Enslaved by Ducks by Bob Tarte Read Free Book Online

words, when the small green bird bent forward,he pinched the flesh of Linda’s finger in his beak as he pulled himself up with his foot. Linda laughed in surprise. Responding to Linda’s voice, the bird unleashed an amiable series of squeals and chirps. “You’re a friendly little guy,” said Linda, and the bird burbled back to her.
    “Let me hold him!” I begged, extending a finger in friendship to the cheerful bird who cheerfully leaned over and bit me with great gusto.
    “He’s just being possessive,” Joyce hastily explained, as I studied the neat pair of puncture marks below my knuckle. “He loves his people!” she assured us. “He loves his cage a lot, too,” she decided, snatching the bird from us and returning him to his perch before he could inflict another incision. Having worked up a hearty appetite biting a gullible pair of newcomers, the bird turned his attention to his seed dish.
    “So, what kind of bird did you say he is?” I asked, as I massaged my finger.
    “Violet, the store owner, isn’t here today,” Joyce apologized. When we begged her for a hint, she finally acceded, “I think he’s a peach face,” but no further explanation followed. The $150 price tag on its cage was more than we had intended on spending, but it seemed a shame to miss out on the chance to bring home a friendly bird who had only bitten me due to extraordinary circumstances that would never occur again. That must have been my thinking. Either that, or all the blood had rushed from my brain to my throbbing finger, because otherwise I never would have even considered such a Jekyll and Hyde of a bird. As it turned out, the dual nature of the misnamed “peach face” was precisely why it was one of the few birds in the store. Violet was out of town at an aviary show, and with her had gone all the well-behaved parrots, parakeets, and lovebirds.
    W E SHOULD HAVE KNOWN better than to trust the stock at Jonah’s Ark. A month or so before cockatiel fever struck, we had flirted with the idea of the budgie parakeet as our dream bird, but only if we could locate one that had been hand-raised, socialized, and hypnotized to enjoy close interactions with people. Violet assured us she had exactly such a bird and apologized for the high price of eighty dollars versus around twenty dollars anywhere else.
    “It takes a lot of work to bond a parakeet to humans,” she had explained, as she plucked a small blue budgie off its perch, “and this one is really special.” Almost at once, the bird squirmed from her grasp to lead the three of us on a floor-level chase around the store. If his wings hadn’t been clipped, we never could have caught him. “He’s just nervous,” she told us, when we had finally surrounded him near a refrigerator bearing a sign that read, LIVE BAIT , suggesting that the bird business at Jonah’s Ark wasn’t all that it could be. Both Linda and I made an attempt to get the bird to sit on our index fingers, but he thrashed with fear whenever we approached him.
    Our “peach face”—actually an orange-chin pocket parrot—responded to the car ride home with aplomb. Instantly taking to his cage, he hung from the bars while trying to dismantle his virgin birdie swing with a surgical application of his beak, ignoring the honking car horns and frequent stops and starts as we battled a spurt of rush hour traffic. We set him up in our living room, placing his cage on a plastic floor-standing pedestal whose base we had filled with twenty pounds of aquarium gravel to discourage our cat, Penny, from tipping over the stand. Within a couple hours of owning our parrot, Linda suggested the name, Ollie, which promptly stuck. At about the same time, I made a reluctant observation.
    “Am I imagining things,” I asked Linda, “Or does it seem like whenever we leave the room, Ollie starts chirping?”
    “I noticed that, too.”
    We exchanged a look of dread, hoping this was merely a coincidence.
    “Didn’t Violet