Scrawl-Shorts: Duck Strings

Gabon Stone never struck me as an irrational man. His ways were neat, his house keeping habits the same. Every aspect of his life was so confoundingly concise that it seemed almost a waste of time. Well, that is, until that memorable day when he called me at 3:20 in the morning and had me join him in a nearby park.

Now, don't get me wrong, it wasn't the phone call that unnerved me. No. It was the purpose of the untimely greeting that struck my curiosity to the point of concern. He began talking about ducks, mallards to be precise, and the things he had been learning about them in the past week of doing supposedly nothing. What had brought my dear friend to the point of studying birds was beyond me. Maybe it was an unfulfilled childhood dream or a...well...whatever you call it when a person goes temporarily funny in the head for no reason. Never mind.

When I got to the park, Gabon was crouched down in the smooth bank that rolled down into the shallow pond bed. Apparently he had been trying to tempt the birds with food of some sort and, after half an hour of no luck, stood to meet me with a handshake and an awkward little thing immediately afterward which I don't believe he realized I was unfamiliar with. "Take a look at this." he said as a moistened hand raised up a white string with a bit of meat tied to the end of it. "Bacon," said Gabon, swinging the object lightly from side to side. I gathered from the time he continued to stare at the dangling breakfast meat, that this week had been more dull for him than I thought.

While following him over to the grassy shore of the pond, I watched him pick up a handful of small pebbles from the walking path and sling a few of them over to the ducks that were nesting in a patch of reeds. Within minutes of this, the mallards were all out on the surface of the water, squawking and beating their wings against each other. Needless to say that this woke the people that lived by the water front and induced hollering and tossing of fairly large and heavy objects down the embankment as encouragement to "...shut the hell up!!"

When the birds got control of their emotions, Gabon took me down to the water and began unwinding a long string that soon proved to be an extention of the segment that I'd been introduced to before. With wonder and much confusion on my part, he threw it out to the ducks and began dragging it back in. It was just like fishing except that there was no pole, it was in an urban pond instead of a mountain stream and these were...well, ducks.

Gabon continued at this for some time before one of the mallards realized that "Hey! There's food flying around in front of my face. Maybe I should eat it." It hastily swallowed the bacon and swam merrily around in circles with the string still hanging out of its mouth. At first I felt that Gabon hadn't noticed this improvement in his effort. Then I saw a grin spreading across his face and he pointed slowly to the water where the duck still swam in little circles.

To my amazement, I saw the slice of bacon bobbing around the water directly behind it. However, before I got a better look, a second duck swam in and ate it without any perceivable hesitation. I turned to a smug looking Gabon Stone who couldn't take his eyes off the ducks. A psychotic gleam permeated his gaze as, one-by-one, the mallards partook of the stringed ham.

Plagued by curiosity I asked him why this was happening but he just sat there and chuckled softly as the birds attached themselves to his toy of the week. This was his response to the next eight questions I asked but when I implored as to what he was going to do about Mr. Gardener, the caretaker of the park, and the owner of the flock, he simply said, "I'll see what I can come up with."

When all the ducks had managed to get strung up, Gabon stood and began waving the string back and forth. The only way that the sight could be described as is bizarre. A flock of 13 mallards all attached to each other by a thin white string being dragged around by a guy that was so insanely bored that he would bother researching this sort of thing. While Gabon seemed absorbed with the situation, I decided to myself that this was all fun and inhumane, but that sleep would be a good thing to have had for work the next morning and so I ducked out (no pun intended).

***

The next day I asked a biologist on my lunch break about ducks and ham. To my surprise, the answer to last nights question about "why" was that mallards can't digest the salt on bacon. Because of this, the meat passed right through their digestive tract and popped out the other end in much the same form as it had been when it went in. This was just one of the many things that I later filed in my office under a folder labeled "useless information".

When I got home that day, there were 3 messages on my answering machine. The first one was the usual: "Hello, I need to borrow/talk to you about this or that. I erased it immediately. The second one was a message from an old, not-quite-friendly acquaintance turned IRS representative who was threatening to reposses my house. That one was gone before the first sentence...but the last one was from Gabon. I turned up the volume to hear what he had to say after last night.

"Hey there, just calling to say that I didn't forget what you said last night about Mr. Gardener. Yeah, I'm at his house right now. This is kind of cool. I managed to get both him and his wife strung together while we were having dinner this afternoon. Interesting really. Maybe you could come down sometime soon and check it out..."