Quacking and Cobblery
Gentle hills that seemed to keep going up forever, without ever getting terribly tall, stretched away from Sandra. Blanketed in strips of housing, with uneven, irregular clumps of trees popping up between them that hinted towards the presence of some gardens or other green space, they always reminded her of a seaside town. She'd visited a lot of them in her youth, and they all had these kinds of hillside housing estates which seemed to be one good gale away from rolling down the slope and into the sea. It wouldn’t do much good to the non-aquatically inclined home owners, but nothing in life was ever fair, and at least it would provide affordable housing to all manner of crabs and anemones.
This town was not near the sea. It wasn't even particularly nearby to a lake, but a few small rivers did wind their way between the estates here and there. Luckily, Sandra hadn't come here for a sea view. She just wanted a quiet spot, on a grassy hillside overlooking some other, slightly less grassy hillsides. It was an ideal picnic location, except for the risk of any cylindrical packs of biscuits rolling away from her, but proper alignment of biscuit and slope would mitigate such an eventuality. Or they could stay in the backpack, she supposed, but that carried the chance of them being forgotten entirely, and there was no way she'd forgive herself for filling up on cheese and crackers when there were biscuits on the cards. This was her own time on her own lunch break, and nobody was going to rob her of the opportunity for baked desserts while they also robbed her of the best hours of her day.
In a development which had caused a spat of related conversations throughout the whole office, the sun had come out that morning and showed no signs of leaving again. This rendered the ground sufficiently dry for external lunchtime endeavours, and had thereby driven Sandra out into the real world for an impromptu picnic. Despite the general consensus that sunshine and eating outdoors were good, no-one had volunteered themselves to join her. This was, largely, in line with what Sandra had wanted, because she also hadn’t invited anybody along. It was just difficult to walk out of the building without anyone noticing, and announcing it had therefore made for a cleaner escape.
On the breeze were the scents of wild lavender and pollen, rendered benign and friendly by the hard work of antihistamines coursing through Sandra's body. Of all the attacks her various immune system feared that day, an all-out assault by pollen was one about which she wished it would calm down. The only harm she had ever come to from airborne pollen was at the hands of her own overactive tear ducts and mucus, but that reasoning always fell flat when she tried it with her nervous system. Always on edge and ready to panic at the slightest provocation, it was very appropriately named.
In the brilliant light of the sun, Sandra strolled through the meadow grass, just off the worn footpath, and scanned for a prime position. Top of the list of criteria, obviously, was securing a picturesque view for the lunch proceedings, hence her presence in the park to begin with. Looking out across the vista, she drifted along hillside judging the scene against the key factors of maximum visible distance, number of foreground obstructions, quantity of unsightly human-made structures, and variety of features. There was no formal checklist for these things, of course. Her clipboard had remained squarely on her desk in the office, with nothing to be checked until she was back on the clock, just as the Lord intended, but in her mind she kept a tally of the ever-changing panorama. A few likely contenders stuck out to her as she strolled, including a framing of the distant town by two copses of silver birch, and a stunning overlook of a deciduous woodland above a gorse patch, but the true champion was located around a gentle bend, shifting her perspective slightly and bringing a broad, still pond into her line of sight. Sited at the bottom of the hill on which she stood, the pond was large but not within the remit of the lake. Across its surface swam pods of ducks and other waterfowl, with blankets of lily pads between water irises and various reeds. On its own it was sufficiently spectacular, but coupled with the hillsides beyond, the occasional trees dotted around the descent between itself and Sandra, and the quintessential man on a bench feeding the pigeons at the water's edge, it reigned supreme in the picnic site stakes.
Having chosen her general area, the other selection criteria could come into play. First and foremost it was vital to put enough distance between herself and the bins, especially those dedicated to the leavings of the canine visitors, and there couldn't be rocks or lumps of hard dirt disrupting the surface. Incidental puddles or piles of animal leavings, domesticated or otherwise, were obvious no-gos on similar stench and hygiene grounds. Much to Sandra's surprise and delight, no such troubles were present on her patch of grass and so, with some minor repositioning to avoid thistles which might seek to pierce the buttock of the unwary, she rolled out her picnic blanket and sat herself down. In a series of graceless movements, the seated Sandra removed her backpack, containing the precious enabling items for a picnic, and settled herself in.
Down there, low to the ground, the gentle breeze she'd barely noticed was further reduced. She straightened out her legs to maximise surface area in the sunlight, and kicked off her sensible shoes in favour of quaint, barefoot enjoyment of the grass. For a few moments she sat still and simply breathed in and out, in the traditional manner for respiring organisms, enjoying her soak in the bathtub of daylight. Breathing requirements fully satisfied for the moment, hunger gave her a nudge about their real purpose there, and Sandra dutifully opened up her pack, pulling out the biscuits on which she'd been fixating for some time. Positioning them end-on to the hill and prominently centring them on the blanket, she then went back for the secondary items such as cheese, crackers, and a flask of cold water from the office. A grumble of anticipation sounded in her stomach, unwilling to let her delay for even a second longer. Heeding its warning, Sandra opted to tear open the top of the biscuits and take just one for the moment; it was important to save room for proper lunch, but what harm could a single biscuit do just to take the edge off her ravenous hunger? None, of course.
