Many mysterious, man-like creatures have frightened the unsophisticated and unscientific peoples of the world. The Yeti of the Himalayas for example, or the Bigfoot of the United States. Few have been as mysterious, as elusive, and yet lived as close to Civilisation, as the Duck-man of Furzton.
The first anyone knew of him was when the Canada Geese started disappearing.
The thing with Canada Geese is, nobody really cares that much about them. So when the number of geese started to go down no-one worried about it.
"There don't seem to be so many geese around the lake these days", people would say to each other as they walked round Furzton Lake. Some people thought maybe the geese were migratory, and they had all flown off somewhere. Canada sprang to mind. Other people thought the lake could be getting polluted. But nobody really cared. Nobody cares about Canada geese.
Then strange rumours started to spread among the anglers. You must have seen the anglers? Every summer evening they're out by the side of Furzton Lake in their hundreds. Practically shoulder-to-shoulder. Each has his little tent to crawl into when he becomes cold or tired. There is actually only one fish in Furzton Lake, and the fishermen are catching the same one over and over again. Some of them have noticed it's always the same fish, but since most of them are only there to get away from their wives, or because their wives want to get away from them, they don't mind too much. Some said it was the shadows on the lake, and some said it was the mental strain caused by trying to outwit fish, but the anglers claimed they had seen something in the trees.
The Brook runs through the middle of Furzton. To the south of the Brook lies the original estate. The people in the other half of the estate sometimes call it Old Furzton because it was built as long ago as the 1980s. To the north lies the new half of the estate, imaginatively called North Furzton. The Brook itself runs west to east through the park, down into the lake. Just where it meets the lake there is a small spinney. And that is where the anglers saw something. The branches moved as something slunk through. A shadow was cast across the water of the lake. And there was a strange snuffling noise.
They couldn't really say what it was. A furtive couple enjoying some extra-marital activities, some thought. A sleepwalker with a heavy cold, said others. A very, very big badger was another suggestion. But nobody really worried about it too much.
Until the swans started to go missing.
After all, geese did not really matter. What difference was a goose here or there? But when there were no more geese, the swans started to go. Some people fed the birds on Furzton Lake every day; old ladies and young mothers with their children. They didn't mind the geese going. The geese were aggressive. If you didn't give them all your bread straight away they would mug you for it. But it is different when you are down to your last swan. The one remaining swan became very, very fat as it wolfed down the bread of a hundred different schoolchildren. The mallards and moorhens had never had it so good.
The children started to talk about a strange character. The Duck-man, they called him. They said he lived in Cold Harbour Spinney. Nobody believed them. They said he caught the fish in Furzton Lake with his bare hands. Nobody believed them. They said he ate ducks. People started to listen. The Neighbourhood Watch started taking an interest.
One of the local Neighbourhood Watch committees was very keen. Other Neighbourhood Watches spent their time having coffee mornings, with a bit of peering through the curtains in the evenings. But due to a recent outbreak of car thefts, this Neighbourhood Watch had transformed itself into a Neighbourhood Lynch Mob. Woe betide anyone caught entering a car in Old Furzton, with or without the key, if they could not provide documentary evidence that they owned it. Nobody had actually been hanged from a lamp-post, but a few youths had ended up in the lake for such crimes as hanging around on street corners, or playing football without a permit during the hours of daylight.
The Secretary of the Neighbourhood Watch and his deputy were making their regular patrol at midnight one night. They marched briskly through the park and down to Furzton Lake, resplendent in their Neighbourhood Watch hats, Neighbourhood Watch arm-bands and Neighbourhood Watch steel toe-capped boots. They had once had Neighbourhood Watch baseball bats, but the Police had confiscated them after the unfortunate business with the vicar.
Pausing only to tell the anglers to take their rubbish home with them, they walked round to the little wooden footbridge, which crosses where the lake is narrowest. They would have checked out the sports pavilion, but they turned off towards the edge of the lake, having seen something moving in the trees down there. The Moon threw its light over the scene. On the edge of the lake sat a mallard. Towards the mallard, creeping through the undergrowth, came what appeared to be a man. He was moving cat-like, creeping through the bushes without the slightest noise. The Neighbourhood Watch Deputy Secretary rested his hand on his Neighbourhood Watch flick-knife, which the Police had failed to find when they searched his house .
Unlike the Duck-man, the Neighbourhood Watch had never learnt to keep in the right direction with respect to the wind when stalking. The Duck-man stopped for a moment, sniffing the air. Then he turned round and looked straight at them. The moon shone with a strange yellow light in his eyes. He fled through the bushes. The Secretary chased for fifty yards or so, but the branches knocked his hat off. In any case the Duck-man was moving too fast. The mallard flew off across the lake, thanking whatever wet and feathery gods ducks thank in such circumstances.
