Sightlines

by Kathleen Jamie

  * * *

  To service the colony required a constant airlift, a bringing in of relief and supplies. Every minute, birds were turning our corner into the colony. They are not small, and they’re not tentative. Each commanded its space, whether in the air or on the ledges where they made their fuss.

  Urr-urr, they said, from way down in the throat. As some arrived, others were departing at speed, silent, heading straight out to sea. I tried to watch individuals, to follow particular narratives, but to no avail; each story wove into another. Here they were in the air, gannet, gannet, repeated like a stammer, the whole idea of gannet amplified and displayed. On the cliff, each pair had its own precise space, just out of reach of the next, and these spaces were well policed. Whenever a bird landed, with its big wings flapping, all the neighbours raised a hue and cry, and that set off a chain reaction; so all over the cliff there were outbreaks of noise and aggression; more harsh urr-urr and wings and long stabbing beaks.

  But, under the bother, many birds were sitting incubating. I presume they were incubating, that they had eggs under their bellies, under their black webbed feet. Once folded and settled, they seemed able to enter a dwam, as Scots say. They could shut out all the noise, and face inward, to gaze at the cliff face inches in front of them. When gannets close their wings, the tips form a cross at the back. All over the white-stained cliff, I could see nests made of seaweed, and that each nest was marked with a black cross.

  ‘D’you remember that one with the rope?’ I called to Tim. He was looking out to sea through binoculars, elbows resting on drawn-up knees, concentrating. He nodded, he could hardly have forgotten. It had been a couple of years before and we’d been on a boat and seen a gannet flying overhead, with six or eight feet of rope dangling from its gullet; discarded rope it must have mistaken for a fish, and plunged for, and tried to swallow. I can picture it still, silhouetted against the sky, its cruciform shape and this rope unspooled from its beak, unnerving and apocalyptic.

  ‘So much plastic tat here, too. Look at it all!’

  Their nests are just padded-down rings of seaweed, each bird sat on top of seaweed on top of a trail of white droppings, but woven into the nests were shreds of nylon rope, orange and blue, or scraps of net. In one was a length of that flat stuff used to bind parcels, the kind that whips back if you cut it with a Stanley knife. It was a blue line against the white cliff and it caught my eye because one end was playing in the breeze. But a neighbouring bird had spied it, too, and reached out along the ledge with a surreptitious beak, and gently, carefully, began to steal it away. Creatures of the eye, they see what they want and want what they see, just like the rest of us.

  Just then, a commotion broke out, even more of a stramash than usual. About halfway down the cliff two birds were fighting, seriously this time. Their big beaks were scissored together and, as they tussled, both beat with heavy wings, striving to stay on the ledge. But one of them fell off and began to tumble down the cliff, passing level below level of identical birds. There was nothing else to do but watch it fall in disarray toward the sea, but as I did so an image came to mind. It was a painting, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ by Breughel. In that picture, Icarus, strapped to his white feathery wings, has already plunged into the green water. He’s drowning. Only his little legs stick up. No one has noticed: not the ship sailing by, not the distant white city, especially not the peasant in the foreground, ploughing his field. What, the painting asks, is the fate of one boy—or one bird—in the scheme of things? Then, though, the gannet opened his wings, was lifted by the air, and lost in the multitude.

  I lowered the glasses again. This was exhausting. Exhilarating, but exhausting. What it must be for them, this breeding business. Shredded nerve and argy-bargy and sexual tension, and the young weren’t even hatched yet. The birds’ noise purled on up into the warm afternoon air. They held their long beaks at every angle, like—paintings again—those portraits of aristocratic dynastic families, where everyone is elegant and looks into the distance, looks anywhere except at each other. Thus it would all continue till the season was over, and it was a long season. It could be September before the young were fledged and the adults quit for their other lives, the silent scrutiny of the sea.

  ‘D’you suppose there are any who just don’t bother? Any gannets who fly in and take one look at all this, and think yuk, and head straight back out to sea?’

  ‘My dear, the noise, the people.’ Shouldn’t think so.

  ‘I suppose they’re at the mercy of their own instincts. No option.’

