Things That Are Page 2

  How terrible for the pioneer goats in the end, when the sailors returned! But how splendid in the interim—between the sowing and the reaping! After lives of being followed around by people with shears, people with milk pails, people with scalpels; sharing fields with sheep who never stop communicating; being corralled, prodded, nipped at and yapped at by border collies in the wroth winter weather; then after coopy months on a tossing greasy ship—to be lowered into a wherry and rowed to shore on a palmy blue evening and left behind, to rest their shipworn bodies on the quiet beach for the night, and open their eyes in the morning to lagoon light, translucent yellow fruit and turquoise bird wings and emerald dew-drippy leaves! To be free! On a ferny island! With sweet rainwater and fellow goats! O life like wine!

  On some ferny islands the goats ran wild, became as successful as flames (fire is a generalist too). Pinta Island, for example, was fernier before the goats landed and took a fancy to the tree ferns, which giant tortoises had always used as shady canopies. Since the goats ate the tortoises’ food as well, Pinta tortoises eventually lost their grip. All except for Lonesome George. For thirty-five years Lonesome George lived by himself on Pinta Island until he was moved to an institution and beatified alive.

  To prevent other tortoises on other islands from becoming similarly rare, similarly sainted, some people have proposed the importation of dingoes. The trouble is, after the dingoes finished the goats they might eat the natives, so crocodiles would have to be introduced to eat the dingoes. A succession of increasingly dangerous animals would have to be sailed to the island until someone would inevitably have to bring thirty hippopotamuses across the ocean and set them loose to squash everything, a stable but sad climax. To circumvent this and other onerous scenarios there is another solution: guns. Some tortoise advocates just shoot the goats from helicopters. If it seems like the noise would bother the tortoises, it does not—such innocents do not know a bang-bang from a ding-dong.

  Goats appear to have more misgivings, though, for there are always hundreds who evade the helicopter sessions. To locate these fugitives, a goat will be trapped, given a radio collar and sent back into the bush to search them out, for goats do not like to be alone. If you only own one goat, instead of two, she will flock to you, scramble into your car, chew through the palings between you, climb the fire escape, walk along narrow carpentry, along a drainpipe, over a roof, and bleat a million bleats, just to be with you, to have you rub her long, heavy ears and stroke her withers. So Radio Goat, he goes looking for companions, and when he finds them his collar advises the helicopter, whereupon all the goats are disembodied.

  Elsewhere, people are trying to reembody certain goats, like the bucardo, a Spanish mountain goat. (Mountain goats are as agile as tightrope dancers, but who can be agile on a landslide?) The last bucardo was found with her head crushed by a falling tree. It is an old truism that no bygone goat rises again, but this is no longer certain, because someone was careful to preserve a bucardo ear, which is more than anyone did for the quagga, and someday from this ear bucardos may laboratorily spring.

  FOR NOW, bucardos dwell in an ear. They dwell in the potential world, where they are pushing their noses into soft moss and eating potential rosinweed and glory peas in the cold glittering sleet, growing thick brown wool, bearing triplets of wriggly kids whose twisty zigzags tempt potential people to laughter, sharing a mountain with Etruscan shrews and mouflon sheep and flaxen boarlets and fat battling marmots and napping rusty squirrels and rosy goldfinnies and hazel dormice, and potential otters paddling in streams threaded with slender blennies. Bucardos are caught in the potential world as the fatlings of Bashan are caught in the past world; as fainting goats are caught in the actual world. There is no ladder out of any world; each world is rimless.

  They say if you are leading your flocks from a depleted field to a field of fresh Spanish broom, and you stop to rest, the sheep will stand there wondering what on earth is going on. But the goats lie down, switching nimbly from traveling to resting to leaping to ruminating; from barreling into each other, horns first, to listening spellbound to the tipple flute; from munching on lantana and woody weeds to gathering together—as the sun sets on whichever implausible world they inhabit—to sink into reasonless, companionate sleep.

