The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (24 page)

The girl bent down, reached for a rock, and, winding her arm back as far as she could, she set a sharp stone flying so high and hard it bonked the snapper on his slick scalp, so he saw stars, we’re sure, his mouth flapping open in surprise. And in that split second of surprise the baby swan slipped free while the disgruntled turtle regained his senses and stroked away from the scene with a few filaments of bird flesh for a snack. The swan pushed her wrecked head above the water, blood pouring from the beak bitten off.

There was so much blood it just kept coming, more blood than it seemed the body of a baby could possibly hold. And now people saw. They saw the girl standing there—she had started screaming—and they saw the ruined swan with its beak torn in two, swimming slowly to shore, leaving a trail of red and feathers in its wake.

The girl’s mother, who had heard the screams, came running, and she picked up the swan in one hand, the girl in the other and brought them both—along with the story I’ve just told—to the veterinary hospital where I was working during that difficult time in my life, my supervisor an eccentric man named Dr. Brumberg, who cursed his colleagues as corrupt, claiming they cared little for animals and much for money. Dr. Brumberg had wounded monkeys shipped to him from Brazil, and he had the hide of a bat hung on one office wall, its webbed wings pinned in place.

It was later on in the day when the girl and the mother brought in the bloody swan. Dr. Brumberg and I named her Ivory. Her white seemed all the whiter because of the blood streaked body.

Ivory, surely, would die. How, after all, can you save an animal whose beak has been torn from its face? How is the bird to eat, to drink, to laugh, which birds surely do, just listen. Listen in the morning, before the cars have started, when all the trees are full.

And then, on top of the physical problems, there were the political ones. A swan? How can a swan be political? During my year as a vet tech I learned there are extensive laws in place preventing
most
vets or anyone associated with them from treating wildlife, especially endangered species. Dr. Brumberg had told me how once, in Florida, he’d seen a wounded dolphin thrashing in the water, near to drowning. He’d pulled the dolphin to safety, only later to find himself penalized with a heavy fine, because dolphins are endangered.

A swan, of course, is not endangered, except when it is, as it was then. That was, however, only one of the barriers to care. More immediately pressing: cash. The perpetual question was cash.

Unlike a vet, a human doctor faced with a dying poor person in an emergency room would never risk his job because he treated the non-paying patient. State and federal funds exist for just such situations. I saw Dr. Brumberg though, several times, in trouble with his supervisors for treating animals—strays who desperately needed care but who had no payer tied to their tale. This is probably one reason why some studies have found that veterinarians are amongst the most unhappy of professionals, why they rank high in problems, with alcohol and suicide attempts. They are regularly faced with the impossible conundrum: save your job and violate your ethical mandate; honor your ethical mandate and risk losing your livelihood. It was, at least when I worked in the field, a wearying, repetitive problem that reared its head every time someone showed up with a sick stray or a child brought in a chipmunk.

Here then, was a white swan stained red and sticky with blood. If Dr. Brumberg treated the animal, his hospital would receive no funds. In fact, his hospital would lose funds, because there would be no way to ever replace the expended resources—the time, the medicine, the technology. But if he didn’t treat the animal it would hurt his heart, violate his morals, and, as he often told me, he’d grow sick in a way no human could ever heal.

But now, with the swan before us, we didn’t have time to think through all this. See—a baby bird! See—so much blood! What one does in such situations is simply act, both fluidly and thoughtlessly. The primary danger was one of infection. Dr. Brumberg started stitching; he put the baby on IV antibiotics. I helped thread a butterfly needle through the froth of feathers. Then another line for water. We found a box; we found bedding; then another line for pain.

I stepped back. Hours and hours had passed and I had no idea of how. When I looked up, night had fallen, fast.

I left the hospital later on that night and drove home, the roads doused in darkness and just a few stars scattered overhead. The moon was thin but bright, a curved bird beak set against the sky.

I wondered about the girl who had brought the swan in. The image of the swan molested by the turtle would probably stay with her for life, a little slice of horror. That is one way memories are made.

