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Authors: Dick King-Smith

BOOK: Clever Duck
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“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.
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.

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