With a satisfying crunch that also contained the hidden nectar of a custard-cream filling, the rampaging voice of consumption in Sandra's head was temporarily quieted, and she could appreciate some more of the view that she'd taken such pains to select.
A kite, hitherto unnoticed, was being flown by someone unseen on the far side of the trees. A multi-sectioned affair of various garish prime colours, it evoked both the stereotype of a perfect summer's day and the reality of the difficulties in kite flying around foliage. As far as Sandra could tell, the kite itself was doing its level best to hurl itself against any high, easily-tangled structure it could find, be it a tree, a telegraph wire, or a jackdaw on a danger-close trajectory, while the operator on the ground fought inexpertly against it. Quite why the flier of the kite had chosen such an imperilled location for their flight was a matter of some mystery.
Another custard cream went into the maw of Sandra the observer as she ruminated on the crisis-mode kite flying. What was a second biscuit to a whole lunch's worth of hunger? No harm could come of it.
Below her, at the bottom of the hill, was there more motion but of a calmer sort. The old man by the bench had attracted what must have been the bulk of the town's pigeon population into a few-metre radius around himself. Where the ground around Sandra was composed of the typical constituents, grass, soil, wildflower and the like, the ground by the old man was predominantly feather, beak and claw. He was sat in a roiling, frothing sea of winged gluttony and desperation, weathering the gale of cooing and flapping. Even from her elevated position on the hillside, Sandra could hear the cacophony of feeding at the pond’s edge.
Below the frenzied, feeding masses would, of course, be a harrowing horrorscape of pigeon emissions, the collected works of a hundred or more cloacas left to their own whims. Such thoughts would have been enough to put Sandra off one of her cheese crackers, but the appeal of the biscuits held strong against assaults like those. It was, therefore, the only thing she could do under the circumstances to pop a third one into her mouth; no sense in going back to the office on an empty stomach.
A wave of increased enthusiasm, both vocally and physically, swept from front to back among the ranks of the pigeons as the old man's hand plunged back into the seed bag. All of the tiny, beady black eyes set above peck-ready beaks were focused intently on the man's hand. The masses quivered with excitement and anticipation, heads shifting in perfect unison with the hand that prepared to feed. All except one.
In the synchronicity of motion that an impending seed scattering had created, Sandra became acutely aware of the single non-conforming element towards the back of the flock. This head did not follow, or even seem to acknowledge, the old man's hands, nor the movements of the other birds. Where they swayed and jostled in unison, this independent thinker kept a rock-steady bearing, and in intent focus on the centre of the excitement. It also seemed to belong not to a pigeon, but a mallard duck.
Sandra chuckled to herself through a mouthful of biscuit at the attitude of this particular waterfowl. She admired its unflinching attitude to the crowd and its determination to reach the old man. Even as the seed was finally thrown, soaring in a spiral arm like that of a galaxy in danger of eventual germination, the duck seemed utterly disinterested in matters of minor gastronomical profit. Its sights were purely on the purveyor of the goods and, presumably, on seizing the stockpile that he hoarded so jealously.
Under normal circumstances, Sandra would have taken a dim view of theft and subterfuge. In her position as a freelance office manager, swooping into struggling businesses to deal with their critical failures of office logistics, supply management, building maintenance and no-shoe policies, misappropriation of office supplies was an all-too-common foe of hers. Here, however, in the brutal, survival-of-the-fittest, real-world crucible of avian seed hegemony, she was loving it.
"Go on, little duck!" she muttered to herself, grin equally broad and crumb-covered. Her hand moved idly back to the packet of biscuits and, one-handed and without looking, she slipped another biscuit into her fingers. One couldn't be expected to resist the lure of a fourth snack while such entertainment was ongoing. It could easily be her last before having at least some of the savoury element she'd brought out here.
Like an oily-feathered U-boat, head held high like a periscope to see above the cooing waters, the mallard slipped between podgy wings and pecking heads. It seemed to absorb every collision from oblivious feeders as if it were made of jelly, contorting its way through the crowd unfazed by any seed or any competitors for it.
In the course of his contented survey of the followers he had amassed, the old man happened to turn towards the duck. In a move which very nearly made Sandra spit custard cream all over both herself and the picnic blanket, the duck responded to this by snapping its head down to the ground and pecking for seed, as if acting inconspicuous. The old man, from what Sandra could tell, was completely taken in by the mallard's ruse, seemed perfectly happy to have another guest for lunch, and watched the duck for a moment before returning his hand to the bag. Once more the pigeons looked up in excitement, and the duck pressed onwards with menaces. Again, there was a scrum as the seed were thrown out, and the duck seized the opportunity to close the distance between itself and its prize. Every time the old man looked in the duck's direction it would repeat the subterfuge of feigned interested in the sown seed, and the man would fall for it over and over. Sandra almost felt a little bad for him, but she was more impressed by the duck's natural gifts for deception than anything else. It was apparently a master of infiltration, despite the bright and beautiful plumage. She supposed that with such an appearance it had been forced to learn to hide in plain sight.
