Killdeer fly above the creek at night. Their calls shatter the night, echo from the hills just to the west. Cold mist swirls beneath sodium vapor lamps. Each beautiful thing in turn fades into night.
There are hundreds of killdeer here. They live here year-round, probing the endless salt mudflats for worms, flying in pairs and threes to pluck moths from lawns.
I took Zeke to the park again this morning. He is ever weaker, the twice-daily walks of October now coming twice a week. Usually he lifts his head an inch from the bed, sighs, falls back into fitful sleep. The gutters were slick with half-inch ice, spring picnic weather where I was born, 35 degrees and rising. Halfway down the hill he fell. I carried him the rest of the way, his head leaning sociably on my right shoulder. We found a sunny spot of lawn and I laid him down.
Killdeer scattered across the grass shouting pierced protest.
In fall I started carrying a nut or two on our walks, and the fox squirrels know Zeke now, remember that the slow blond dog signifies a free meal. They will walk to me eager and tentative, edge up to the offered peanut and take it slowly, with deliberation and gentility. Those teeth can maim. I watched two males fighting up the hill not a month ago, so blind with rage that I walked up two feet away from them to watch them. They would break, stand upright and screaming, then a feint and lunge and melee. One, blood-smeared on mouth and breast, staggered off at last. His wounds looked nasty, his gait near death, and the red-spattered victor watched him recede, still an arm’s length from my boots. I appreciate all the more their caution since that day, their pacifically bringing teeth and claws a half-centimeter from my fingertips, shiny black claws sometimes soft-raking my skin, and each time they do I startle and drop the nut.
One of them saw Zeke today. She came to us across twenty feet of park, regarded me from the trunk of a paper bark Melaleuca, walked atop a row of footstool-sized rocks to reach me. “I don’t have anything for you,” I apologized. “I thought you’d be asleep.” She hopped onto the lawn, walked to within a foot of Zeke’s nose, and then leapt backwards to the Melaleuca trunk when he roused, excited. Even a squirrel on his head is not enough reason to get all the way up, these days. The squirrel was suddenly an inaccessible four feet away, at least ten inches up the tree: why bother? We sat for a while longer, one side cold and one sun-warmed, a feeling like the high desert mornings I will not see again until he’s gone, and a killldeer flew past low above us piping sweet and mournful.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Zeke
The Neighborhood
Wildlife
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