Greg Stepanich

Requiem for a duck

To me, he was entirely beautiful, a miracle of design whose neck, head and bill were perfectly suited for his daily life, whose welcoming honks always followed the slamming of the car door as I came home each worknight.

But now he is gone, and I wanted to take this moment to remember and honor our wonderful bird friend, who came to visit our house in February 2002 and never left.

Our pet white Pekin duck, whom we always simply called Ducky, died July 8 after being badly wounded sometime early on the morning of July 4.

I woke up that day to go out and feed him and saw immediately, even from a distance, that something was wrong. He was floating in his larger of the two pools we had for him in the backyard, but he was barely moving. I ran over to him and saw that a large chunk of his neck was missing. It had been stripped of feathers and skin so that his internal muscles and tendons could clearly be seen, and there also appeared to be something wrong with his right wing.

I ran back into the house to get Sharon, and we tried to figure out how severely he'd been hurt, who or what had done it, and what we would do now. He was too weak to climb out of the pool like usual, so I bent down to scoop him up, and saw how drenched he really was. These are animals built to be buoyant on the water, but he was sinking.

I lifted him out of the pool, and he stood there for a long time, twitching and shivering. We immediately began calling around to veterinarians, looking for help, but it was July 4, and we weren't able to get anyone at first. We've lived here a while, and we know that there are emergency animal clinics all over the area, but we didn't take him to one of them right away.

I don't know why we didn't. I don't know why we waited.

We left him alone for a little while as we called various doctors, and then maneuvered him into a big cage we have for him but had never used, and deposited him on our screened-in porch. We tried to take a good look at him and see how bad things were, and for some reason that I will never be able to explain except to call it the stupidity of hope, we determined that he'd had a close call, but probably would make it.

And so we watched and waited, when what he really needed was immediate attention.

We finally did get him to a vet early the next morning, and they worked on him for a couple days, trying to clean him up, trying to make him eat. But his wounds were much deeper than we'd realized. The vet said originally it probably was a raccoon attack, but then said the puncture wound in his back was too big, and that more likely it was a dog.

It could also, we think, have been a fox, frightened and enraged by the continual barrage of fireworks that went on for days in our neighborhood before the Fourth. We'll never know for sure.

It became clear late on the night of the 7th, as Sharon held him in her arms — for the first time ever, since Pekins always run when you try to grab them — and I tried to clean his wounds and give him antibiotics, that he was getting worse and that there was little we could do, as the vet had warned us. So we took him to an all-night clinic down near Lauderdale, and they looked him over and agreed there wasn't much to be done except end his suffering.

And so, weeping, we said farewell.

People write about their pets a lot, and they always write when they're gone, and it's not very interesting to people who aren't involved. But like a lot of childless couples, our animals are the closest thing Sharon and I have to our kids, and they mean the world to us.

So I beg your indulgence as I pay this tribute.

If we had gotten Ducky treated right away, he would have had a better chance of surviving, and he might even now be recovering on our porch. And had I built a pen for him, like I meant to, so he could be safe from predators at night, he'd be with us still.

Friends have said that we gave him a good life; after all, he was wandering around the neighborhood the day we got him, and had he not stopped at our house, I don't think he would have gotten through the rest of the day unbruised.

But that doesn't help. I want to tell him how sorry I am that he was hurt, how much I feel that we let him down when he needed us most, and how helplessly we miss him.

It's astounding that these creatures can mean so much to us, but they do. I try to write about the better things of humanity when I write about music and literature, and it seems to me that caring about other animals with whom we share little but space fits into that same category, the one in which the reedeming qualities of humanity are listed.

And so:

In my mind's eye, it will always be a Saturday just after the big pool has been filled with fresh, cold water, Ducky's quacking impatiently for me to get out of the way, and then he slides in. He scratches the right side of his head with an orange foot, then dives, swimming around and around in circles, then shoots up to break the surface, quacking and slapping his wings on the surface of the water. I can watch him do this endlessly, fascinated by how perfectly he fits his environment, and how much he complements it.

What I see is joy, and what I feel is joy, and when I think about him, I will think of this.

And those Saturdays will go on forever.