Somewhere in the recesses of Sandra's subconscious, a voice of dietary reason made her hands reach for the packet of crackers and bag of cheese slices that she had prepared earlier. No grown adult should give in to subsisting on biscuits alone, the voice seemed to say, and therefore it was time to make concessions to the comparatively sensible, but still not necessarily nutritionally balanced, savoury option. She made it as far as tearing open the packet, when developments by the pond overtook her attention.
Having closed the gap fully with the old man, the duck's head still did not rise up to face the bag. Instead, it was looking at something close to the ground. Attempting to trace its line of sight as best she could from such a distance, Sandra could only conclude that the duck was looking at something between the old man's feet. No, not between them at all, it was staring directly at them.
A thousand questions raced through Sandra's mind, between her natural curiosity and her newfound fascination with the avian motives unfolding before her. The crackers, although open, lay abandoned once more and she shovelled a custard cream into her mouth reflexively. Biscuits were the food of an audience, not cheese and crackers. Five biscuits did not a lunch make, and she would obviously have room left for her proper lunch when the situation by the pond had died down.
Hypothesis number one was that the old man must have had some seed on his feet, having spilled from the bag or his hand during an attempt at distribution. It didn't look like anything was amiss as far as Sandra could see, but they may have been dark seeds that blended in with his sensible, dark brown shoes.
Maintaining a low profile, like a lioness stalking its prey, the duck crept towards the old man's feet. Noticing something going on, he looked down at the duck and caught it in the motion of hurriedly pecking at the floor. Interested in this development, the old man shuffled his feet around and watched the duck for a few moments, before shrugging and dropping some seed down as tribute. The pigeons, although enthusiastic, were wary of coming too close. There was a minimum distance they kept at all times, in accordance with inscrutable rules that Sandra suspected they themselves couldn't articulate, but the duck obviously had no such reservations. It pecked gratefully, or with the illusion of gratitude, at the seed offering until the old man was definitely not looking and then, once the coast was clear, it extended its neck towards the shoes.
This time, Sandra sent half a chewed biscuit clean over the blanket and onto a nearby dandelion in shock. The duck had taken the old man's shoe lace in its bill and was, ever so gently, tugging at the end. Walking backwards gently to maintain tension, it slipped the knot loose, and then guiltily began pretending to feed again. Sandra stared with wide-eyed excitement, waiting to see if the man would notice, but such was the duck's sleight of bill that nothing had been felt at all.
A sixth biscuit went into the mouth. The previous one couldn't be counted after its ballistic fate, and nothing could be allowed to distract her from the business at hand.
Having succeeded in both untying the knot and avoiding detection for the time being, the duck proceeded to carefully approach the shoe once again, the motion and noise of the pigeons providing ample cover for its clandestine operations, and slipped its bill between the two loosened laces, pulling them apart gently until they were lying completely away from one another. It gave a furtive look up, to double check that the man hadn't noticed, and then set about the onerous task of loosening the laces between each eyelet. Like a disquietingly organic sewing machine, the mallard set about its work with precision, speed and an awful lot of bobbins. It worked with a methodical discipline that Sandra would scarcely have expected from most of the people with whom she worked, let alone the local waterfowl.
Biscuit seven barely touched the sides; it was devoured on autopilot while the shoe bothering occupied every available neuron in Sandra's mind.
With the laces fully loosened, the duck gingerly took itself to the shoe's tongue and started to yank it backwards, rendering shoe's opening a gaping maw, out of which the man could stepped with barely any notice. The thought dawned on Sandra that if she didn’t know any better, she'd have said the duck was trying to steal the shoe from the old man's foot. When the duck puffed itself up, marched to the front of the man, and then leapt into the air, quacking aggressively and flapping its wings in a fury, Sandra was fully disabused of the notion that she'd ever known better about anything in her life. With the same intensity that the pigeons had employed in their pursuit of seeds, the duck worried and bothered at the old man until, arms flailing amid much vocalisation, he toppled backwards into a seated position on the bench. As he did, his legs slipped forwards and the sabotaged shoe was flung off the foot, arcing high into the air and landing to much kerfuffle among the pigeons.
Sandra could hear the shocked exclamation even from her elevated position, as the duck shot through the crowd and snatched the illicit gains from where they had fallen.
"Oi! My shoe!" Sandra heard the old man cry, as he scrabbled to regain his balance and composure. An eighth biscuit went the way of the dinosaurs as Sandra watched on eagerly. No longer could she argue that it wasn't spoiling her lunch, but she didn't care because the drama unfolding was far more important.
The duck, clearly heavily laden by the shoe, was doing its best to make an escape through the dense crowd of pigeons, but the extra mass and dimensions were making it far more difficult. No longer could it slip, serpent-like, through the feathery throng, instead having to barge its way through, delivering kicks-by-proxy using the shoe to speed the process along. Its head-start, so cunningly won by deft manipulation of lace and keen stealth, was rapidly being eroded by the old man, who had regained his feet and was hopping after the felonious mallard.
A devastating blow from the toe of the shoe to the rump of a pigeon cleared the way for a waddling dash for freedom, not towards the banks of the pond as Sandra might have expected, but towards a small copse of oak and hornbeam.
