Clever Duck Read online

  Not half a mile on, they came upon an open gateway and, beyond it, a fine crop of sugar beets.

  Eagerly the hungry pigs fell upon this bonanza, tearing and swallowing the green leafy tops and ripping great chunks out of the sweet roots in the ground beneath, eating and eating until at last they could hold no more, and even the General was speechless.

  They lay in the ruined crop and snored, and none of them saw a brown-and-white duck flying over the sugar-beet field.

  “Looks like they’ve struck it lucky,” Damaris told Rory when she arrived back at the farm.

  “Took me a bit of time, but when I did find them, they’d gorged themselves in a field of roots and were all lying there, blown out like balloons.”

  “Good,” said Rory. “The happier they are, the less they’ll want to come back here. We don’t want things to go wrong for them so that they start to wish they were safely back in their old paddock.”

  But it was not long before things started to go very wrong indeed for the General and his wives.

  At first it looked as though he had led them to the promised land, so well did they feed. For a day and a half they stuffed themselves with sugar beets and sugar-beet tops. There was even a pond in the corner of the field, where they could drink and wallow. But then they began to pay the price.

  “I don’t know why, dear,” said Mrs. Portly to Mrs. Stout, “but my guts feel funny.”

  “Mine too,” said Mrs. Stout, and the other sows grunted agreement.

  Mrs. O’Bese did not mince her words.

  “I’ve got the trots,” she said, and before long they all had, the General included.

  “In my opinion,” he said uncomfortably, “this unfortunate condition has been caused by an imprudent consumption of the fresh green tops of the sugar beets, acting as a purgative.”

  “Tops or bottoms,” said Mrs. O’Bese, “I know which end of me is worse off. Come on, General, let’s be getting out of here.”

  So they did, marching off once more down the road and leaving upon its surface plentiful evidence of their troubles.

  But worse was to come.

  That afternoon the pigs reached the outskirts of a village. So far their journey had been through a countryside of few houses and isolated farms, but now they came upon a signpost saying

  MUDDLEHAMPTON 1/2

  And shortly after that, there was an open gateway with a sign, which read

  MUDDLEHAMPTON CRICKET CLUB

  PRIVATE

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

  But just how prosecuted they were about to be, the General and his followers were yet to realize.

  Beset by their troubled stomachs, the sows turned in at the gateway. Beyond, they could see, was a large and well-mown field with, at its far end, a single-storied wooden building in front of which a lot of people were sitting in deck chairs.

  In the middle of the field were a number of other people all dressed in white.

  As the pigs drew nearer, they could see one of these white-clad people appear to throw an object at another, who struck at it with a kind of wooden cudgel. The spectators began to clap, and there were cries of “Good shot!” and “Well hit!” while the umpire at the bowler’s end prepared to signal what looked like a certain four-pointer. But before the ball could reach the boundary, it reached the General, who fielded it neatly in his great jaws and started thoughtfully to chew it. Meanwhile, the sows began to root about in the well-kept grass, plowing their way purposefully toward the pitch, while the shocked players stood as though turned to stone.

  All eyes were on the pigs. No one noticed a brown-and-white duck circling overhead.

  Then pandemonium broke loose as both the Muddlehampton First XI, who were fielding, and the two visiting batsmen sprang into action. The visitors led the charge, brandishing their bats, while with them ran six of the fielders, each waving a hastily uprooted wicket pole, while the rest of the cricketers, plus the two umpires, rushed to join the fray.

  The General and his wives galloped wildly about, squealing their dismay and leaving behind them in their fright much evidence of their recent unwise feasting.

  Smack! went the bats on fat bottoms. Crack! went the stumps on broad backs, while several of the pursuing cricketers slipped and fell, adding a quite new color to their snowy flannels. Until at last the invaders were driven out, and the match abandoned.

  Muddlehampton’s scorer was a stickler for the truth, and solemnly he wrote in his scorebook, Pigs stopped play.

  5

  Mr. Crook

  Damaris had not yet returned to the farm after the scene on the cricket ground. She was a fairminded bird, and as annoying as she had thought the pigs in the past, she began to feel sorry for them as they hurried off, now sore outside as well as inside. I must keep an eye on them for as long as I can, she thought. Perhaps someone else will give them a home.

  And, shortly, someone else did.

  Among the spectators at the cricket match was a local livestock dealer called Crook, a name, some said, that suited him well, for some of his deals were a trifle shady.

  As the General and his wives retreated, squealing, before the onslaught of bat and wicket pole, Mr. Crook wasted no time but slipped behind the pavilion and out of the grounds, making his hasty way across the fields to his yard, a little distance beyond the village. Thus it was that the angry sows (for by now each blamed the General for her bellyaches and her bruises) and their defeated leader heard a familiar and most welcome sound.

  “Pig! Pig! Pig! Pig!” crooned Mr. Crook, appearing in the lane before them, rattling a bucket, and the General and his wives eagerly followed. In through a gate they went, across a yard, and into a pen.

