Everyone on the farm was waiting for the big event. The birth of mother duck's chicks. She had been brooding them for days and they could arrive at any moment.

On the hottest day of the summer, mother duck suddenly heard… quack, quack! and when she got up, she saw how one by one they began to hatch. Well, all of them except one.

- That's a turkey egg! said an old duck to mother duck.

- Never mind, I'll just heat it up a bit more so it can hatch.

But when it finally hatched, it turned out to be a duck that was completely different from the rest. It was big and ugly, and didn't look like a turkey. The other animals in the yard soon noticed its appearance and started laughing at it.

- Ugly, ugly, you are very ugly! they sang to him

His mother defended him but after a while she didn't know what to say. The ducks pecked at him, the turkeys chased him and the chickens made fun of him. In the end his own mother ended up convinced that he was an ugly and stupid duck.

- Go away, I don't want you to be here!

The poor duckling felt very sad when he heard those words and ran away from there, rejected by everyone.

He ended up in a swamp where he met two wild geese who, despite their ugliness, wanted to be his friends, but one day some hunters appeared there and suddenly killed them. In fact, the duckling was about to suffer the same fate if it weren't for the fact that the dogs saw him and decided not to bite him.

- I'm so ugly that not even dogs bite me! - thought the poor duckling.

He continued his journey and ended up in the house of an old woman who lived with a cat and a hen. But since he was not able to lay eggs, he had to leave that place too. The poor duckling felt that he was worthless.

One autumn evening he was looking at the sky when he saw a flock of large birds that left him speechless. He didn't know it, but they weren't birds, but swans.

- How big they are! And how white! Their feathers look like snow.

He wished with all his might that he were one of them, but when he opened his eyes he realized that he was still an ugly little animal.