Noah's Duck
by Timothy Fogg

(This was written in the fall of 1999, when people were so worried about the possible consequences of New Year's Day, 2000.)

It was Jimmy Noonan who tipped me off, who showed me how closely we are skirting disaster by merely being alive. Jimmy and I had been in school together, and on the rare occasions we got together, it was to be outdoors—fishing or calling turkeys or any of the other myriad pastimes that outdoor New England has to offer. 

Jimmy wrote an outdoor column for the Kennebec Tribune, and he was good at it. While people always expect outdoor editors to be experts in every field, they rarely are; foremost, they are newspapermen reporting for their paper. If they are good writers, people look at them as experts, but in truth they are just good reporters. 

My friend Jimmy was the exception. He was an expert in his field long before he thought of becoming a journalist, and the difference was easy to see. When he wrote of salmon fishing in Nova Scotia, he could not only find a promising lie and expertly cast a fly to it, he could also tie that fly and recite its history from rote. He knew the deer, the bear, the moose, and he knew the ways of ruffed grouse on sunny afternoons in the beautiful leaves of a mixed growth forest. He was on a first name basis with bush pilots from Newfoundland to Alaska. In short, Jimmy never had to guess; he knew the outdoors.

The newspapers had never held an appeal for me, and I had worked previously in freelancing for magazines—mostly outdoors periodicals, but sometimes going so far offshore as to write some women's confessions. Lately I had turned my hand to writing books, but I was finding acceptance harder to come by in this new field. Still, I was plugging away. I had just finished a second novel and didn't even have an agent to pimp the first one. Ah, well, a writer is always an optimist, mostly out of necessity. 

Jimmy had sent a message saying that he had a genuine phenomenon to show me. Obviously I expected something in the outdoor field, so I was quite disappointed when we reached our destination. 

"Well, what do you see?" inquired Noonan. 

"It's a duck, Jim; a plastic duck. And not a particularly good looking one." I was sure this was some kind of a joke, but I couldn't see the humor in it. This imitation duck was on a front lawn, and it was dressed in a T-shirt and a straw hat. I had seen it before. The owner apparently dressed it in clothes to suit the weather. It was somewhat of a local landmark. 

"Now let's take a ride around," said Jimmy. We cruised for an hour, stopped and ate a little lunch, and then rode back for another look at the duck. It was now clad in a yellow slicker and rain hat. 

"Well, that's that," I said. "They can't even tell what the weather is by looking outside." It was still sunny with not a cloud in the sky.

"Oh, yeah, well, wait a minute." And he was right. Suddenly dark clouds loomed in from the west and the day became a rainy one. "So what do you make of that, my friend Fogg?" 

"Simple. They must have a good weather radio. Maybe one of those new computerized weather stations."

"Who is 'they'?" asked Jimmy, and before I could say how the hell do I know he was talking again. "This is going to sound nuts, but I swear it is true. Nobody has ever seen anybody come out of that house to change the duck's clothes. I checked with the postman to see who lives there, and he didn't know. He delivers mail addressed to a Margaret Seaver, but listen to this: she was presented with the Boston Post Cane in 1965. At the time she was 102 years old. 

"There must be a daughter or something." I was sure he was reading more into the story than was there.

"Sorry to differ, but the family is a complete mystery. The old timers remember some talk of Indian heritage, but that's the only info I could dig up. Where things get scary is that in the last few years the duck has changed clothes a lot more frequently, and it has always been right. 

"It's not El Niño, for the changes are way too fast. The Pacific current brings about a gradual change for the course of the winter."

"So what do you think it is?" Despite my earlier doubts he had my curiosity aroused. 

"I know it sounds crazy, but somehow that duck and whatever goes with it controls the weather. You saw the sudden rainstorm. The weather maps showed no disturbances or fronts for the whole day. I saw them myself. Yet when the duck's clothes changed, the storm came." 

"You have obviously checked into this. What do you make of it?"

"I have heard of an old curse put on the Europeans by an Indian that was killed on the Kennebec River. Tomorrow I'm going to dig deeper in the library to try to find the story. Care to join me?" 

We had been cruising around again as we talked, and we took one last look at the duck. It was now clad in a parka. I was about to say that this was foolish, and then the heavens opened up and large flakes of snow fell from the sky. Bear in mind that this was happening in August. Not exactly a run-of-the-mill occurrence. The ground was soon covered in white. The squall soon stopped and the sun melted the out of season snow, but the experience had made me a believer. 

The next day I ran over on my motorcycle and joined Jimmy at the Maine State Library. "It has something to do with Arnold's march, but beyond that I don't know what we're after."

"If it's here we'll find it." I felt assurance because I enjoyed such research. Hours later I was beginning to wonder, and then I came across an old tome entitled, "Superstitions of the Kennebec Valley." On page 78 was the answer we had been looking for. 

When Benedict Arnold had led his men up the river on their trek to Quebec, an old Abinaki medicine man had tried to steal one of their canoes. In his mind anything on the river was fair game, but the white men did not share this view, and they hanged him. Before he died, he put a curse on these newcomers from Europe. The weather in the new land would kill them off. He added something about full moons and a thousand seconds, but the observers weren't real interested and didn't take notes. Nobody took him too seriously, until now. 

"Jimmy, did you learn anything else about the old woman? She must have had some relatives or something."

"Nope. She had some Indian heritage, or maybe I should say has. There was never any record of her death."

We had learned all we could there, so Jimmy jumped on in back of me, and we drove back to the faux fowl. A thought was coming to me—a thought I didn't like. Just past the rotary I pulled over and shut off the Harley. "The thousand seconds doesn't add up, man. That's no time at all. What if he actually said the second thousand, as in years?"

"I don't like it," said Jimmy. "We're in the millennium year, and tonight is one of the full moons. It ain't good. Let's go take a look at the bird."

When we drove up, the duck had a length of two-inch hawser wrapped around it, attaching it to the concrete steps. "Oh, shit, man, tornado."

I ran the old dresser down into a thick copse of oaks and tied it to the strongest tree I could find. We went to the crest of the hill to see the extent of the destruction. We were just in time to see the last of the big bridge, the one between the rotaries where they had built a wire-retaining fence to keep people from jumping. That was fine except that they then took out the Edwards Dam, and the river was more often than not a bed of mud. Anyone who jumped in there would give a new meaning to the term mud puppy.

At any rate, that was all in the past, for as we watched, the bridge rose three hundred feet into the air before it broke into three pieces and hurtled toward the eastern shore. I pitied anyone unfortunate enough to be in that area when the bridge came down. We felt the shock wave where we stood, over a mile away. And then all was fair again. The sudden burst of nature's force might not have happened. 

Jimmy and I glanced at each other. We both knew what we should do next, and neither wanted to go, but the attraction was irresistible, and we walked up to the road and looked across to the duck. I swear I saw him return my gaze with blazing red eyes as we checked out his latest outfit.

The duck was in full scuba gear with three tanks strapped to his back, enough for a deep dive!

And then we were running like our feet were on fire, running toward the river, for our only chance of survival lay in finding a boat.

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Nolan Chart