"Get back here!" the man persisted in shouting, in the vain hope that the duck was both able to understand human language and in the mood to co-operate. Having witnessed its clear grasp of how shoes worked, Sandra wouldn't have put it past the duck to be capable of holding a conversation to at least the level of a ten year old. Alas, capable or otherwise, the duck did not yield to the request, instead giving a shoe-muffled quack by way of reply and re-doubling its efforts to get away. It was the most thrilling low-speed chase that Sandra had ever seen; an exhausted duck carrying twice its own body weight in shoe being pursued by a hopping old man with balance that left a lot to be desired.
Biscuit nine went in without guilt or fear of recourse.
Despite the impressive lack of athleticism on display from both sides of the chase, the old man was gaining on the duck with every juddering hop. Even a single human leg, working completely alone to prevent its partner foot from getting covered in dirt, was able to outpace the tiny webbed legs of a bird much better suited to flying or swimming. The ponderous, pounding, heavy-footed gait of the old man bore down on the duck, and with as much of an over-the-shoulder look as it could achieve with a shoe ensconced precariously in the bill, the mallard had taken note of that fact. Sandra was on the edge of her blanket seat, biscuit ten dangling from her lips as she leaned ever forwards to will the duck on. Sandra wasn't much of a sports fan in general, but she finally started to understand the appeal of spectating; never before in her life had she felt so invested in the relative speeds of two bipeds she'd never met.
Duck and man, still locked in pursuit, were growing closer and closer together with every hop. Fists clenched and toes curled, Sandra wished with her all might for the duck to find a hidden well of energy inside, or get a second wind somehow for a burst of speed, or for the man to fall over, not so hard that he got hurt, but enough to give the waterfowl some time.
No such event came, however. Instead, the duck remembered that it had wings.
With a panicked flapping that was rivalled only by the hungriest of the pigeons around the seed, the mallard thief took to the air upon ungainly wings, listing heavily to one side with the weight of the shoe. Rather less agile than the duck, on account of his single active leg, the old man tried in futility to capture the bird before it gained too much height, but was powerless to stop it. One legged and panting, he was forced to watch on impotently as the duck took an erratic, spiralling flight up into the lower boughs of a nearby hornbeam, securing its own safety as Sandra cheered enthusiastically. The underdog, or in this case the underduck, had found success against admittedly somewhat-surmountable odds. Nonetheless, it was still impressive.
From what Sandra could see, as she chewed on the eleventh of the biscuits, the branch in question had a broad, flat surface close to the trunk, and it was there that the duck set the shoe down to rest. As the man below looked up, apparently pondering on the question of how to proceed from there, the duck poked its bill into some kind of cavity within the hornbeam, fishing around for something. The motives of this mallard remained the most intriguing thing on which Sandra had speculated for a great many years. The more it acted, the deeper that intrigue went, as was exemplified when the duck 's bill remerged from the tree clutching what looked a lot like an insole.
There was nothing else for it. Biscuits twelve and thirteen had to go in together in order for Sandra to cope with what was going on in the hornbeam. The duck was, honest to goodness, inserting an insole into the shoe of the old man who, in his position as another observer of this debacle, had stopped his gesticulating and fretting in favour of dumbfounded watching. As deftly as it had unlaced the shoes, the duck inserted its head fully into the cavity, presumably to position the insole correctly and then, without ceremony or hesitation, pushed the shoe back down into the old man's waiting arms. He caught it clumsily, had a quick look inside and then, tentatively, set it down. His much-laboured hopping leg was finally given some respite, as its de-shoed companion was set back down, and he inserted the colder of his two feet back inside.
To the comforting crunch of a fourteenth custard cream, with a sensation that she was much less hungry than before lunch started, Sandra watched as the man tied his laces back up and walked with the otherwise unique gait of someone at a shoe shop. Backward and forward he went, a few paces at a time, with a perfectly level walk and un-rotated ankles. Eventually he stopped and, with a silent, reverential bow, he placed the remainder of his bag of seed onto the ground, at the base of the tree. A happy quacking came back his way.
Accepting that the damage was already done, Sandra returned her cheese and crackers to their space in her backpack and set about finishing her custard creams in what remained of her lunch break. At the base of the hill, the pigeons still flocked by the bench at the pond's edge, but their excitement had waned considerably in the absence of any new seed. The old man had taken a seat on the bench again, presumably trying to reconcile the events of the previous few minutes, and cast the occasional curious glance up at the duck, who was happily munching from the bag of seeds in the tree. Everything was peaceful and bright in the sunshine, except for the determined crunching of Sandra, as she thoroughly spoiled her lunch.
As soon as it had got underway, her lunch break was over, and it was time to head back into the office. As she rolled up her picnic blanket and hoisted up her backpack, Sandra resigned herself to the fact that no-one would believe her story, no matter how she told it. It would be safer to say nothing than to become the lady who walked back in with sunstroke, babbling about a duck committing run-by cobblery. She spared one last glance down to the tree and saw, with a little disappointment, that the duck had moved on, likely full of seed and quite content with a job well done. With a shrug, and a determination to come back to the same spot the next day, Sandra made her way back out of the park, stepping obliviously into a patch of soft, damp soil as she went.
