Corvus (20 page)

I wept the night he died. Sitting in bed, filled with the utter loss of his person, I felt diminished, bereft. I talked about him, but not very much, in the main to members of the family, who felt the same, but to few others.

It’s the only way, this compact and measured grief, for those of us who are aware that there has to be proportion in loss and mourning; we laugh at ourselves for our grief, trying to deal with this feeling that is different in quality, incomparable with the loss of a human being. I laughed at myself as I had once laughed at and with a friend, a surgeon, while he told of weeping in the operating theatre the morning after the death of his parrot. I laughed but I cried too, briefly, in the telling of Spike’s death, in the staffroom at work. I cried, mourned him, as we all did. We felt – we knew – that something immeasurable had gone. Han felt it particularly, his sibling and his friend. As it may
be after any death, of someone, something close, we may lose a part of ourselves, however small a part, one that anchors or measures us, places us in our particular constellation, if not among the stars, then in our reflection on this earth.

Han and I, in particular, both still miss him. We talk about him often. ‘Eh!’ we say to one another, ‘eh!’

I recalled again this sense of closeness one night recently when, just towards midnight, I heard Chicken call. I ran downstairs to where she was standing on the floor, distressed, appearing disorientated. I didn’t know what had happened. She seemed to find it difficult to hop back onto her branch. I lifted her onto it and for the rest of the night lay between sleep and waking, afraid of what might be, and during the hours of the night I knew again that we are by now part of one another in a way I cannot easily explain, that she defines something of my life, as Spike too had done. I came down early, six-ish, filled with anxiety, and as I reached the bottom of the stairs heard her, in full vigour of her morning voice. Perhaps the dove who insists on sleeping on the ledge of the window above the study had disturbed her, or the light of the full moon had startled her from sleep.

I think about Spike often. Walking through the district, I see magpies, hear their distinct, distinctive
chuk-
chuk-
chuk
. I think of the vibrancy of his, of all magpies’ existence. I think of what he was.

A couple of years ago, a friend gave me a book of poetry. In it I
found the finest, simplest counterweight to all anti-magpie sentiment. In 1917, the year before his death at Hermies in the Somme valley, a Derbyshire vicar’s son, Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson, wrote:

O
n a morning in October, as I’m opening the doo’cot door early, I hear the geese returning. It’s the first sound of winter. If there has been a summer, it’s over by September, the few bright days full of intimations of cold, the nights beginning to frost. The scent of wood-and peat-smoke is blown on the wind. We are far north here, north of Moscow, Riga, Novosibirsk. Almost surrounded by sea, the intensity of cold is less than on the great land masses of northern Europe and Russia, but the seasonal light is the same: long, glowing days and nights followed by diminuendo into darkness.

In the newly chill mornings, the geese are streaming back from their summer homes in Greenland, Iceland, calling, trailing black, drypoint lines across the high northern sky. They are pink-footed and barnacle geese flying in the formation that gives safety and guidance to the young, the new migrators, the paths of all but the leading bird
eased as they gain lift and are pulled into the circular air currents spiralling from the tip-vortex of the wings of the bird in front. I stand and watch them pass overhead, listen to their voices. They feel like part of this place, part of the season and the sky. They come back to the flat land, to fields and water, to the Loch of Skene a few miles away, the Loch of Strathbeg forty miles north. For some, they’re a bane, symbol of the many darknesses of winter, but I welcome them. I like to know that there’s something, someone who chooses to be here, to share our winter.

Watching the geese, I think of migration, of the leavings and arrivals, of the many mysterious ways in which migrating birds know where to fly, of the dangers of their journeys, these intrepid, brilliant international travellers. Migration is unimaginable, the distances, heights and speeds. (The swallows and swifts have long gone to their winter grounds in Africa. Their going is the beginning of the winter’s silence.) We are all, bird and human, part of the earth, of its time and its matter, impelled by the mechanisms within, the ones that order our responses to days, months, years, to light and darkness, the rhythms, circadian, circannual, that regulate what we are and what we do.

It’s the genetically determined activity known as
Zugunruhe
, migratory restlessness, that controls migratory behaviour in birds, making even caged birds turn, fluttering, dancing, towards the direction in which they know they should be going. Birds migrate in response to the urgencies, the needs of their lives, for food, or warmth, or for the conditions that may help to ensure their continued survival. They may make limited migrations, moving vertically from lower to higher
ground according to the season; they may cross continents or span the world. The patterns of migration may be variable, some birds migrating only in response to a seasonal lack of the specialised food they require.

Preparatory to migration, a bird’s metabolism changes, its response to day and night. To develop sufficient fat to allow their often prolonged flights, they eat much more than usual, more fruit, more high-calorie food. Their bodies become more efficient at using food and they accumulate quantities of subcutaneous fat, greatly increasing their percentage of body fat, their fuel for the daunting, hazardous journeys they undertake. The cost in mortality of migration is high. Migrants face inestimable dangers – exhaustion, storms, becoming lost, landing in the wrong places, interception by predators, by hunters, starvation, drought – but still they do it, obliged by the clock within.

Most birds migrate at night. The ones who don’t are obliged by the nature of their wings to take advantage of warm air to aid their flight. The night flyers use the calm and cool of night air, leaving shortly after dusk, coming to land before daybreak. They fly in great flocks, or they fly alone, a single bird, a family group.

