do I have this feeling in my blood?’
‘Wait and see,’ she said mysteriously. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after …’
When the day came, there was a difference about the salt marsh and the slob. The ant-like man, who had walked out so patiently every sunrise to his long nets, with the tides fixed firmly in his head – because to make a mistake in them was certain death – heard a far bugle in the sky. He saw no thousands on the mud-flats, and there were none in the pastures from which he had come. He was a nice man in his way – for he stood still solemnly, and took off his leather hat. He did this every spring religiously, when the wild geese left him, and every autumn, when he saw the first returning gaggle.
In a steamer it takes two or three days to cross the North Sea – so many hours of slobbering through the viscous water. But for the geese, for the sailors of the air, for the angled wedges tearing clouds to tatters, for the singers of the sky with the gale behind them – seventy miles an hour behind another seventy – for those mysterious geographers – three miles up, they say – with cumulus for their floor instead of water – for them it was a different matter.
The songs they sang were full of it. Some were vulgar, some were sagas, some were light-hearted to a degree. One silly one which amused the Wart was as follows:
We wander the sky with many a Cronk
And land in the pasture fields with a Plonk.
Hank-hank, Hink-hink, Honk-honk.
Then we bend our necks with a curious kink
Like the bend which the plumher puts under the sink.
Honk-honk, Hank-hank, Hink-hink.
And we feed away in a sociable rank
Tearing the grass with a sideways yank.
Hink-hink, Honk-honk, Hank-hank.
But Hink or Honk we relish the Plonk,
And Honk or Hank we relish the Rank,
And Hank or Hink we think it a jink
To Honk or Hank or Hink!
A sentimental one was:
Wild and free, wild and free,
Bring back my gander to me, to me.
And once, while they were passing over a rocky island populated by barnacle geese, who looked like spinsters in black leather gloves, grey toques and jet beads, the entire squadron burst out derisively with:
Branta bernicla sits a-slumming in the slob,
Branta bernicla sits a-slumming in the slob,
Branta bernicla sits a-slumming in the slob,
While we go sauntering along.
Glory, glory, here we go, dear.
Glory, glory, here we go, dear.
Glory, glory, here we go, dear.
To the North Pole sauntering along.
One of the more Scandinavian songs was called ‘The Boon of Life’:
Ky-yow replied: The boon of life is health.
Paddle-foot, Feather-straight, Supple-neck, Button-eye:
These have the world’s wealth.
Aged Ank answered: Honour is our all.
Path-finder, People-feeder, Plan-provider, Sage-commander:
These hear the call.
Lyó-lyok the lightsome said: Love I had liefer.
Douce-down, Tender-tread, Warm-nest and Walk-in-line:
These live for ever.
Aahng was for Appetite. Ah, he said, Eating!
Gander-gobble, Tear-grass, Stubble-stalk, Stuff-crop:
These take some beating.
Wink-wink praised Comrades, the fair free fraternity.
Line-astern, Echelon, Arrow-head, Over-cloud:
These learn Eternity.
But I, choose Lay-making, of loud lilts which linger.
Horn-music, Laughter song, Epic-heart,
Ape-the-world:
These Lyow, the singer.
Sometimes, when they came down from the cirrus levels to catch a better wind, they would find themselves among the flocks of cumulus – huge towers of modelled vapour, looking as white as Monday’s washing and as solid as meringues. Perhaps one of these piled-up blossoms of the sky, these snow-white droppings of a gigantic Pegasus, would lie before them several miles away. They would set their course towards it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth – and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seemingly solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. Then, in a moment of time, they would be in the jewelled world once more – a sea under them like turquoise and all the gorgeous palaces of heaven new created, with the dew of Eden not yet dry.
One of the peaks of the migration came when they passed a rock-cliff of the ocean. There were other peaks, when, for instance, their line of flight was crossed by an Indian file of Bewick Swans who were off to Abisco, making a noise as they went like little dogs barking through handkerchiefs, or when they overtook a horned owl plodding manfully along – among the warm feathers of whose back, so they said, a tiny wren was taking her free ride. But the lonely island was the best.
It was a town of birds. They were all hatching, all quarrelling, all friendly nevertheless. On top of the cliff, where the short turf was, there were myriads of puffins busy with their burrows. Below them, in Razorbill Street, the birds were packed so close, and on such narrow ledges, that they had to stand with their backs to the sea, holding tight with long toes. In Guillemot Street, below that, the guillemots held their sharp, toy-like faces upward, as thrushes do when hatching. Lowest of all, there were the Kittiwake Slums. And all the birds – who, like humans, only laid one egg each – were jammed so tight that their heads were interlaced – had so little of this famous living-space of ours that, when a new bird insisted on landing at a ledge which was already full, one of the other birds had to tumble
