A Duckling Called Button

by Helen Peters

As soon as Jasmine and Tom got to the farmhouse, they raced up to Jasmine’s room. “I have to go in first,” said Jasmine. “If they’ve hatched, I have to be the first moving thing they see.”

  She peered into the incubator. Egg One hadn’t changed since the morning. And Egg Two was still intact.

  “I hope they’re all right,” Jasmine said. “It’s a long time without anything happening.”

  “Let’s stay and watch,” said Tom. “It would be so cool to see one hatch.”

  They sat on Jasmine’s bed, scrutinising the eggs for signs of life. But nothing happened. After what seemed like a very long time, the back door opened and they heard Manu and Ben’s voices. Dad called up the stairs. “Jasmine, there’s a parcel here for you.”

  Jasmine jumped up. “Yay! I thought they weren’t going to arrive in time.” She turned to the incubator. “You keep trying to break out, little ones. We’ll be back very soon.”

  “But what if they hatch when we’re not here?”

  “I don’t think they will. Anyway, we’ll only be a minute.”

  They ran downstairs. Dad was standing in the kitchen in his socks, warming his hands at the big Aga cooker that gave off heat all day and all night. Manu and Ben sat at the table, drinking milk and eating biscuits.

  “How are the eggs?” asked Dad, who hadn’t been around at breakfast time.

  “Egg One pipped this morning,” said Jasmine.

  “Oh, good. How eggciting.”

  Jasmine groaned. “That is a terrible joke. Is that my parcel?”

  Dad handed her a cardboard box. “It’s addressed to you.”

  Jasmine ripped off the parcel tape, opened the box and rummaged amongst the bubble wrap. She pulled out a little bag.

  “Elastic bands?” said Ben. “Why have you bought elastic bands on the internet? You can get those in the village shop.”

  “They’re not normal elastic bands,” said Jasmine. “They’re leg bands for the ducklings.” She tore the bag open and shook the bands out on the kitchen table. “I ordered a different colour for each of them, and eight different sizes in each colour, so I can change them as they grow.”

  “An eggcellent idea,” said Dad. “Sorry, Jas.”

  “Have you got names for them?” asked Ben.

  “I’ve thought of some,” said Jasmine, “but I’m going to wait until they’re born to see if they suit them.”

  “Dave,” said Manu. “You’ve got to call one Dave.”

  “Alan,” said Ben.

  “Keith.”

  “Those are all stupid,” said Jasmine, who was pulling more bubble wrap out of the box. “And they’re all boys’ names. The ducklings might be girls.”

  “When can you actually tell if they’re ducks or drakes?” asked Tom.

  “Not until they’re four or five weeks old,” said Jasmine, “when they start quacking. Females quack much louder than males.”

  She pulled out a clear plastic dome with a yellow tray at the bottom, wider than the dome.

  “What’s that?” asked Ben.

  “It’s a duckling drinker. You put the water in the top of the dome and it goes into the tray for the ducklings to drink, but because the dome’s in the middle of the tray, they can’t get in it to swim.”

  “Why don’t you want them to swim?”

  “If they’re not hatched by their mother, they can’t swim for the first few weeks.”

  “Why? Does their mum give them swimming lessons?” asked Manu.

  Ben’s face lit up. “We could give them swimming lessons! Can we take them to the pool? That would be so cool. We could get them little mini life jackets.”

  “It’s not about teaching them to swim,” said Jasmine. “Ducks have oil glands, so they can oil their feathers to make themselves waterproof, but ducklings’ oil glands don’t work until they’re a few weeks old. So the mother duck spreads her oil on the ducklings. But these don’t have a mother, so their feathers won’t be waterproof until their oil glands start working.”

  “Why don’t we oil the ducklings?” said Ben. “It would be a cool experiment. We could try all different oils to see which worked best. Sunflower oil, olive oil…”

  “Tractor oil,” said Manu.

  “And leave the other one without any oil on, just to see what happens.”

  “I can tell you what would happen,” said Jasmine. “It would get waterlogged and drown.”

