Prologue

If you don’t know what a ‘Prologue’ is, don’t panic. ’Prologue’ is just a fancy word that means ‘the part of a story that happens before the story’. I must include one here, and I hope you’ll read it (and not be the kind of person who skips introductions and prologues and goes right to the story part of stories).

I cannot tell you the strange and wonderful stories of Mr. Quakers’ adventures until I tell you something about the girls who discovered him. (Or, perhaps he discovered them; it’s impossible to say which is correct.)

Their names were Rae and Vanny, although I should tell you that those weren’t their real names. Mr. Q has asked me to keep certain things about his story confidential, for reasons that will become more and more obvious as you learn about his dangerous life.

Rae and Vanny were sisters who were almost-ten and almost-eight when they bumped into Mr. Quackers (quite literally) in a small swimming pool. The pool was in a small yard in a small town in Hungary. (I can’t tell you the name of the small town, because that too is classified information.)

If you’ve never visited Hungary before, please talk to your parents (or whoever takes care of you) and ask them to visit Hungary with you as soon as possible. I can’t give you too many details here, as this is not a travel blog, but I will tell you one thing about Hungary that you will love, and then I’ll get on with my story: sunflowers. Oh, and lavender. And lavender lemonade. And ice cream. Many, many, many flavors of ice cream. Okay—that was more than one thing. Sorry. Just trust me. Go to Hungary someday.

Rae and Vanny were splashing around in the small swimming pool in the small back garden of a friend of theirs, and suddenly, there he was…a bright yellow duck floating peacefully around in the pool enjoying the bright Hungarian sunshine and the beautiful day.

Rae adopted him on the spot. She told the rest of us that he was Mr. Quackers. Then, we (Rae, Vanny, and I) immediately started learning about his adventures in his hometown of South Duckington (and in many of the other Duckingtons as well).

If you’re not familiar with the land of ducks, the first thing you need to know is that there are quite a few Duckingtons there. Ducks don’t like to bother to make up fancy names for their towns like humans do. If they find a good name, they pretty much stick with it, possibly adding a word or two to make sure they don’t get too confused about which town they are talking about.

There’s a South Duckington, as I’ve already mentioned, and there are also:

  • North Duckington
  • West Duckington
  • East Duckington
  • Central Duckington
  • New Duckington
  • New New Duckington
  • New New New Duckington…
  • and probably many more.

Mr. Quackers has been in all kinds of sticky situations in the various Duckingtons—like the time he was accused of shoplifting gum at the Grab-n-Go in South Duckington—which turned out to be completely false, of course. He always gets out of those sticky situations, though, because he is the smartest duck in all of the Duckingtons.

Rea and Vanny had such a fun time with Mr. Q that he ended up visiting them later in their home country, but that is a story that must be told at the proper time, and that time is not now. I must get on with telling you the story of how Mr. Quackers handled a big problem with the Sand Witch that could have destroyed most of the Duckingtons.

Our Prologue is done! On with the story!

Mr. Quackers and the Sand Witch

The Sand Witch was the most powerful witch in the part of the world where the Duckingtons were. She had three sisters (because witches always come in groups of four sisters—in case you didn’t already know that) and she also had a very foul temper.

She also hated ducks. All ducks. They annoyed her to no end. The mere sight of a duck could send her into fits. She especially hated it when they waddled onto her property without an invitation—and she never invited ducks to anything.

The only thing she believed ducks were good for was grilling. Whenever she caught a duck in her garden or anywhere near her house…grilled! Around the time when this story begins, she had even installed a bright, shiny, new grill in her back garden, and she was looking forward to using it. She was hoping some poor duck would be foolish enough to wander into her garden (or anywhere near her house) so she could enjoy a nice dinner of grilled duck from her new grill.

The Sand Witch’s had installed her new grill as a present to herself, because on the day this story took place, it was her birthday. She was not having. a very happy birthday, though. She was very upset with the ducks of North Duckington and South Duckington because not one single duck had brought her the customary birthday tribute that she demanded of them.

(‘Tribute’ is a word that means ‘a gift that someone demands from someone, which makes it not really a gift at all’.)

The Sand Witch couldn’t believe that the ducks had ignored her birthday! What was the point of turning three hundred and twenty two years old if no one was going to honor you and bring you tribute? The nerve of those ducks!

The ducks could not be blamed, of course. They can’t remember a witch‘s birthday like you remember my birthday and I remember yours. That’s just not information they keep in those little duck heads of theirs. But the Sand Witch didn’t consider any of that as she got more and more angry.

