Rockport High School - Tatler Yearbook (Rockport, ME)

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32 THE TATLER ly she gave a cry of alarm. One little duck was missing. However, Mrs. Duck could not leave fourteen babies to go look for one. No, she must stay and protect the babies in the new nest. She settled down on the leaves. And back by the beech tree, the lost duckling walked feebly through the leaves, too cold and hungry to cry very loudly. Its body shivered. After a while the little duck tucked its head under its wing and went to sleep. And there it was found by the greedy fox, for this is the way of the woodland. Shirlene Heath, '57 HILL-903 It's your nineteenth birthday, Bill Morse. It's a cold, wet birthday. It's your first birthday away from home. You're in a position that you wished you'd never be in, at the bottom of hill-903, North Korea. It's been quiet all day and, now that night has set in, you have time to think. Time to think of war. The stinking, rotten war! You've been a family boy all your life, and it's hard to get used to the tortures of war. You feel that if the enemy doesn't get you, the Weather will. Boy, what you would give to be home where you belong. You should be playing base- ball instead of running around a little piece of land, back and forth, over the same territory at least a dozen times a week, getting shot at for something you didn't start in the first place. You get up from the muddy bank of the trench you had helped to dig and splash over to where Bob is sit- ting. Bob Roberts is your best friend in the outfit. He is older than you, and seems to understand. Things al- ways seem all right after talking to him. He is sitting on a rock with water all around him, eating up the con- tents of a can of beans. He grins as you sit down beside him, placing your' MI on your lap, with a heavy sigh. Cold, isn't it Y you ask, tunn- ing your back to the wind. You won't be cold long, Bob answers, tossing the empty bean can over his shoulder. The LT. is taking out a scouting party tonight. You and I are included. We're just lucky that way, Bob says with a laugh. You tilt your helmet to one side and stare at the black overcast sky. A scouting party. What a birthday present! A long, wet, fearful walk into enemy territory. You figure you'd better get some shut-eye. You are wakened by a nudge in the back. It is Bob. Let's go, kid, he says. The rain has stopped and it is getting colder. The party gets briefed on the objective and you're ready to go. The job is to get a line on the enemy strong point a mile up the hill. You check your MI and keep close together as you enter enemy terri- tory. From here on in each man knows anything can happen. You're plenty warm now, Bill Morse, all warm except your hands. They are numb from the cold and sweat on them. You're at the top of a ridge now. Below you to the left is the objective. A well-lighted supply camp with plenty of supplies. The LT. splits the group into twos. You and Bob are to- gether. From here on in, no talking. You must depend on field signals. You finally stop on a crest overlook- ing the southern end of the supply camp. Bob hands you a pad and pen- cil. You both crawl as far as possible to the edge of the crest. Bob surveys the camp with binoculars and begins whispering the amount of tanks, troop trucks, artillery, and big guns on hand, as fast as you can write them down. With the inventory taken on your assigned side of the camp, you proceed back to the meeting place and wait for the rest of the party. It isn't a long wait and soon you are advancing back to your outfit. Your MI becomes heavy and your back be- gins to ache because of walking in a

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. 1is.thvca.t. No one stirred, so he began to steal silently on his way again. He finally reached the bottom of the stairs after much uncertainty. Now to find that door. He knew just where it was because he had memorized every detail, so that he would know where to go when the time came. He thought he knew! But, what was this he had walked into? Strange, it felt like a wall. At last he found the door leading into the room of his destination. Now, of all times, was no time to be careless when it was almost in his greedy fingers. Every plan must be followed care- fully. Moving quickly over to the shelf, he reached up with one hand to the container. He put his hand into it and felt around. A great wave of disap- pointment suddenly rushed over himg it was empty. Such an awful lot of trouble for a seven year old boy, and not one cook- ie in the whole jar! Ninon Ingersoll, '54 MRS. WILD DUCK MAKES A NEST Mrs. Wild Duck circled the woods one day looking for a place to build her nest. Down in the ravine where the stream flowed, there was a plea- sant spot, but Mrs. Duck had seen a fox down there. That was not a good place for a nest. Once more she circled the woods. This time she saw a large beech tree. It was very old and tall, and had a deep hole in the trunk, high above the ground. It was a little out of the ordinary for a duck to build off the ground, but why not? A nest in the beech tree would be far from the dan- ger of animals prying below. Mrs. Duck settled on the ledge of the hole in the beech tree and looked about her. She looked in at the pos- sible new home. The hole was lined with soft tree pulp. Eggs will hatch there very nicely, thought Mrs. THE TATLER 31 Duck. Still perched on the ledge, she viewed the scene below, and decided to look no farther. Mrs. Duck went about the work of building a nest. First, she gathered a few twigs together, putting them in the hole. Then she made the nest warm with downy feathers. After that, she went about the business of laying eggs. For a long time after that Mrs. Duck's neighbors rarely saw her. They forgot Mrs. Duck. Then one day Mrs. Crow fiew down through the woods calling out that something in- teresting had happened at the old beech. The wood folks looked and saw Mrs. Duck poke her head out of the hole. She had something dark and fuzzy in her beak. She dropped the dark object to the earth below, then in went her head again, and came out with another dark object. Fifteen times she repeated this operation. When the dark fuzzy objects were all dropped, Mrs. Duck perched for a moment on the edge of the nest, then she glided to the ground below. Then Mrs. Duck nudged each little black object, and quacked a sharp command. She marched off down the ravine with the fourteen baby ducks walking in a neat parade behind her. One little duck seemed rather stun- ned by his experience, and sat right where he had landed. He seemed very much alone. He was cold and hungry and his mother was gone. Mrs. Duck by this time had reached the stream at the bottom of the ra- vine. She quacked loudly to her brood, waddled to the edge of the water and then went in. Promptly her brood followed. Now Mrs. Duck led her brood across the stream. When they reached the other side, she found a place for them to climb the bank. She led them down the path to a deep thickness of leaves. Here Mrs. Duck hollowed out a soft nest and coaxed her ducklings to join her. Proudly she looked at them. They were a handsome family. But sudden-

