Clever Duck

by Dick King-Smith

  “You got it,” said Damaris, “and they’re supposed to be more intelligent than any dog.”

  “Or even a pig.”

  “And certainly any duck.”

  “Except one,” said Rory proudly.

  The farmer’s wife came into the kitchen.

  “Go on, Rory,” quacked Damaris softly.

  Rory began to bark excitedly. He bounced around beside the Pig Breeders’ Gazette, putting a paw on the picture, scratching at it, pointing his muzzle at it, doing everything in his power to get the woman to look at it.

  She did.

  “What’s the matter, Rory?” she said.

  The farmer came in.

  “What’s the matter with Rory?” he said.

  “He’s trying to tell us something.”

  At that moment Damaris joined in. She could not flap her wings because of the bandaging, but she quacked as loudly as she could. The farmer’s wife lifted her out of the cardboard box and put her down on the floor beside the magazine, and Damaris began to tap with her bill upon the picture of the Supreme Champion Large White.

  “She’s trying to tell us something, too,” she said. “About our pigs, it must be.”

  “There you go again, Emma,” the farmer said. “Trying to tell me that these two know where the pigs are.”

  “Remember what you said, Jim. ‘Animals know things we couldn’t know.’ Those were your very words.”

  “Yes, but I was talking about a dog like Rory. There’s no such thing as a clever duck, not outside of a children’s storybook.”

  7

  Market Day

  “Anyway,” said the farmer, “I’d best be off on my usual search. I must have looked in almost every field in this valley. Someone must have them shut up somewhere.”

  “You’re just taking Tess?” his wife said.

  “Yes.”

  But as he went out of the kitchen, Rory followed, and at his heels came Damaris, waddling as fast as she could.

  The farmer’s wife went to the front door to see them off. The dogs had, as usual, jumped up into the bed of the truck. Damaris was standing waiting by the passenger door.

  “You’ll have to take her, Jim,” the farmer’s wife said.

  “She won’t be able to see anything, she’s too short.”

  “You’ll just have to stop every so often and lift her out and let her have a look around. If she quacks and Rory barks, like they’ve just been doing, I reckon you’re getting warm. Try all the villages in turn.”

  Some time after the pickup truck had gone off down the farm road, a cattle truck drove into Mr. Crook’s yard. It was market day in a distant town, and the dealer reckoned he had waited long enough. Whoever owns these pigs, he said to himself, must have given up hope by now.

  Meanwhile the farmer had driven in turn to the villages of Muddlebury, Muddlechester, Upper Muddle, and Lower Muddle. Near each he had stopped and, feeling foolish, had lifted Damaris out. But she had made no sound. Each time, Rory had barked, but Damaris remained silent.

  The dog barks at the smell of pigs, any pigs, the farmer thought, but will the duck only quack at the right pigs? What am I saying? The duck knows more than the dog? I’m beginning to believe it.

  In a lane outside Muddlehampton, not far from the river Muddle, he stopped and lifted Damaris out once more.

  Immediately she began to quack loudly and to struggle wildly in his arms. Hearing her, Rory let out a volley of barks, and Tess, of course, joined in.

  “What’s all that racket, boss?” said the hauler to Mr. Crook as they raised the tailgate behind the pigs and clamped it shut. And at that moment, they saw a pickup truck come to a stop in the yard gateway, blocking it.

  From it jumped a man holding in his arms a bandaged duck and followed by two sheepdogs. The dogs were barking and growling, the duck was quacking madly, and the man, who looked angry, walked up to Mr. Crook and said, “What have you got in the truck?”

  “Mind your own business,” said the dealer.

  “It is my business,” said the farmer. “You’ve got a pedigree Large White boar and seven sows in there, haven’t you?”

  The hauler’s jaw dropped.

  “Here,” he said, “how did you know that?”

  “There’s something else I know too,” said the farmer.

  He took a notebook out of his pocket.

  “Now then,” he said to the dealer,”here are all the numbers on the ear tags of these pigs. Let’s have a look and see if they match, shall we?”

  Mr. Crook knew when he was beaten.

  “Hang on a minute,” he said to his hauler, and he took the farmer across the yard to his office.

  “Am I pleased to see you, sir!” he said. “I’ve been keeping those pigs safe, hoping someone would claim them. Couldn’t afford to keep them any longer, you know—eating me out of house and home. Just loading them up to send to a friend of mine who’s got a bit of rough ground …”

  “Don’t bother spinning me a cock-and-bull story about it,” said the farmer. “I know the dates of the markets. I’ll tell you where you’re sending them, and that’s straight to my farm. You’ll pay the haulage, of course.”

  “They’ve cost me a lot already,” said Mr. Crook sullenly.

  “And they’d have earned you a nice lot, too, if I hadn’t turned up,” said the farmer.

  “How did you know where to come?”

  The farmer looked at the dealer.

  Then he looked at Damaris.

  Then he looked at a shotgun, propped in the corner of the office.

  Then he suddenly knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what had happened.

  “The duck told me,” he said. “I’ll send you the vet’s bill.”

  Mr. Crook mopped his face with a large spotted handkerchief. “No need for us to say anything to anybody else about all this business, is there, sir?” he said.

  “No need at all,” said the farmer. “And I’ll tell the duck to keep quiet about it too.”

  8

  Clever Duck!

  “There’s no place like home,” grunted Mrs. Stout to Mrs. Portly as the pigs made their way down the tailgate of the cattle truck and through the freshly mended gate into their old paddock.

  “Quite right, dear,” said Mrs. Portly.

  “Journey’s end,” said Mrs. O’Bese, “and it was a miserable old journey, so it was.”