  ‘Actually, they’re doing a lot of research into homosexuality in seabirds.’

  We watched quietly for a while more, just with the sound of the birds and the surf. Then Tim called, ‘Pomarine skua! Beyond the rocks . . . heading left, dark, low over the waves . . . did you get it? Did you see its spoons?’

  He meant its tail feathers, which twist into a spoon shape. I saw the bird, briefly, but I didn’t see its spoons. If ever I had that acuity of vision, I don’t now.

  It was mid-afternoon. Wind and sun in our faces. To the west, the headlands of the Shetland mainland receded away southward. If you sailed, or flew—strapped to your dubious wings—due east, you’d be heading for Bergen. The sun was still high. We’d brought a bit of a picnic, so unpacked that and, using our rock as a table, ate cheese and oatcakes and apples. Sometimes a big wave sent a booming echo up from below. Thrift bloomed between rocks, the birds came and went, the noise and smell, like a smog, curled up from the colony. Gannets can fly far in search of food; that’s why their numbers are holding up well. It’s the puffins and guillemots and kittiwakes that are struggling to feed their young in a depleted sea.

  It had been a while since I’d thought about those baby days—the intense early weeks. And to be reminded of it by gannets, of all things. I’d always quite fancied the gannet life. Seen from the shore or out on a boat, it looked like the radical alternative. All air and light and ocean waves, rigorous and austere. Whether glinting against a storm cloud, or folding themselves into a dagger, to plunge for fish, gannets seemed more mind than body, more mineral than animal. I like to watch lone gannets interrogating the sea, like some old patrician poet frowning over his papers. And here they were, en masse. It was quite funny, really, to hear them make this flagrant din. Yes, even gannets: highly strung, noisy, aggravated and frustrated after all, crammed together in a domestic order that looked like chaos.

  When we’d eaten enough, I wiped my hands on my jacket and picked up the binoculars again, but this time turned away from the cliff with all its squalor and dramas, and looked instead down at the sea below. There were yet more gannets down there. A club of juveniles occupied a flat terrace of rock at the cliff-foot, twenty or so birds in mottled plumage who had come back from their early wanderings, summonsed by that breeding instinct. Not yet old enough to do it, but old enough to take an interest. Out on the water, before the waves broke, were more adults, a raft of them riding up and down on the slight swell. The binoculars framed three or four at a time. Each white breast caught the sunshine, and against that white the water appeared an impenetrable dark blue.

  There was no particular reason to look there, except that it was restful. The birds maybe found it restful, too, compared to the colony. Perhaps they were just stealing a little time before heading back into the fray.

  The gannets rode the water a couple of hundred yards out, and I looked down at them from the clifftop, without thinking much. Actually, I was beginning to wonder about the time. We’d have to make a move soon, to get the last little boat off the island at the end of the day. The day according to the clock, that is. The sun would be high for hours yet. Small waves rolled in, and on the waves the gannets lifted and fell.

  Just then, though, I began to realise that there was something in my field of vision that hadn’t been there before. It was as though someone had leaned over my shoulder and drawn, among the resting birds, a quick vertical line with a pencil. T
hat’s all. A quick line. I thought it was perhaps a mirage, a trick of the light—it was a bit wavery. Or just a creel marker that had lost its flag. But it didn’t bob like a creel marker.

  It was probably nothing, so I said nothing, but kept looking. That’s what the keen-eyed naturalists say. Keep looking. Keep looking, even when there’s nothing much to see. That way your eye learns what’s common, so when the uncommon appears, your eye will tell you.

  My eye told me that there were gannets, riding on the waves and, among them, an oddity, a vertical pencil line. This seeing, wordless and intent, lasted only a few seconds, but felt longer. Sealed off from the gannets’ noise and the surf and the sky, held in a tunnel of my own vision that linked the clifftop to the sea, hundreds of feet below, I was curious now, and concentrating. I could feel the moments unfold. It was surely growing taller, this dark line. It was acquiring presence. Then two of the nearby birds began to flap their wings, ready to take off. They’d been disturbed. Something was happening underneath them, under the water’s surface. The birds lumbered into the air, and at that moment the black line turned into profile, and I realised what it was.

