Over pasta with butter and pepper, ancient Parmesan from the back of the fridge grated over the top, the men split the last two beers in the house. The wanderer tried to mind his manners, but the taste of a warm meal urged him to gulp and slurp beyond the reign of his control. After subsisting on rationed beef jerky and cold cans of soup, the simple flavor of pepper and cheese on warm pasta made his head spin.
“So, where are you headed?” Warren asked.
“Not sure. East toward the desert seems wise for the winter. The wetness of these western forests is getting to me.”
“Seems wise. I’ve never been to any desert besides the Great Basin.” Warren pointed out the window to the desert side of the house and paused to wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I hear there are lots of snakes.”
“I would imagine so,” the wanderer said, wiping the grease from his mouth onto his sleeve in imitation, something he’d had drilled out of him by at an early age by his well-to-do parents. He adjusted the napkin in his lap nervously. “But there are snakes wherever you go.”
“I s’pose so.”
The two ate in silence for a few, the clinking of forks on china a sort of conversation in itself.
“Did you feel that earthquake earlier today?” Warren asked. “Just before you arrived, if I remember correctly.”
“Strange.” He wiped the last traces of delicious peppered oil from his plate with an old, hard crust of bread. “I can’t say that I did.”
“Well,” Warren sighed. “Don’t always trust the sensations of an old man. Might have been my stomach growling for all I know.”
“No earthquake, no. But those secessionists were sure causing a ruckus out there on the highway. What can you tell me about them?”
“Don’t get me started,” Warren said, getting up and opening the fridge for a beer, forgetting that the last two had already been consumed. “Thieves, the lot of them.”
“What’s your experience with the movement?” asked the kid.
“Well, we’re in the heart of the matter, right here.” Warren said. “All’s these men want is to get at the copper in the hills. It’s not about anything but yet another gold rush by selfish men.”
“Have you seen the Charlie Chaplin film The Great Dictator?” the wanderer asked.
“’Fraid not,” Warren said, but he couldn’t really be sure if he had or hadn’t.
“Did you notice that the double cross symbol the Jeffersonians use is the same as the one the parodied Hitler, the leader of Tomania, used?” The boy’s eyes sparkled as he theorized and conspired, waving the pamphlet he’d been given earlier. “What do you suppose that means?”
“I don’t suppose I know,” Warren said.
“Well, I don’t think it very wise to align themselves with Adolf Hitler in any way. Even a parody. Not with what’s brewing in the world and this country on the brink of war.”
“Absolutely right you are,” Warren sighed. He was suddenly feeling exhausted. “Boy. I’m too old to live through another war. I just don’t think I can do it.”
“There’s a paragraph at the end of Chaplain’s long monologue I’ve memorized,” the wanderer said, ignoring the old man’s flagging interest. “I think it has to do with what you were talking about earlier, about the greed of man. Would you like to hear it?”
“Sure,” Warren said, easing himself back down into the chair with a sigh.
“‘Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people!’” began the wanderer, sitting up straight in his chair and closing his eyes. “‘Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world—to do away with national barriers—to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness. Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!’”
“Sounds like sense to me,” Warren said.
“I think at the core of your argument, you feel the same way. As if the secessionists are just impeding the progress of man toward a more tolerant world and are simply concerned for their own pocketbooks’ well-being. Theirs is a clear greed for goods in these parts. I can tell just from the conversations I’ve had hitching into the ‘state of Jefferson.’ They just want riches, not the betterment of mankind like they say they do. Isn’t that what’s ultimately wrong with our country? We propagate greed for greed’s sake.”
“I do believe you are the single most reasonable fellow I’ve spoken to in a long time. I admire your energy for the subject. And I hope you keep up the good fight.”
Warren stood up with some difficulty and went into a room in the back of the old drafty house and returned with an envelope.
“Here’s a little something for your travels.” Warren paused. “Please don’t open it until you are on the road. No need to thank me.”
That night, as the young wanderer did the dishes, Warren played back the earthquake as best he could in his mind. It had rattled him, and he remembered the egg breaking. But when he went to fill his pipe with tobacco and peered into the portal of the collection, there sat the murre egg perfectly intact. If I’m imagining earthquakes, this must be the end of it, he thought to himself. Surely I will be joining my Olive soon. The very idea sent a shiver of anticipation through his whole body. He took the case down and opened it one last time, touching the lock of hair gently before closing the lid again. He withdrew the lock of hair and placed the strands on his tongue and moved it around, swallowing with difficulty the little gnarled nest of all that was left of the woman he loved. Perhaps he would be able to find her more easily in the great beyond if a part of her was inside him. He closed the lid and took the collection into the kitchen.
“I’d like you to hold onto this.” He pushed the collection carefully across the kitchen counter toward the wanderer as he dried his hands on a towel.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It was my wife’s. Her mother gave it to her. It’s a very old collection of bird eggs.”
“It’s real nice,” Victor said. “But I’m not the gentlest on items that get thrown into my rucksack. Isn’t there maybe someone else who should have it?”
