The Megaphone and the Ducks

At five in the morning, the Northgate bus depot is the loudest quiet place in the city. Engines cough awake one by one. Drivers shout across the yard. Somewhere a metal door bangs, and somebody laughs at nothing.

Dax stands in the middle of it all, holding a megaphone he hates.

He is twenty, and this is his fourth week as the depot's morning caller. His job is simple. Thirty-two buses leave the yard between five and six. Each driver needs to hear which bay to use. The old speaker system broke in the spring. Nobody has fixed it, so Dax has the megaphone.

"Bay six, Route Twelve!" he shouts. His voice cracks on the word "twelve." A driver in the nearest bus waves lazily, as if Dax were a fly.

Dax lowers the megaphone and sighs. He has never been a loud person. At school, he sat at the back of every class and answered questions in a whisper. At home, his sister says he talks like someone reading a very sad letter. But the depot does not care about that. The depot wants bay numbers, and it wants them loudly.

"You're doing fine," says a voice behind him.

It is Malika, who drives the first bus of the day, Route One. She has worked at the depot for eleven years. She is the only person who speaks to Dax before six. She leans against her bus with a metal cup of coffee and a half smile.

"I'm not," Dax says. "They can't hear me. Yesterday, two buses went to the wrong bay."

"They heard you. They were just pretending they didn't." Malika drinks her coffee. "Drivers are like cats. They only come when they want to."

"That doesn't help."

"It's not supposed to help. It's supposed to make you feel better." She nods at the megaphone. "Stop shouting at it. It does half the job already. Talk like you're telling a friend something important."

Dax tries. He raises the megaphone and takes a breath. "Bay eight, Route Seven," he says, in the voice he uses for his sister. Two drivers look up at once. One even gives him a thumbs-up.

"See?" says Malika.

"Wow," Dax says. He feels about two centimetres taller.

For the next twenty minutes, the routine works like a small machine. Dax calls the bays. The buses leave, one after another, with their lights glowing yellow in the grey morning. The air smells of diesel and warm metal. Dax starts to think that maybe, just maybe, he is good at this.

Then something strange happens at the north gate.

At first, he thinks it is a trick of the light. A small brown shape waddles through the gap under the fence. Then comes another, and another. Dax counts seven in a line, each smaller than the one before. They march across the yard with great confidence, as if they own the place.

They are ducks. A mother duck leads six ducklings straight toward Bay Four. A large green bus is just starting to reverse there.

"Malika!" Dax cries. "Ducks!"

"I see them."

"The bus doesn't see them!"

Malika drops her cup and starts to run. Dax runs too, with the megaphone bumping against his leg. The driver of the green bus cannot see anything behind him. The bus rolls back slowly, steadily, and the ducks walk calmly beneath its shadow.

Dax does the only thing he can think of. He lifts the megaphone and shouts, "STOP!" so loudly that every driver in the yard turns around. The green bus freezes with a squeal of brakes. Fifty metres away, a mechanic drops his spanner.

For a long second, nobody moves. The ducks keep walking. They reach the middle of the bay and sit down together on the warm concrete. They look around as if they are waiting for a ticket.

"Well," Malika says, slightly out of breath. "That worked."

"It was too loud," Dax says. His heart is pounding. "I think I scared them."

"You scared the whole depot. That's different." She grins. "But look at the mother."

The mother duck is looking straight at him. She does not seem scared. She seems annoyed, in the way of someone whose long walk has been rudely interrupted. Behind her, the ducklings are beginning to peep, and the sound grows until it fills the bay.

Malika crouches down. "We can't pick them up. She'll panic, and the babies will scatter." She looks at the buses, then at Dax. "We need to move them out of the yard. Slowly. Calmly."

"How?"

"You tell me. You're the caller."

Dax stares at her. Then he looks at the megaphone, which suddenly seems very heavy. For once, he knows what Malika means. He does not need to be loud. He needs to be gentle.

He crouches down, raises the megaphone only a little, and speaks in his sister's-letter voice. "Hello," he says. "This way, please. Mind the step."

The mother duck turns her head. Dax slowly walks backward toward the north gate, saying the same quiet words, and the ducks follow. Malika holds up one hand to stop the traffic. Thirty drivers sit in their seats and watch in total silence. Even the engines seem to hush.

It takes four minutes. At the gate, the mother duck squeezes through the gap in the fence. Her six ducklings follow. On the other side, a canal glitters in the first pale light. One by one they slide into the water and drift away.

Behind Dax, the depot erupts. People clap. A driver blows his horn. Someone whistles through two fingers, and the green bus flashes its headlights three times.

"Not bad," Malika says, leaning against the fence. "For a boy who whispers."

Dax laughs, the first proper laugh he has had at work. His hands are still shaking, but he does not mind. He lifts the megaphone one more time and looks at the empty bay.

"Next time," he says, "I'm putting them on the schedule. Six fifteen, Bay Four, ducks."

Malika picks up her cold coffee and shakes her head. "Fine," she says. "But they sit at the back. They are far too noisy."