Orcasional Musings | The Peacock

— Orcasional Musings by Steve Henigson —

Long ago and far away—well, maybe about 15 years ago and across Horseshoe Highway from the golf course—a neighbor kept an avian menagerie of sorts. The most visible of its exhibits was her guinea hens, who were always crossing the road to find out what was on the other side, and who always seemed to forget that cars don’t stop for chickens. Many an Orcasian automobile’s chrome grille became gaily decorated with pretty black-and-white guinea hen feathers.

Less often seen, but still a formidable presence, was a huge and well-fed peacock, glossy, iridescently blue of neck, and magnificently full-tailed. The peacock, although a bird brain, had sufficient native intelligence to stick around where the food was plentiful and good, and, at least for most of the time, declined to go a-travelling.

However, in spring a young peacock’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love; alas, that love was destined to remain continually unrequited. If there was one thing that Orcas Island was well known to lack, it was even one peahen.

But he never gave up trying. Once a year, rain or shine, free food or no food, that peacock set his little mind upon the task of discovering a suitable mate. And if that meant travel, then travel was what he would do.

Invariably, his first stop was to check out the large flock of Canada geese which to this day seasonally inhabit the golf course. The conversation must have been interesting and enlightening, since the geese are keen and critical observers of the old Scottish game but, somehow, these visits never led to a date with a suitably feathered young lady. So our hero pressed on.

His next stop, which for some reason was always his last stop, was at our house. Perhaps it’s because our house is painted dull green, a color which has always been a feature of peahen neckwear. At any rate, every year the peacock decided that our house was to be the limit of his travels, and here he stopped, and here he cried his lovelorn cry.

The mating call of the peacock can best be described as the cry of a child who is being tortured with the nastier instruments of the Spanish Inquisition. After a few hours of this, repeated frequently, my own wife expressed herself more than willing to volunteer to mate with him, just to get him to shut up. While that may indeed have added an interesting variation to our married life, it was unfortunate that she was the wrong shape and the wrong color, and the peacock would have nothing to do with her.

Every year, we would telephone his owner with an arrival report, and every year she would drive over to retrieve him. Evidently his one annual excursion was so disheartening to him that he wouldn’t try another—until the next year, when hope would once again spring eternal.

During one springtime, we were having some kitchen remodelling done, and the workmen left the door open as they carried things in and out. The peacock, unsatisfied with the lack of response he was getting on the outside of our house, decided that perhaps he should try inside as well. Maybe the echo-chamber effect encouraged him, or it might have been something else, but, no matter how he was approached, he absolutely refused to leave.

It is difficult to remodel a kitchen with a lovelorn peacock underfoot, not to mention what a lovelorn, or indeed any, peacock deposits on the floor as he passes by. Finally, the finish carpenter, a man of broad experience, had had enough. He cornered the bird inside our pantry, deftly reached past his pecking bill, grabbed him by the feet, and turned him upside-down. The peacock instantly went catatonic and limp, the carpenter tucked his head under his wing, turned him right-side-up, and held him, fast asleep, while I phoned his owner and she came and got him.

That was the last time we saw the peacock. I think that he must have felt insulted at the treatment he had received, and thus he decided that eternal bachelorhood was preferable to being handled so ignominiously.