by Joshua Lobb
‘Which bird, or which species?’
‘Which bird. You have ten pairs left, say.’ His tone will be careful, measured, as if he’s said this out loud before.
‘I don’t want to think that,’ I’ll say.
‘We may have to.’
The mosquitos will shimmer around our faces. The canopy above us will creak. Tap tap tap tap.
We’ll head west, up the mossy slope. We’ll squeeze our way through a teepee of knotted vines. Dad will direct me to another metal stake. A yellow cattle eartag: Y271. The nest will be in a natural rock cavity, held within the lazy curve of a fig-tree trunk. A ragged-mouthed portal.
I’ll reach my hand inside and my fingertips will brush against downy feathers.
‘Dad,’ I’ll say. He’ll be standing between two tall cabbage-tree trunks, holding the data sheet against his chest like a security blanket.
‘Dad,’ I’ll say again, ‘you’ll want to see this.’ As gently as I possibly can, I’ll draw out the nestling. The chick will wriggle, fluff its wings. Grey and soft and fragile. It will look like those clumps of lint we used to scrape out of the door of the dryer. I’ll cradle it between my hands.
He’ll edge his way closer. He’ll steady himself, his palm pushing into the rough bark. His mouth will open and close. The bird will twitch its dodo-curved beak.
I’ll offer him the chick to touch but he’ll teeter back. ‘I can’t,’ he’ll say.
‘Please, Dad,’ I’ll say. The body will feel warm and alive in my hands. I’ll hold the bird out in front of me, like an offering. The golden-green light of the forest will make the feathers glow and hum. ‘Please, Dad,’ I’ll say again.
I won’t know why it’ll seem so vital for him to touch the downy bird. I’ll know exactly why. This bird will fledge and fly and transcend. It will follow the rim of the Pacific: trace the currents of the Tasman Sea, hairpin along the coasts of South America, trace the scent of fish along the line of the equator. It will sleep and soar and dive and drift. And then it will return. It will circle the island and fly down through the canopy and land, right here, right on the spine of this fig-tree root. It will be part of a flock of a thousand birds, or two hundred, or ten. It doesn’t matter. It will return.
I’ll offer this living being to my father. His face will contort. ‘Please, Dad.’ He’ll lean forward, his fingers clutching at the air. In my hands, the feathers will be soft. He’ll bend down and reach out his hand.
The chick will flick its neck, twist its beak.
His hand will recoil.
‘Dad,’ I’ll say.
‘I can’t, I—’
‘Dad.’ I’ll feel the body struggling in my hands.
‘It’s too—I just—’
‘Come on, Dad.’
His arms will be dithering in the air.
‘I can’t. We can’t. All those things—the rabbits and the poisoned fish and—’
‘And the birds survived, Dad. This one will survive you picking it up and feeling its feathers.’
But the pebbles under his feet will scatter. He’ll say, ‘I can’t—I can’t—’ and he’ll scurry off, over the crumbling rocks, away from the breathing bird in my hands.
I’ll find him out on the clifftop, looking over the expanse. The wind will be pounding; he’ll be sheltering inside a cleft in the rocks. Absent-mindedly—or maybe full-mindedly—he’ll be stroking the palm of his right hand with his left thumb.
I’ll ease myself into the cleft beside him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I’ll say.
He’ll squint at the ocean.
‘I put it back in the nest,’ I’ll say. ‘Everything will be all right,’ I’ll add, redundantly, possibly untruthfully.
We’ll wait in the constricted space. The wind will whip over the top of my head. I’ll wrap my arms around my chest. We’ll watch the grey waves rumple.
He’ll say, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Dad,’ I’ll say.
‘Do you remember Charlotte? The first Charlotte?’
‘That was years ago, Dad.’
He’ll be staring at the ocean like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, or around his neck. ‘I’m still so sorry—I didn’t mean to—’
I’ll see him going off to that place—wherever it is—that place where he always wants to go.
‘And there’s always more to come,’ he’ll want to say.
‘You can’t keep telling the same story, Dad,’ I’ll want to reply.
Instead of that conversation, we’ll huddle in the crack between the rocks and listen to the hollow cry of the wind. He’ll look into the sky in that crumpled way he always does.
