The Ugly Duckling

It was summer in the countryside, and down among the reeds by the pond, a mother duck sat on her nest, waiting for her eggs to hatch. One by one the shells went crick, crack, and one by one, out tumbled little yellow ducklings, blinking at the big green world.

But the largest egg, an odd grey-white one, took its time. The mother duck sat, and sat, and sat some more. And when at last it opened, out climbed a duckling who was not yellow at all. He was big, and grey, and gangly, with a wobble in his walk and feet he had not grown into.

"Hm," said an old duck who had come to inspect. "That one came out wrong."

"He came out mine," said the mother duck, and she tucked him in with the rest.

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But the farmyard was not kind to the grey duckling. The other ducklings called him ugly. The hens shooed him from the corn. The cat looked at him the way cats look at things they have decided not to bother with. Even his brothers and sisters, who should have known better, learned the word ugly and used it, because it always got a laugh.

He was actually a fine swimmer, the finest of all of them, and in the water his wobble disappeared entirely. But nobody was watching for what he did well.

So one evening in autumn, when the leaves were turning the color of toast, the grey duckling slipped through the hedge and went out into the wide world by himself, to find a place where nobody would mind him.

He spent the autumn on a marsh among kind, plain moorhens who mostly left him be. And one evening he saw, high overhead, a flock of great white birds flying south, with long necks and wide wings, calling to one another in voices like silver horns. He did not know their name. He only knew that watching them made his chest ache, the way beautiful things sometimes do, and that he would have given anything to go where they were going.

Then came winter, and winter is long when you are small and alone. The duckling paddled circles in his corner of the pond to keep the water from freezing around him, and tucked his head under his wing against the wind, and waited, the way everything in winter waits.

If this part of the story feels a little cold and a little lonely, that is because it was. You may hold somebody's hand until spring comes. It comes on the very next line.

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Spring came all at once, the way it does. The sun grew warm, the larks went up singing, and the duckling stretched wings that had grown over the winter without his noticing, and they beat strong and wide and carried him up over the water before he even meant to fly.

Below him lay a garden with a quiet green canal, and there on the water floated three of the great white birds from the autumn sky. Swans. That was their name, he had learned it on the marsh. The most beautiful birds he had ever seen.

He came down on the water a little way off, and bowed his head, ready to be sent away, because being sent away was the only thing he knew to expect.

"I am sorry," he said. "I know I am ugly. I only wanted to look at you."

But the swans came gliding toward him, and they did not send him away. They circled him, and stroked him with their beaks, gentle as anything, and one of them said, "Ugly? You are the newest of us. Look down."

And the duckling looked down at his own reflection in the clear water, and what looked back at him was no grey and gangly duckling at all. It was a swan. White as first snow, with a long proud neck and wide strong wings. He had been a swan the whole time, from the very first morning, only nobody around him had known how to see it, and so he had not known either.

Just then some children came running down to the bank with bread for the swans, and the smallest one shouted, pointing, "There's a new one! The new one is the most beautiful of all!"

The young swan hid his head under his wing, because a heart can be shy when it is that full. He thought of the farmyard, and the marsh, and the long winter, and how none of it had guessed this ending. And then he lifted his neck, and sailed up the canal with the others, home.

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And if ever you feel grey and gangly and out of place, remember the swan's secret, which is this: you are not a wrong duckling. You may simply be an early swan, and spring is on the very next line.