Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood Page 9
distance. Tony and Dad cupped their ears. “Ay-yarp,” came Nip’s
voice—from the hole in the ground.
Tony leaned down and listened intently. “Sweet Jesus, the little bugger’s down there with the rabbit! He’s probably stuck!” We called and called. It was almost dark. “Ay-yarp,” cried Nip from the hole, 77
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but fainter now. It was really getting cold. “We’ll have to dig him out before he freezes to death,” Dad said.
It didn’t take Dad and Tony long to make decisions. “Davy, you
stay here in case he comes out,” Dad said. “Tony and I will go home and get picks and shovels. If you get too cold, walk to the farm down the road. C’mon, dogs.”
The loneliest thing I ever saw was the single taillight of Tony’s Dodge as it winked out of sight through the trees. The loneliest thing I ever heard was the ear-ringing silence of those cold dark woods.
I was too young to have a watch, but a lot of hard, cold time
passed as I sat alone by the hole. I called my little dog, I prayed, I cried, I pounded my mittened hands on the frozen ground. He
wasn’t baying anymore. I didn’t want to imagine him down there in the darkness.
Then I heard engines. Headlamps jolted down the road, casting
crazy moving shadows in the woods. The engines stopped and I
heard voices. I saw a half-dozen lights swinging through the trees, coming slowly closer. Who were all these people? I hollered so they could find me.
Dad was the first to get there, carrying a Coleman lantern and
calling “Davy!” Tony was next, leading four other men with lanterns, picks, mattocks, spades, and pry bars.
“This is Dave’s boy,” Tony said, introducing me. “He’s lost his
dog.”
“Don’t worry, kid, we’ll get him out of there,” said one of the
strangers, a short, wiry French-looking man with a mustache.
“Charlie, you start here with the pick, and we’ll see which way the hole goes. But dig easy! Let’s find some branches to hang the lanterns on. Giddown, dog!”
Dog?
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It was Nip—wet, dirty, bloody Nip.
In cold weather, cottontails hole up in old woodchuck burrows,
and woodchuck burrows have several exits. Down in the burrow and unable to turn around, Nip had dug his way through its passages
until he found one of those back doors. It had taken him more than two hours to do it.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dad said.
Nip was exhausted, but he still had a lick for me. Somehow it
wasn’t cold anymore, so I took off my parka, wrapped Nip in it, and carried him out of the woods.
It was a happy little procession that headed back to our house,
Tony’s car first, followed by an orange Manitowoc County pickup
truck and our Studebaker station wagon. As I burst through the
front door, I could smell chili and a big pot of coffee perking on the stove. Mom had built a fire in the fireplace, and seven bowls were set at the dining room table.
There were introductions, and a lot of talk. The French-looking
man was Tony’s brother-in-law, who worked for the highway department. He had loaded the truck with tools and picked up Charlie,
who worked with him. The two other men were from the shipyard,
where Dad worked. A couple of phone calls had rounded them up.
It didn’t take long for six men and a boy to finish a gallon of chili and a quart or two of coffee. Dad raised his cup in a kind of toast.
“This wasn’t much of a New Year’s Eve for you guys,” he said.
“Haven’t got a drink in the house, but I thank you.”
“Hell,” said Charlie. “It was just a little walk in the woods. Could have been my dog out there.”
When everyone had left, Dad lit his pipe and smiled at me across the table. “Well,” he said, “this is what it’s like to have friends.”
In our family, we used to sit up until midnight on New Year’s
Eve, and when Guy Lombardo played “Auld Lang Syne” on the
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radio we would blow our duck calls and polish off some Canada
Dry. I didn’t wait for midnight that night. Up in my cold, dark
bedroom, Nip’s tail was thumping on the comforter.
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I n my dream I was in a belfry. The bell was ringing, and from the bottom of a long ladder, someone was shouting my name.
Then I woke up. My windup alarm clock was clattering and Dad
was calling me from the foot of the stairs.