The next morning the Deputy Secretary phoned the Police, to tell them about the Duck-man. The duty officer laughed. The Secretary went round to the Police Station in person, to tell them what they had seen the previous evening. The duty officer fell about laughing. The Neighbourhood Watch decided it had to act alone. Some questioned what right they had to stop someone catching ducks, which after all were wild animals. Some of the others said that it was probably out of the duck-hunting season. Others asked whether the duck-hunting season, if it existed, applied only to shooting, and not to sneaking up behind ducks and catching them with your bare hands. Others said, in any case, he'd been catching swans as well. and they belonged to the Queen, so it had to be theft.
Eventually they decided it was their moral obligation to catch the Duck-man. A few of the more radical Neighbourhood Watchers just wanted to beat him up and throw him in the lake, but it was generally agreed that they would catch him red-handed, and record him in the act with photographic evidence. So began the first Neighbourhood Watch stake-out in Milton Keynes history.
The best policy, they decided, was to blend in with the background down by the lake. Some people suggested hiding in holes in the ground, or up trees. After a moment's thought the Secretary came up with the best way to go undetected by Furzton Lake.
That night there were a lot more anglers than normal sitting round Furzton Lake. The Neighbourhood Watch blended in perfectly, in their blue or orange Pak-a-macs. But in their little tents they had secreted the tools they needed for their job: cameras, searchlights and nets. Most importantly they each had a pointy stick.
The pointy stick as a weapon has an important history among the peoples of the South Midlands. It has two functions - you can hit people over the head with it while you are catching them, and then you can poke them with it when you have caught them. And since you can pretend it is a cricket stump, the police are very unlikely to confiscate a pointy stick if they catch you in the park with one.
Again it was a clear night. The moon, one day fuller than the previous night, shed its silvery light on the scene again. There was silence around Furzton lake, broken occasionally by a car roaring down Watling Street or a midnight cyclist riding into a bollard. And so they sat all night. Nothing happened. There was no sign of the Duck-man.
The next night they all sat there again. No sign.
The next night there was a small crime wave as the burglars realised that the entire Neighbourhood Watch was out sitting round the lake.
Then it occurred to someone that what they really needed was a decoy. And the decoy was conveniently close to hand. The one remaining swan had been rescued from the lake for its own good, and now lived in someone's back garden. After a week or so of being the only swan in Furzton, it was now so fat it could not fly. Every well-wisher for miles around had been coming round to feed it bread crumbs, lumps of cake - even the leftovers from a barbecue. The Secretary of the Neighbourhood Watch commandeered the swan.
That evening, the scene around Furzton Lake was much the same as the last three nights. The fishermen sat around, complaining about the Neighbourhood Watch people. The Neighbourhood Watch people sat around, armed with their pointy sticks and air pistols. The local press sat around, armed with a huge battery of cameras. But this time, about four feet from the shore of the lake tied to a post, bobbed the fattest swan in Milton Keynes.
Around about midnight the Secretary said he would make a patrol of the lake. He set off anticlockwise from the bridge. From their positions on the Bowl side of the bridge, the other Neighbourhood Watchpeople saw him walking round past the outflow, and along the path parallel to Chaffron Way. As he walked towards North Furzton he went out of sight. He should have been back after half an hour, even allowing for a moderate amount of telling people off for returning from the pubs late, but after an hour there was no sign of him.
After two hours the Neighbourhood Watch Treasurer went out to look for the Secretary. It took him twenty minutes to get round the lake, and he saw no sign of the Secretary.
A little later there was a rustling in the bushes over by the swan. Seventeen bogus fishermen held their breath. A dark figure appeared beside the lake. About to make a spring for the swan, the Duck-man stopped as he noticed the stake to which the swan was tied. He looked around, and seemed to be sniffing the air.
The Neighbourhood Watch lost its discipline. People switched on searchlights and blazed away with cameras. Four or five of them ran across the bridge, waving pointy sticks and shouting blood-curdling oaths. The Duck-man, for the second time that week, turned and ran. But in the moment that he had been held in the glare of the searchlights and the camera flashes, they had seen something awful. He had been wearing a Neighbourhood Watch Secretary's hat.
They eventually found the Secretary. He was hanging by his ankles from the bridge over to Emerson Valley, with only his Neighbourhood Watch "Macho Man" studded belt, tied round his ankles and the railings, stopping him from landing in the middle of the V3. When they hauled him up and asked him what had happened, he could only gibber "The feathers! The feathers!"
The Duck-man was never seen in Furzton again. Life had clearly become too hot for him. The swan population gradually recovered, as swans flew in from other lakes, and before long Canada Geese were mugging schoolchildren and housewives the same as ever. The Neighbourhood Watch Secretary had to retire due to a fragile mental state, but otherwise the operation was declared a reasonable success. When the photographs were developed, the Duck-man bore a striking resemblance to the ex-leader of a former religious cult, which had believed that Fishermead was the New Jerusalem and that Armageddon would be fought in Milton Keynes. The cult had, of course, folded when they discovered that traditionally Armageddon was meant to be fought on a mountain.
And that was that. Only two loose ends remained from the whole episode. One was the tradition in Old Furzton of leaving the leftovers from the turkey outside on Christmas Night "to keep the Duck-man happy". The other was, the people in Woburn Sands and Bow Brickhill started noticing, there weren't as many rabbits around as there used to be.....