Over the ocean—a long way off—a single bird will be flying. It will be arcing its way towards us, skimming low against the slate-grey water and then up into the pink afternoon sky. It will tilt, stretching its wings vertically, so its span looks like a shard of frosted glass. It will turn away, and the white of its belly will be replaced by the grey of its back. It will fly close, shadowing over us and then diving down into the forest.
‘Aves admittant,’ I’ll say.
Looking at the bird, my father will say, ‘I’m sorry about—’ He’ll sweep his hand, palm up, in a circle. A gesture that incorporates everything.
In the heaviness of the night, my supervisor will spin another yarn. This one will be about Roman augurs. ‘They used birds to predict the future,’ he’ll say explaining how they surveyed the arc of a bird’s flight—or its entrails. Whenever a matter of importance needed to be resolved, the city would call upon the College of Augurs. The augurs would make their way to the top of a hill at dawn and ask the gods for a sign. They’d sit and watch the birds. With a stick, they’d draw a series of lines on the ground. Two straight lines intersecting each other—north–south; east–west. The spaces would correspond to different quadrants of the sky. If the bird flew in a particular direction, in a particular way, into a particular quadrant, then the augurs could make a prediction. The pronouncement would either be aves admittant (‘the birds allow it’) or alio die (‘another day’).
‘We’re doing the same, in a way,’ my supervisor will murmur. ‘Using the birds—and the island, and the water—to see what the future will be. But we can’t wait for another day. It may be a future without them. Or without us.’
‘I don’t want to think that,’ I’ll say.
‘We don’t have a choice,’ he’ll reply.
He’ll shift in his seat. ‘We’ll do what we can,’ he’ll say. ‘When we translocated the GPs to Boondelbah, way back when, I wasn’t a hundred percent convinced it would work. It was a painstaking process. We had to weigh and measure them, assess their plumage to determine their age, shift them into nesting boxes, ferry them over in the Zodiac, feed them by inserting segments of squid and fish into their oesophagus. Then we had to wait. Not just for the fledging, but for the next breeding season, or maybe the one after that. Even then, it wasn’t plain sailing. The worst day for me was when we saw what happened to the first hatchling to die. A fledgling had returned with a mate and set up a nest in his natal box. We watched the brooding process: the disappearance of one for a week, two weeks; the other nesting, still, silent. Then they’d swap. When the egg finally hatched it felt like the birth of my own child.’ He’ll be quiet for a few moments. The lines around his eyes will tighten.
‘What happened?’ I’ll ask.
‘A rockfall destroyed the nest box.’
The forest canopy will breathe above us. The lines on my supervisor’s face will expand and contract.
He’ll look at me. ‘You know what we did?’ he’ll say. ‘We replaced the crushed box, put another plastic container in its place. The next season the brooding pair returned and produced another egg.’
Above us, we’ll hear the whoosh of a bird on the wing, a quiet whistle as it calls in the air. Coming home, or flying away?
And then he’ll tell me about his side project, what he’s really been doing on the island. He�
�ll have spent the last two days not watching the flights of the birds, but tracing the rim of the island, measuring the sea level, noting the shifts in water temperature. ‘These last three years,’ he’ll tell me, ‘the tides have been different. Cabbage Tree is doing all right at the moment, but Boondelbah lost thirty-four breeding boxes with the flooding of the basalt valley. The islands are going,’ he’ll say, ‘one by one.’
I’ll think of my nestling flying home to a swelling ocean, only the crown of Cathedral Rock reaching out of the water. But maybe there’s something we can do. Translocation has worked before and it might work again.
We’ll talk through logistics, the precarious processes. I won’t yet be convinced, but my supervisor will say that he’s going to try, if the birds allow it.
‘But where …?’ I’ll ask.
My supervisor will tilt his head towards the north-east. ‘Broughton looks good, for the moment.’
‘And then?’
‘Another island? And another after that?’
On the clifftop, my father will be sweeping his hand, palm up, in a circle. He’ll say, ‘Doesn’t this—doesn’t all of this—make you angry? Doesn’t it sadden you?’
‘We don’t have time for sadness,’ I’ll say to him. ‘Come on, we’ve got work to do.’
The Flight of Birds
Yes, I’ve looked everywhere
You can look without wings.