“I don’t believe so. We never had any kids.” Warren organized his beard nervously. “I’m nearing the end of my days and really this collection deserves to continue on until it’s been completed.”
“How will it be complete?” the wanderer asked, skeptical of the whole scenario.
“You’ll know, I suppose,” Warren said, sighing at the boy’s lack of understanding. He grew impatient and stood up. “Just keep it safe. It’s not to be bought or sold. When the right person comes to pass it along to, you’ll know.”
“What bird is this from?” The wanderer put his finger near a lightly speckled taupe egg.
“Ah. The hermit warbler,” the old man sighed. “I collected that one just after my wife died, when I became a hermit myself.”
“I see,” the wanderer said. “I appreciate the symbol.”
“Well, I hear the bed calling me.”
The old man went up to bed, laboring with each step up the creaking stairs. The wanderer stood alone in the kitchen and opened the lid to the collection. One of the eggs rolled up and out of its divot and then settled back—the largest, a perfect blue-green brown-speckled egg with a sharp point on one end. He wrapped up the collection tight in an old T-shirt and placed it at the bottom of his rucksack, padded by his few, threadbare items of clothing. He moved the sealed envelope back and forth between his hands, holding it up to the light to try and see what was inside. He suddenly felt bad that he hadn’t even told Warren his name—Victor. And here this man had been generous as a mother to an unnamed, dirty kid. He placed the letter back in the rucksack and forgot all about it as he lay down on the couch and slept the slumber of a stone.
The Followed Path
Spring in the Sonoran Desert, Arizona,
1983
All morning, Sal felt pursued. By what, she was not sure. When she started her transect in the first dawn light, she stood before a steep wall of giant tawny boulders and took a deep breath to ready herself for the labyrinth ahead. Looking down at the dry, cracked ground, she saw cougar tracks, barely there, indications that a big cat had passed through recently. She started up through the spaces between the rocks, using blind handholds that quickened her heart rate, cutting a winding path among the boulders and scrub so disorienting she had to recalibrate her direction over and over with her compass to make sure she was on track to hit all her points.
Once she had navigated to the right spot for her first count, she stood and diligently listened and looked for all the birds in earshot, identifying each species and marking them down on her data sheet. Rock wrens perched high above her, black-throated sparrows chattered in the scrub, the acrobatic, inky-black phainopepla picked away at some mistletoe, and the colorful verdin delivered its short, straightforward song. With each turn of her body to hear a new bird, Sal felt a sense of danger lurking behind her. More than once she shivered and whipped around to see what might be creeping up. But she never encountered more than a horned lizard, keeping quiet and still so as not to be eaten by this strange, upright, and downright jumpy predator.
Sal, a scientist first and foremost, reminded herself that cougars preferred not to interact with humans. They were not hunting her because she was not their understood prey. And while she knew on an intellectual level that she was not being stalked by a cat, she just couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being pursued. By something. When she was finished with the point count portion of her transect, she decided to take a seat on top of a flat boulder and eat some lunch before diving into nest-searching. The sandwich and hot sun made her sleepy, so she lay back for just a moment and closed her eyes. Her 4:30 a.m. wake time suddenly inhabited her body like a drug and she fell into a hard sleep.
In her dream, she found herself in a small boat on a rough, midnight-blue ocean sitting next to a pregnant Alice who had her hand up to her eyes looking into the distance. White caps licked at the sky as storm clouds brewed overhead. Very far away, a lightning bolt made its way into the water.
“Where does lightning go when it touches down on water, I wonder?” asked Alice.
“That’s a good question,” Sal said. “How are the fish safe?”
“Maybe all the electricity just bursts into a million pieces and all that’s left is a tingle here, an inkling there.”
“Like a memory of something fierce.”
“Exactly,” Alice said, smiling and folding her hands over her belly.
“I suppose it must dissipate over the surface until the charge is spent.”
“Like all bright and dangerous things,” Alice nodded, “it finds its way to calm.”
The two women waited quietly together for the lightning storm to make its way toward them over the water.
When Sal woke, she was covered with sweat and felt a mild panic take over her body. She glanced at her watch. She had only been asleep about fifteen minutes, but she could hardly remember what day it was, or even for a split second who she was. The reality of herself in the desert came back to her quickly, like her essence had been dropped back into her body from a great height. She gathered up her things and scrambled down from a boulder and into the sandy wash to begin looking for nests.
It was only 11:00 a.m., but the sun was hot overhead and Sal’s steps through the sand felt slow and plodding. She listened with one ear for birds’ contact calling or acting erratic—two signs she might be near a nest—but she was still haunted by her dream and she couldn’t shake the feeling of being pursued. She remembered a professor of ecology had once stressed that lightning, much like a stream, plant, or even an ice crystal, takes the path of least resistance. It seemed this idea could then be applied to any number of actions in the biological world. In general, energy winnows itself down smaller and smaller until it is dissipated. The plight of the earth’s creatures, then, is to gather and use energy before it disappears into infinity. Every creature is subject to the first law of thermodynamics. Energy is always lost and so there can be no perpetual motion in any real sense. She sighed. It seemed that life and living, in this sense, were walled in by the natural course of things. Every living thing succumbs to an eternal and unending decay of energy, matter, and time. The path of least resistance is simply a gentle way of nodding toward death.
