Creatures of the Kingdom: Stories of Animals and Nature

  ‘Now!’ Turlock signaled, and the guns blazed. Before the startled geese could take to the air, the six Turlocks dropped their guns, grabbed others and blazed away, dropped them and reached for their backups. Geese fell in startling numbers, and by the time Onk-or could get his flock into the air, enough lay dead to stock the icehouse.

  When they reassembled in the marsh, Onk-or discovered that one of his sons was dead, and he was about to lament when he found to his terror that his wife was missing, too. He had seen geese falter and fall into the grass offshore, and he knew intuitively that the men would now be combing that margin to find the cripples.

  Without hesitation he left his flock and sped back to the mating ground. His arrival disconcerted the men, who, as he had expected, were searching for wounded birds. Flying directly over their heads, he landed in the area at which he had seen the geese falling, and there he found his mate, sorely crippled in the left wing. It was impossible for her to fly, and within minutes the dogs and men would find her.

  Urging her with heavy pushes of his bill, he shoved her through ill-defined waterways, heading her always toward the safety of the deeper marshes. When she faltered, he pecked at her feathers, never allowing her to stop.

  They had progressed about two hundred yards when a mongrel yellow dog with an especially good nose came upon their scent and realized that he had a cripple somewhere in the bushes ahead. Silently he made his way ever closer to the wounded goose, until, with a final leap, he was upon her.

  What he did not anticipate was that she was accompanied by a full-grown gander determined to protect her. Suddenly, from the water near the cripple, Onk-or rose up, whipped his heavy beak about and slashed at the dog. The startled animal withdrew in shock, then perceived the situation and lunged at the gander.

  A deadly, splashing fight ensued, with the dog having every advantage. But Onk-or marshaled his powers; he was fighting not only to protect himself but also to save his crippled mate, and deep in the tangled marsh he attacked the dog with a confusing flash of wing and thrust of beak. The dog retreated.

  ‘There’s a cripple in there!’ Turlock shouted to his sons. Tiger’s got hisse’f a cripple.’

  But the dog appeared with nothing except a bleeding cut on the head. ‘Hey! Tiger’s been hit by a honker. Get in there and find that cripple.’

  Three boys and their dogs splashed into the marsh, but by this time Onk-or had guided his damaged mate to safety. They hid among the rushes as the men splashed noisily, while the mongrels, not eager to encounter whatever had struck Tiger, made little attempt to find them.

  A week later, when the crippled wing had mended, Onk-or herded his geese together and they started their mandatory flight to the Arctic: Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maine and then the frozen moorlands of Canada as they had done for generations. On a similar flight, thirty years earlier, as a flock of great geese flew over a small town in central New York, they made a great honking, and citizens came out to follow their mysterious passage. Among them was a boy of eight. He stared at the shadowy forms and listened to their distant conversation. As a consequence of this one experience he would become attached to birds, would study everything about them, and in his adult life would paint them and write about them and take the first steps in providing sanctuaries for them, and all because on one moonlit night John James Audubon heard the geese pass overhead.

  THE INVADERS

  In the summer of 1968 a family of immigrants—mother, father, four daughters—moved quietly into the oil town of Larkin, Texas, and within three weeks had the owners of better-class homes in a rage. They were such a rowdy lot, especially the mother, that an observer might have thought: The rip-roaring boom days of 1922 are back!

  They were night people, always a bad sign, who seemed to do most of their hell-raising after dark, with mother and daughters off on a toot marked by noise, vandalism and other furtive acts. They operated as a gang, with the weak and ineffective father along at times, and what infuriated the townsfolk particularly was that they seemed to take positive joy in their depredations.

  Despite their unfavorable reputation—and many sins were charged against them that they did not commit—they really did more good than harm; they were an asset to the community, and they had about them elements of extraordinary beauty, which their enemies refused to admit.

