These early weeks in spring the peninsula was crowded with tens of thousands of birds, a hundred species and sub-species jostling together as they passed through from their southern wintering grounds to their northern breeding grounds. She was well-acquainted with the peninsula birds—all the usual species of the summer breeding season—but the mixed flocks of the spring migration were another matter. She kept Tom’s field guide open in her lap and referred to it frequently. If a bird was not already illustrated there, she opened to a blank page and sketched it quickly herself, drawings she would have to refine later—Tom had been the better artist—and then compare to specimens in the Stanford natural history collections in hope of discovering the name.
At high tide, or whenever rain flooded the hollow she was sitting in, she slogged across the point to the driftwood beach, made herself comfortable among jumbled drift logs, and took up scrutiny of the gulls and little plovers and sandpipers along the surf line. When the huge old howitzers at Fort Canby twenty miles to the south let fly their practice rounds, the dim booming echo sent the shorebirds into the sky in a great rippling cloud.
At the end of April, a heavy storm arriving in the night lifted and belled the walls of the tent, drove rain through the waxed canvas, brawled and thrashed in the heavy-limbed firs. For hours, a strange green lightning flared almost continuously, and thunder followed in tremendous explosions—she imagined this must be the sound of a battlefield under a barrage. She lay awake listening to the shriek and groan of falling trees, the crash of breaking limbs. In the last hour before daybreak the bombardment at last slackened, and although the wind was still howling, she dressed in waterproofs, put specimen sacks in the pocket of her coat, took a flashlight, and went out into the storm. She kept to the rain-flattened grass at the edge of the foredune, away from drift logs and the high, huge, booming surf. The wind was beating in from the northwest; it rattled and shook the rain clothes, drove cold and wet through seams and gaps to bare skin. In other weather, she had watched gulls walk the beach at night, breakers rushing in ranks of yellow-green flame, the wet sand alive with tiny stars. Now a leaden surf rolled out to a black sky, and she felt herself to be alone at the edge of the known world.
The beach was empty of birds—all but the dead. The sand was littered with hundreds of bodies of water-soaked gulls, short-billed dowitchers, pelicans, puffins. Among them were storm-petrels, albatrosses, shearwaters—pelagic birds who spent their lives at sea, and came to land so rarely that she had seen them only in taxidermy. She took several corpses into her specimen sacks.
She climbed over the dune and waded a mile of salt marsh to the bayshore. The curved point was completely flooded, the tide flats and sand shore drowned under feet of water. The headland, four miles north across the bay, was indistinguishable in the darkness—no lights shone from Tokeland—but the North Cove lighthouse swung a red beam and then a white one through the storm every half minute or so, the brief streak of light glimmering with tiny sparks, bits of haloed flotsam falling with the rain.
To keep from the flood, she broke a path a dozen yards inland through salt grass and scrub, her legs whipped by willow branches. At her feet, in the dim cone of the flashlight, drifts of bluish chaff floated on the puddles. She took some into a specimen sack—bits of sodden feather, maybe, from an elegant tern, or a mew gull.
She ate a cold breakfast back at the tent, and when the darkness thinned she autopsied a dead albatross and recorded her findings on a fresh page in Species Accounts: No bones broken; dark streaks of something viscous—not oil—in the anterior and posterior air sacs; death from obstruction of the airway? Or from causes unknown.
The small bits she had collected from the wind-roughened puddles were not feather, as she had thought, but something like flakes of ash or thin scales of paint, blue to her eye, even now in daylight, but colorless under the lens—motes as clear and insubstantial as breath. She wrote, I do not know what they are.
In late morning, she walked out to the ocean again. The sky was lurid—utterly black in the west, veined with great streaks of orchid purple and emerald green. The wind was squally and cold, the beach in flood tide awash with the bodies of dead birds. She stood and looked and then hiked across to the bay.
From the edge of the marsh, she could hear a dog howling, a terrible prolonged wailing of pain or fear, and when she came out on the mud flats a wet black dog was pacing back and forth, lifting its muzzle every little while in a long, loud, doleful cry of anguish. She called to it without coming very near—she knew nothing of dogs, and thought this one might be rabid. The dog went on pacing and crying, looking out across the bay where an oyster boat rolled and heaved on the swell. Several men on the deck of the boat appeared to be casting and retrieving a drag net without recovering anything. The water was too choppy to see what it was they cast for—a man overboard, she feared, and then realized he must already have drowned—that they were casting for a body—or their efforts would have had more urgency. This was not something she could think about for long.
While she stood watching they brought up something heavy and dark, something like a waterlogged stump. The oystermen had seen her watching from the bay shore, and when they had the thing aboard they hoisted it up and displayed it for her, lifting and spreading the arms wide, lifting up the heavy head until the mouth fell open to white teeth, a red tongue. The bear’s thick, sodden pelt streamed with salt water. The dog pointed his nose at the sky and suddenly raised a new wail—it seemed to her a sound of terrible bereavement. One of the men on the boat shouted something, but she could not make it out against the chop of waves on the muddy shore.