Maxwell Anderson, ‘It Never Was You’
There’s an old fairy tale—sorry, one more story, I promise only one more story—about a farmer so protective of his wife that he decides to take her out onto the moors and hang her. Is he jealous? Is he paranoid? The story doesn’t tell us; it doesn’t need to. He is resolute in his decision to hang her. Nothing she can say will soften his heart, the story says. The farmer reaches for a hempen rope from the rafters of his cottage, drags his wife by the elbow through the stone doorway, out into the cold night. It’s a lonely farmhouse, and the moor is desolate. The wind is bitter. The farmer spots a solitary tree on the horizon silhouetted against the midnight blue sky. As the man and his wife trudge towards it—dragging, pleading—a flock of birds sweeps over them, battling against the wind. The story doesn’t tell what kind of birds they are. Maybe they’re crows, sharp-beaked and intelligent, their black wings barely trembling as they sweep overhead. Maybe they’re sparrows, tiny specks of brown quivering against the brisk night. I like to think of them as seagulls. The farmhouse could be tressled on a clifftop and the wind could be an ocean squall. The seagulls lift off from the gnarled rocks below. They glide across the empty sky, over the lumbering couple, their white feathers glimmering in the moonlight.
The farmer and his wife reach the tree. It’s a dead husk, grey and leafless, like a skeleton’s hand reaching out of the ground. The birds have settled on one of the branches. They stare down at the couple silently with only the occasional twitch of a wing. The farmer puts the noose around his wife’s neck; she’s too exhausted to struggle any more. Her face is spattered with tears. The farmer throws the rope up towards the strongest bough, the one where the birds are perched. The rope arches over the branch but doesn’t stick: the rope slides over the birds’ silken wings. The farmer tries another branch, higher up. But the birds ripple up and land on that branch too; once again, the rope slips and coils itself to the ground.
The man sees another solitary tree, sharp against another horizon, across the expanse of the moor. He drags his wife towards it—stumbling, weeping. The wife’s head is still in the noose. The birds fly with them. The farmer and his wife reach the tree: it’s another hollow, barren shell. The birds settle on the branches and, try as hard as he might, the farmer cannot fasten the rope. He hefts the rope again and again, but it slithers over the birds’ feathers and falls to the muddy ground.
It’s lighter now and the wind has dropped. It’s that pale time of morning before the day begins. There’s one more tree to be seen across the expanse. The farmer sets off, pulling his wife along. The birds soar high in the air, off and away. Maybe the birds have forgotten the wife; maybe they’ve caught the scent of a fish on an ocean wave and left her to her fate. The farmer and his wife shuffle and sob towards the next dead tree. Much to his relief, the branches of the tree remain birdless. As he flings the rope up there’s a great whirr of wings; the birds whoop down, as if from nowhere, and the rope falls once more. The man tries again.
He is sweating, his arms are aching. His wife is quiet, as still as the morning. The farmer looks at his wife. The first rays of the dawn break over the moors, over the clifftop, over the ocean. The rays catch the wife’s face. She’s smiling as she sees the birds’ wings fluttering in the early morning light.
I don’t remember how the story ends. Maybe the woman’s smile makes the farmer’s heart soften and the couple—repentant, forgiving—wander back to the cottage, hand in hand, exhausted. Maybe he succeeds, and the rope is fastened to the bough of the next tree. Or maybe the birds plunge and, wings flapping wildly, surround the wife and lift her up into the air, away from the wasteland of the moors, away from her husband and her barren life, never to be seen again.
The young man has not heard this story and is not interested in fairy tales. At this moment, he’s not interested in anything. His mind is a blank; well, not quite a blank. He’s trying to keep focused on the task at hand. He’s sitting on a rattling, sweaty bus. The bus is not important to his story: it’s just a means to an end. A way to get from his empty granny flat to the ocean. His destination.
He’s had his destination mapped out for some time. He may not read fairy tales, but he has read The Waste Land and knows all about Phlebas the Phoenician, who forgot the cry of gulls and now swells in the deep seas. He’s heard the story of Virginia Woolf lining her pockets with rocks to weigh her down in the water. The young man doesn’t have rocks, but his pockets are laden with packets of pills. Their plastic cases rustle like dead leaves. Some of the cases are already empty. They’re just painkillers but there are enough of them, he hopes, to be productive. The plan is simple, obvious: once he’s drowsy enough he’ll take the plunge.