A nearby rattle juggled Sal’s thoughts into dispersing seeds on the wind. A small western diamondback made its way along the sand, rattling at any nearby movement. Sal noticed that the snake’s eyes were sheathed and cloudy, a sign that it was ready to shed its skin. She had read about this phenomenon but never seen it in the flesh. Having just woken from its long, winter slumber, the snake rattled along, jutting back and forth with poor eyesight, blindly announcing itself in the bright spring midday sun.
The snake’s intense drive to survive snapped Sal out of her borderline-nihilistic scientific musing. She sat down on a soft bank and took out her notebook. Decay was inevitable, sure, but wasn’t it beautiful, the infinite variety with which creatures raked and railed against it? As though she had hit the bottom of her own dark thought pool, she bounced back up toward the light. Every little live thing surrounding her suddenly shone and sang with the song of resistance. She plucked a bright orange wolfberry from a nearby plant and popped it in her mouth. The tang and sweetness echoed the sharpness of survival.
Across the narrow wash, a tiny yellow-headed verdin popped inside a sharp, barbed globe that hung from a low branch, revealing its nest location. Within the uniform ball of woven thorns held together by spider silk, the bird had made the tiny cup of its nest. The effect was that of a perfect fortress but for a small hole the bird popped in and out of. She knew that inside, where the eggs were nestled, it would be soft and cushioned by feathers, plant down, and soft leaves.
The idea of a home so safe gave Sal pause as she filled out her data card, marking the exact location of the verdin nest. Sal spent so many of her nights in a tent, picking up and moving from here to there. Maybe that was the source of this feeling of being pursued. She had moved around so much the last couple years her body and mind had finally been tricked into believing she was being followed. Why else would a person run so hard?
Sal couldn’t conjure a place or person that made her feel as protected as those eggs, save Alice. She waited until the bird left the nest and poked her finger into the hole to count the eggs. She had to be extremely careful not to shake the globe or she might lose an egg out the entrance. One, two, three, four. Four perfect little eggs nestled in the fluff. What lucky birds to have such a secure spot to start out their lives.
The nest got her thinking. Sal had always told herself she was free, that she was the rolling stone that gathered no moss. But what if all her rambling had simply been an easy conceit to avoid any real commitment to one place, job, or, for that matter, person? Was she pursued, then, by her own lack of direction or dedication? The thought did not feel especially pleasant. She thought of Alice, back in the farmhouse with her parents, so rooted there now as a mother that she couldn’t possibly find her way out to travel with Sal for a season, as Sal had often wished were possible.
Sal found a few more easy nests, the acrobatic phainopepla, some mourning doves, and a lesser goldfinch, before calling it a day. She walked back toward her truck and ran into her field partner, a baby-faced redhead named Eric with skin so pale he wore a sun hat with full neck and earflaps in combination with wraparound sunglasses and still managed to burn in the intense desert sun. She found him waiting for her curled up in the shade reading a fantasy novel about time travel and dragons. Sal often wondered if Eric would make it in the long term as a field biologist, so sensitive was his skin and, for that matter, his countenance. When she asked him questions he often shuddered before answering and a
voided eye contact. But he liked the job, he told her, because he didn’t have to interact with actual people most of the day.
The two were quietly riding the forty miles to their next transect site when Eric broke the silence.
“I forgot to mention, I picked up the mail from the PO Box in town yesterday. This came for you.” He handed her a postcard with a watercolor of a little girl on the front that Sal instantly recognized as Lily. She was driving, so she put it on the dashboard to read later. As they drove along the highway, she noticed some virga clouds dotting the horizon, letting down moisture in a watercolor wash that never quite reached the ground. The effect was that of a motion interrupted. The feeling from her dream earlier in the day came back to her and she could see Alice’s face lit by lightning. She still felt pursued, but traveling at sixty miles per hour on the highway helped put the day sufficiently behind her. Perhaps if she drove just a little faster she could outrun the darkening feeling. Eric braced himself on the dash like she was going to kill them both and Sal smiled a little as she pushed the little truck into the upper limits of its horsepower.
When she dropped Eric off at his tent site, he seemed especially relieved not only to be alive but that Sal would be moving on and leaving him alone once again. She laughed as she bumped up the dirt road away from him. What was it in her that enjoyed torturing the poor guy so? Maybe she was bored. But maybe it was biological dominance, pure and simple. She was older, stronger, more tanned and knowledgeable in the field. And she made sure they both knew it. She knew better how to survive in this place where survival was a desperate and difficult mission. Maybe it was important that someone else recognized this fact.
That night, after a lonely meal of dehydrated beans and rice, some carrots, and a single beer, Sal set up her tent to the side of a sandy wash near her next transect and settled in for the night. From a saguaro nearby, an elf owl hooted its high-pitched laugh of a mating call, but Sal couldn’t hear a mate responding. She read the postcard from Alice again and again, wanting to understand exactly what to make of it. It read:
The Wild Birds Page 16