  As Mr. Crook closed the lower part of the stout door behind them and bolted it, he heard a quacking, and looking up, he saw a brown-and-white duck flying around.

  He thought nothing of it, for he was too busy reckoning in his head what a Large White boar and seven sows might fetch. He leaned on the half door and addressed them.

  “You lot can stop here,” he said, “till the fuss has died down, and if your owner should come looking, I’ll just say I was keeping you safe for him. Then, after a while, I’ll take you to market, not the local one, but a good way away. Easiest money I’ve made in a long time. Now then, it looks to me as if you’ve been eating summat you shouldn’t. Starvation’s the best cure for that sort of trouble, so no grub for you lot for a bit.” And off he went.

  Once he was out of sight, Damaris flew down to the pen. It isn’t easy for ducks to perch like chickens, but the top of the half door was quite wide, and she managed to balance on it. Inside, there was a babble of noise, and it was plain to Damaris, listening, that the General was no longer in command.

  “Now look what you’ve gotten us into,” said one sow.

  “First you walk the legs off us!”

  “Then you let us eat all those sugar-beet tops!”

  “And we get the trots!”

  “Then we get beaten black and blue with clubs and sticks!”

  “And finish up in this poky little hole!”

  “With nothing to eat!”

  “Ladies! Ladies! Please!” The boar snorted, but they took no notice of him.

  “Calls himself a general,” someone said. “A general disaster, he is!”

  Not until the rumpus had died down did the sows notice Damaris perching on the half door.

  “Begorra,” said Mrs. O‘Bese, “isn’t that the duck that knew the meaning of ‘ignoramus’? She’s a clever duck, that one is.”

  “Thank you,” said Damaris.

  She rather liked Mrs. O’Bese, she suddenly realized. Her heart, Damaris felt, was warmer than those of the others.

  “Isn’t it the lucky duck you are,” went on Mrs. O’Bese. “You can just fly home tonight. I wish I could. I wish we were all back home, well fed and housed in our old paddock, free to roam around and root about in the fresh air, instead of being stuck in this prison.”
r />   And a secure prison it looked to be. The floor was of concrete, and the strong wooden door, which opened inward, was faced with a large sheet of tin. No pig would ever be able to force it open.

  “I’m beginning to feel sorry for them,” Damaris said to Rory the next morning, when she had told him all that had happened.

  “I don’t care about the pigs,” said Rory, “but I’m beginning to feel sorry for the farmer. He’s worried stiff, you can see it, driving about all over the place, every minute he can spare, looking for them.”

  “What are we to do?” said Damaris.

  “We’re going to have to tell the farmer where they are.”

  “Oh, yes, and just how do we do that?”

  Just then there came a shrill whistle.

  “Here we go,” said Rory. “You think of something, Damaris. If anyone can, you can.”

  Luvaduck, thought Damaris, I′m not that clever.

  The farmer and his wife were sitting at breakfast the next morning.

  “Where are you going to look today, Jim?” asked the farmer’s wife.

  “Don’t really know, Emma,” said the farmer. “I’ve been everywhere—Muddlehampton, Muddlebury, Muddlechester, Upper Muddle, Lower Muddle.”

  At that moment they heard a tapping noise, and there, sitting on the windowsill outside and banging on the pane with her bill, was a brown-and-white duck.

  “Whatever’s she doing that for, silly thing?″ said the farmer’s wife.

  “Oh, that’s Rory’s pal, that is. Thick as thieves, they are. Never known a dog to chum up with a duck before. You’d have thought Rory would have had more sense,” said the farmer, and he rose and threw up the window sash.

  “What do you want, stupid?” he said.

  To answer, Damaris let out a volley of excited quacks and flew away in the direction of Muddlehampton, calling loudly all the time.

  “Perhaps she’s trying to tell you something, Jim,” said the farmer’s wife.

  “Oh, come on, Emma!” he replied. “Next thing you’ll be saying she knows where the pigs are.″ And he shut the window.

  Looking back, Damaris could see that no notice had been taken of her signals.

  That afternoon Damaris flew all the way back to Mr. Crook’s yard and landed once again on top of the half door of the pen. The pigs, she saw, now had a thick bed of straw, so at least they looked a good deal cleaner.

  “Hallo,” she said. “How are things?”

  “Terrible!” said a chorus of voices. “There’s no room to move in here.”

  “Not even to swing the proverbial cat,” said the General. “I fear that some of us are—what can I say?—getting on each other’s nerves.”

  “You’re getting on everyone’s nerves!” the sows shouted at him.

  “See here, clever duck,” said Mrs. O’Bese. “Can’t you help us?”

  “I’ve tried,” Damaris said, “but I can’t think of a way.″

  “You wouldn’t,” said Mrs. Stout. “You’re not intelligent enough.”

  “Quite right, dear,” said Mrs. Portly.

  Just then Damaris heard the noise of a door shutting on the other side of the yard.

