We had ducks when I was a kid. When I was 6 or 7, my dad brought home 3 yellow furry ducklings. In fact, I remember going with him to Berend Brothers (our local farm outfitter) where they had these crates of chipring yellow fuzballs. '3 Please.' He told the man. The duck-seller proceeded to place our new familial additions in a little cardboard box with holes in it, so we could keep an eye on the little guys of course! The whole ride home, I would peak into the box. The peep-peep-peeping little guys would all cock their heads to see what and who I was, probably wondering where mom went too.
Keeping the ducklings in teh bathtub for the first few days worked fairly well. It turns out that baby ducks are two things: 1. Noisy and 2. Stinky!
So, my Pop chose a spot out at the back of our property under an old mulberry tree. The thinking being that the shade would be a nice place to raise them. Together we assembled a spacious 10x10x6 cage and covered it with chicken wire, to keep our birds in and the predators out. It was dry and dusty but the little guys thrived. They grew so fast in fact that it seemed as though it happened while I watched. As they got older and their tastes widened, we began to realize why the mulberry tree hadn't been as ideal as we had considered. Ducks poop. Everything does. Like any bird, duck poop is messy, but duck poop on feed and mulberries is a whole other category of messy! Still, they were our birds and I loved them. I would sit at school and wonder what they were doing while I was cooped up in the stodgy, boring old classroom. In hindsight, they probably wondered the same thing about me!
While they were still young, I came home from school one day to find one of the little guys lying still on the ground. I poked him with a stick thinking he might just be asleep. But none of my encouragement to wake up made a bit of difference.
"He's dead Mike." My dad told me. "We'll have to bury him."
So, we chose a spot next to the porch, outside the dining room window. Placed his little body in a cardboard box and dug a hole in which to bury him.
Naturally, in the days that followed I'd just sit at dinner and stare out at the fresh dirt, thinking of what death must be like and wondering how come the ground didn't fill up with dead bodies. Did he turn into bones? Would he make a plant grow? Would he become dust, like the Bible said?
After a week, I couldn't take it any more. I rushed home from school and grabbed a shovel. The box was still intact and I was disturbed to find that my little duckling was now a duck-mummy and was throwing a party with a whole box full of bugs! I tossed the whole kit back into the hole it had come out of and pushed the dirt back over. I never got curious about the dead again!
