Brave little goldfish are survivors




 

 

When someone asks you to pet-sit, it’s a serious responsibility— even if it’s just a self-reliant indoor/outdoor cat and a couple of teensy goldfish.

The goldfish were in an open container in my friend’s backyard, with a little water recirculating motor from a defunct fountain placed in the container to keep the water fresh.

Her home is on a wooded lot in rural Agoura, an area known as prime raccoon-fishing territory. She was new to the area and a bit naive, and soon her setup became the masked marauders’ private sushi bar.

She started with six adorable little goldfish. By the second day of my house/pet-sitting, there were only two left. The container had been roughly invaded. The wee motor had been knocked out of the container and some water plants upended.

I peered sadly into the container’s depths and was startled to see two terrified multicolored fish under a decorative rock wreathed in fake moss. They resembled tiny versions of the huge koi in the Japanese section of Gardens of the World in Thousand Oaks.

In a bid to protect the sole survivors, I placed a patio chair over the container each night. That thwarted a return raccoon raid until my friend came home between trips and decided chicken wire placed over the top of the container would foil the sushi seekers. Unfazed by her losses, she bought another half-dozen goldfish before taking off again.

“They’re only 35 cents each. I’m not emotionally attached to them, as you seem to be,” she said.

The night of her departure there was a tremendous clamor. In the morning, the chicken wire had been peeled back with a surgeon’s dexterity. The container appeared entirely fished out. How could such skinny morsels even pose temptation to a zaftig raccoon?

When I went to drain the fishless container, I was surprised to again find two terrified goldfish remaining. They were hiding in the deepest recesses.

“I’ll save you!” I promised. At night, I resumed covering their abode with the patio chair, which was heavy and difficult to displace. Each morning I removed the chair and searched anxiously for the pair. I put down their fish flakes to no response. I looked for corpses, trapped or floating, but there remained no sign of them.

Then I realized my looming shadow and the sound of my voice—which probably blared like a bullhorn to them—were adding further fear to the traumatized pair. It took more than a week before I spotted the two for a split second.

They fled at the sight of me. Another week of zero sightings passed, then one bright orange fish flitted across the container to snare a flake of food.

It didn’t matter to me that these were 35-cent, so-called “feeder fish” to be fed live by humans to other creatures (but not raccoons), or that they lived not in a fancy tank but in a vulnerable outdoor pot snugged beneath a bulky patio chair. What mattered was that they were alive despite their travails. It’s amazing what a human can learn about resilience from a pair of brave little fish.

Reach Gloria Glasser at whirlawaygig@gmail.com.