Quackers earned the family respect and admiration by winning the titles of Monterey County Fair Champion Water Fowl and Best of Show in Poultry Division awards. He gave us excitement (chased children and wild animals from our yard), money (won $14 from the County Fair), and fertilizer (everywhere he waddled in the yard and on the deck), but the lovable Quackers, pet extraordinaire and award-winning duck, met an untimely death in the form of a neighborhood dog (or raccoon or skunk or possum or cat—the duck had many enemies) in early fall.
I will never know what beast the duck encountered, yet I have no doubt that there was quite a struggle. Judging by the down feathers and fur floating in the air and on the trees, the blood-stained dirt, the trampled bushes, Quackers must have inflicted his share of wounds upon the perpetrator (as he did on all of us). As the sayings go, “He who lives by the sword must die by the sword” or “All bills must be paid.” The duck attacked everyone, except perhaps Dale—the alpha male of our flock, who dared enter his domain. In fact, the night before he died, Quackers brutally bit a skunk on the nose. I knew what was going to happen next, so I darted out the garage and into the backyard, which, of course, meant the duck now had to chase yet another invader from his yard. I owned the house; the duck owned the yard. He quacked, released the skunk’s nose, and went after me. The next day the duck died and we sobbed.
We received the call from our whimpering children who arrived first and witnessed the carnage. It has taken years of therapy to relieve them of the trauma. Though the girls considered Quackers a general nuisance, avoiding him at all costs, their phone call betrayed their true feelings, “Ducky’s dead. He’s dead.” I cried with them. He was fodder for many a story—shoot—he could have been an entire book.
Dale and I drove quickly home to bury Quackers beneath our fruit trees, a veritable orchard and pet cemetery in our yard. Beneath each fruit tree (and we have dozens) lie the pet remains of cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, hamsters, and now our duck. The cemetery also includes random animals that did not escape our yard, such as the possum that fell into our pool and died. Dale had skinned several of our previously dead animals, just like out of those crazy, southern backwoods shows on television. Rex, our 4H show rabbit who died years before, was our first model, with a hide we deemed too precious to waste. Dale skinned that thing, stretched and salted it, and we both used the sample fur for years in our biology classrooms. In fact, I passed the “skinning” technique on to my biology classes, as we “harvested” the hides of fetal pigs from dissection, using them for hacky-sacks or mini-footballs (pigskins for pigskins).
But, Quackers’s death was different. The wafting down feathers might have made a pillow or jacket, but not this time. Quackers required a deep hole and resting place near the plum-tree and beneath his old swimming pool–a place we could visit every afternoon and stay as long as we wanted. No one would chase us from the yard again and we would miss this.
Love is Complicated 