She decided to do something to punish those insolent ducks. (‘Insolent’ means ’rude and disrespectful’, but of course you and I know that the ducks weren’t being insolent at all.) She went to the cupboard where she kept her magic things and pulled out her magic bowl. It looked like any large wooden bowl you might find in a kitchen, but it was far more dangerous than any ordinary bowl.

She placed it on her kitchen counter and began to fill it with mysterious ingredients. I can’t tell you what they were, because I’m not a witch, but I’m going to guess that they were strange, secret ingredients that she knew how to use to do terrible things.

Some of them looked like sand. Others looked like small black stones. Some looked and smelled like foul, damp, disturbing tea leaves. It was a creepy combination of weird items with no liquid of any kind. (She usually avoided water and left that to her sister, the Witch of the Sea.) Once the bowl was full, she began to swirl it around.

As she swirled the bowl, a cloud of dust and sand began to form in the air above the bowl. The cloud became funnel-shaped as it grew and grew. Soon it was so big that it couldn’t fit in her house anymore! It twisted sideways, blew out through her kitchen window, and then started growing ten times faster! As it grew, it sucked up sand from the ground around the Sand Witch’s house.

Soon it became a huge sandstorm! It began moving towards North Duckington and South Duckington! When it reached the two major duck towns, it would surely destroy them!

Over in South Duckington, Mr. Quackers was enjoying a quiet afternoon picnic with several of his duck friends. A small duckling named Sammy pointed at the sky and yelled, “What is that?!” As soon as he saw it, Mr. Quackers knew exactly what it was.

“Sandstorm!” he yelled to all of the picnicking ducks. “Get the ducklings somewhere safe. The rest of us have work to do.”

“What kind of work?” asked a duck named Charles—whose name you won’t need to bother remembering, because he’ll probably never appear in any stories after this one.

“It’s a sandstorm,” Quackers repeated. “Does that give you any clues about where it might be from?”

“Somewhere sandy?” Charles guessed.

“It’s from the Sand Witch,” Mr. Quackers explained with a sigh. “She’s obviously angry about something. What’s the date?”

No one knew.

“I’m guessing it’s her birthday,” Mr. Q said. “We need to bring her presents or we’re all doomed. Round up every adult duck you can find and tell them to bring presents to the Sand Witch! Fly around the storm, not into it! Hurry!”

Charles flew off to follow Mr. Q’s instructions, and soon there were hundreds of ducks flying towards the house of the Sand Witch—a place they usually avoided most carefully.

Each duck flew over her house as quickly as possible, dropping items on her lawn. The items were quite random: there were beautiful seashells, ordinary seashells, colorful little stones, some seeds, a few flowers…

In case you didn’t know, ducks are not very imaginative when it comes to gift-giving.

Mr. Quackers knew, though, that the gifts themselves weren’t the important part, but the number of them. He watched carefully while he circled above the witch’s garden and counted as each item fell onto the grass below. (Some of them bounced off of the Sand Witch’s shiny new grill as they fell—but he tried not to think about that).

When his count reached three hundred and twenty two, he quacked loudly for all of the ducks to stop dropping gifts and fly back to North Duckington and South Duckington. Then he flew off towards home himself.

The Sand Witch must have been napping while the items were falling into her garden, but when she heard loud quacking she stepped outside to see what was happening. She didn’t see ducks anywhere, but she did see that they had finally remembered to bring her tributes—and exactly the right number!

You might think that she would be happy about this, but she was more than a little disappointed. She had been sure that no ducks could count as high as three hundred and twenty two, so she had been looking forward to doing some grilling once her sandstorm had destroyed two of those pesky duck towns and captured dozens (if not hundreds) of ducks for her to grill.

With a heavy sigh she went back into the house and went to her magic bowl. Above the bowl there hovered a smaller version of the sandstorm she had spun up. She could see that it was nearly at one of the duck towns. She really wanted to keep it going and watch as it smashed the town to bits, but there are rules, even in magic, and the ducks had somehow managed to bring her the exact number of items as tribute. She grasped the bowl and swirled it the in the opposite of the direction she had used before.

Somewhere close to North Duckington the sandstorm stopped spinning in its tracks and dropped all of its sand over parts of the town.

The sand made a bit of a mess, but the ducks didn’t mind that at all. The sand falling from the sky and the not-there-anymore sandstorm was proof that Mr. Quackers had saved them all from a terrible fate.

Mr. Quackers smiled. It wasn’t the first time he had outsmarted the witch and saved the ducks–and it probably wouldn’t be the last.