Duck Brains

by John Kavanaugh Marsh

As it cuts a straight line through north Seattle, Highway 99 is called Aurora Avenue. It is six lanes wide where it runs past my front window, separating my house from the trees of Woodland Park and Green Lake. The throb of traffic swells loudest at weekday rush hours, morning and afternoon. But it persists through the day and evening. I hear the wavering thrum at night when I'm trying to empty my head, and I hear it again in the morning just before my alarm goes off.

Sometimes when I wake abruptly at 3:19 on a Sunday morning, I hear nothing, and then nothing, and then a distant car approaching, and accelerating, and passing on. And then nothing.

A few times I've seen a brown and gray rabbit munching my front lawn. The rabbits live in the park across the road. They come in gray, brown, black, white and various combinations. They are not native; they have been abandoned by people who thought they looked cuddly in the store, but lost interest after bringing them home. In the park, they are fed by tenderhearted people, they have sex and give birth, they dig holes, expose roots, erode slopes. When the population is peaking, I sometimes see rabbit skins, flat and dry like cardboard, beside the underpass near my house that leads to the lake.

I see other wildlife. Once I saw a bald eagle fly into the trees after a morning of hunting on Green Lake. He glided in from one side of my window frame, and stretched his talons forward to perch at the top of a Douglas fir. I saw his white head peering out from above the green boughs. A raft of crows flew up, circling the eagle, cawing, swooping close. The eagle rose haltingly, his body heavy, his wide wings clumsy so close to the ground. He flew across the highway, trailed by the harassing crows, out the other side of my window frame.

One morning I walked out to get my newspaper and surprised a raccoon on my front walk. He sat his fat body down, glanced at me wide-eyed, and wheeled around, running away on long, skinny legs.

“You'd better stay out of my garbage,” I yelled.

I followed — at a distance. I've heard raccoons have nasty tempers. But I lost sight of him.

One time — it must have been in late spring — I looked out my window and saw a mother duck and five mottled ducklings clipping the grass of my front lawn. I couldn't believe they had found their way over here from the lake.

The mother duck plucked the grass blades calmly. Her brown and black blob of a body balanced stately on her twig-narrow legs. She seemed to pay no attention to the ducklings that bounced around her, their feathers fuzzy like my hair after a shower and a swipe of the towel. The little ones had more tan, and less black, to their coats than their mother. They bobbed, and cheeped, and ran, and finally pecked at a blade of grass, expending twice the nourishment that they must receive from each blade just trying to get it to their stomachs.

Cars drove past. A city bus lumbered by.

How did they get here? How were they going to get back? Her duck brain full of mother's instinct surely didn't have the capacity to plan and follow a route around through the underpass and back.

I stood close to the window; watching, not moving. I wanted to walk out the door and lead her away from the highway and street, through my yard, down the slope in back, and through the underpass. Maybe she would quack her thanks when she saw the lake ahead.

But I knew that she and her ducklings would scatter in all directions as soon as they heard my door open. They would hop frantically when my shadow fell across them.

I worried, but mother duck didn't seem bothered. The route home, and the threat of the highway, were concepts too big for her duck brain. She plucked a blade of grass, and stepped forward to the next blade, and stepped forward to the next blade after that. The ducklings jumped and fluttered and ran this way and that, but always circled close around their mother like bees around a nodding sunflower.

The family wandered past the frame of my window, toward the corner of my house close to the fence and, beyond, the highway. I couldn't see down from the bathroom window on that side, the east side. I was afraid to open the front door or the back door.

I hurried downstairs, and peeked through the tilted slats of the window blind. The mother and her ducklings marched past on my garden path two feet outside the window, between the fence and the house. There was no grass to distract them here, and she waddled purposefully down the slope.

They disappeared past the rose bush outside my window, toward the back yard. This was the way down to the underpass. Maybe her duck brain knew the way.

I leaned back from the window and noticed the clutter on my desk. Such a mess. I picked up a stack of papers that had accumulated where they didn't belong. Below was a pile of magazines that were supposed to go upstairs.

I sorted my clutter and glanced to my window. I filed some papers and glanced again.

The mother duck hurried back up the path, her short legs striding quickly. Her ducklings scurried single file behind.

Something had frightened them. Now they wouldn't find their way to the underpass.

I ran up the stairs and looked out my front window in time to see the mother duck take a left turn around the fence. Toward the highway. The ducklings followed.

I couldn't see them now. The fence was solid wood and six feet high.

I hurried to the bathroom and stood on a box, but I couldn't see down over the fence.

I hurried to the front door, but stopped with my hand on the knob. I heard an unusual noise from outside

I heard nothing.

I looked out the window.

The near two lanes of highway, headed to the south, were empty. Not a car.

In the far two lanes, oncoming cars were slowing to a creep, or already stopped.

I stood on the box and looked out the bathroom window. Past the fence, cartops lined up at a standstill in the near two lanes.

Back to the front window. A blue car rolled slowly by in the near lane, gradually picking up speed. A red car followed. Then a car in the next lane.

On the far side, the line of cars remained at a standstill.

I watched.

Then a car edged forward. Then one behind it. One by one, the oncoming cars on the far side began to move forward, first haltingly, then smoothly. They picked up speed, and soon the approaching cars did not slow down at all.

The sound of the highway returned to its normal rushing throb.

*****

John Kavanaugh Marsh grew up in the wooded suburbs of Portland, Oregon, and it ruined him for life, at least so far. He has worked in newspapers and magazines in the Pacific Northwest, and has published short fiction in nwdrizzle.com (under the pseudonym J.K. Mercury) and Happy. One summer, he worked in a traveling circus.