Enslaved by Ducks Read Online Free PDF

dryer and the sink, beneath the workbench, under the fuel-oil tank, in the hellacious cubbyhole where Linda stored Halloween, Easter, and Christmas decorations, against the wall next to the water heater, in a pile of possibly clean, possibly dirty clothes, and even among the canning jars. The third time I hit the basement to search for him, Binky sat nonchalantly grooming himself in plain view as if awaiting my arrival. When I took two steps toward him, he sauntered to the end of an unfinished run of plasterboard, hopped onto a cinderblock, and disappeared behind the wall.
    Just beyond arm’s length, he resumed his toilette, oblivious to my cajoling, pleading, and threats. I tried to chase him out with a broom, but that only drove him in deeper. From a step ladder, I poked my trusty wrapping-paper tube down toward him via an opening in the unfinished ceiling, hoping to block his path and force him out into the open. But he was too fast for me. He scuttled down the full length of the wall to the far corner, where I could just make out the shape of his ears with a flashlight. I had no reasonable hope of getting to him.
    Common sense told me to wait patiently until Binky tired of this warren that lacked a single chewable wire or until his stomach beckoned him toward his food-stocked cage in the kitchen. But I wasn’t in the mood for common sense. I needed to show Binky thata rabbit wasn’t the boss of our house.
    “Leave him alone,” Linda counseled. “He’ll come out when he’s ready.”
    “You’re absolutely right,” I told her, pretending to agree as I followed her upstairs. Then, while Linda was taking a bath, I sneaked back to the basement.
    With a small utility knife, I cut a vaguely rectangular shape in the plasterboard at the base of the wall exactly opposite where I knew Binky sat, then used a screwdriver to pull and tear the hunk of drywall free. The commotion should have tipped Binky off, but since no amount of thumping had ever driven him from a hiding place, he remained still just long enough for me to make a grab at him. He was sitting too far forward, with just his hindquarters framed by the wallboard cut-out, and he wriggled from my grasp just as I tried darting a hand in front of his chest. He came out from behind the wall the way he had gone in and, before I could catch him, ran across the basement floor toward the stairs to the kitchen.
    Binky’s independence angered me, and the fact that he angered me angered me further. After almost two years in our house, he wasn’t becoming any more domesticated. If anything, he seemed to be growing wilder by the day. I didn’t like the feeling of chaos that Binky brought to our environment, the notion that I could be innocently reading the
Lowell Ledger
newspaper thinking all was well with the world when some portion of the house was being eaten away under our feet. I also took his disobedience as a conscious thumbing of his wiggly nose at my alleged authority.
    I came to this conclusion after the most impressive of Binky’s numerous escapes from the backyard pen that I had cobbled together for him. I had based his pen around the structure of a play area and sandbox that the previous owner of my house had built. I added metal fence posts between the existing four-by-four timbersand looped a roll of chicken-wire fencing around the whole thing. At first, escaping was simply a matter of Binky perfecting his hurdling skills to clear the three-foot-high fence I had foolishly assumed would keep him in. When I raised the height a couple of feet by adding another roll of fencing, he started probing my less-than-sterling workmanship. My fence posts protruded from the ground at widely varying angles like a bad set of teeth. Upon locating the post that leaned away from the pen at the greatest angle, Binky developed the fancy footwork needed to scramble up the steeply inclined fencing. Or he would run in circles around the pen until he’d built up sufficient speed for