I opened my eyes and shut the alarm off. It was three thirty in the morning. I put on jeans and a wool shirt, laced up my boots, hung binoculars around my neck, and stuffed my copy of A Field Guide to the Birds into a back pocket. It was a Saturday in early May 1954, I was eleven years old, and Dad and I were going to win the Bird
Breakfast birding contest.
I’m not sure when Manitowoc’s annual Bird Breakfast got
started, but in the early fifties it was a minor cultural institution, sponsored by Saint Paul’s Methodist Church. For a couple of years it was held at our house just outside the city limits. I don’t know why 81
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we were chosen to host the event, but I suppose it was because we belonged to the church and had two bathrooms.
The procedure was to arrive at dawn, eat an outdoor breakfast
cooked on a Coleman stove, and then go birding. The competitors
listed the species they saw, and those who had the most by noon
won modest prizes. Scoring was on the honor system, so beginning birders who said they saw rarities like fulvous tree ducks or painted buntings got to count them. Some participants did not go birding at all, but instead hung around Dad and his big cast-iron skillet, eating bacon and eggs and drinking coffee. “My God, Dave, that makes
three eggs I’ve had,” a man would say, and Dad would reply, “Five, but who’s counting?”
This year, though, Dad was leaving the cooking to Mom. This
year, I was old enough to do some fairly serious birding. Dad and I were going to skip breakfast, start out in total darkness, drive briskly from one hot spot to another, and rack up sixty or seventy species.
This year, we were going to win.
Mom, Dad, and I had no particular interest in birds until we
moved to Manitowoc. But when we bought our house on River
Road, we acquired Merle Pickett and Lillian Marsh as neighbors,
and they were master birders—experts, sharks. They knew habitats, field marks, and songs and shared their knowledge with everyone.
Under their guidance we became birders as well. Not masters, of
course, but studious apprentices. And now, with three years of bird-chasing under our belts, Dad and I hoped to be contenders for the father-and-son title.
Down in the kitchen, Dad poured me a half cup of coffee and
slapped butter on toast. “Eat quick, and let’s get going,” he said.
“We’ve got a lot of miles to cover.”
Dad planned our day as we finished our coffee. “First stop is the thrush woods,” he said. “We should get two or three thrushes and an 82
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owl, if we’re lucky. Then we’ll drive out to Collins for puddle ducks and shorebirds. After that we’ll come back here and check out Rahrs’
farm. Then the cemetery, Lincoln Park, and the Little Manitowoc, if we can squeeze it all in.”
Our beagles, Nip and Rip, yawned and stretched and kept an eye
on us. They knew something was up and wanted to be included.
Dad reached down and patted Rip’s head. “No, we aren’t going
rabbit hunting and you aren’t coming along,” he said. “But don’t feel bad, boys—in a couple of hours there’ll be a hundred people here, and all the leftovers you can eat.”
Outside, we paused for a moment in front of the garage. The
moon was down, it was pitch dark, and there was a gentle breeze
out of the south. From the black sky overhead we heard the faint chipping calls of migrating songbirds. We weren’t skillful enough to identify them, but birds were clearly on the move.
Dad raised the garage door. It made its usual screech and was
answered by the rasping crow of a cock pheasant somewhere down
in the wooded ravine that ran along the east side of our yard. “How about that!” Dad said. “Species number one and we haven’t even
started the car. It’s a good sign.”
On our way to the thrush woods, Dad turned on the overhead
light in our Studebaker station wagon. He took a folded bird list from his Field Guide. “You can be the accountant today,” he said, handing me the list. I ran the point of my pencil past the loons and ducks and geese until I came to ring-necked pheasant and made a
check. “That’s one,” I said.
The thrush woods was our name for a woodlot about ten miles
west of town. It was split down the middle by a gravel road and we stopped partway through. Dad lowered the Studie’s tailgate and we sat on it while he poured some coffee from the thermos and lit his pipe. We waited through five minutes of unbroken silence.