  * * *

  The baby days are over. My son is old enough to have his own mobile phone, and to be droll. Later I sent him a text, ‘Saw 5 killer whales!’, and he came back, ‘Not bad for a day’s work!’ He can look me level in the eye now, and laugh and say: ‘In three years I’ll be able to get married! Drive a car!’ ‘Fine,’ I reply. ‘But first can you pick your dirty underpants up off the floor?’

  Tim was onto the killer whales as soon as I hollered, as soon as I leaned over and thumped him, delighted, yelling about fins. Three fins were clear of the water now, jet-black and sheeny, the male’s on the outside so tall, as tall as a man, that the sun dazzled off it. With a slow sea motion they rolled up, fin first, then backs so broad the seawater spilled off on either side, then we saw their nearsides, a medley of white and black. As those three tilted back down in unison, Tim swung to sit beside me, calling, ‘Two more, just behind!’ And indeed, two more fins, shorter and more hooked than the male’s, were appearing up through the water’s surface. There was something about that second pair, a collusion or privacy, which made me wonder if they were mother and young. Then they in turn blew, and began to roll under the surface, and the water closed over them as if they’d never been.

  For a few moments there was only sea, and gannets passing below us, with outstretched necks. Then, farther along rightwards, and side by side, the first three fins began to rise again, appearing from underwater into the visible world of light and birds.

  Tim said a party of gannets appeared to be following the animals, as gulls follow the plough, and it was so, but the gannets, lately so impressive, suddenly seemed flappy, airy little things, next to the orca’s greater presence. And exposed: the killer whales revealed only as much of themselves as was necessary; much more of their bodies remained concealed from us under the sea’s surface, even when they blew, but the birds were all there, all visible.

  The procession was travelling eastward, following the curve of the island, and because that was the direction we’d have to take to reach the jetty Tim and I packed up hastily, left the gannets to their ruckus and began to run over the turf. We jumped rocks and tufts of pink thrift, avoided rabbit holes, and ran along trying to keep up, trying to keep the animals in view down in the water at our left, calling, ‘There!’ when they rolled up to breathe. When they appeared they were a stern, tight black and white, visible for a long moment against the wide loose blues of the sea and sky, and then they slowly rolled down and then gone. I stopped to catch my breath and look away out to the horizon. All this was happening in a tiny corner of the sea, but the sea suddenly seemed different. It appeared vaster, more alive and knowing and expressive than before.

  We hurried a mile downhill, down to sea level, until we stood breathless and jubilant on a rocky shore, looking out over the water, but the animals had entered a broad band of glare far too bright for our human eyes, and that was that.

  * * *

  Gannets glitter. They’re made for vision, shine in any available light, available to see and be seen. Their eyes are round and fierce, with a rim of weird blue, and they are adapted to see down through the surface reflections of the sea. There, they take what they need—and what they don’t. Less patrician poet, more bargain-hunter. ‘A butter-scoop, a battledoor, a golf-ball, some toy whips, some little baskets and a net-maker’s needle’ are just some of the oddities found in gannets’ nests,—but that quaint list was compiled a century ago, when an ornithologist called J. H. Gurney published an earnest, learned book called simply The Gannet. All that was then known of the bird’s history and natural history is there. A battledoor is a sort of tennis racket, and what would a gannet want with one of those? But the acquisitive habit continues, hence the shredded polyprop rope and nylon net. Sometimes the youngsters get entangled in this stuff, and die like that, hanged from their natal cliffs before they can fly.

  * * *

  I read later that orca live in family groups, and that what I’d assumed, with slight world-weariness, was a dominant male with one or two adult females, ‘his’ females and his offspring, was nothing of the kind. They are matriarchal; a son remains with his mother. In a year or so, god willing, my son will indeed be taller than I am. When he measures himself against me, and gloats, I’ll poke him in the chest and say, ‘Just be glad you’re not a killer whale, pal.’

  We learned, too, that this was a resident group, following a regular beat around the islands; they were not a rare occurrence. But I remember how that huge fin manifested itself in front of my eyes, a private miracle. For days after I felt different, looser of limb, thrilled because the world had thrown me a gift and said, ‘Catch!’

