Surely I had located absolutely every single stuffed Labrador Duck in the world. I had perused Paul Hahn’s 1963 inventory until my eyes were full of gravel, contacted most of the curators of the world’s bird collections, and followed every insidious tendril of the World Wide Web. Fifty-two stuffed Labrador Ducks and one beak had survived the ravages of time, right? But then Frank Steinheimer sent me a message from Berlin explaining that he had discovered another duck, residing in the teeny-tiny village of La Châtre in the middle of France. Blast! There was even a photograph of this specimen on the website of the village’s Musée George Sand et la Vallée Noire. From what detail I could make out, it seemed real enough. If I had known about the duck a year earlier, I could have snagged it while in France with Julie. Now to ensure that no Labrador Duck would escape my quest, I would have to make a return journey to France and revise my global list. Oddly, the museum in La Châtre was not dedicated to extinct ducks, but to the nineteenth-century French author George Sand.
What do You think about The Curse Of The Labrador Duck?