In the stillness of the sunlit park, a duck walked quietly over the grassy hillside, until it reached the gateway that led into the town beyond. At the edge of this gateway was a patch of soft mud, rendered damp not by rain or spillage but by a mallard with ulterior motives for carrying pond water on its back. Any bystander would have looked upon the duck as it stared at a footprint in the mud, assuming it to be looking for worms or small insects, given its unwavering attention. A duck couldn't be examining a footprint and performing a gait analysis, much less with a view to custom making an insole. That would be ridiculous.
This town was not near the sea. It wasn't even particularly nearby to a lake, but a few small rivers did wind their way between the estates here and there. Luckily, Sandra hadn't come here for a sea view. She just wanted a quiet spot, on a grassy hillside overlooking some other, slightly less grassy hillsides. It was an ideal picnic location, except for the risk of any cylindrical packs of biscuits rolling away from her, but proper alignment of biscuit and slope would mitigate such an eventuality. Or they could stay in the backpack, she supposed, but that carried the chance of them being forgotten entirely, and there was no way she'd forgive herself for filling up on cheese and crackers when there were biscuits on the cards. This was her own time on her own lunch break, and nobody was going to rob her of the opportunity for baked desserts while they also robbed her of the best hours of her day.
In a development which had caused a spat of related conversations throughout the whole office, the sun had come out that morning and showed no signs of leaving again. This rendered the ground sufficiently dry for external lunchtime endeavours, and had thereby driven Sandra out into the real world for an impromptu picnic. Despite the general consensus that sunshine and eating outdoors were good, no-one had volunteered themselves to join her. This was, largely, in line with what Sandra had wanted, because she also hadn’t invited anybody along. It was just difficult to walk out of the building without anyone noticing, and announcing it had therefore made for a cleaner escape.
On the breeze were the scents of wild lavender and pollen, rendered benign and friendly by the hard work of antihistamines coursing through Sandra's body. Of all the attacks her various immune system feared that day, an all-out assault by pollen was one about which she wished it would calm down. The only harm she had ever come to from airborne pollen was at the hands of her own overactive tear ducts and mucus, but that reasoning always fell flat when she tried it with her nervous system. Always on edge and ready to panic at the slightest provocation, it was very appropriately named.
In the brilliant light of the sun, Sandra strolled through the meadow grass, just off the worn footpath, and scanned for a prime position. Top of the list of criteria, obviously, was securing a picturesque view for the lunch proceedings, hence her presence in the park to begin with. Looking out across the vista, she drifted along hillside judging the scene against the key factors of maximum visible distance, number of foreground obstructions, quantity of unsightly human-made structures, and variety of features. There was no formal checklist for these things, of course. Her clipboard had remained squarely on her desk in the office, with nothing to be checked until she was back on the clock, just as the Lord intended, but in her mind she kept a tally of the ever-changing panorama. A few likely contenders stuck out to her as she strolled, including a framing of the distant town by two copses of silver birch, and a stunning overlook of a deciduous woodland above a gorse patch, but the true champion was located around a gentle bend, shifting her perspective slightly and bringing a broad, still pond into her line of sight. Sited at the bottom of the hill on which she stood, the pond was large but not within the remit of the lake. Across its surface swam pods of ducks and other waterfowl, with blankets of lily pads between water irises and various reeds. On its own it was sufficiently spectacular, but coupled with the hillsides beyond, the occasional trees dotted around the descent between itself and Sandra, and the quintessential man on a bench feeding the pigeons at the water's edge, it reigned supreme in the picnic site stakes.
Having chosen her general area, the other selection criteria could come into play. First and foremost it was vital to put enough distance between herself and the bins, especially those dedicated to the leavings of the canine visitors, and there couldn't be rocks or lumps of hard dirt disrupting the surface. Incidental puddles or piles of animal leavings, domesticated or otherwise, were obvious no-gos on similar stench and hygiene grounds. Much to Sandra's surprise and delight, no such troubles were present on her patch of grass and so, with some minor repositioning to avoid thistles which might seek to pierce the buttock of the unwary, she rolled out her picnic blanket and sat herself down. In a series of graceless movements, the seated Sandra removed her backpack, containing the precious enabling items for a picnic, and settled herself in.
Down there, low to the ground, the gentle breeze she'd barely noticed was further reduced. She straightened out her legs to maximise surface area in the sunlight, and kicked off her sensible shoes in favour of quaint, barefoot enjoyment of the grass. For a few moments she sat still and simply breathed in and out, in the traditional manner for respiring organisms, enjoying her soak in the bathtub of daylight. Breathing requirements fully satisfied for the moment, hunger gave her a nudge about their real purpose there, and Sandra dutifully opened up her pack, pulling out the biscuits on which she'd been fixating for some time. Positioning them end-on to the hill and prominently centring them on the blanket, she then went back for the secondary items such as cheese, crackers, and a flask of cold water from the office. A grumble of anticipation sounded in her stomach, unwilling to let her delay for even a second longer. Heeding its warning, Sandra opted to tear open the top of the biscuits and take just one for the moment; it was important to save room for proper lunch, but what harm could a single biscuit do just to take the edge off her ravenous hunger? None, of course.
With a satisfying crunch that also contained the hidden nectar of a custard-cream filling, the rampaging voice of consumption in Sandra's head was temporarily quieted, and she could appreciate some more of the view that she'd taken such pains to select.