  The real rarity, apparently, was Tim’s Pomarine skua, with its spoons, which was the first ever recorded for Noss.

  * * *

  Sometimes in winter, when the dark comes early and presses at the window, and I’m feeling landlocked, I think about gannets. Or gannetries, rather. There are gannet stations all around the coast; some have been active for centuries. Grassholm, Little Skellig, Ailsa Craig: I can rhyme off their names. Stac Lee and Stac an Armin on St Kilda, Sula Sgeir and Sule Stack out in the Atlantic and named after ‘solan’, which is the gannet. Hermaness, at the very north of Shetland, Noss, Troup Head, The Bass, Bempton: stacks and sea-cliffs and flat-topped rocks. Actually, The Bass Rock is far from remote: it’s near as dammit in the city, you can see it from the windows of the John Lewis store in Edinburgh, a shining beacon of bird shit in the Firth of Forth. You can imagine gannetries like you imagine lighthouses. Romantic outposts, if you please, facing down the wild sea—but without all that rugged manliness. They’re wild and far-flung, but domestic, ignoble, noisy, seasonal.

  My son grows tall, my daughter lives in a girls’ web of thrills and tensions invisible to me. She frets about who said what to whom, and who sent what text; sometimes whole days are spent in fallings out and makings up and social anxiety. I want to say it doesn’t matter. ‘It does matter!’ says my daughter, and she’s right.

  What is the fate of one gannet? If a chick is hatched too late in the season, its parents may simply abandon it on its ledge, when instinct calls them back out to sea: ‘Everything turns away / quite leisurely from the disaster.’ Back to sea until the spring comes, and the thrift blooms, bringing again its one imperative—breed!

  * * *

  What might just save us, according to the naturalist Edward O. Wilson, is a quirk. More than a quirk, ‘An almost miraculous gift of human nature to future generations’ which we’re only just noticing. By human nature, Wilson means women’s nature. We don’t ‘breed’. When women have the choice, and health and a measure of prosperity, we immediately risk having fewer children, or none. Wilson calls it an instinct: ‘A universal instinctive choice’. He says that it might just happen that, over the next century, through women’s empowerm
ent and health care for infants, human numbers will stabilise then begin to fall. In turn, human demands on the planet will reduce, too, and we might avert a catastrophe, and carry ourselves, and innumerable other species, into the times to come. It’s a good vision. A kind of thrift. Raise one or two children, who, disaster aside, will become healthy adults, then you’re free go back to watching the sea.

  Sometimes I think about the killer whales, too, another kind of vision—the sudden unexpected. They were unmistakable, black and white, showing us only as much of themselves as they had to. If ever I see a pod of killer whales again, I’ll regard that male, six-foot, film­star fin differently. I’ll wonder which of the others is the matriarch.

  So we go on. Next summer the gannets will be back from the sea to their colonies, going through the whole palaver again. Sometimes they fly alone, and sometimes one behind the other in long fast ribbons just above the waves, with urgency in their beating wings and outstretched necks.

  LIGHT

  EVERY YEAR, IN THE THIRD WEEK OF FEBRUARY, there is a day, or, more usually, a run of days, when one can say for sure that the light is back. Some juncture has been reached, and the light spills into the world from a sun suddenly higher in the sky. Today, a Sunday, is such a day, though the trees are still stark and without leaves; the grasses are dry and winter-beaten.

  The sun is still low in the sky, even at noon, hanging over the hills southwest. Its light spills out of the southwest, the same direction as the wind: both sunlight and wind arrive together out of the same airt, an invasion of light and air out of a sky of quickly moving clouds, working together as a swift team. The wind lifts the grasses and moves the thin branches of the leafless trees and the sun shines on them, in one movement, so light and air are as one, two aspects of the same entity. The light is razor-like, edging grasses and twigs of the willow and apple trees and birch. The garden is all left-leaning filaments of light, such as you see on cobwebs, mostly, too hard to be called a sparkle, too metallic, but the whole garden’s being given a brisk spring-clean. Where there are leaves, such as the holly 200 yards away, the wind lifts the leaves and the sun sweeps underneath. All moving because of the fresh wind.