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“Come on, owls,” Dad whispered. He tapped his pipe on his
palm, dislodging a small shower of glowing red embers onto the
gravel. Then, at a considerable distance, we heard the first owl of the morning. “Hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo, hoo,” it said, in a five-note pattern I had heard once before. Dad struck a match so I could see the list, and I checked off the great horned owl. “That’s two,” Dad said. “Heard birds count, if you’re really sure what they are.”
There was a hint of gray in the east. Dad cupped his hands
around his mouth. “I wonder if this will produce anything,” he said.
“I’ve never tried it, but it’s supposed to work.” He hooted eight times in a jazzy rhythm.
There was an immediate, loud reply from a tree almost overhead:
“Hoo, Hoo Hoo-Hoo, Hoo, Hoo, Hoo Hoo-aw!”
We tried to spot the owl, but it was too dark. “You try it, Davy,”
Dad said. I hooted, and got a similar answer. The owl was still invisible. “Anyway, it’s a barred owl,” Dad said. I checked it off. So far we had three species without seeing a thing.
Dad and I sat on the tailgate for another ten minutes, drinking
coffee and listening. The thrushes started in shortly after the owls knocked off, and for a while we heard a veery and a wood thrush
singing simultaneously on opposite sides of the road.
“Some day,” Dad said, “you’ll be reading a book and you’ll come
across the word ‘ethereal.’ It means heavenly, and it’s the only word that describes what we’re hearing right now.” I glanced up at Dad; I had never heard him say anything like that.
He looked at me and winked. “Well, it describes Audrey Hep-
burn, too,” he said. “She’s pretty ethereal.”
By this time it was light enough to walk into the woods. We saw
hermit and olive-backed thrushes, a brown thrasher, a flicker, and a yellow-bellied sapsucker. Birds were singing all around us. Dad
peered through the underbrush. “There’s a fallen log over there—let’s 84
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sit on it for a minute and listen.” But when we got close to the log, it seemed to blow up. There was a thunder of wings and a shower of
leaves as a large bird rocketed into the air and disappeared.
“Grouse,” Dad said. “We must have jumped him off his
drumming log.” We headed back to the car. On the way we passed
through a small clearing, and I flushed a chubby, long-billed bird that ran erratically ahead of us and then twittered into the air.
“Woodcock,” Dad said.
Back at the car, Dad looked at his watch. “Five thirty. We’ve got to hit the road for Collins. The sun will be up soon.”
I took a last look around. On a lower branch of a big oak I saw
a small, white-bellied bird with an eye ring and a long tail. Dad saw it too, studied it with his binoculars, and flipped through his Field Guide. “Blue-gray gnatcatcher,” he said. “Page one sixty-three.”
On the way to Collins Marsh, I checked off the birds we had seen or heard at the thrush woods; we were up to thirteen.
The marsh was a low-lying area along the Manitowoc River. In
wet years, it offered a stopping place for migrating ducks and shorebirds. Dad turned down a side road and stopped beside a flooded
cornfield that was covered with ducks. He started identifying them and pointing them out to me as I made checks on our list. We saw nine species of ducks, a horned grebe, a hooded merganser, a marsh hawk tilting low over the field, Forster’s and black terns, an eastern kingbird, and a yellow warbler. Through the shimmer and glare we thought we could see shorebirds on the far side of the cornfield, but they were too far away to identify with our seven-power binoculars.
“Shoot!” Dad said. “I was counting on getting some shorebirds at this spot. We could walk out there, but there’s no cover and we’d just scare them away.” I counted up my check marks. “That makes
twenty-nine,” I said.
Out on the highway, Dad gunned the Studie up through the
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gears and leveled off at about fifty. Then I saw some puddles in a grassy field just ahead. Dozens of small, long-legged birds were wading in the puddles.