  “Hear, hear!” said Mrs. Chubby, Mrs. Tubby, Mrs. Swagbelly, and Mrs. Roly-Poly.

  Only Firingclose General Lord Nicholas of Winningshot said nothing. The promised land had not lived up to its promise, and for once he thought it wise to keep his mouth shut. What’s more, he soon found that he no longer had one of the two pig huts to himself, for the sows took over both of them. They grumbled so loudly when he meekly tried to push in, that he often found himself sleeping outside. A male chauvinist pig he may once have been, but now he was to his wives just a boring old boar, and they did not hesitate to tell him so.

  Two months later, however, the General had the paddock to himself. His wives had all been moved to a range of farrowing houses to await the birth of their children.

  Damaris felt sorry for the boar. Once her wing was fully healed, she flew over now and again for a chat. Not that she got a word in edgewise. The General had lost much of his authority but none of his gift of gab. He appeared quite unaware of the duck’s part in the rescue, as indeed were all the sows except one.

  Mrs. O’Bese alone mentioned it when Damaris went visiting the expectant mothers.

  “Sure and it was you that found us, wasn’t it, duck?” she said. “I knew you were the clever one, right from the start. ‘If you don’t know what an ignoramus is,’ you said, ‘then you must be one.’ Begorra, you could have knocked me down with a duck’s feather. And I never thought much of ducks before.”

  “Why not?” said Damaris.

  “Too stupid, I thought. Don’t know anything.”

  “Actually,” said Damaris, “I never thought mu
ch of pigs before.”

  “Why not?” said Mrs. O’Bese.

  “Too clever by half. Think they know everything.”

  Mrs. O’Bese gave a fusillade of little grunts that sounded like “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  “I know one thing, duck,” she said. “I like you, so I do. Good luck to you.”

  “Thanks,” said Damaris, “and I hope all your troubles will be little ones.”

  Which they were, because before long, all the sows farrowed.

  Most had eight, nine, or ten piglets, but Mrs. O’Bese, just to be different, gave birth to no less than thirteen little babies.

  “Let us only hope,”she said, “hat they don’t grow up to be as longwinded as their dad, or it will be an unlucky number.”

  “I like that sow,″ said Damaris to Rory. They were having one of their evening conversations out in the orchard, Rory lying in the grass, Damaris squatting beside him.

  “She’s the best of a bad lot,” said Rory, “but none of them has changed, really They still patronize all the other animals on the farm. They still think they’re the greatest and they don’t hide it.”

  “Look at those two, Emma,” said the farmer to his wife, as side by side they leaned against the orchard gate, enjoying the end of the day.

  “It’s the strangest friendship, Jim,” she said.

  “That’s the strangest duck,” he said. “I’ve said it many times before, I know, but she saved us a packet of money. We’d never have seen our pigs again, and that dealer would have been laughing. She found them, all by herself.”

  “And could have lost her life.”

  “Yes. Why should a duck worry about pigs? She goes visiting them, you know. I saw her today, quacking away to that old sow and the sow grunting back at her. Look at her now, bending Rory’s ear about something or other. I’d dearly love to understand what animals say to one another.”

  “Look at the farmer and his wife chatting away, Rory,”Damaris said. “I’d dearly love to understand what humans say to one another.”

  “That,” said Rory, “is one thing you’re never going to be able to do. I can understand the odd word—‘Come, boy!’ ‘Away to me!’‘Down!’ ‘Stay!’—that sort of thing. But most of what they say is gibberish.”

  He got up and moved toward the two people, Damaris waddling behind.

  “Listen,” he said. “They’ll say something when we reach them,” and when they did, the man patted him and said a couple of words.

  “I got that,” Rory said. “He’s telling me I’m a good dog.”

  The woman bent down and stroked Damaris’s brown-and-white plumage, and she, too, spoke two words.

  “What did she say to me?” asked Damaris.

  “Haven’t a clue,” replied Rory, as the farmer’s wife said once more, “Clever duck!”

  ALSO BY Dick King-Smith AND Nick Bruel

  Visit a wonderfully silly nonsense world and the very unusual creatures that live there. You’ll meet Wollycobble, Tumblerum, Og, and Ut as they set up house under the mishmash trees.

  When a bad-tempered camel escapes from the zoo, he leaves a trail of havoc across the English countryside.

  An adventurous family of mice strikes out in search of a new home and finds a completely different kind of life.

  When a rampaging tyrannosaurus rex threatens the Great Plain, a pterodactyl and apatosaurus combine their unique skills to take him on in this hilarious adventure.

  Text copyright © 1996 by Foxbusters Ltd.

  Illustrations copyright © 2008 by Nick Bruel

  Published by Roaring Brook Press

  Roaring Brook Press is a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings

  Limited Partnership

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

  All rights reserved

  First published in Great Britain by Puffin Books, an imprint of the Penguin Group

  Book design by Jaime Putorti

  eISBN 9781429925136

  First eBook Edition : May 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  King-Smith, Dick.

  Clever duck / Dick King-Smith ; illustrated by Nick Bruel.—1st American ed. p.cm.

  Summary: When the pigs start picking on all the other farm animals, Damaris, who is a very clever duck, and her best friend, Rory the sheepdog find a way to enact revenge, only to find their plot backfiring.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59643-327-4

  ISBN-10: 1-59643-327-2

  [1. Ducks—Fiction. 2. Domestic animals—Fiction. 3. Farms—Fiction. 4. Revenge—

  Fiction.] I. Bruel, Nick, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.K5893Cj 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008011138

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  For details contact: Director of Special Markets, Holtzbrinck Publishers.

  First American Edition October 2008