So I'm A Duck (Ne Súwæk)

 

by Brett Rutherford

     adapted from a Mingo Indian narrative

So, I’m a duck. Get used to it.
Suwaek they call me
when I fly over the houses.
But duck will do. I’m good with that.

You already know
that I talk a lot, quack,
quack, that’s just the way I am.
I can only do things one way.

I talk when flying south;
I talk when coming back:
it’s all the same to you
except the way my bill
is pointing. One quack
is as good as another.

I talk when someone tries
to bring me down with his gun.
I talk to the dog and tell him:
not this time, buster!

Talking got my bill so dull.
No one would mistake
me for a hawk or an eagle.
I cannot rend my dinner,

But akya'tíyú, I am beautiful!

The handsome friend
you’re walking with,
enjoying so much chatter:
it might be me, you know,

talking away in wood-shade,
making you tired from so much
walking. I’ll even make tea
from boneset if your leg hurts,

just to keep our conversation
going, just to keep company
with a fellow talker. It’s almost ten
in the morning, and we have a ways

to go. Just over there,
beyond the fir trees, we might,
if we are lucky, spot some
of the Little People I spoke of.

But wait! A little pond!
Just let me rinse my toes first.
Ah! That’s better. Oh look:
there goes a snipe,
that brown spot, hardly moving!

So nice to see a relative,
though with that beak
as long as a porcupine quill
he’s not much of a talker.

Look over there! Not every day
you see a kingfisher fly down
and do his quack-quatic —
I mean aquatic —

dive-and-catch, then quack —
I mean back — to the treetop
(excuse my stutter). I don’t mean
to repeat myself so much!

I’m more than I’m quacked up
to be, you know. That ocean,
far off and many hills away:
one of us made that, you know.

We stretched it out on a frame,
like a fish, drying. No big deal.
And all those islands
and continents? We made them!

Now I know something
that you do not, since I have flown
all the way over and back,
across the whole ocean —

I’ll bet you didn’t know
that people live there, too!
All upside down and quack-
backwards, but there they are!

You can eat those berries:
the red ones, the blue ones.
Myself, I do not eat them.
You’d better not ask me why.

Let’s walk a little more. From here
on forward the way is smooth
along the lake shore. There!
That’s what I wanted you to see:
a heron! Look at him go,

catching that fish, as big
as my body, with his horned
war-club of a bill, so pleased
with himself he is!

Now aren’t you glad
we took this walk together?

(The original of this narrative, in the Mingo language, contains Mingo words that sound like "quack", so this version attempts to re-create that comic effect.)