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EKDAL: It's Hakon Werle we have to thank for her, all the same, Gina. [To GREGERS] He was shooting from a boat, you see, and he brought her down. But your father's sight is not very good now. H'm; she was only wounded.
GREGERS: Ah! She got a couple of slugs in her body, I suppose.
HIALMAR: Yes, two or three.
HEDVIG: She was hit under the wing, so that she couldn't fly.
GREGERS: And I suppose she dived to the bottom, eh?
EKDAL: [sleepily, in a thick voice] Of course. Always do that, wild ducks do. They shoot to the bottom as deep as they can get, sir — and bite themselves fast in the tangle and seaweed — and all the devil's own mess that grows down there. And they never come up again.
GREGERS: But your wild duck came up again, Lieutenant Old Ekdal.
EKDAL: He had such an amazingly clever dog, your father had. And that dog — he dived in after the duck and fetched her up again.

Having just revealed the treasure of the garret to Gregers, Ekdal recounts the story of the wild duck in Act II. The wild duck is a "quilting point" for most of the characters' fantasies of themselves and those around them; its tale comes to serve as an allegory for much of the play's action. Thus Ekdal figures as the wild duck in having been betrayed and shot down by his old partner Werle. He has sunk into his reveries never to return. Gregers imagines Hialmar as the wild duck in his entrapment in the "poisonous marshes" of his household, the tangle of deceit that makes his marriage possible. In contrast, he imagines himself in the figure of the clever dog that would rescue the wounded bird. He also considers himself the wild duck in becoming the Ekdals' adopted tenant. Lastly Hedvig figures as the wild duck in losing her family and place of origin—she is in some sense her father's adopted child.

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