Mostly, it sounded like a fight.

From the outskirts of the crowd, Mickey could make out at least three distinct groups, not including the vans from two of the local television stations.

The police, at least twenty of them, six of them mounted on horseback, held a line near the shoreline of the lagoon. The nonequestrian cops were turned out in “hats and bats”-full assault gear, helmets with tinted face masks, batons out. A larger, homogeneous, and clearly hostile group of maybe fifty citizens milled around on the sloping banks of the lagoon as if waiting for instructions to charge the police line. In front of them, a tall bearded guy in camo gear was right up in the face of the lead cop with the bullhorn. Finally, down by the water’s edge, a smaller group of perhaps twenty people in the uniforms of the city’s Parks and Recreation Department huddled fearfully by a small fleet of rowboats laden with what looked like netting of some kind.

The camo guy started a chant, “Hell, no, don’t let them go!” and in seconds the crowd was in full throat behind him, pressing forward toward the police line. The cops brought up their batons as the bullhorn exhorted the crowd to “Back away! Back away!”

“Hell, no, don’t let them go!”

A white-haired man in a bathrobe and tennis shoes with his arms crossed and wearing a bemused expression stood on a lawn across the street. Mickey sidled up next to him. “What’s going on?” he asked.

The man shook his head. “Idiots.”

“Who?”

“All of ’em.”

“But what’s it about?”

The man looked over, askance. “You don’t know about the ducks? Where you been?”

“What about the ducks?”

“They’re moving ’em, or trying to.” He shook his head again. “Lunatics. Stupid idea, bad planning, insane timing. But what else do you expect nowadays, huh? You really don’t know about this? Moving the ducks down to Foster City?”