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 off. Yet they were in good humour, so cheerful and cockneyfied and teasing one another. They were like an innumerable crowd of fish-wives on the largest grandstand in the world, breaking out into private disputes, eating out of paper bags, chipping the referee, singing comic songs, admonishing their children and complaining of their husbands. ‘Move over a bit, Auntie,’ they said, or ‘Shove along, Grandma’; ‘There’s that Flossie gone and sat on the shrimps’; ‘Put the toffee in your pocket, dearie, and blow your nose’; ‘Lawks, if it isn’t Uncle Albert with the beer’; ‘Any room for a little ’un?’; ‘There goes Aunt Emma, fallen off the ledge’; ‘Is me hat on straight?’; ‘Crikey, this isn’t arf a do!’
They kept more or less to their own kind, but they were not mean about it. Here and there, in Guillemot Street, there would be an obstinate Kittiwake sitting on a projection and determined to have her rights. Perhaps there were ten thousand of them, and the noise they made was deafening.
Then there were the fiords and islands of Norway. It was about one of these islands, by the way, that the great W. H. Hudson related a true goose-story which ought to make people think. There was a coastal farmer, he tells us, whose islands suffered under a nuisance of foxes – so he set up a fox-trap on one of them. When he visited the trap next day, he found that an old wild goose had been caught in it, obviously a Grand Admiral, because of his toughness and his heavy bars. This farmer took the goose home alive, pinioned it, bound up its leg, and turned it out with his own ducks and poultry in the farmyard. Now one of the effects of the fox plague was that the farmer had to lock his hen-house at night. He used to go round in the evening to drive them in, and then he would lock the door. After a time, he began to notice a curious circumstance, which was that the hens, instead of having to be collected, would be found waiting for him in the hut. He watched the process one evening, and discovered that the captive potentate had taken on himself the responsibility, which he had with his own intelligence observed. Every night at locking-up time, the sagacious old admiral would round up his domestic comrades, whose leadership he had assumed, and would prudently assemble them in the proper place by his own efforts, as if he had fully understood the situation. Nor did the free wild geese, his some-time followers, ever again settle on the other island – previously a haunt of theirs – from which their captain had been spirited away.
Last of all, beyond the islands, there was the landing at their first day’s destination. Oh, the whiffling of delight and self-congratulation! They tumbled out of the sky, side-slipping, stunting, even doing spinning nose-dives. They were proud of themselves and of their pilot, agog for the family pleasures which were in store.
They planed for the last part on down-curved wings. At the last moment they scooped the wind with them, flapping them vigorously. Next – bump – they were on the ground. They held their wings above their heads for a moment, then folded them with a quick and pretty neatness. They had crossed the North Sea.
‘Well, Wart,’ said Kay in an exasperated voice, ‘do you want all the rug? And why do you heave and mutter so? You were snoring, too.’
‘I don’t snore,’ replied the Wart indignantly.
‘You do.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You do. You honk like a goose.’
‘I don’t.’
‘You do.’
‘I don’t. And you snore worse.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘How can I snore worse if you don’t snore at all?’
By the time they had thrashed this out, they were late for breakfast. They dressed hurriedly and ran out into the spring.
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