Most birds fly at low altitudes, between two and six thousand feet, but many, particularly waders, fly higher, at fifteen to twenty thousand feet, while the mountain birds, lammergeyers and bar-headed geese may fly at altitudes of twenty-five to twenty-eight thousand feet.

The long-distance star of migration, the Arctic tern, a smallish bird, breeds in the Arctic and migrates eleven thousand miles to the Antarctic. In a year, this small bird traverses the world.

Rooks too migrate, though not in great numbers, mainly from northern European countries to Britain for the winter. At migration times, I watch Chicken for signs of
Zugunruhe
. I try to identify in her that urgent, ontological restlessness but I see no hopping, no straining to be off. She seems as peaceable as ever, contented, displaying no indication of being overly attracted by doors or windows, no particularly noticeable interest in either north or south.

In late October, the clocks change. (For those us of wintry disposition, whose circadian rhythms respond to this particular seasonal adjustment, the change is welcome.) In the bare garden, the doves peck among the empty stalks and bathe in the rain of cold afternoons. By now, they head homewards from the surrounding roofs by midafternoon.

It’s Hallowe’en and then Bonfire Night. In preparation, I shut the doves in early. To muffle the noise a little, I close the wooden door over the screen of wire that lets in light. I speak reassuringly to them as they move uneasily on their perches within the deafening range of the fireworks’ artillery thuds. They don’t cower silently in fear. They sit along their perches, angry, expressing to one another loudly their dislike, their fury at the pointless noise, at the interruption of their peaceful nights. (They must be used to city noise, although I wonder what they think of the weekend routine of late-night Scottish cities, a never-ending scale, a continuum between rejoicing and lament as drunks band together against the world in song and chanting through the darkened streets. Whether the clamour wakens sleeping doves at two, three, four in the morning, those uncertain sounds, if they regard
them merely as another of the vicissitudes, the frustrations, the endlessly inexplicable conundrums of life in close contact with people, I do not know.)

One blowy morning in December, I find a stranger in the doo’cot, a sleek, beautiful, bewildered bird, one elegant pink leg ornamented by the enigmatic tag engraved with the indecipherable code of numbers that denotes a young racing pigeon. It has happened a few times over the years: a young bird, newly released to find its way, gets lost, deceived by magnetic storms or cloud and, I assume, on seeing my birds flying, follows them home. This one, like the others that have appeared this way, is a rare and cultured beauty, with the equivalent of the high-bridged nose of an aristocratic pharaonic lady. Clearly hungry, it feeds nervously. I shut the door while I catch it. I always regard these birds with a kind of fearful respect (they are highly bred and usually expensive), removing them quickly from the low company of my own rabble and putting them into boxes in the toolshed, scared that they might be impregnated by one of my common types, determined upon class warfare. I examine the leg-ring and phone the appropriate organisation. Immediately, they identify the bird from the numbers.

Before a morose man arrives and silently, unsmilingly, reclaims what is rightfully his, I carry the bird to the kitchen in a box. Over the years, I’ve become used to visiting pigeon fanciers, the ones who work as
window cleaners or joiners but are, at their root and in their bones, pigeon men. (There are pigeon women too, but men predominate in their passion and commitment. The disparity of sexes is accounted for, I assume, by the fact that in the main women have other houses to clean, other food to prepare, other offspring to whom maximum attention must be given.) I used to dread the way, whenever one was in the house, they’d stop at the first faint hint of a
roucoule
or a
kurre kurre
from outside the window, listen, run outside to peer at the doves, to examine their house, their food, their water, to give their opinions of what I was doing wrong, some of them managing graciously enough to conceal their contempt for the lax standards of my dove-keeping. Now I accept the distance between their expectations and mine, for these are experts, urban Mendels, easy with Xs and Ys, with dominant and recessive, with straight wings and stepped wings, meiosis, intragenic complementation, all things about which I know absolutely nothing. (I think of them too when the sparrow-hawk visits. I’m sorry when it’s one of my birds but how might I feel if I had paid tens, if not hundreds or thousands, of pounds, watching it being silently consumed in the middle of the flowerbed, the worth of the remains, a pair of feet, a loop of coral entrails, a slew of greyish, dampened feathers?)

In early evening, the owner arrives and I hand over the bird. I don’t like to think about it getting lost, being blown adrift by gales, led astray by the distortions of solar energy, landing at best in an alien doo’cot filled with potential maniacs. As I always do, I spent a little time stroking and admiring it, talking to it, wondering how much it might have cost. As with the others, I considered ransom.

 
streaming back from their summer homes

There are freezing nights in December and January. I worry about my very old doves, the few who must be twelve or fourteen, perhaps older, possibly failing of sight, tatty of feather or frankly balding, irascible, treated with wary caution by their younger housemates; but so far no one has perished from the cold. Few seem to die in their beds, or rather on their perches. They’re not there one day, slower perhaps than the others, grabbed on the wing by the watching raptor.

I shut them in, taking my torch, or when Leah, Bec’s daughter, is here she carries it for me, my intrepid torchbearer. We make our way to the doo’cot, shine the light in to look at the lines of roosting doves. They hold themselves very still in the cold air, fluffing their feathers, drawing themselves in, standing on one leg to conserve their warmth. (I remember the cold owl of Keats’s poem ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’.) In the morning, we’ll smash the ice on the water dishes and bath. I listen in the darkness for the hum and
chwee
of the small electric fence a friend installed around the doo’cot roof for me to keep out intruders. I check it regularly. I like the sound of it as it sends out its little warning signals.