  “How do you know, though?” said Manu. “I bet no one’s ever tried it.”

  “Maybe because no one wants their ducklings to drown.”

  “How was the last day of term, Jasmine?” asked Dad.

  “Same as usual,” said Jasmine, peeling the label off the plastic dome on the drinker.

  “Except for George setting fire to the toilets,” said Tom.

  Jasmine laughed. “That was funny.”

  “George did what?” asked Dad.

  “He stuffed all the toilet paper down one of the toilets and set fire to it with his lighter,” said Jasmine.

  “With his what?”

  “This lighter he brought into school,” said Tom. “He said he found it on the pavement. The fire alarm went off and we all had to stand in the playground for hours, freezing to death.”

  “I thought it would be Manu and Ben,” said Jasmine. “I was really relieved when we found out it was George.”

  Manu and Ben looked outraged. “That is so unfair,” said Manu. “We only set the fire alarm off once.”

  “And it wasn’t our fault,” said Ben. “Alfie pushed us into it.”

  “Well, I hope George isn’t still wandering around the village with a lighter,” said Dad.

  “No, Mrs Murphy took it off him,” said Tom. “She said it wasn’t an appropriate thing to bring into school. And his mum had to come and get him.”

  “Poor woman,” said Dad.

  “Oh, and we have to do a holiday project,” said Jasmine. “To make something from things we’ve found in nature. Bella Bradley’s making beauty products.”

  Manu pulled a face. “She would.”

  “I’m going to make things out of wood,” said Tom. Much his mum’s horror, his grandparents had given him a proper tool set for Christmas.

  “I can’t think of anything to do,” said Jasmine.

  “You should make a monster,” said Ben, “out of Manu’s skull and bone collection.”

  “That would be so cool,” said Manu. “You could use the fox’s head and then put the legs of four different animals on it.”

  “No, five legs,” said Ben, “from five different animals.”

  “And call it the Beast of Oak Tree Farm.”

  “It should be a two-headed monster,” said Ben. “You could put the badger’s head on the other end.”

  “If you think I’m going near any of those disgusting skulls,” said Jasmine, “that you don’t even wash before you put in your bedroom—”

  “I do wash them.”

  “Not properly.”

  “Oh, by the way,” said Dad, “Angela phoned. She knows you want to run a boarding kennels to fund your rescue centre. She’s away halfterm week and her dog sitter isn’t around. She wondered if you’d like to do it.”

  “Have Jake for a week? I’d love to!”

  “You’d have to keep him on a lead around the sheep.”

  “Of course I will.”

  “Come on,” said Tom, “let’s go and check the eggs. I really want one to hatch while I’m here.”

  “Can’t you just crack the shell open and get it out?” said Ben.

  “No!” said Jasmine. “Not unless nothing’s happened for ages and ages. It’s a really big thing for them to get hatched. You have to let them do it in their own time.”

  They ran upstairs again and stared into the incubator.

  “Nothing different,” said Tom. “Not even one more tiny crack.”

  “Let’s do some designs for the rescue centre while we wait,” said Jasmine.

  She got out the big pad of
art paper she had been given for Christmas and they lay sprawled on the rug, drawing maps of the animal rescue centre and boarding kennels they were going to run when they were grown up. Every few minutes, they got up to look at the eggs, but there was no change. Tom reluctantly left at half-past five, and still nothing had happened.

  “Phone me as soon as one hatches,” he said to Jasmine.

  “I will.”

  By the time Mum got home at six, this day already felt like the longest of Jasmine’s life.

  “The eggs are probably bad,” Manu said helpfully.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Jasmine. “How can they be bad if a duckling is cracking open the shell?”

  “That’s the badness coming out. Soon they’ll explode. That’s what rotten eggs do.”

  “Shut up, Manu,” said Jasmine. “You know nothing. Anyway, me and Mum have been candling them. We know there are ducklings in them.”

  “If they explode, they really stink,” Manu said hopefully.

