and waiting to catch him when he fell.
Rizzo also had an eye for cats. And when I say that “he had an eye for cats,” I mean that he wanted to kill them. Rizzo wouldn’t toss obscenities at the cats, largely because he didn’t know any. Nor did he try to bite the cats or claw at them as one might have expected. Instead he would try to strangle them. At the sight of a cat, his little furry arms would shoot out and his little furry hands would come together in a desperate grasping gesture.
I had never imagined that this was the raccoon’s preferred method of attack: strangulation. I had always assumed that human beings were the only animals on earth that strangled one another. However, seeing Rizzo attempt it I realized that it probably happened all the time in the wild. Every night as my family lay asleep in their beds, raccoons were out there in the woods, strangling stray cats, strangling mice, fish, birds, maybe even other raccoons. Somehow the thought didn’t sit particularly well with me.
Soon the time for Rizzo’s release into the wild came…and went. Rizzo, however, remained. When asked why Rizzo had not been released, my mother would become defensive and say:
“We can’t let Rizzo go now, he’s part of the family.”
We tried reasoning with her saying that, despite being raised by us, Rizzo was still a wild animal.
To this my mother would simply shrug and perhaps say something vaguely provocative and utterly non-sensical such as “if you ask me, we’re the real wild animals.”
The interesting thing about mammals, of course, is that they eventually go through puberty unless they are neutered. Puberty accomplishes a great many things for an organism. Chief amongst these is that it makes the pubescent organism sexually viable by awakening its secondary sexual characteristics and instincts. Along with this viability comes a surge of other conditions designed by nature, to protect her newly awakened investment. Chief amongst these (in the male of the species anyway) are aggression, increased muscle mass, and the frequent marking of one’s territory usually via the spray of musk or urine.
When Rizzo went through puberty he began biting and pissing on everything. He also grew until he was the size of a small, muscular dog. The cats lived in perpetual fear of him and the rest of us couldn’t really get near him without being bitten or pissed on. Even my mother was having trouble “bonding” with him.
“He’s just grouchy because he’s got a lot of free floating anxiety,” she’d say cheerfully as she poured iodine on her most recent puncture wound.
One day Rizzo escaped from the wildlife center and went missing for three days. During that time, my mother became deeply depressed as if she had lost one of her children. My father would go out at night with a flashlight calling for Rizzo. They left food out for him which got eaten by something each night but Rizzo did not return.
On the third night, Guthrie and Candace came home late from a concert only to discover that their shack had been ransacked. All the dishes had been thrown on the floor, all their toys and books and clothes had been tossed and torn. Paper was everywhere; even the silverware had been taken out of the drawers and scattered around.
“Stay out here,” said Guthrie to Candace. Not knowing what else to do he grabbed the axe that they kept outside for chopping wood. Cautiously he opened the door and went inside. The place appeared empty. Just then Guthrie heard something falling and crashing to the floor. It had come from the bathroom. Grabbing the axe a little tighter he made his way to the bathroom and pushed open the door. Rizzo was there, standing on the edge of the sink. The medicine cabinet was open and he was casually rifling through it, tossing things he didn’t like over his shoulder and muttering under his breath..
When he saw Guthrie he threw his little hands up in the air and screamed “EEEEEEEEEEE!!!!” and ran. Guthrie didn’t know what to do so he tried to catch Rizzo. Rizzo was furious at being discovered in the middle of what could only be likened to a “bender,” and he ran around the coop, knocking obstacles into Guthrie’s path, biting, scratching and trying desperately to strangle Guthrie’s wrist. Finally Guthrie restrained him and placed him in an unused clothes hamper.
As he was taking Rizzo outside to return him to his cage in the Wildlife center, Guthrie was mobbed by the dogs who had heard the commotion and come running to see what all the fuss was about. Candace tried to keep the dogs from Rizzo but there were too many of them. Eventually the hamper got knocked over. Rizzo escaped somehow and scampered into a nearby tree where he sat in the highest branch and hissed.
Too tired to try and get him back down, Candace and Guthrie put the dogs away and began straightening up their house. Periodically Guthrie would go outside to check on Rizzo. Each time Rizzo was still in the same spot. The last time he checked on Rizzo, the little Raccoon was fast asleep. Exhausted, Guthrie and Candace decided to go to bed.

The next morning the sun rose on red earth. As it was Springtime, my mother had recently received her semi-annual transfusion of new ducklings and chicks to replenish the dwindling populations in the chicken coop. These new baby birds were currently being kept in large open topped aluminum bins in the wildlife center until they were big enough to make it on their own within the murderous wilds of the chicken coop. Along with these tender specimens were the usual assortment of inmates: homeless mammals, wounded rodents and seagulls with buckshot through their wings.
When my mother came down that morning she was shocked to find the door to the center slightly ajar. The door was rarely, if ever, locked but it was customary to keep it tightly closed to insure the safety of all the helpless little creatures inside. Apprehensive to say the least, my mother stepped inside.
What met her eyes there was a scene of carnage and horror. Feathers were everywhere. Dots of bright red blood speckled the newsprint lining the cages. Corpses of chicks, geese, ducks, sparrows and seagulls lay piled haphazardly like sandbags in some makeshift bunker. The only animals still left alive were the wounded ones locked safely away inside their cages and these, having witnessed such atrocity, released terrified shrieks as my mother entered the room.
Lying atop this mountain of carnage sleeping peacefully, the limp neck of a duckling still clutched between his furry little hands, was Rizzo. After his adventure with Candace and Guthrie, Rizzo had apparently worked up quite an appetite. He had waited until the dogs were gone and then climbed down the tree, made his way to the wildlife center, somehow turned the doorknob and then proceeded to strangle every bird in the center that wasn’t behind bars. Judging from the feathers still stuck to his face, he had eaten his share as well.
After this incident, my mother was shaken but still insisted that Rizzo was merely “going through a difficult time” and refused to release him into the wild. It turned out that the choice wasn’t really hers to make. Raccoons are very intelligent creatures and keeping them in captivity once they have reached sexual maturity isn’t just a bad idea, logistically, it is nearly impossible. Soon Rizzo escaped again and this time he didn’t come back.
My mother was crushed that her child had abandoned her and I suppose there was some legitimacy to that, but really she had done Rizzo a wonderful service, she had been his mother and raised him from a tiny, helpless little baby. In the wild, Raccoons do not remain with their mothers after they reach sexual maturity, it simply wouldn’t make sense.
My mother was as much a mother to Rizzo as any raccoon ever could have been and I’m sure that somewhere, deep in the obsessive compulsive recesses of Rizzo’s twisted little brain, he is aware of that fact. And somewhere, even deeper, beyond thought, beyond perception, in the deepest wells of his raccoon mind where the foundations of who he is are kept safe and sacred like treasures in a vault, I’m certain that he holds an image or a smell of her -some token scrap of memory- under which, in whatever clumsy language raccoons speak, the word “Mama” is written.