Free Enslaved by Ducks by Bob Tarte Page A

will.”
    “But you wouldn’t try to pet a wild dog, would you?”
    She had me there. Stanley was a wild-caught bird. Stolen from his nest and forced to undergo a miserable journey to America, Stanley had every reason to despise people. He hadn’t fared much better as a pet, enduring four different owners in just five years of life. How deeply these circumstances had affected him was clear from the eerie noise he produced each evening once we had covered his cage and switched out the lights.
    “What is that?” I asked Linda, turning down the volume on
Wheel of Fortune
’s “Bonus Round” the first time I heard what sounded like a person sobbing in our kitchen.
    The following day, our vet, Dr. Benedict, told me over the phone, “It’s amazing the range of vocalizations these birds can emit. They can imitate anything and everything from your voice to a ringing telephone. But you have to remember that those sobbing sounds are just air passing through his throat when his muscles are in a state of relaxation.”
    “So he’s not really crying?” I asked,
    “The phenomenon has no meaning,” he assured me in one of several potentially disastrous misdiagnoses of our pets. Though we trusted Dr. Benedict, we trusted our senses more. Stanley was clearly upset at having been thrust into yet another new environment with unfamiliar people. We did our best to put him at ease. Whenever one of us heard him sobbing, we would lift his cage cover and talk to him, reassuring him that he had finally found a home with easily manipulated humans who would cater to him for the rest of his life.
    The crying was so persistent throughout the summer, we warned our pet-sitter Hannah about it before leaving on vacation to SouthDakota, lest she think our home harbored a troubled ghost. Once we managed to breach the wall of Hannah’s phone calls to her boyfriend, she confirmed that our bird was continuing his crying jags. But things turned around when we returned. Stanley was relieved to see us and immediately seemed more relaxed. As soon as we flung open his cage door, he climbed on top, fluffed his feathers, and preened contentedly, eyeing us with the same affectionate attentiveness he had heaped on Lynn. That first night back, he didn’t cry. In fact, he never cried again. Instead of sobbing when he wanted his usual after-bed peanut, he summoned his servants by ringing his bell. Bell-clanging accompanied by squawks meant that the TV in the living room was too loud, or that we were otherwise disturbing his beauty sleep. If I retired him too early, his vocal with instrumental accompaniment flowed unabated, and I soon learned for all our sakes not to cover him up until he was good and ready.
    Stanley began slowly warming to us, and slow was the operative word. Far more reticent than Binky or even Ollie, Stanley was the teacher who relentlessly hammered home the true meaning of patience. Where Stanley was concerned, changes unfurled at a glacial, geological pace in which progress was measured by microscopic increments rather than discernible movement. One day I noticed that his cage lacked a perch close to the door. Maneuvering to the cage front from the single perch required him to climb horizontally around the cage walls, which struck me as awkward and inconvenient.
    Normally, I would have simply installed another perch. But the mere sight of a notched and smoothly sanded stick sent Stanley into a wing-flapping tizzy. Introducing this malevolent entity into his world required first positioning it nonchalantly on the chair beside his cage for a day or two. Once he had ceased his vigilance over the perch, I was able to slip it inside his cage and set it on thebottom grate, tucked up against the cage body, where it called the least amount of attention to itself. A few days later, I attached it to the bars at the level of the bottom grate. Over a week’s period, I gradually raised the perch an inch or so at a time, until finally it stood