All around me, as I was driving, the woods lining the sides of the road were thrumming with life, seen and unseen. Behind the trees, miles into the green New England forests, there were deer and even coyotes; there were tawny chipmunks and moles in their underground tunnels. Farther out there were bears, big and brown, some slumbering in protracted hibernations, others up, swatting at prey with their huge mitted paws, their claws so sharp they could rip the face from a person in a single swipe. Fierce. Frightening. Beautiful. All creatures great and small, they surround us, for sure. And more shocking than their various pelts and tails and instincts is the very fact that they are here, that the planet is so populated by such a myriad of forms, that beneath our feet live millions of microbes and that in the rich gritty soil of our gardens are ecosystems spawned by slippery worms and snails in whorled shells. We talk about appreciating animals as though they were adjuncts, accessories to our lives. But we forget, or fail to ever learn—animals are our lives. If we were to lose the microbes thrumming in the dust you vacuum up each day, the planet would deflate like a big balloon. Even back then, before global warming was so much as a green glow on the horizon, I could—everyone could—see the intricate, impossibly possible connections between disparate forms of life. Dr. Brumberg saw. Save a swan and you save yourself.

I did not sleep well that night. These were times when often sleep eluded me, with the result that my dreams dried up. Sometimes I would stay awake the whole night through, listening to the church bells clang by the hour, listening to my clock tick by the minute, my mind empty of sleep’s greatest gift—those strange hybrid dreams where sounds come in color and colors seem to sing.

I tried to write about the swan, but my wording was weighted, awkward, and sentences slipped past me before I could secure them in my snapping flapping maw. In the mirror in the hall of my house I looked beastly to myself, greedy for something I could not name. I tossed and turned in bed. Although not yet summer, the mosquitoes seemed rampant, nibbling on my neck. When I finally fell into a fitful slumber it was early in the morning, and I swear I’d been under no more than seconds when an anguished cry cut through my dreaming and jolted me up right. What was it? Nothing. Silence and bugs. I was about to lie back down when the sound came again, this time more piercing than the last, the cry of an animal in anguish somewhere in the woods that fringed the yard, and this time the sound didn’t stop. It was stranger than anything I’d heard before. It was a cry, unearthly, in agony; it was a shriek of pain and protest, and it just went on and on, piercing the night. I tried but failed to imagine what could cause such distress, such unrelenting pain. I had the sense then that I sometimes did when I slipped beneath the surface and saw the horror of the ordinary, the cruelness in the quotidian. Eventually, maybe after an hour, or two, the cries ceased.

As soon as it was light enough I got out of bed, slipped my feet into my slippers, and plodded out across the dawn-moist yard to find the source of such sound. I thought there would be a carcass there, somewhere near my rented house, something quartered with its innards spilling out. But I found nothing. I searched the sky for vultures, but the sky was just a gentle blue, a barely blue, no sign yet of the sun. There was great pain but no particular place of emanation; I saw that then. One could not pin pain down. It would come and come from every direction, from any direction, and you could try to treat it, try to send some soothing, and you might get lucky and succeed. But pain was the one animal that could never be captured, trained or domesticated. It was a wild beast for sure, and it lived by laws we could not ever learn.

For these reasons—the sleeplessness, the beastly sound, the bugs nibbling at my neck—for these reasons I figured that I would find the baby swan dead in her enclosure at work. It would not have surprised me if she had failed to survive the night, what with half her head gone and a tube in her neck. I got to work early that day, turned the key in the door, entered the hospital’s hallways. Dr. Brumberg, indeed no other vets, had arrived yet. Dogs dreamt in their cages. A cat sat on its carpeted perch, her maple-colored eyes huge and glowing. I could hear my footsteps as I walked the long hall and then opened the door to the baby bird’s room. Inside: silence. The smell of scat and straw. “Ivory?” I called out. I clucked. No response. Slowly, I made my way over to where she was, looked over the edge of the box and saw her there, dead or sleeping, I wasn’t sure which.

“Ivory, Ivory,” I called and then I put my hand on her tiny, toy-sized body and felt the waxy warmth of the white feathers. Elation moved through me, slowly, like heat, it spread from my hands up my arms into my neck and up through my eyes until it seemed light was coming out of my eyes. This is what it means to beam. You find the baby bird alive. You feel the waxy warmth of feathers. You watch as the cygnet wakes up, one swollen lid slowly opening to reveal the dark ink drop of the pupil floating.