  Talent

  On baby wrens hatched in a a hanging flower basket, the sun shines through silky leaves and flapping flowers and glittery rain, which inspires earthed worms to unearth themselves. The spring winds may send the nest of wrens swinging, but swinging with geraniums. In the warm flowered sunlight, the newborn wrens begin to riot. Their riots are perpetually rewarded with worms. The only hint of winter for the wren, when the wren is young, is that flowers close at night.

  Perhaps if penguin eggs were hatched in geranium baskets, penguins would be better at rioting. As it is, when an emperor penguin hatches out of its egg, it presses its two short flippers against its body and stands bunched on its father’s feet, on the ice, in the dark. It is born midwinter in Antarctica, where winter is unremittingly dark. The father stands over; but he is starving; he hasn’t eaten in four months. Hundreds of miles out in the ocean, the mother has been winter fishing for squid and fish a thousand feet down in the dark sea for two months, and now she is hopefully walking back across a hundred miles of ice, and she is hopefully fat. But she doesn’t walk very fast because her knees don’t bend.

  The reason penguins don’t place their egg at an easier distance from the sea is that their continent has meltable edges. Sorry the infant who stands close to sea, for spring may send it drifting off on a detached floe of ice; a straying acre bearing away a stationary, pear-shaped bit of fluff. How do you locate a wave?

  If the female doesn’t come back soon after the chick hatches, the starving father will have to shuffle, or else snow-paddle on his stomach, away to the sea. The saggy hatchling will stand on the ice, as far from fish as from flowers. Another mother returning to the colony with food will not help; if she finds herself being torn after by three frantically hungry chicks, she will out-tear two of them until she is pursued only by her true chick. So true chicks will be plumper than spurious chicks. Spurious chicks will close their black eyes and bunch down on the bare ice, unbabied, in the darkest, stabbingest winter on earth.

  But even chicks whose parents are present aren’t entirely invulnerable: sometimes penguin males accidentally incubate stones instead of eggs, so that after nine weeks they have no chick. No infant penguin can peck its way out of a stone. Thus, if a hatched chick wanders briefly off its parent’s feet, disappointed fathers of stones may chase after it, trying to maneuver it onto their own feet. It is hard to be tender when you are disappointed, and when you are vying with six other disappointed penguins, and when you have only clawed feet with which to appropriate babies; sometimes the craved reeling penguin chick gets kicked and frozen to death; although one unrealistic adult may still kick its spoiled floppy body along on the ice, still dreaming that it will mount his feet and be his own.

  While birds seem as suited to the Antarctic winter as morning glories are to boiling mud, penguins do have some qualities to make a winter on ice sufferable. For example, stiff legs, which make the standing easier. If penguins can stand through four-day blizzards without getting dashed down and exhausted by snow, if they can live through their first year—as two out of five do not—and grow streamy slick feathers and stop looking like fraying bags; and if their parents, finally, when the chicks are strong, stop arriving with squid, so that the chicks become hungry enough to wobble off, through miles of golden blowing snow, to find the unseen sea, then they will discover, once they leap in, that they have talents besides standing—swimming with sudden winging, wheeling grace in water.

  OSTRICH NESTS ARE hardly more lavish than penguin nests: a scrape in the sand for their twelve peeping eggs. (The eggs peep so that they can orchestrate hatching day.) Twelve peeping eggs sit on the scrape, where they can be eaten by hyenas and baboons, where lions can roll them awa
y to play with, where Egyptian vultures can drop rocks on them to crack them and stop their peeping.

  Sometimes ostriches start twirling, or running in circles on the sand. To what purpose do they twirl? Who can twig the intricated soul of the pirouetting bird? A little is known about the rotary impulse in other creatures, like lost people. Lost people travel in loops; only, they don’t know it, because a big enough circle seems like a line; and the flying moon and the shifting moths, and flowers which tip east and then west along the way, further prevent the insight that something is repeating. But are ostriches lost too when they spin? Is twirling a kind of program by which they are not allowed to travel forward when lost—forward where they might become loster, forward where they might end up among bad hill beasts? Or are ostriches, like many who twirl, trying to forget yesterday?