A kite, hitherto unnoticed, was being flown by someone unseen on the far side of the trees. A multi-sectioned affair of various garish prime colours, it evoked both the stereotype of a perfect summer's day and the reality of the difficulties in kite flying around foliage. As far as Sandra could tell, the kite itself was doing its level best to hurl itself against any high, easily-tangled structure it could find, be it a tree, a telegraph wire, or a jackdaw on a danger-close trajectory, while the operator on the ground fought inexpertly against it. Quite why the flier of the kite had chosen such an imperilled location for their flight was a matter of some mystery.
Another custard cream went into the maw of Sandra the observer as she ruminated on the crisis-mode kite flying. What was a second biscuit to a whole lunch's worth of hunger? No harm could come of it.
Below her, at the bottom of the hill, was there more motion but of a calmer sort. The old man by the bench had attracted what must have been the bulk of the town's pigeon population into a few-metre radius around himself. Where the ground around Sandra was composed of the typical constituents, grass, soil, wildflower and the like, the ground by the old man was predominantly feather, beak and claw. He was sat in a roiling, frothing sea of winged gluttony and desperation, weathering the gale of cooing and flapping. Even from her elevated position on the hillside, Sandra could hear the cacophony of feeding at the pond’s edge.
Below the frenzied, feeding masses would, of course, be a harrowing horrorscape of pigeon emissions, the collected works of a hundred or more cloacas left to their own whims. Such thoughts would have been enough to put Sandra off one of her cheese crackers, but the appeal of the biscuits held strong against assaults like those. It was, therefore, the only thing she could do under the circumstances to pop a third one into her mouth; no sense in going back to the office on an empty stomach.
A wave of increased enthusiasm, both vocally and physically, swept from front to back among the ranks of the pigeons as the old man's hand plunged back into the seed bag. All of the tiny, beady black eyes set above peck-ready beaks were focused intently on the man's hand. The masses quivered with excitement and anticipation, heads shifting in perfect unison with the hand that prepared to feed. All except one.
In the synchronicity of motion that an impending seed scattering had created, Sandra became acutely aware of the single non-conforming element towards the back of the flock. This head did not follow, or even seem to acknowledge, the old man's hands, nor the movements of the other birds. Where they swayed and jostled in unison, this independent thinker kept a rock-steady bearing, and in intent focus on the centre of the excitement. It also seemed to belong not to a pigeon, but a mallard duck.
Sandra chuckled to herself through a mouthful of biscuit at the attitude of this particular waterfowl. She admired its unflinching attitude to the crowd and its determination to reach the old man. Even as the seed was finally thrown, soaring in a spiral arm like that of a galaxy in danger of eventual germination, the duck seemed utterly disinterested in matters of minor gastronomical profit. Its sights were purely on the purveyor of the goods and, presumably, on seizing the stockpile that he hoarded so jealously.
Under normal circumstances, Sandra would have taken a dim view of theft and subterfuge. In her position as a freelance office manager, swooping into struggling businesses to deal with their critical failures of office logistics, supply management, building maintenance and no-shoe policies, misappropriation of office supplies was an all-too-common foe of hers. Here, however, in the brutal, survival-of-the-fittest, real-world crucible of avian seed hegemony, she was loving it.
"Go on, little duck!" she muttered to herself, grin equally broad and crumb-covered. Her hand moved idly back to the packet of biscuits and, one-handed and without looking, she slipped another biscuit into her fingers. One couldn't be expected to resist the lure of a fourth snack while such entertainment was ongoing. It could easily be her last before having at least some of the savoury element she'd brought out here.
Like an oily-feathered U-boat, head held high like a periscope to see above the cooing waters, the mallard slipped between podgy wings and pecking heads. It seemed to absorb every collision from oblivious feeders as if it were made of jelly, contorting its way through the crowd unfazed by any seed or any competitors for it.
In the course of his contented survey of the followers he had amassed, the old man happened to turn towards the duck. In a move which very nearly made Sandra spit custard cream all over both herself and the picnic blanket, the duck responded to this by snapping its head down to the ground and pecking for seed, as if acting inconspicuous. The old man, from what Sandra could tell, was completely taken in by the mallard's ruse, seemed perfectly happy to have another guest for lunch, and watched the duck for a moment before returning his hand to the bag. Once more the pigeons looked up in excitement, and the duck pressed onwards with menaces. Again, there was a scrum as the seed were thrown out, and the duck seized the opportunity to close the distance between itself and its prize. Every time the old man looked in the duck's direction it would repeat the subterfuge of feigned interested in the sown seed, and the man would fall for it over and over. Sandra almost felt a little bad for him, but she was more impressed by the duck's natural gifts for deception than anything else. It was apparently a master of infiltration, despite the bright and beautiful plumage. She supposed that with such an appearance it had been forced to learn to hide in plain sight.
Somewhere in the recesses of Sandra's subconscious, a voice of dietary reason made her hands reach for the packet of crackers and bag of cheese slices that she had prepared earlier. No grown adult should give in to subsisting on biscuits alone, the voice seemed to say, and therefore it was time to make concessions to the comparatively sensible, but still not necessarily nutritionally balanced, savoury option. She made it as far as tearing open the packet, when developments by the pond overtook her attention.