  They were armadillos, never known in this area before, a group of invaders who had moved up from Mexico, bringing irritation and joy wherever they appeared. Opponents of the fascinating little creatures, which were no bigger than small dogs, accused them of eating quail eggs (a rotten lie); of raiding chicken coops (false as could be): and of tearing up fine lawns (a just charge and a serious one). Ranchers also said: ‘They dig so many holes that my cattle stumble into them and break their legs. There goes four hundred bucks’

  The indictment involving the digging up of lawns and the making of deep holes was justified, for no animal could dig faster than an armadillo, and when this mother and her four daughters turned themselves loose on a neat lawn or a nicely tilled vegetable garden, their destruction could be awesome. The armadillo had a long, probing snout, backed up by two forefeet each, with four three-inch claws, and two hind feet with five shovel-like claws, and the speed with which it could work those excavators was unbelievable.

  ‘Straight down,’ Mr. Kramer said, ‘they can dig faster than I can with a shovel. The nose feels out the soft spots and those forelegs drive like pistons, but it’s the back legs that amaze, because they catch the loose earth and throw it four, five feet backwards.’

  Mr. Kramer was one of those odd men, found in all communities, who measured rainfall on a regular basis—phoning the information to the Weather Service—and who recorded the depth of snowfall, the time of the first frost, the strength and direction of the wind during storms, and the fact that in the last blue norther, ‘the temperature on a fine March day dropped, in the space of three hours, from 26.9 to 9.7 degrees Celsius.’ He was the type who always gave the temperature in Celsius, which he expected his friends to translate into Fahrenheit, if they wished. He was, in short, a sixty-two-year-old former member of an oil crew who had always loved nature and who had poked his bullet-cropped, sandy-haired head into all sorts of corners.

  The first armadillos to reach Larkin were identified on a Tuesday, and by Friday, Mr. Kramer had written away for three research studies on the creatures. The more he read, the more he grew to like them, and before long he was defending them against their detractors, especially to those whose lawns had been excavated: ‘A little damage here and there, I grant you. But did you hear about what they did for my rose bushes? Laden down with beetles they were. Couldn’t produce one good flower, even with toxic sprays. Then one night I look out to check the moon, three-quarters full, and I see these pairs of beady eyes shining in the gloom, and across my lawn come these five armadillos, and I say to myself: “Oh, oh! There goes the lawn!” but that wasn’t the case at all. Those armadillos were after those beetles, and when I woke up in the morning to check the rain gauge, what do you suppose? Not one beetle to be found.’

  Mr. Kramer defended the little creatures to anyone who would listen, but not many cared: ‘You ever see his tongue? Darts out about six inches, long, very sticky. Zoom! There goes another ant, another beetle. He was made to police the garden and knock off the pests.’

  Once when a Mrs. Cole was complaining with a bleeding heart about what the armadillos had done to her lawn, he stopped her with a rather revolting question: ‘Mrs. Cole, have you ever inspected an armadillo’s stomach? Well, I have, many times. Dissected bodies I’ve found along the highway. And what does the stomach contain? Bugs, beetles, delicate roots, flies, ants, all the crawling things you don’t like. And you can tell Mr. Cole that in seventeen autopsies, I’ve never found even the trace of a bird’s egg, and certainly no quail’s eggs.’ By the time he was through with his report on the belly of an armadillo, Mrs. Cole was more than ever opposed to the destructive little be
asts.

  But it was when he extolled the beauty of the armadillo that he lost the support of even the most sympathetic Larkin citizens, for they saw the little animal as an awkward, low-slung relic of some past geologic age that had mysteriously survived into the present; one look at the creature convinced them that it should have died out with the dinosaurs, and its survival into the twentieth century somehow offended them. To Mr. Kramer, this heroic persistence was one of the armadillo’s great assets, but he was even more impressed by the beauty of its design.