  Straight after dinner, Jasmine ran back to her room. And what she saw when she looked in the incubator made her gasp with horror.

  There was a duckling on the incubator floor. It was wet and slimy, as ducklings are when they first hatch. But it wasn’t cheeping. Its eyes were shut. And it was completely still.

  For a few seconds, Jasmine stood over the incubator, frozen to the spot, her heart thudding against her ribs. Then she unfroze, rushed out of her room and hurtled down the stairs. She missed her footing on the bottom step and crashed on to the hall floor.

  Mum came running into the hall.

  “Jasmine! Are you all right?”

  Jasmine scrambled to her feet. “There’s a duckling,” she sobbed, grabbing her mother’s hand and dragging her to the stairs. “And I think it’s dead.”

  Mum followed Jasmine to her room. She peered into the incubator. Then she lifted the lid, gently picked up the tiny duckling and replaced the lid.

  She laid her fingers softly on the little creature’s side as it lay in her palm. Jasmine stood beside her, holding her breath.

  After a minute, Mum turned to Jasmine.

  “I’m really sorry, sweetheart,” she said, “but you were right. This little one is dead.”

  Sometimes These Things Happen

  It was nearly midnight when Jasmine finally cried herself to sleep. She had put the little duckling, whom she had named Petal, in a box that she had lined with fabric, and surrounded it with buttercups and daisies. They had buried Petal in the garden, next to its mother. At the funeral, Ella had read out a sad poem about death in springtime.

  Jasmine was inconsolable. As well as feeling desperately sorry for the poor little duckling that would never see the world, she was also choked with guilt. She was their mother. It was her job to keep them safe. And she had failed. She had let her duckling die. She hadn’t even been there when the poor little thing had hatched. She had been downstairs, eating her dinner. How long had that tiny motherless creature suffered on its own?

  “It won’t have suffered,” said Mum. “There was nothing more you could have done, Jasmine. This sometimes happens, I’m afraid. Not all eggs produce live ducklings.”

  But Jasmine was wracked with guilt. Why had the duckling died? Had she damaged it when she had chased after Manu with the eggs in her hands? Had it been too long before the eggs went into the incubator? Had she done something wrong during the incubation period?

  “We’ll never know,” said Mum. “You looked after those eggs as well as you possibly could, Jasmine. It’s very sad, but sometimes these things happen.”

  When she went back to her room after the funeral, Egg Two had pipped. But this time, Jasmine felt no excitement at all. Because her worst worry of all was so terrible that she couldn’t even say it out loud.

  If there had been something wrong with Petal, was there something wrong with this one, too?

  Would both ducklings be born dead?

  Nothing anybody said could give her the slightest comfort. Both her ducklings were going to die, and it was all her fault. She wouldn’t be able to bear it.

  When she woke on Saturday morning, her first thought was for her dead duckling. She buried her head in her pillow. The thought of looking into the incubator terrified her. She didn’t have the courage to face it.

  Gradually, she became aware of a high-pitched squeaking noise. Sunk in misery, she didn’t take much notice. Then, suddenly, her stomach did a somersault. She sat bolt upright and stared into the incubator.

  There was no duckling. The egg was still whole. But that noise was definitely coming from the incubator.

  It was the sound of a duckling, cheeping inside its egg.

  “Oh!” she gasped. “Oh, you’re talking!”

  She scrambled out of bed and looked through the misty perspex into the incubator. And what she saw made her break out into a big smile.

  The duckling in Egg Two had made a breathing hole. Tiny feathers stuck out of the hole. The feathers were moving as the duckling breathed. And the duckling was cheeping, loud and strong.

  That must be a good sign, surely?

  But what if Petal had cheeped like that, too, right before she died?

  “I’m not going to leave you,” she told her egg. “Not for one second. Not until you’re safely hatched.”

  Should she wake Mum?

  If nothing has happened by eight o’clock, Jasmine thought, I’ll wake her. Even though she wanted to sleep in this morning, she’ll understand it’s important.

  Wait a minute. What was that?