The birds had mostly gone to ground or been driven inland by the storm, so in the afternoon when the rain briefly slackened she took the sand trail to Oysterville to replenish groceries and post her letters. She walked quickly, holding down her hat. The sky in the west was still black, but now rippling every little while with silent green lightning. Dry blue flakes —she was still at a loss what label to give them—lifted and fell on the wind, and gathered at the outer edges of puddles in a stiff rime.
Oysterville’s prosperity had failed decades earlier with the failure of the San Francisco oyster market, the village by now reduced to a few dozen weather-battered houses and barns scattered between the upland woods and the mud flats. The post office occupied space in Mulvey’s Store, and the storekeeper, whose name was not Mulvey and who served also as postmaster, remembered her from previous years.
“It’s you, is it, come back to look for your strange birds.” He meant this in a neighborly way. She was, by most standards, an odd woman, one who dressed in trousers and tramped about in wild territory that was home to bears; a woman said to carry a pistol, and whose behavior and study could not properly be called “bird watching.” But he had known women of her sort in North Carolina as a boy—“yarbs” who sold leaves and snake venom as curatives door to door, and lived out wild in the woods; and he was himself eccentric enough to think well of her.
It crossed her mind to tell him the correct term for a strange bird was incidental, or rare; but she smiled slightly and said, “Yes, it’s me,” and handed him several letters to post.
While he rummaged for any mail that might have come for her, he said, “Well, that was a storm we had, wasn’t it, I never seen a sky like that, never have, nor such lightning.”
She agreed that it was a terrible storm.
“A tempest, my mama would have called it, but no, I never seen it like that, which I wonder if it wasn’t those fellows over to Fort Canby, shooting off some sort of ordnance, which they claim not. Or else the Japs, but if so they have got poor aim, they hit nothing but trees.” He brought out two letters, one addressed in her mother’s hand and the other in her father’s. “Now what else can I do you for, miss?”
She gave him a short list—flashlight batteries, chocolate, a piece of smoked ham—and bought a copy of the weekly Chinook Observer, its bold headline announcing Yanks shoot down Yama
moto. She stowed everything in her knapsack and swung the sack to her shoulder, but did not immediately take the trail to camp. On the lee side of Mulvey’s porch she found a bench and sat to read her letters. Her parents each gave much the same mundane report comprised of errands and weather and neighborhood gossip. “They have shot down Yamamoto,” her father wrote, which was his only reference to the war.
While she was skimming the front page of the newspaper a young girl ten or eleven years old came through the yard; when the girl saw her there she veered across and stepped up onto the porch. “Is your name Miss Kenney? Are you the woman looks for birds?” The girl was in rubber boots and a brown sweater. Her fair hair was unevenly cut, held back with bobby pins under a hat decorated with fish hooks and bird feathers.
“I am Barbara Kenney,” she said. And then—this is what Tom would have done—she told the girl, “I am an ornithologist, which is a scientist who studies birds. Are you interested in science?”
She considered her answer. “I wonder about things, if that’s science.”
“It is.”
The girl ran her tongue across her chapped lips. “I wonder about some birds I saw. I could show you them.”
“Do you know the species name? Or can you describe them to me?”
“They’re oystercatchers.”
On the peninsula, she had only ever seen oystercatchers on the rocks below the North Head Lighthouse a good twenty miles to the south, prying mollusks out of coastal rocks with their long, tough, bright orange bills. She said, “Where did you see them? Are you certain they are oystercatchers?”
“They’re over on the mud flats”—the girl pointed vaguely—“which is not where I ever have seen them. And most of them dead on the ground.”
She could not think what the girl’s story might mean, or how to measure the accuracy of it. But she thought of the albatrosses and petrels dead on the Leadbetter beach. She put away her newspaper and stood. “Well, all right, show me.”
The girl led her south on the tarred plank road toward Nahcotta. There were jack pines on both sides of the road, and the wind made a sound in them like the rattle of pebbles in a jar. A splintered windmill on the roof of a house made a faint whine, spinning its few intact vanes. In the west, the black sky was shot through every little while with flutters of silent, virid-green lightning.
After half a mile, they turned east and walked on the criss crossing dikes of a cranberry farm and then the girl stepped down onto one of the bogs and headed straight across it. The field was soggy but not flooded, and the vines had not yet begun to bloom. The girl stepped with care, not to break the twiggy branches.
At the far edge of the bog they passed through a small woodlot and came onto a secluded part of the bayshore. There were dozens of black oystercatchers dead and dying on the wet mud. The birds not yet dead beat their long wings weakly against the ground and made faint yelping sounds, ghostlike and plaintive. Their golden eyes seemed to study the sky through milky film.
She knelt and examined several of the dead birds. She lifted wings and spread feathers and felt along the bodies for shotgun pellets, but the birds were unbloodied and intact.
The girl, watching her, said, “What made them fall? How come they died, do you know?”
“We have had such a fierce storm,” she said after a moment. “I imagine it had something to do with that. There were a great many dead birds on the beach this morning—seabirds we don’t see on the land. It may be the unusual weather drove them ashore. And brought down the oystercatchers.”