  ‘Armadillo? What does it mean? “The little armored one.” And if you look at him dispassionately, what you see is a beautifully designed animal much like one of the armored horses they used to have in the Middle Ages. The back, the body, the legs are all protected by this amazing armor, beautifully fashioned to flow across the body of the beast. And look at the engineering!’ When he said this he liked to display one of the three armadillos he had tamed when their parents were killed by hunters and point to the miracle of which he was speaking: This is real armor, fore and aft. Punch it. Harder than your fingernail and made of the same substance. Protects the shoulders and the hips. But here in the middle, nine flexible bands of armor, much like an accordion. Always nine, never seven or ten, and without these inserts, the beast couldn’t move about as he does. Quite wonderful, really. Nothing like it in the rest of the animal kingdom. Real relic of the dinosaur age.’

  But he would never let it end at that, and it was what he said next that did win some converts to the armadillo’s defense: ‘What awes me is not the armor, nor the nine flexible plates. They’re just good engineering. But the beauty of the design goes beyond engineering. It’s art, and only a designer who took infinite care could have devised these patterns. Leonardo da Vinci, maybe, or Michelangelo, or even God.’ And then he would show how fore and aft the armor was composed of the most beautiful hexagons and pentagons arranged like golden coins upon a field of exquisite gray cloth, while the nine bands were entirely different: ‘Look at the curious structures! Elongated capital A’s. Go ahead, tell me what they look like. A field of endless oil derricks, aren’t they? Can’t you see, he’s the good-luck symbol of the whole oil industry. His coming to Larkin was no mistake. He was sent here to serve as our mascot.’

  How beautiful, how mysterious the armadillos were when one took the trouble to inspect them seriously, as Mr. Kramer did. They bespoke past ages, the death of great systems, the miracle of creation and survival; they were walking reminders of a time when volcanoes peppered the earth and vast lakes covered continents. They were hallowed creatures, for they had seen the earth before man arrived, and they had survived to remind him of how things once had been. They should have died out with Tyrannosaurus rex and diplodocus, but they had stubbornly persisted so that they could bear testimony, and for the value of that testimony, they were precious and worthy of defense. ‘They must continue into the future,’ Mr. Kramer said, ‘so that future generations can see how things once were.’

  ‘What amazes me,’ Mr. Kramer told women he tried to persuade, ‘is their system of giving birth. Invariably, four pups, and invariably, all four of the same sex. There is no case of a mother armadillo giving birth to boys and girls at the same time. Impossible. And do you know why? Because one fertilized egg is split into four parts, rarely more, rarely less. Therefore, the resulting babies all have to be of the same sex.

  ‘But would you believe this? The mother can hold that fertilized four-part egg in her womb for the normal eight weeks, or, if things don’t seem propitious, for as long as twenty-two months, same as the elephant. She gives birth in response to some perceived need, and what that is, no one can say.’

  As he brooded over the mystery of birth, wondering how the armadillo community ensured that enough males and females would be provided to keep the race going, he visualized what he called the Great Computer in the Sky, which kept track of how many four-girl births were building up in a given community. And some morning it would click out a message—‘Hey, we need a couple of four-boy births in the Larkin area.’ So the next females to become pregnant would have four male babies, and the grand balance would be maintained.

  Mr. Kramer could find no one who wished to share his speculation on this mystery, but as he pursued it he began to think about human beings, too: What grand computer ensures that we have a balance between male and female babies? And how does it make the adjustments it does? As what happens after a war, when a lot of men have died in battle. Normal births in peacetime would be a thousand and four males to a thousand females, because males are more delicate in the early years and the adjustment has to be made. But after a war, when the Great Computer knows that there’s a deficiency in the number of males, the balance swings as high as one thousand and nine to one thousand.

  So when he looked at an armadillo on its way to dig in his lawn, he saw not a destructive little tank with incredibly powerful digging devices but a symbol of the grandeur of Creation, the passing of time, the mystery of birth, the great beauty that exists in the world in so many different manifestations. An armadillo is not one whit more beautiful or mysterious than a butterfly or a pine cone, but it’s more fun. And what gave him the warmest satisfaction was that all the other sizable animals of the world seemed to be having their living areas reduced. Only the armadillo was stubbornly enlarging his. Sometimes when Mr. Kramer watched this mother and her four daughters heading forth for some new devastation, he chuckled with delight: ‘There they go! The Five Horsewomen of the Apocalypse!’

