It feels an age since I’ve had him, and I am clutching at him as he pulls me tighter, moves callously inside me as though to destroy whatever civilized parts of me still exist, to push me through them into something uncivilized, something barbarous, and as I feel that liberation from my own shame I come with a leap, a bound into the air, a tugging away of something into the wild and lush and out of control, a place where I don’t run or leave, somewhere I am still.
26
MER BASE, CAIRNGORMS NATIONAL PARK, SCOTLAND FOUR YEARS AGO
Niall and I watch her, holding our breaths. When she extends her wings up and back like the Winged Victory I feel my pulse quicken. Her beak, usually orange to match her legs but now sooty for the winter cold, darts upward and then down into the bush. She eats one, two, three grass seeds.
The indrawn breath of the collective viewers is exhaled.
“Good girl,” I whisper.
“See!” Harriet cries. “I knew it. Adaptation.”
Niall is expressionless; for once I have no idea what he’s thinking. To be fair, he never said the birds wouldn’t adapt, only that with a little help from us they might not have to. He’s been working on getting permission to fund fisheries in the Antarctic waters but it’s been—in his words—“about as successful as pushing shit up a hill.” No governments give a rat’s ass about feeding birds when the fisheries could be feeding humans. The apathy is staggering.
I gaze at the Little tern, a smaller seabird than her Arctic brothers and sisters. She would normally migrate to the east coast of Australia if we didn’t have her caged here, eating grass instead of fish.
I wish I could touch her, but it’s strictly forbidden unless absolutely necessary. Not by the base, but by Niall. He says that human touch to an animal is disruptive and cruel. The tern’s mate is louder than she is, giving his distinctive, creaking call. He’s been eating the seeds longer. The female waited and waited, enduring more in the stubborn hope of freedom. For a while it seemed like we would stand here and watch her starve to death, but today, at last, she’s surrendered.
Niall and I head for our cabin. He is silent and introspective.
“What are you thinking?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer.
“Today went well,” I say, not understanding.
He nods.
“So then what?”
“We should have done better for her,” he says. “Harriet thinks it means they’ll change their course and their breeding grounds. Start mating on the coast of Australia or South America.”
“All of the terns?”
He nods.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“It’s smart, finding a species of plant that will withstand inclement weather and grow on most continents. It’s smart, seeing if the birds will eat it, when pressed.”
“But…?”
“I don’t think they’re going to fly around the entire world to eat grass.”
“Harriet’s saying they won’t have to fly around the entire world anymore.”
He flashes me a look that implies I’m a traitor for listening to Harriet. We’re quiet awhile, concentrating on our feet on the slippery ground, on our breath making clouds.
I’m sure we’re both thinking of the creature in her cage.
“You think they’ll keep flying, don’t you,” I say.
Niall nods once, slowly.
“Why?”
“Because it’s in their nature.”
* * *
We leave for Galway in the morning. Christmas with Niall’s parents. The car is waiting to drive us to Edinburgh but first Niall and I go to the bird enclosures to say goodbye. Instinctively we both move to the Little terns. The male is eating his grass seeds again, making do, while the female flies around her cage, around and around, her wings brushing futilely against the metal, forever trying to reach the sky.
I turn away, unable to watch her.
But Niall stands witness, even as I know it must break his heart.
Sterna Paradisaea, SOUTH ATLANTIC OCEAN MATING SEASON
I’m holding the skull of a baby wren. I found it this morning in one of the nests in our yard, right down the back in those willow trees; I think its parents must have left it there when it died. Discarded. Or maybe they waited with it as long as they could. It’s like an eggshell, only much tinier, much more delicate. It barely fits on the tip of my pinkie finger. I keep thinking about how easy it would be to crush. It reminds me of her. But not of you. You are made of a different thing. Something far more enduring. I never saw that thing you spoke of, the one that was missing from the stuffed birds in my lab. I see it now, or its absence. Your absence has never felt crueler. I’ve never hated you until now. I’ve never loved you more.
* * *
The letter smells of him, somehow. I’m holding it to my face when—
“’Scuse me, love.”
Ennis is ducking awkwardly beneath the doorframe. I refold Niall’s letter and return it carefully to my pack with the rest. That one was from a particularly dark time, not long after Iris died.
“It’s about to get rough,” Ennis says.
“What should I do?”
“Stay down here. Take your shoes off.”
“In case we have to swim.” The corner of my mouth curls.
Ennis nods. I think he might be excited about the infamous Drake Passage. He has nothing else left but this journey, and in this we are the same. I take no excitement in it, only cell-deep weariness, only a need to see its end.
We no longer have anything to follow. No tracked terns. We can only guess at the birds’ destination, and it seems an age ago that I even saw them moving. How long has it been since I knew they were alive?
Instead of staying in the small bedroom—there is also a simply stocked kitchen, a cramped bathroom, a dining table, and a set of bunk beds that Ennis graciously offered to take—I go up to the helm and stand by the skipper. There is static in the air. A black sky. I can feel the sea waking slowly, readying itself; I can feel it in my gut.
“Do you know how to do this?” I ask softly.
“Do what?” he asks, but he knows what I mean. After a moment he shrugs. We gaze at the dark churning water and the waves growing steadily before us. There is no land yet in sight. “Not sure anyone knows how to do this,” Ennis says.
And then. He turns the wheel hard and steers us sideways up the wall of an oncoming wave, outrunning its hungry crashing teeth, until we reach its lip and sail over its other side, over the steep cliff edge. I let the held breath from my lungs as we plummet down but Ennis is already turning the boat in the opposite direction, sailing up the wall of the next wave and reaching the end just as I think we’ll be tipped backward and swallowed. He does this a long time, zigzagging his way between waves, following and outrunning them, turning always for their gentlest slopes and edges. He maneuvers the tiny craft through the enormity of this most perilous sea; it’s a dance, and it’s quiet, and the sky watches us, and it’s as close as I’ve ever come to feeling utterly at one with an ocean this ferocious.
Rain begins with a rumbling shudder.
The plastic windshield does its best to protect us but soon we are drenched and the waves are sweeping onto us from every side. Ennis has tied us both to the helm, and we do our best to stay upright, exposed and vulnerable.