Having closed the gap fully with the old man, the duck's head still did not rise up to face the bag. Instead, it was looking at something close to the ground. Attempting to trace its line of sight as best she could from such a distance, Sandra could only conclude that the duck was looking at something between the old man's feet. No, not between them at all, it was staring directly at them.
A thousand questions raced through Sandra's mind, between her natural curiosity and her newfound fascination with the avian motives unfolding before her. The crackers, although open, lay abandoned once more and she shovelled a custard cream into her mouth reflexively. Biscuits were the food of an audience, not cheese and crackers. Five biscuits did not a lunch make, and she would obviously have room left for her proper lunch when the situation by the pond had died down.
Hypothesis number one was that the old man must have had some seed on his feet, having spilled from the bag or his hand during an attempt at distribution. It didn't look like anything was amiss as far as Sandra could see, but they may have been dark seeds that blended in with his sensible, dark brown shoes.
Maintaining a low profile, like a lioness stalking its prey, the duck crept towards the old man's feet. Noticing something going on, he looked down at the duck and caught it in the motion of hurriedly pecking at the floor. Interested in this development, the old man shuffled his feet around and watched the duck for a few moments, before shrugging and dropping some seed down as tribute. The pigeons, although enthusiastic, were wary of coming too close. There was a minimum distance they kept at all times, in accordance with inscrutable rules that Sandra suspected they themselves couldn't articulate, but the duck obviously had no such reservations. It pecked gratefully, or with the illusion of gratitude, at the seed offering until the old man was definitely not looking and then, once the coast was clear, it extended its neck towards the shoes.
This time, Sandra sent half a chewed biscuit clean over the blanket and onto a nearby dandelion in shock. The duck had taken the old man's shoe lace in its bill and was, ever so gently, tugging at the end. Walking backwards gently to maintain tension, it slipped the knot loose, and then guiltily began pretending to feed again. Sandra stared with wide-eyed excitement, waiting to see if the man would notice, but such was the duck's sleight of bill that nothing had been felt at all.
A sixth biscuit went into the mouth. The previous one couldn't be counted after its ballistic fate, and nothing could be allowed to distract her from the business at hand.
Having succeeded in both untying the knot and avoiding detection for the time being, the duck proceeded to carefully approach the shoe once again, the motion and noise of the pigeons providing ample cover for its clandestine operations, and slipped its bill between the two loosened laces, pulling them apart gently until they were lying completely away from one another. It gave a furtive look up, to double check that the man hadn't noticed, and then set about the onerous task of loosening the laces between each eyelet. Like a disquietingly organic sewing machine, the mallard set about its work with precision, speed and an awful lot of bobbins. It worked with a methodical discipline that Sandra would scarcely have expected from most of the people with whom she worked, let alone the local waterfowl.
Biscuit seven barely touched the sides; it was devoured on autopilot while the shoe bothering occupied every available neuron in Sandra's mind.
With the laces fully loosened, the duck gingerly took itself to the shoe's tongue and started to yank it backwards, rendering shoe's opening a gaping maw, out of which the man could stepped with barely any notice. The thought dawned on Sandra that if she didn’t know any better, she'd have said the duck was trying to steal the shoe from the old man's foot. When the duck puffed itself up, marched to the front of the man, and then leapt into the air, quacking aggressively and flapping its wings in a fury, Sandra was fully disabused of the notion that she'd ever known better about anything in her life. With the same intensity that the pigeons had employed in their pursuit of seeds, the duck worried and bothered at the old man until, arms flailing amid much vocalisation, he toppled backwards into a seated position on the bench. As he did, his legs slipped forwards and the sabotaged shoe was flung off the foot, arcing high into the air and landing to much kerfuffle among the pigeons.
Sandra could hear the shocked exclamation even from her elevated position, as the duck shot through the crowd and snatched the illicit gains from where they had fallen.
"Oi! My shoe!" Sandra heard the old man cry, as he scrabbled to regain his balance and composure. An eighth biscuit went the way of the dinosaurs as Sandra watched on eagerly. No longer could she argue that it wasn't spoiling her lunch, but she didn't care because the drama unfolding was far more important.
The duck, clearly heavily laden by the shoe, was doing its best to make an escape through the dense crowd of pigeons, but the extra mass and dimensions were making it far more difficult. No longer could it slip, serpent-like, through the feathery throng, instead having to barge its way through, delivering kicks-by-proxy using the shoe to speed the process along. Its head-start, so cunningly won by deft manipulation of lace and keen stealth, was rapidly being eroded by the old man, who had regained his feet and was hopping after the felonious mallard.
A devastating blow from the toe of the shoe to the rump of a pigeon cleared the way for a waddling dash for freedom, not towards the banks of the pond as Sandra might have expected, but towards a small copse of oak and hornbeam.
"Get back here!" the man persisted in shouting, in the vain hope that the duck was both able to understand human language and in the mood to co-operate. Having witnessed its clear grasp of how shoes worked, Sandra wouldn't have put it past the duck to be capable of holding a conversation to at least the level of a ten year old. Alas, capable or otherwise, the duck did not yield to the request, instead giving a shoe-muffled quack by way of reply and re-doubling its efforts to get away. It was the most thrilling low-speed chase that Sandra had ever seen; an exhausted duck carrying twice its own body weight in shoe being pursued by a hopping old man with balance that left a lot to be desired.