  Another Larkin man had a much different name for the little excavators. Ransom Rusk, principal heir and sole proprietor of the Rusk holdings in the Larkin Field, had a fierce desire to obliterate memories of his unfortunate ancestry: the grand fool Earnshaw Rusk; the wife with the wooden nose; his own obscenely obese father; his fat, foolish mother. He wanted to forget them all. He was a tall, lean man, quite handsome, totally unlike his father, and at forty-five he was at the height of his powers. He had married a Wellesley graduate from New England, and it was amusing that her mother, wishing to dissociate herself from her cotton-mill ancestry, had named her daughter Fleurette, trusting that something of French gentility would rub off on her.

  Fleurette and Ransom Rusk, fed up with the modest house in whose kitchen Floyd had maintained his oil office till he died, had employed an architect from Boston to build them a mansion, and he had suggested an innovation that would distinguish their place from others in the region: ‘It is very fashionable, in the better estates of England, to have a bowling green. It could also be used for croquet, should you prefer,’ and Fleurette had applauded the idea.

  It was now her pleasure to entertain at what she called ‘a pleasant afternoon of bowls,’ and she did indeed make it pleasant. Not many of the local millionaires—and there were now some two dozen in the Larkin district, thanks to those reliable wells that never produced much more than a hundred barrels (of oil) a day, rarely less—knew how to play bowls, but they had fun at the variations they devised.

  Ransom Rusk, as the man who dominated the Larkin Field, was not spectacularly rich by Texas standards, whose categories were popularly defined: one to twenty million, comfortable; twenty to fifty million, well-to-do; fifty to five hundred million, rich; five hundred to one billion, big rich; one to five billion, Texas rich. By virtue of his other oil holdings in various parts of the state and his prudent investments in Fort Worth ventures, he was now rich, but in the lowest ranks of that middle division. His attitudes toward wealth were extremely contradictory, for obviously he had a driving ambition to acquire and exercise power in its various manifestations, and in pursuit of this he strove to multiply his wealth. But he remained indifferent to its mathematical level, often spending an entire year without knowing his balances or even an approximation of them. On the other hand, he had inherited his father’s shrewd judgment regarding oil and had extended it to the field of general financing, and he always sought new opportunities and knew how to app
ly leverage when he found them.

  He was brooding about his Fort Worth adventures one morning when he heard Fleurette scream: ‘Oh my God!’ Thinking that she had fallen, he rushed into the bedroom to find her standing by the window, pointing wordlessly at the havoc that had been wreaked upon her bowling green.

  ‘Looks like an atomic bomb!’ Ransom said. ‘It’s those damned armadillos,’ but Fleurette did not hear his explanation, for she was wailing as if she had lost three children.

  ‘Shut up!’ Ransom cried. ‘I’ll take care of those little bastards.’

  He slammed out of the house, inspected the chopped-up bowling lawn, and summoned the gardeners: ‘Can this be fixed?’

  ‘We can resod it like new, Mr. Rusk,’ they assured him, ‘but you’ll have to keep them armadillos out.’

  ‘I’ll take care of them. I’ll shoot them.’ In pursuit of this plan, he went to the hardware store to buy a stack of ammo for his .22 rifle, but while there, he happened to stand beside Mr. Kramer at the checkout counter, and the retired oilman, who had worked for Rusk, asked: ‘What are the bullets for?’ and Ransom said: ‘Armadillos.’

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t do that! Those are precious creatures. You should be protecting them, not killing them.’

  ‘They tore up my wife’s lawn last night.’

  ‘Her bowling green? I’ve heard it’s beautiful.’

  ‘Cost God knows how much, and it’s in shreds.’

  ‘A minor difficulty,’ Kramer said lightly, since he did not have to pay for the repairs. And before Ransom could get away, the enthusiastic nature lover had drawn him to the drugstore, where they shared a Dr Pepper.

  ‘Did you know, Ransom, that we have highly accurate maps showing the progress north of the armadillo? Maybe the only record of its kind.’

  ‘I wish they’d stayed where they came from.’