“Lauren, Lauren,” someone called.

Dr. Brumberg’s supervisor, and mine by extension as well. Dr. Proctor. He owned the practice. His picture hung in the hall. “Lauren,” he called, beckoning me from where he stood in the shadow of his open door.

I met him in his office. “The swan has survived the night,” I said.

He was a good man, Dr. Proctor, but here’s the problem: not good enough.

“We can’t keep the bird here,” he said.

He told me to turn her out.

“But I can’t do that,” I said. “I’m just a tech.”

“Precisely why you can,” Dr. Proctor said. “And will,” he added.

“She’s not my patient,” I tried again. “She’s Dr. Brumberg’s—”

“Turn her out,” Dr. Proctor repeated.

“But she’ll die,” I said, and then I had tears in my eyes and was squeezing my toes.
Don’t cry. Die. Don’t cry. Die.

“And if she lives, Lauren,” Dr. Proctor said, “what do you think will happen to your swan if she lives?”

“The swan wants to live,” I said. “It’s clear. She has the will to live.”

“No,” Dr. Proctor said. “She has the
instinct
to live. But here’s the problem with instinct. It is devoid of intelligence. You save that swan and you are consigning her to a life of misery, a life where she will be unable to survive on her own, unable to catch food, unable to mate. Do you call that ethical? Whose pain are you really trying to treat?”

The world is full of intelligent Homo sapiens who even as they propel a heinous argument make excellent points. How is that we humans are capable of thinking excellently about actions so dishonorable? Is this where we cross the line from rational to rationalizing creatures? True, if you looked at the situation from the perspective of pure logic, Proctor’s points were worth tucking under one’s big beret. Might it be better to have no life than a life so mangled it dispirits and despairs? One can endlessly balance the odds, tweak the scale, move this weight here and that there, but in the very end, the scale itself is the problem. I believe there are whole systems of celestial logics we have yet to unravel, and that there are ethical mandates that come from a place beyond what we can easily figure. Sometimes I think I know what it means to be human. You have to care. Side with life. It’s terribly, terribly simple.

Vets don’t treat wildlife for three reasons: money and law and some sort of ethics based on some sort of limited logic that says it is sometimes better to “let nature take its course.” How silly. Is medical intervention outside of nature? Is anything, ever, outside of nature? You show me something that does not arise from nature while I wait. And wait.

In the meantime, there are things to tend to and care for. First and foremost, Ivory needed to eat. She had been almost twenty-four hours now without food or water. I tried feeding her crushed grass, fish sticks, but the beak didn’t work and food would not find its way to her mouth. Dr. Brumberg arrived soon after. He inserted a tube straight into the small swan stomach and got her nutrients to her that way.

And it worked. Ivory grew bigger and plumper, filling out measurably, day after day. Her pain subsided, and Ivory began to waddle around her cage, dragging her wings behind her. Feathers floated up in the sunlit air. I sometimes scratched her long, looped neck, and like a dog or a cat she leaned into the feeling, taking pleasure, her eyes half closing as she drifted into swan-sleep. Other times, Dr. Brumberg would have me fill a tub with cool water and place her in it, and she would paddle her feet fast, circling around and around, her eyes bright and dancing. She never made a sound—she was a mute swan, because a bird needs a beak to sing. But I could tell, when Ivory heard the sound of water rumbling in the tub, I could tell she was singing in her mind, singing with her eyes. She would telescope her head up over the enclosure and look for the source of the water. She would hop into my hands with eagerness, knowing it was time for a bath. I would cradle her, carry her into the bathroom, set her gently down on her aquatic playground. Sometimes she twirled in place, like a ballerina spinning on tiptoe, she would twirl and twirl, making a whirlpool of the water, her eyes closed, as though she were remembering some other place.

In one of my favorite Greek myths that was read to me as a child, Zeus, infuriated with Leda, who spurned his advances, turned into a magnificent white swan with a huge wingspan and, flapping down from his regal perch in a pear tree, wooed Leda in disguise. In this version, Leda falls in love with the swan and marries him, living with him happily ever after, not ever knowing that her spouse is the man she rejected.