The girl pulled at the hem of her sweater with grimy hands and glanced toward the dark sky in the west. “I went over to Klipsan this morning and there were a lot of whales that drove up onto the beach. We get them sometimes, one or two, but there’s so many I couldn’t count them all. Maybe a hundred, they’re laying all up and down the sand for most of a mile, just laying there waiting to die I guess. Is that on account of the weather too?”
“I don’t know. It may be.” She said nothing about the dog, the bear.
She wrapped two dead birds and then a living one in sheets of newspaper and put them in the knapsack. The live bird rustled the paper and cried weakly.
“You’d think a big storm would make whales swim down deep, not come out on the beach,” the girl said, which was perhaps not a question. Then she said, “Will you cut the birds open to see what killed them?”
“Yes. Sometimes an autopsy can work out the cause of death.”
She walked among the birds still on the ground, quickly twisting the necks of those still moving. The girl watched this in silence and then said, “I live at the Whalebone Inn. Will you come and tell me if you work out what killed them?”
She knew the Whalebone Inn, a boarding house in Nahcotta. “Yes, I’ll come and find you if I learn anything.”
They walked back together across the cranberry fields. When they came out on the road, the clouds were huge above the tops of the trees, violently bruise-colored, rippling with that strange lightning. They looked at the sky in silence. A dry blue rain had begun to fall again; it collected in fine drifts on the brim of the girl’s hat.
“I am camped at Leadbetter Point. Will you come and tell me if you find any more dead birds in numbers like that, or where they aren’t usually seen?”
The girl nodded, and after a hesitation she said, “Do you know the real name for an oystercatcher?”
“Do you mean the species name? The black ones here on the peninsula are haematopus bachmani. Bachman was a friend to Audubon, and there are several birds named for him.”
“Have all the names been given out by now?”
“Do you mean, have all the birds on the earth been discovered and given a name? No, no, every year some new ones are found. If we were in South America we might discover one—there are more species of birds there than anywhere. I don’t imagine all the species on the earth will ever be known and named. People are always finding new mushrooms and insects and fish.”
The girl cast her a sidelong look. “Are any birds named for a woman?”
“Yes, a few.” She considered how much more to say—how much Tom would have said. “But most of those are named for queens or goddesses, or for the daughters or wives of scientists, not for women who are themselves scientists.” She did not say, that in the winter just past she had taken work as a poorly paid assistant to a prominent male professor, trapping birds and preparing their skeletons for his outdated study of the mechanics of bird flight; or that, the winter before, she had resorted to teaching children at a grade school in Calistoga. She did not say: Universities are willing to educate women, but not employ them.
“Are any birds named for you?”
“No.” She did not smile. “Not yet.”
Overnight, as blood will clot in a wound, the clouds thickened and hardened, and in the morning what remained was a black flaw stretching out of sight to the north and south, a long, shifting vein of darkness, glossy and depthless.
The storm had battered the coast for hundreds of miles, from Vancouver Island to Bandon, and inland as far as Spokane and Boise. Fishermen cutting through her camp on their way to the beach told her the widespread belief: that a new and terrible weapon detonated over at Hanford or at one of the secret sites in Canada had brought on the unnatural storm and left that huge black pall in the sky.
A woman she met on the beach was of another mind. God, she said, had opened a portal into heaven and shortly would raise up all the believers.
In the following days, extraordinarily high tides gnawed at the beaches and mudflats; roads and paths disappeared; fifty-year-old houses built on bluffs above the sand fell into the sea. Rafts of dead fish floated in on the next tide and the next, and their decaying bodies littered all the salt marshes and the sand beaches. There were so many fin whales and gray whales decaying on the beach at Klipsan that when the wind blew northerly she could smell the stench from her camp almost ten miles away.
Her notebook became a
record of casualties and losses. Thousands of plovers, the subjects of her summer study, had been scattered, driven away or killed in the storm. She posted signs to warn people away from the nesting grounds—this was a crucial time for the few hundred pairs who remained—but the beach had been reduced to a narrow strand, and the Coast Guard horse patrol came up and down it twice a day, heedless of the birds’ shallow nests. And in the days after the storm, beachcombers from the tourist cabins, as well as peninsula natives from Oysterville and Nahcotta, walked over the dunes and through the plover nesting sites or drove onto the beach and parked above the high tide line. From the open sand, the black rift seemed to hang just overhead, almost within reach, and on clear nights it was a starless streak through the firmament. People sat on blankets on the sand, or on the fenders and the running boards of cars, and stared up at it.
She watched it too, from drift logs above the nesting grounds. One day she watched a single heron, then nine pelicans, then a pair of horned grebes rise through the sky and vanish into the blackness. Methodically, she wrote down the time of day, and the numbers of the birds, their names. She tried to think what else to say, and finally wrote, Gone.
The woman who came to the door at the Whalebone Inn was not someone she recognized, though the woman seemed taken aback and said, “Oh! It’s you!” as if they were acquainted from long past.
“I’m looking for a girl who lives here, she has a brown sweater and her hair is light in color. I failed to get her name.”
“It would be Alice. What do you want her for?”
“I’d like to speak with her, if I may.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven Page 20