June 25, 1992
Noon, 96° Fahrenheit
Fish crows turn to face the smallest breath of air with open beaks. Half a dozen bobwhite quail whistle. The light is white. So is the surface of the pond, disturbed by riffle beetles skating over its milky surface in long reaches that end abruptly in dimples. The heat is such that I see through cataract eyes, heat rising out of the earth, a condition that will last three months and that more than once will scare me into believing the land is on fire.
Anhingas break the surface of the lake with brims as wide as my hand sideways in their beaks. Anhingas hunt underwater alongside the turtles and alligators; at water-level they swim like snakes. I watch them waddle up on stumps, smack brim against logs and throw them in the air to make them fall headfirst down their throats. Then they open their wings wide to dry. Yellow light highlights their primary feathers and long, pale, buff-colored necks, which flop back and forth from the bird’s chest to its back, to each wing and back again, slowly, languorously. In flight the anhinga’s head is almost invisible, an extension of a neck ending in a sharp, thin, yellow bill, fashioned long before man invented the spear. In the water, the narrow head never stops moving, swimming, angling, looking back and front—a distant cousin of the Loch Ness Monster. Steam rises out of the pond.
My farmer friend gave me four geese, two brown ones and two white. I wanted a pair of Canadas, but that’s what I got. The brown geese have orange-rimmed eyes; the white geese have yellow rims and blue eyes. They all have orange bills and wrinkled legs with thick nails filed to a point, and their stomachs are shaped like a woman’s purse. On hot days like today they lie around and nod.
“The trout won’t bite when the cows are lying down,” Bill tells my doctor friend this morning. He and another doctor had been casting flies at bass since dawn. “Check Channel Six, at five-fifty-five P.M., Doc; they broadcast the Solunar Tables. Feeding time’s the same for fish and cows. It’s too hot. The cows were already on the ground when I drove up this morning.”
Doc tells Bill about the cottonmouth they saw swimming high in the water shortly after sunup. Bill spits out his plug and says, “I was fishing this hole one time when I saw this cottonmouth moccasin swallering her young ones. I shot her in the belly, and damn if them little ones didn’t spill outta her and swim away.”
The doctors leave. Purple martins skim the water on the pond; some pitch in the water headfirst. Bill looks at his notebook: “I pushed up two hundred tree stumps this winter, and killed twenty-six Bell Boys (rattlesnakes). One snake about every ten stumps.” He thumbs through the pages on which he records things like that, along with planting dates, maintenance dates, weather-pattern dates, the-number-of-fish-caught dates, odds-and-ends dates, etc.; a well-kept record of his year on the farm that adds weight and credibility to both our lives.
He continues, “To that, add seven moccasins and the five-foot alligator that ate the gosling. You cooked it up in butter and garlic with black beans and rice and said it didn’t taste like anything.” Bill keeps good records.
I listen to other figures that have to do with the price of grain and seeds while I wonder again about the ethics behind killing species that out of fear, surprise, or plain hunger could kill one of my dogs. I know, of course, that in a year’s time twenty-six rattlesnakes eat hundreds of rats, and that alligators eat just as many turtles, who in turn eat just as many fish. But no matter how much I think about it, in the end, the safety of the dogs, like the safety of children, prevails. It has something to do with the humanization of pets.
I shot a yellow-bellied slider the first year I was here because I was told that there were too many turtles and they would eat all the bream. When the turtle blew up, I wondered what possessed me to do such a stupid thing and for a while I lost my mind. Perhaps it is a sign of abnormal times or simply a sign that my time is coming, but in either case, every year it is getting more difficult to kill. I need help in the matter, help from my dogs who so love to hunt the birds I so love to eat. In cases like this, I pray for fall to come quickly, before I forget how much I love to hunt, how maudlin I can get when I drink red wine, and that, on the average, quail live less than a year.