Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [45]
Upstairs we settle in on a mattress, our backs propped against a stack of pillows. Amy snuggles in between us, trilling with happiness. After three years of being a visitor in this house, I’m still getting used to the idea that we live here now. I think of my parents in that ’56 Chevy, leaving Nekoosa. As the movie begins and Amy turns her attention to the screen, I reach an arm around Anneliese and pull her closer, squeezing Amy between us.
CHAPTER 4
Winter is on the fizzle, and Mister Big Shot is looking for love.
Mister Big Shot is a cock pheasant. He has been appearing at the edge of our yard nearly every morning for several weeks now, and he is plainly addled by love. He sports a glorious set of head feathers: blood-splash eye patch, bottle-green Batman cowl, a pristine white collar. The colors startle the eye, bright in the brown weeds like scraps of birthday balloon. Sadly, once he follows his beak out of the weeds, Mister Big Shot reveals the limits of his machismo, because somewhere along the line the poor bird lost his tail feathers. You have to figure the bobtail is a drawback on the dating scene. Like a bachelor with a bald spot, he must find ways to compensate. And so he inflates his chest, struts the perimeter of the yard, and crows blusterously.
Thus we call him Mister Big Shot.
The first time I saw him, I was stepping out the front door after breakfast. He had emerged from the row of spruce trees beside the pole barn. I froze and whispered over my shoulder to Amy, “Come here, look, look!” I cautioned her to move stealthily, not wanting to scare him off.
Turns out we couldn’t scare him away short of a shotgun. The relationship has gone from breathtaking Animal Planet moment to There’s that knuckleheaded pheasant again. For all my would-be woodsy knowledge, it took me a few sightings before I caught on: Wait a minute…isn’t he supposed to have tail feathers? We didn’t have a lot of pheasants around when I was growing up, so I tracked down some pheasant photographs on the Web to check myself. Sure enough. Most male pheasants have grand plumage sprouting out their hinders—sweeping quills of the sort you might use to sign ceremonial parchment, or to accessorize your Robin Hood cap. I wrote to a wildlife biologist and asked what might have gone wrong. He told me the feathers could have been snatched by a predator in a near-miss. Also, he said, sometimes the tail freezes to the ground during cold snaps, and when the pheasant takes flight, some of the feathers remain fixed. I picture the pheasant windmilling like mad, getting zero lift, then—puh-luck!—he blasts wide-eyed skyward. The biologist also said if the pheasant was pen-raised, it might have broken its tail feathers while tussling with other pheasants. Mister Big Shot does seem a little too tame for his own good (we can get pretty close before he bolts), so perhaps he was raised by humans. On the other hand, the biologist said only 10 percent of released birds survive the winter, so in that case Mister Big Shot would have earned the right to strut.
In the process of our speculation about the missing tail feathers, I tell Amy the legend of how the bear lost his tail: Bear’s friend Fox convinces him he can catch a fish by dangling his tail through a hole in the ice. Bear sits there all night long. In the morning he feels a nibble, but when he leaps up, his tail—which has frozen in the ice—is pulled off. A gruesome story, as many fables are. Amy draws a connection to the plight of Mister Big Shot, and we discuss whether or not he might have been ice fishing. Then Amy asks me to pretend I am Mister Big Shot at the moment he did the power-molt. I flap my arms, wince with feigned effort, then holler “Yee-owch!” and look behind me in dismay and wonder. Amy laughs and asks me to do it again. But then