If you know me very well, you probably know how much I like ducks. I like to look at them, I like to talk to them, I like to eat them, and I like to play Duck Hunt on the original NES (I don’t think I would like actual duck hunting because I am scared of shooting guns).

There are these two ducks that hang around our neighborhood. I’m not sure where they come from; we’re far enough from the river that it seems improbable that they’ve wandered from there, and I’ve never seen ducks in the creek behind our house. Regardless, this is my second spring in this neighborhood, and this is the second spring they (or a male and female duck who look just like them) have been wandering around, almost getting hit by cars, eating worms out of the ground after a rain, and generally being cute. Because they’re always hanging out together, I assume they’re in love and I call them the douple (get it? couple + ducks?).

Tonight I was out for a jog on my street, and I happened across a male duck all alone. I grew concerned. “Where’s your girlfriend?” I asked him. He didn’t answer me, but he didn’t move away, either; he seemed to be my tame old friend. Not twenty feet away, I saw a rude-looking black cat. I took a quick look around for duck feathers, and finding none, I assumed that the lady half of the douple was just off sitting on a nest somewhere. I’m an optimistic person. I didn’t want to think about the alternative.

(Now’s the part where you say, “But you said just a paragraph ago that you enjoy eating duck. Why is it ok for you to eat duck, but you get mad at a cat who may or may not have eaten a duck?” The answer is that I do not eat my friends. If I had a pet lamb, I would not eat it, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying a nice lamb chop. If I were in a plane crash in the Himalayas, you can be quite sure that I would eat strangers first and do my damnedest not to eat my friends. Eating your friends is absolutely a last resort. On a related note, I will do my damnedest to save my friends from being eaten by others.)

I gave the rude cat a stern talking-to (“You be good, you hear me?”). It didn’t answer, but it did look at me for a while. I hope I got my point across. I was worried but had no concrete evidence of violence.

A couple of blocks later, who did I see but the douple. Apparently the first duck I saw was not the man half of the douple at all, but rather a bachelor duck (a dacherlor?). The douple was safe and sound, chumming around together as usual. The man duck opened and closed his mouth silently at me, as if to say, “And you were so worried. Posh!”

The lady duck kept eating worms.

I hope the worms weren’t somebody’s friends.