Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(35)
Suddenly there was no one in the room beside me. Despite that, the crowd noise continued. Then another bird stood at the podium: the Educated Chicken. “Come here often, sucker?” she asked. I realized I was naked and thought of the man in the tree.
I awoke in my bed and still heard the cries. I looked around my bedroom for the birds and realized my dream had ended, but the Halloween party that was this neighborhood continued out on the street.
I dozed but didn’t get a lot of sleep. Early the next morning, in the full glory of All Saints’ Day, I staggered into my front room. The hawk sat outside my window. He glanced my way, as he tore into a small bloody carcass.
Wanting to make him feel at home, I put on my feathered mask and sat close to the window. We exchanged stares. I was being summoned to worship. I wouldn’t have Neil’s immortality. And I might end up as a lunatic in a tree. I was fascinated but terrified.
The hawk flicked a small bloody clump from the carcass it held. It fell on my windowsill. He waited to see what I’d do.
The Orphan Bird
ALISON LITTLEWOOD
The lake was silent. Its surface was utterly unmoving and the deepest grey in hue, except where the light made it shine the no-colour that Arnold saw in this place and this place alone. The only thing stirring the surface was his own head, a slick, dark mound in the hood of his wetsuit, as he turned to look at the bitterns. There was no other way to see them. No one else knew they were there. The only way that Arnold knew was the sound of their booming, which he had heard one day ringing emptily across the lake like a call from beyond the world. For a time, he had almost believed that it wasn’t a real thing; then he had seen the source and had been astonished, despite all his knowledge, that such a sound could come from so ordinary a creature.
The bitterns had nested in the swampiest part of the shore, if it could be truly called a shore at all. It was a nowhere place, belonging to neither lake nor land, covered by treacherous reeds that would not support the weight of a man.
Arnold lifted his camera, bulky in its waterproof housing, to the surface of the lake, tilting it to let the greyish water run off the transparent plastic without making any dripping sounds. He’d zoomed in before he’d set off that day; he didn’t want the low whirring of the mechanism to alert the birds to his presence. Now he waited for one of them to raise its head from the mud before he pressed the shutter release, barely hearing the click. The birds didn’t hear it either. They were among the rarest creatures to be found in these parts; indeed, they had never before nested by the lake until this year. It felt like a kind of portent. They were red-listed, and yet they looked like nothing. Shorter than a heron, more thick-set and with brown feathers, they were nondescript, like him. Arnold smiled. They passed through the world with secrecy and silence, despite their ability to roar. Sometimes it was good to do that, to be able to avoid being noticed.
He watched them a little longer, already knowing how he would paint them. The male would be side-on, his head raised, watching something that could not be seen beyond the edge of the page. The female’s head would be lowered, her beak ready to dart into the water to catch some fish or insect, and yet her eyes would be fixed upon whomever looked at the picture.
Arnold relaxed into the water, lifting his feet from the soft mud and floating. He rolled over onto his back, resting the camera on his chest, seeing only the grey lid of the clouds folding over the grey lake. He knew that no one was watching him. No one ever came here. The lake was too far from any decent road for coaches to come and disgorge their cargo of old ladies; too muddy for hikers with their noisy dogs; too far from anything, even the mountains he could just see rising in the distance. This part of Cumbria wasn’t an attraction. Here were no neat shores, nowhere to sunbathe, no shops selling sandwiches or gift-wrapped gingerbread or mint-cake.
He thought of all the depth of cold, dark water beneath him, of all the life that was in and around and within it, seen and unseen. A slow smile spread across his features as he allowed himself to drift. In his mind he was already mixing the paints; selecting the brush; making the first bold mark on a fresh white sheet of paper.
Later, the image he had visualised so clearly began to appear in front of him. It was never the same as the golden perfection he had built in his mind, not quite, but that wasn’t the point. The process, for him, was as important as the result.
As he worked, adding streaks and bars to a bird’s wing, he meditated on the creature. His knowledge of it, the depth of his research, was invisible, and yet he felt it gave him an understanding and a connection with his subject that no one else had. The bittern was known as h?ferbl?te in Old English. Its current name came from Old French: butor, which in turn derived from Gallo-Roman butitaurus, a compound of Latin būtiō and taurus. Taurus was a reference to the bittern’s incredibly deep cry: it was a bird with the cry of a bull. Bitterns were a member of the heron family, the botaurinae. Arnold wondered what the other herons, the tall, grey, stately creatures, would think of their ugly little brother.
He narrowed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate more deeply. He would render the creature to perfection, capture it on the page. He would study it and describe it in the only way he knew how and finally file it, in his cabinets, along with all the information he had found. He sold his pictures, mainly to publishers of ornithological texts, but that wasn’t the point either. He had so many birds in his cabinets, along with some insects and plants; one little piece of the world after the next, catalogued and understood. Made safe. One day, perhaps all of it would be in there. Then nothing would surprise him, not any longer. Nothing would have the strength to hurt; their power over him would be altogether lost.