Funny Frank (9 page)

So Frank launched himself back into the water very carefully and began to swim gently around the duck pond with slow, measured thrusts of his big yellow webbed feet, and the little yellow ducklings swam with him, like a flotilla of small boats escorting a big ship.

Then the big white drake and all the other ducks, seeing how the ducklings were enjoying the company of the strange chicken, came out onto the water and swam along too, so that Frank found himself at the head of a great armada of ducks.

At last, he thought happily, I am in my element!

Chapter Nine

It so happened that later that day one of Tom Tabb's best cows was having difficulty in calving, and so he sent for his brother the vet. Later, when the calf had been safely delivered—a heifer calf at that, which pleased the farmer—Ted Tabb asked how Jemima's Frank was getting on.

“You'll be amazed,” Tom said. “Carrie has made him artificial feet. I'll just go and get a bowl of corn and we'll go down to the duck pond and you'll see.”

By chance all the ducks and the ducklings were pottering about in the orchard grass, so that the pond was empty of birds except for Frank.

He had been trying to copy his friends, who were so good at putting their heads below the surface to pull up weeds or snap up wiggly things. If I'm going to be a proper duck, he told himself, I've got to be able to do that, and so he had been practicing. But somehow he didn't seem to have the knack of it. He could put his
head under all right (though not very far—the wet suit would not allow it), but he wasn't too clever at holding his breath or keeping his beak closed, so that the water got up his nostrils and down his throat. Altogether he was fed up and glad to see the two men approaching, one holding a bowl of corn and calling him by name.

Frank went into overdrive. He whizzed across the surface of the pond so fast that he shot out of the water onto the bank, landing flat-footed on his big yellow webs.

“What d'you think of that?” asked the farmer.

“Amazing!” said the vet.“Look at those feet! How fast he goes! Carrie's a genius. But, Tom, what's to become of this funny bird that is a chicken but wants to be a duck?”

“Blessed if I know, Ted,” said his brother. “I hope he doesn't come to any harm, Jemima's that proud of him. We'll just have to wait and see.”

So they waited, as the weeks and indeed the months went by, and they saw Frank grow and grow till he was almost the size of his father, the big red rooster. (Or rather as big as his father had
been
, for one day, down at the far end of the orchard, he had met an old fox that had hidden itself in a nettle patch.) On Frank's head now was a big floppy scarlet comb, while out of the back of the wet
suit there hung a fine plumy tail. His wings had grown enormously, too, so that now he could really scull with them to make his speedy progress on water even speedier.

All this time Frank spent his nights in the duckhouse and his days on the duck pond, only coming ashore for food. Of his mother he saw practically nothing, for she kept well away from him, as indeed did his brothers and sisters and the rest of the flock. Sometimes this made Frank feel a little sad, for he was after all a chicken at heart. He had his friends, the ducks, but the older he got the more he began to realize that though he could swim like a duck—
far better, in fact—he could never look like one.

He would see his three brothers come strutting by and think how handsome they had grown, with their fine feathers and their elegant, sharp-clawed feet, in contrast to his clumsy green rubber suit and his awkward yellow rubber webs.

A little later he noticed that there were only two of his brothers, and later still only one, and at last none. Where had they gone? Frank wondered. Little did he
dream that they had made three plump Sunday dinners for the Tabb family.

For a long time Frank had tried hard, too, to copy the sounds that all the ducks made—his first friends, the ducklings, were grown up now—but his “Quack!” was really still only “Frank!” But then, one fine morning, something quite unexpected happened to funny Frank.…

Jemima had let the hens out and then had opened the duckhouse door, and all the ducks and the big white drake and Frank came out and made for the pond as usual.