THE RURAL LIFE: The Saxony Drake Duck Died

October 27, 2003 - New York Times
THE RURAL LIFE
The Saxony Drake
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

One of the Saxony drakes in our flock ?- 5 months old ?- died on a recent bright fall afternoon. Why he died, I don't know. Not a feather had been ruffled. He lay in the duck pen, seemingly relaxed and half-hidden by nettles, while the rest of the flock marched back and forth across the lawn. The only thing unusual was death itself, which always lies, invisible, on the other side of each of the creatures on our small farm, and of us, too, of course.

The ducks have never liked being picked up. They have a sense of personal autonomy and flock coherence that is much stronger than in chickens. So I held the Saxony under one arm and looked him over closely.

I opened the webs on his feet, which had relaxed in death ?- as if on the fore-stroke while paddling ?- and ran my fingers through his deep down. I could see the hornlike reinforcement on the prow of his bill, called the bean, and the fringing inside the back of the bill that allowed him to filter water through it. I could feel the sudden, mournful density of his weight. His massive bluff gray head and neck had lost their arch in death, but some strange new dignity had come to him too. The inherent comedy of his everyday manner ?- the way his feet were forced to waddle around his keel, his depth of body ?- had been replaced by the staggering intricacy and beauty of his feathering seen up close.

We often think of stone as the great revealer of time. But even something as ephemeral as the finger-thick down on this drake's belly seemed utterly suffused with time, the evolutionary time needed to create it. In our lives, we make steady, categorical distinctions between the present moment and the past, as if the two could never meet. And yet the beautiful brown cape on this Saxony's shoulders carried the deep past of evolution directly into the present, where I stood with the drake under my arm, watching the leaves whirl away from summer into fall, while the rest of the flock grazed nearby as if this were just another good day to be a duck.