“Shorebirds!” I yelled, and Dad stamped on the brakes. From
behind us came the squeal of tires from a much larger car. It slid to a stop a few feet from our bumper. I looked back and saw the toothy grille of a Nash Ambassador. The car was painted an ominous black and white; it was a state trooper. “Oh, Lord,” Dad said, and pulled over onto the shoulder.
The trooper got out of his cruiser, straightened his flat-brimmed campaign hat, and walked slowly up to Dad’s side of the car, carrying a leather citation book.
“Why did you stop so short?” the trooper asked. “It’s lucky I was paying attention or I would have run you over!”
The trooper had probably been following us too closely, but Dad
decided not to mention it. “Well, Officer, we saw those birds over there,” he said, pointing. The trooper looked over the top of our car at the puddles.
“So what?” he said.
Dad smiled ingratiatingly. “We’re in a contest—a birdwatching
contest.”
“I never heard of a birdwatching contest,” the trooper said.
“Who’s putting it on?”
“Saint Paul’s Methodist in Manitowoc,” Dad replied.
“Oh,” said the trooper. He didn’t seem impressed. He was a big,
beefy blond fellow, probably a Lutheran or Dutch Reformed. “So
what kind of birds do you see over there?” he asked. He was checking on us.
“Let me look,” Dad said, lifting his binoculars. “Well, right in front of us is a Wilson’s snipe, and behind him is a flock of dunlins—
the little guys with the black bellies—and then just to the left is a 86
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semipalmated plover and a pectoral sandpiper. Then there’s a solitary sandpiper, and behind it is a little flock of yellowlegs.”
Dad rattled on nervously. “Actually there are two kinds of yellowlegs, greater and lesser, but I can’t tell which they are at this distance.
I think that’s pretty much all—except, wait—yes, tho
se little reddish birds drilling in the mud are dowitchers. There’s two kinds of them, too—long-billed and short-billed, but they are really hard to tell apart if you can’t hear them call . . .”
“OK, OK, I believe you,” the trooper said, smiling now. “Tell
you what—I was all set to write you a ticket. But you two have made my day. I can’t wait for the shift change, so I can tell the other guys about your short-legged doohickeys,” he said. “In the meantime,
keep an eye on your mirror—somebody might be gaining on you.”
Dad lit his pipe as the trooper drove off. “Were you marking
those birds down as I was calling them off ?” he asked, all business again. “We’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of being right on the yellowlegs and dowitchers. Mark down one of each.” I counted them up. “That makes thirty-six,” I said.
On the way home, we looked in all directions at once. The sun
was well above the horizon, and we picked up eight more species
flying or perched near the road: a turkey vulture, a red-tailed hawk, a chimney swift, numerous crows and starlings, an eastern meadow-lark, a sparrow hawk, and a goldfinch. I added the checks as we pulled up the driveway—the total was now forty-four.
As Dad eased the Studie into the maze of parked cars on our
lawn, I spotted Nip and Rip working the crowd of breakfast eaters, polishing off bacon crumbs, cold eggs, and sausage scraps, their white-tipped tails waving. People were lining up to feed them. “I hope they don’t get too many eggs,” Dad said. “The last thing we need is gassy beagles.”
We walked around the house to check out the backyard and the
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bird feeders and picked up seven more species: a robin, a chickadee, a mourning dove, a downy woodpecker, a white-breasted nuthatch,
a palm warbler, and a house wren. I added up the checks again.
“Fifty-one,” I said. “Halfway there,” Dad muttered.
The next stop was Rahrs’ farm, across the road from our house.
We walked down the long driveway and saw fifteen more species—a
great blue heron, a killdeer, a phoebe, a blue jay, three kinds of swallows, a catbird, a cardinal, chipping and song sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, a grackle, a cowbird, and a rock dove. I checked them off. “That makes sixty-six,” Dad said. “Two-thirds of the way there.”