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crouched position. It's been quiet throughout the mission. You hope it stays that way. It does. You and Bob stumble into your familiar trench and glance at your matches. One-thirty. You're a pretty tired soldier as you make ready for some sleep. You lie back on the bank of the trench and stare at the sky. The stars seem to be playing tag in the once again clear sky, and in the background you can hear Bob giving 'ihrle details of your inventory to the Your day-dreaming is broken by the splashing footsteps of Bob going to his post further down the trench. He passes by you, stops and turns. HHappy birthday, kid, he says with a tired smile. Still starting at the sky you reply simply, Yeah l You doze off as the sound of Bob's footsteps drifts away from you, and his words echo in your mind. UI-Iappy birthday, kid. Sullivan, '55 THE MOST INTERESTING TRIP I'VE TAKEN My most interesting trip was a short jaunt to the moon, which occu- pied most of the week of August 16, ??74. This was interesting for sev- eral reasons, prime among which was that the infamous Dr. Schlitz, of De- funct University, and a most capable friend, accompanied me. Another valid reason was that we used his brand-new Annihilator Super Delux, Semi-Hard Top Convertible Space Ship, with the thermo-nuclear expan- sion-type motor, and even better, he furnished the fissiohable atoms and molten zinc, which are the rocket age equivalent of high-octane gas. We blasted off from French Equa- torial Zanzibar at about 1100 hours, at which time we would receive the most rotational thrust from the earth. Sailing along leisurely at a mere for- ty-iive hundred m.p.h., I began to THE TATLER 33 think wewould never arrive at Lunar Terminus. But to condense thirty- seven hours into two words, we did. Upon landing, we were surrounded by an enormous, gigantic, very big, huge, extremely large, quite stupen- dous, not to mention colossal, crowd of Luna-tics, called Monstrous Mon- strosities, who looked like people with measles, covered with glue. Quite taken aback by the voluminous ampli- tude of it all, I ran toward the port containing the Cosmo Special, 10,000 volt disintegrator ray cannon. This weapon had the dubious distinction of being as maneuverable as a good sized pachyderm, and about as power- ful as Junior's tricycle on glare ice without chains, but which no self- styled Captain Video should be with- out. Seeing me, Dr. Narragansett- er-Schlitz, grabbed my arm, and simultaneously uttered these choice, sparkling phrases, Don't shoot them, just feed them some bullets. Then if they start shooting off their mouths, we'll clear out. Picking myself up oif the carpet, I complied with his request. As the lunar Aborigines swilled down my ample supply of .44 shells, which I had wisely salvaged from the cam- paign with Admiral Dewey on San Juan Hill, near the Alamo during the Franco-American Spaghetti -- uh - War, knowing they would come in handy some day, I noticed a peculiar reaction. Lumps of assorted sizes, shapes, and hues started popping out all over their transparent little selves. They immediately grew very angry, some literally 'fblowing their tops. About this time a miraculous bit of tensile apparatus contracted, meaning that the main ingregient of our mo- tor, namely a rubber band, had caught on a branch of the local euca- lyptus family tree, and was drawing us in reverse fashion, like a pair of suspenders, back to our own native Afghanistan. We landed in the middle of the Indian Ocean which, as we had done our laundry there before leav- ing, was very soft water. Richard Cash, '54