Biscuit nine went in without guilt or fear of recourse.
Despite the impressive lack of athleticism on display from both sides of the chase, the old man was gaining on the duck with every juddering hop. Even a single human leg, working completely alone to prevent its partner foot from getting covered in dirt, was able to outpace the tiny webbed legs of a bird much better suited to flying or swimming. The ponderous, pounding, heavy-footed gait of the old man bore down on the duck, and with as much of an over-the-shoulder look as it could achieve with a shoe ensconced precariously in the bill, the mallard had taken note of that fact. Sandra was on the edge of her blanket seat, biscuit ten dangling from her lips as she leaned ever forwards to will the duck on. Sandra wasn't much of a sports fan in general, but she finally started to understand the appeal of spectating; never before in her life had she felt so invested in the relative speeds of two bipeds she'd never met.
Duck and man, still locked in pursuit, were growing closer and closer together with every hop. Fists clenched and toes curled, Sandra wished with her all might for the duck to find a hidden well of energy inside, or get a second wind somehow for a burst of speed, or for the man to fall over, not so hard that he got hurt, but enough to give the waterfowl some time.
No such event came, however. Instead, the duck remembered that it had wings.
With a panicked flapping that was rivalled only by the hungriest of the pigeons around the seed, the mallard thief took to the air upon ungainly wings, listing heavily to one side with the weight of the shoe. Rather less agile than the duck, on account of his single active leg, the old man tried in futility to capture the bird before it gained too much height, but was powerless to stop it. One legged and panting, he was forced to watch on impotently as the duck took an erratic, spiralling flight up into the lower boughs of a nearby hornbeam, securing its own safety as Sandra cheered enthusiastically. The underdog, or in this case the underduck, had found success against admittedly somewhat-surmountable odds. Nonetheless, it was still impressive.
From what Sandra could see, as she chewed on the eleventh of the biscuits, the branch in question had a broad, flat surface close to the trunk, and it was there that the duck set the shoe down to rest. As the man below looked up, apparently pondering on the question of how to proceed from there, the duck poked its bill into some kind of cavity within the hornbeam, fishing around for something. The motives of this mallard remained the most intriguing thing on which Sandra had speculated for a great many years. The more it acted, the deeper that intrigue went, as was exemplified when the duck 's bill remerged from the tree clutching what looked a lot like an insole.
There was nothing else for it. Biscuits twelve and thirteen had to go in together in order for Sandra to cope with what was going on in the hornbeam. The duck was, honest to goodness, inserting an insole into the shoe of the old man who, in his position as another observer of this debacle, had stopped his gesticulating and fretting in favour of dumbfounded watching. As deftly as it had unlaced the shoes, the duck inserted its head fully into the cavity, presumably to position the insole correctly and then, without ceremony or hesitation, pushed the shoe back down into the old man's waiting arms. He caught it clumsily, had a quick look inside and then, tentatively, set it down. His much-laboured hopping leg was finally given some respite, as its de-shoed companion was set back down, and he inserted the colder of his two feet back inside.
To the comforting crunch of a fourteenth custard cream, with a sensation that she was much less hungry than before lunch started, Sandra watched as the man tied his laces back up and walked with the otherwise unique gait of someone at a shoe shop. Backward and forward he went, a few paces at a time, with a perfectly level walk and un-rotated ankles. Eventually he stopped and, with a silent, reverential bow, he placed the remainder of his bag of seed onto the ground, at the base of the tree. A happy quacking came back his way.
Accepting that the damage was already done, Sandra returned her cheese and crackers to their space in her backpack and set about finishing her custard creams in what remained of her lunch break. At the base of the hill, the pigeons still flocked by the bench at the pond's edge, but their excitement had waned considerably in the absence of any new seed. The old man had taken a seat on the bench again, presumably trying to reconcile the events of the previous few minutes, and cast the occasional curious glance up at the duck, who was happily munching from the bag of seeds in the tree. Everything was peaceful and bright in the sunshine, except for the determined crunching of Sandra, as she thoroughly spoiled her lunch.
As soon as it had got underway, her lunch break was over, and it was time to head back into the office. As she rolled up her picnic blanket and hoisted up her backpack, Sandra resigned herself to the fact that no-one would believe her story, no matter how she told it. It would be safer to say nothing than to become the lady who walked back in with sunstroke, babbling about a duck committing run-by cobblery. She spared one last glance down to the tree and saw, with a little disappointment, that the duck had moved on, likely full of seed and quite content with a job well done. With a shrug, and a determination to come back to the same spot the next day, Sandra made her way back out of the park, stepping obliviously into a patch of soft, damp soil as she went.
In the stillness of the sunlit park, a duck walked quietly over the grassy hillside, until it reached the gateway that led into the town beyond. At the edge of this gateway was a patch of soft mud, rendered damp not by rain or spillage but by a mallard with ulterior motives for carrying pond water on its back. Any bystander would have looked upon the duck as it stared at a footprint in the mud, assuming it to be looking for worms or small insects, given its unwavering attention. A duck couldn't be examining a footprint and performing a gait analysis, much less with a view to custom making an insole. That would be ridiculous.