The bus reaches the end of the line: an exposed, grassy headland; a carless carpark. It’s on the edge of the city, an empty place overlooking some sharp rocks and the open sea. The brakes on the bus hiss and the young man—the only passenger—stumbles off. Even though the sky is vast above him, the air bites. He holds his elbows tight against his ribs. The ground feels uneven and the blue horizon lopsided. The young man lurches forward. At the far end of the carpark is the way down to the rocks and the sea. He has to stagger down a wooden staircase. The structure feels unsafe. It clutches the cliff like temporary scaffolding, like matchsticks that might snap.
At the base of the stairs he plonks himself down, groggily, and takes off his shoes and socks. It’s probably not the time to be worried about grit in your sneakers, but it’s an old habit. He’s been here before, several times, scoping out the possibilities. He looks out at the grotty expanse of sand. On the weekend it’s swarming with children and bikinis, but today it’s uninhabited: there are only a few chip packets and cigarette butts to indicate human visitors.
Of course, there are birds. Seagulls. Two or three of them, tapping the sand and prodding the stubbed-out cigarettes. The young man ignores them. The birds flap a little when he hobbles past, but for the most part they ignore him too.
He wanders haphazardly over the sand. The beach is not his destination. He’s picked out a spot round the next headland. He has to scramble over some rocks. There are maybe one or two birds hovering high above, but the young man has his head down and his thoughts on other things. He’s reached his destination. Well, not quite his destination, he thinks. The water pulses against the rocks. The young man sits.
The horizon is sharp today, even when seen through the young man’s hazy eyes. A thin strip of midnight blue; an overwhelming sensation of bright blue above. Some days the sky can seem deep and dense, a whole spectru
m of blues, a depth of space. The young man doesn’t see that today. The sky is flat, a monochrome screen at the end of the ocean. The sun is too bright, the blue is too blue, and this moment feels like an overexposed photograph. He sits on the hard rock and stares at the flat sky.
The ocean approaches and retreats. The tide’s coming in. He’ll sit here for as long as he has to.
It takes him a while to notice the seagulls. They’ve flitted down one by one, chosen roosts on outcrops nearby, or on the flat shelf that separates the young man from the grabbling water. The birds are interested in him, it seems. They twist their necks stiffly and make small awkward jumps towards him. Of course, these are not the birds of a fairy tale: sleek, intelligent, benevolent. They’re a dishevelled collection, ripped and ravaged. To the young man, the seagulls’ feathers look moth-eaten, tinged with dirty yellow. Their red beaks are faded, sun-bleached. One bird is missing an eye: the black jagged hole glares. Another is missing a foot: it’s been severed by a net, or hacked off by schoolkids, the young man imagines, or tries not to imagine. He keeps his mind focused on the pills and the swelling ocean. He puts his hand in his pocket. A flash of movement ripples through the flock. They teeter over the rocks. The footless bird makes the littlest movement, the slightest tilt of the head, the tiniest hop on its single foot. It gives out the feeblest noise—more like a bleat or a cough than a squawk. The young man can’t bear to look at this battered creature. He feels sweaty and dizzy. He wants to lash out at the bird, at the birds, to rip off all their feet and pluck out all their feathers. He feels hemmed in by the birds and the flat, overwhelming sky and the ocean shuffling towards his feet.
And then it happens. As if they’d choreographed this moment, all the birds unfurl their wings. They lean to the left, they lean to the right. Then they all glide skywards. For a moment the young man isn’t certain if they levitated or if the rocks dropped from under him. They’re all in the air above him, sharp against the blue sky. They form a synchronised circle that wheels above the young man’s head. Even the one with the missing foot flies smoothly, turning this way and that, letting the sun catch his wings at different angles. Even the one with the gaping eyehole can drift and swoop through the air. In fact it’s impossible to tell which bird is which: they are all perfect, all elegant, all miraculous. The birds move as a group, concertinaing in and out like a lung. Sparkling in the light as they turn, flipping from black to blinding white. The young man watches in awe at this sight, as the birds soothe the sky, their white feathers glinting. Then they soar out to sea, swifting down to the water and up into the air again. Then they’re specks against the sharp horizon. Then they’re gone.