RIP Pretzel, best of ducks

Pretzel was with us from one day old until today.  When his (her-)life-partner Zachary had to be put down, the vet told Jami that she was an OLD duck.  Well, Pretzel must have been triple digits in duck years by that measure.  First we thought he would never recover from her loss, then we thought he would never be nice to the youngsters we got to replace her, and then we thought they'd never be able to manage without him.  Well, now they have to.  Over the past few weeks his legs started to fail him, and this week they gave out entirely, so that we had to lift him in and out of his house in the mornings and evenings and he would just drag himself around from food bowl to pond.  He was a mere shadow of the duck that used to nip a person's achilles tendon demanding to be thrown high into the air (always managing to land in the pond).  Godspeed, fair fowl.