Last evening when I returned home, I was somewhat surprised to see a mallard of the dowdy female variety standing on my front stoop. We live across from a park, as you may know, and therefore ducks are hardly an uncommon sight. However, ducks are in the park. Welcome mats are on the stoop. This is the way it has been, and was to be, world without end.

I eased my car quietly into the garage, wondering whether perhaps the Mallard, staring intently at the swamp across the way and standing in heroic posture over evidence of her long stoop occupancy, was injured. I snuck out of the garage. We surveyed each other equanimously. I crept up to the kitchen and got some of the frozen stale duck bread out of the freezer. It occured to me this might be a bad idea, might teach her that posing for a umbrella handle on our stoop was a good idea. So I decided to use the bread to draw her across the street.

Truly, a healthy duck reluctantly plopping from one step to another of a spiral stairway in pursuit of food is comedy gold. I laughed more than a little. She was very lazy, refusing to pursue crumbs more than one step and one foot away, and eventually I had to admit to myself that crumbs and humorous remarks would not enveigle the duck back to her park home very quickly. So I charged her.

With a discomfited squawk, she hopped through the railing of my stairs and onto the barkdust slope where I was not very inclined to follow (in my sandals, no less). Returning to my bread crumbs, I tried to enveigle her off the slope. Her laziness was insurmountable. Throwing caution to the winds, I hopped onto the slope and stomped towards her again muttering, “House for humans. Park for ducks! House for humans! Wrong side of street!” Taking to her wings, she alighted on my driveway and plotted a leisurely course towards my open garage. Patience well and truly gone, I pattered loudly towards her, sandals slapping loudly against the concrete. At last she worked herself aloft and sailed over the street to sit with ruffled dignity in the grass of the park.

I stared at her for a moment, and a male mallard flew from the pond directly at her. With great squawks of distress, the lady duck flew off, her suitor in hot pursuit. Perhaps I was unkind, I thought. Another mallard drake flew by, and another, and another, and two more, all in hot pursuit of the hen duck and her first assailant. I sighed. I have truly failed a fellow female in her hour of need, I thought. But she was just a duck, I added, and hosed her droppings off my stoop.