  There Mr. Crook used a shed as his office, and looking through its window, he had seen a duck perched on the half door of the pen. Mr. Crook was very fond of ducks (with apple sauce and garden peas and new potatoes), and now he came out into the yard with his shotgun.

  Damaris turned her head to see the man carrying what looked like a thick stick under his arm, and she took off and flew hurriedly up. No sooner had she aimed herself in the direction of home than she heard a tremendous bang and felt, all at the same time, the blast of the charge of shot as it whistled by her and a sudden agonizing pain in one wing.

  6

  The Pig Breeders’ Gazette

  There had been only one thought in Damaris’s head and that had been of flight, to get away, as quickly and as far as possible, from the menace of the man with the gun. But flight was now beyond her powers.

  Unbalanced, beating wildly but fruitlessly with her one good wing, Damaris tumbled out of the sky.

  Yet she was destined to be lucky.

  Through the valley in which all the villages lay ran the river Muddle, and into it, mercifully, Damaris now fell with a great splash. Though she could no longer fly, she could swim, and she paddled hastily away.

  By the time Mr. Crook reached the riverbank, intending to finish off his wounded prey, Damaris was nowhere to be seen.

  Again by luck, the farm lay downstream from Muddlehampton, so that she was swimming with the current. But after some time her homing instincts told her that soon she would be carried too far. I can’t fly, she said to herself, and there′s no point in swimming any farther or I will end up in the sea, so I must get out and walk.

  Normally she would have made for home the shortest way—as the crow, or, in this case, the duck, flies. But that would have meant tramping across country through hedges and over fences and standing crops, so she went as a human would have done, by road. And still, as if to make up for misfortune, her luck held. Ducks are some of the world’s worst walkers, and after almost a mile of waddling, Damaris was tiring rapidly, her injured wing throbbing, her legs aching, her head beginning to spin, when she heard the sound of an approaching motor.

  There, coming toward her, was the farmer’s pickup truck.

  As it reached her, it stopped, and Rory leaped down from the back and ran to her.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “I’ve been shot,” said Damaris.

  “What’s the matter, Rory?” called his mother, Tess.

  “She’s been shot,” said Rory.

  “What’s the matter, duck?” said the farmer, getting down from his cab.

  “I’ve been shot,” quacked Damaris, and “She’s been shot,” barked the two sheepdogs, but, of course, he did not understand. She was hurt though—he could see that—and the farmer carefully picked her up and put her on the passenger seat and turned for home.

  “I reckon this bird’s been shot, Emma,” he said to his wife as he brought the duck into the kitchen. “It’s a funny thing, but about an hour ago, Rory here came into the milking barn whining and whimpering as though he was worried stiff about something.”

  “He knew his friend was in trouble, you mean, jim?”

  “Could be. Animals know things we couldn’t know. Hold her a minute while I have a look at this wing.”

  Gently he stretched it.

  “Don’t think anything’s broken,” he said. “Ah, look, I see. I was right, someone’s had a bang at her. There’s a little cluster of shot right in the angle of the wing joint. Can you see, little black things just under the skin?”

  He looked at his watch.

  “The vet won’t have finished his afternoon appointments yet,” he said. “Come on, duck, off we go again.”

  The vet extracted all the pellets and then bandaged Damaris right around the middle, pinning both wings to her sides. Still woozy from the anesthetic, she spent that night in a large cardboard box beside the wood stove

  “We don’t want her flapping about, not for a day or two,” the vet had said. “Give things time to heal. She’s been lucky.”

  By morning Damaris felt like a different duck. Her injured wing was stiff and sore, but she was safe and at home and well looked after. The farmer and his wife fed her and fussed over her, and even Tess bothered to look into the box and say, “Better?”

  As for Rory, his concern for his friend was so obvious that the farmer decided to excuse him from duty.

  The farmer’s wife came and lifted Damaris out of the cardboard box; she had lined it with newspapers that were by now extremely messy, and she replaced them with a fresh layer.

  It so happened that one of these was a magazine, an old copy of the Pig Breeders’ Gazette, and when Damaris was replaced in the box, she noticed what she was about to sit on.

  The print, of course, meant nothing to
her—“Large White Boar Wins Supreme Championship at the Royal Show” was to her a lot of little black squiggles—but the picture below immediately caught her eye.

  It was the spitting image of the General.

  Something clicked in Damaris’s unusually large brain.

  Here was a way to communicate with the farmer!

  Not by word of mouth—she couldn’t speak to him.

  Not by her actions—she had tried flying away and calling to him to follow, but in vain.

  But how about a pictorial message? Show him the picture!

  “Rory,” she said, “look in here.″

  Rory peered into the box.

  “It’s a picture of a pig,” he said.

  “Yes. Can you get it out?”

  Damaris stood to one side as the sheepdog put his head into the box and carefully picked up the magazine in his mouth.

  “Put it on the floor, pig upward,” she said.

  He did.

  “Now, do you see what I’m getting at?”

  “No.”

  “Listen then.”

  Rory listened as Damaris explained her idea.

  Then he said, “Brilliant! But are they clever enough to get the message?”