Duck Season

Finals Week.

I nearly lived in the library.



I took a mandatory break from book-staring-at to find some external, dynamic stimulation in the library lobby. After 10 minutes or so, I was walking back to my desk when one of my very tall friends from a nearby desk passed me going the opposite direction, grinning down at me from under his awning of dark hair. I slowed and stopped near him to imply "..What..?"

He hardly needed an invitation:

"Somebody just walked past swinging a dead duck!"

"What? a... duck?"

"A dead duck! Swinging it, like this!"

"What? ...in the library?"

"This duck falls off of the library... I didn't see it, but the people in the desk next to me saw it fall off the library past the window! And then this guy walks up and picks it up and walks off with it!"

"What? just now!"

He nods vigorously as we both enter the library lobby (I had joined his original trajectory). I'm still mentally reeling with collecting the images in some coherent conceptual basket when immediately before me at the circ desk, I see:




"Holy Cow! Is that the dead duck? How did it die? (Can I see it?)"

"Sure. My friend shot it."

My mind flashes back to someone requesting slingshots for shooting ducks off of the Steele's during freshman year. Someone is shooting ducks off the library?

"He SHOT it? With a gun?"

"Yeah, it's duck season. He just got back from Sauvie Island"

Oh. This is starting to make sense...
"How did it fall off the library?"

"Oh, well, he brought it back to give it to me on the 2nd floor, and I dropped it out my window..."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"I must cook it and eat it. I can't wait for finals to be over so I can eat this duck."

"...can I take a picture?"

"Sure."



A funny bit of trivia is that there was a guy who graduated last year that used to have loud arguments with the library circ(ulation) desk while tours were going through regarding demands for an explanation of why he couldn't take his duck into the library (he had a convincing-looking fake decoy-type duck). I told this story to the boy with the dead duck, and interestingly enough, I randomly met the boy-who-used-to-argue-about-his-fake-duck downtown and told him the story of how someone actually had an equally un-alive duck in the library.




When I went back into the bowels of the library, the talk of that row of desks was about how a dead duck had fallen off the roof and some guy had just walked up and carried it off, swinging it.

The part that's still a mystery to me is... how he managed to just drop it out of a 2nd story window...