Ducklings
The thing about that day wasn't just the misty beauty of the flooded landscape.
Each tree, each bank, each hillock cut off by lapping water became an object of mystery, seen as a new thing with new eyes because I'd never floated through a forest before.
The thing about that day was the ducks, ancient, ordinary, inhabiting the floodscape with confidence because it wasn't new in the least.
They flapped, quacking casually, between the upright trunks whose unfurling leaves obscured nothing, trunks stately and solemn as the arches of a cathedral that after all in their organic purity and grace, aped the awe of trees that are older than the works of man.
How long have there been ducks? So long have they slipped between the trees, nattering to each other, above the flooded brush, through the bald pleached alleys of the woods.
There - beside us - muttering under their breaths, a mother foraging with her fuzzy yellow ducklings bobbing near her, bills working ceaselessly to strain sustenance from the water, each chick a fluffy mouthful for something hungry.
The paddles bite, the canoe shoulders forward, and we hope the alligator gars and the snapping turtles are confounded by the sudden vastness of the river, so the black eyes of these balls of fluff may in their day, just like this day, steer between upthrust tree-trunks.
By Ruby Jung. Photo by Ruby Jung. All rights reserved.