  Jasmine squinted into the incubator.

  Another tiny crack had appeared beside the breathing hole.

  Something poked through the crack. A bill! A shiny little black duckling bill had pecked a hole through the eggshell. And it was cheeping loudly.

  Jasmine kept her eyes fixed on the egg. She held her breath.

  The bill disappeared inside the shell again.

  Why had it gone back inside? Was something wrong?

  The egg wobbled on the incubator tray.

  Suddenly, a crack appeared right across the wide end of the shell. The bill poked out again. After a few seconds, it withdrew into the shell. It started to cheep again. The crack widened and Jasmine saw the duckling’s wet downy feathers, yellow and brown, moving up and down as the duckling breathed.

  Jasmine forced herself to breathe. The duckling breathed much faster than she did.

  For several minutes, she stayed completely still, watching the feathers moving up and down. Every now and then the duckling cheeped for a few seconds.

  Suddenly, the egg wobbled violently on the tray. The top lifted off, as though it was hinged, and from underneath the eggshell appeared the little wet face of a tiny duckling. Its shiny round black eyes looked straight at Jasmine.

  Jasmine felt as though she was about to burst with love and pride. She smiled through the incubator dome at the bedraggled little creature. “Hello, little duckling,” she whispered. “Welcome to the world.”

  The duckling cheeped loudly. Jasmine’s smile widened.

  “You’re saying hello, aren’t you? I’m Jasmine. I’m going to be your mother.”

  The duckling kicked its legs. Its feet seemed to be stuck in the shell. Finally, it struggled out.

  “No wonder they were stuck,” Jasmine said, looking at its big webbed feet. “They’re massive!”

  The duckling lay curled on its side, breathing hard.

  “You’re all squished up, aren’t you, like you were in the shell. You’ll straighten out in a minute. I expect you’re gathering your strength.”

  As though it had understood her words, the duckling staggered to its feet. Bits of shell were stuck to its head. Jasmine smiled.

  “Well done, little one. You’re strong, aren’t you? Strong and determined.”

  The duckling lifted its head and looked straight at her. It looked amused and intelligent and curious.

  “You understand everything, don’t you?”
said Jasmine, looking back into that shiny round eye. “You’re such a clever duckling.”

  A surge of happiness overwhelmed her. She hadn’t killed both her ducklings, after all. This one was alive and well and strong.

  “You were just a tiny red blob in an egg when I found you,” she said. “And look what you’ve grown into.”

  She considered for a minute, looking at the little creature regarding her from the incubator.

  “I’m going to call you Button. I have a feeling you’re a boy. I don’t know why, but you look like a boy to me. And if you turn out to be a girl, then Button will be a cute girl’s name, too.”

  Button gave a series of piercing cheeps.

  “Good boy,” said Jasmine. “You like your name, don’t you?”

  She must phone Tom, she thought. She had sobbed down the phone to him last night after Petal had died. He would have been worrying all this time.

  She looked at her alarm clock. It was twenty past seven.

  “I’ll be back in a second,” she told the duckling.

  She ran downstairs, grabbed the cordless phone from the living room and raced back up to the incubator. She dialled Tom’s house number. There was no point calling his mobile because he wasn’t allowed to have his phone in his bedroom.

  Luckily, it was Tom himself who answered.

  “I knew it would be you,” he said, as soon as Jasmine said hello. “What’s happening?”

  “Oh, Tom, there’s a beautiful, live, healthy duckling. He’s called Button. He’s just hatched. I’m sorry I didn’t phone before, but it all happened so fast.”

  “I’m coming right now,” he said. “I’ll just tell Mum.”

  He arrived ten minutes later, red-cheeked and out of breath. They raced up to Jasmine’s room. Button waddled across the incubator towards them, cheeping excitedly.

  “Oh, my goodness,” said Tom. “He’s so cute.”

  “He’s the cutest duckling ever.”

  “He’s amazing. I can’t believe he knows you already.”

  Jasmine stared at him. “Do you think he does? How can you tell?”