You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“The savage in man is never quite eradicated.”
It was nearly Mother's Day this spring when I set forth at dawn to take my constitutional along the red brick quays of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Approaching the halfway mark of the tree-studded pier that stretches between the Maryland Science Center and the Rusty Scupper, I was arrested by the sight of a remarkable female duck. All expectable sepia, buff, and beige, she seemed oddly inflated—almost like an open umbrella turned upside down. Feathery, mottled, her tent-like form in the obliquely slanting rays of the morning sun struck me as odd. I saw in her a human person puffed up with pride, preternaturally wide-awake to the world but also serenely self-contained and vain. Silently, on the edge of a stone embankment that abuts the dark waters of the harbor, I crouched to watch her.
As if to reward my patience, a sudden almost imperceptible murmur of feathers disclosed a tiny puff of pale brown fluff, a live being of miniscule proportions almost dandelion-like in form as when, in the final phase of that weed, a breeze or a child's breath scatters it. Then to my amazement I beheld another, and yet another … Trundling delicately out from under their maternal nest, tiny beings tumbled every which way, dispersing themselves in all directions, animating the cold grey surface of sloping rock. They tumbled almost as if without volition, so raw and new, so innocent of exploration and independence, so ignorant of gain and pain, of mastery and usurpation!