  In any case, her twirling hazards the ostrich her offspring, for if she gets off her nest to twirl, the lions may bound in and roll away the eggs; and if, later on, she twirls instead of attending to her chicks, then another ostrich family may abduct them. Nontwirling ostriches can accumulate hundreds of chicks.

  So not many of an ostrich’s chicks hatch, and not many of those who hatch live long, and not many of the chicks who survive remain in their mother’s possession. As a parent, the ostrich is dippy. And of course, although she flaps her wings joyfully, the ostrich will never fly away, for she is very heavy and her feathers are ruffly rather than aerodynamic. Neither are ostriches good cart-pullers, because when they get tired, they just plop down.

  But when she starts to run, then the ostrich laughs at lions, and she laughs at horses and carts and hyenas as she passes them, for she has long pink rifle legs with which to course across the sand.

  FROGS ARE TOO PRETTY for anyone to seriously believe that they disdain attention, but many frogs when they sleep try to screen themselves behind leaves and rocks, to hide from people who want to poison each other with frog poison; or people who want to cremate them into frog ash, which, when worn around the neck, foils the plague; or frog-sucking people who wish to baffle themselves, or to anesthetize an aching tooth, or to forget yesterday by toxifying their heart muscles.

  And so, during the daytime in Borneo—when many frogs sleep—the frog in the tree is like a sea bean, floating out where no one can see it. Frogs sleeping all over the earth—mist frogs, tinker frogs, glass frogs, leaf frogs, wood frogs, and frogs from Borneo—are like so many varieties of sea beans, sleeping unseen in the leaves. But when one sort of frog from Borneo wakes up, instead of progressing down the tree, as other frogs would, and shoeing through the underbrush along with sun bears and bearded pigs and barking deer, and then forcing its way up a tropical heath tree strangled with vines—it never minds the underbrush, never minds the sun bear: it extends its legs and flares its ball-tipped fingers, with webs in between, and glides off, from heath tree to heath tree, steering through the air with immense parasol hands. Nighttime in Borneo is lit by pale green glowing mushrooms, which glimmer on the nocturnal talents of the green flying frogs.

  THE TAKAHE BIRD in New Zealand has a massive beak for breaking eggs and seizing fish and tearing carcasses. But while New Zealand swamps do have fish and eggs and carcasses for seizing, they also have stoats who eat takahe eggs. When the stoats arrived from Europe, the takahes left their swamps for the mountains and learned about grass. Now they live by themselves in the mountains above the fjords, eating long thready tussock grass with their strong beaks, like a nibbling basilisk with no one to look at. The takahe has turned nibbling and dogged, for eating grass means you have to eat all day.

  But the crusher beak affixed to takahes is not only irrelevant. It is also a problem: it is bright scarlet as well as fierce, twice too glorious for life in the grass. The takahe must be aware that her beak is so red, for when a hawk flies over, she puts her face to the ground, or she hides her beak under her wing. A long time ago, the takahe stopped flying, but fortunately she still has wings: if you decide to stop flying, it is wise to hang on to your wings, for you may need them one day when one of your other qualities turns dangerous. So while the takahe may not have the chance to feel anything analogous to what penguins feel when swimming, and ostriches when running, and frogs when flying, at least she has a small wing under which she can hide her talent, lest the hawks fall upon her.

  Warbler Delight

  The water is wide;

  I can cross o’er.

  I suppose that someday, suddenly, I will be transferred to another age, for example the chivalric or the bronze. The hope is, of course, that I arrive in period dress but not resemble a contemporary luminary, for I wish to simply onlook. But, more probably, thanks to chronologically garbled garb, or my mistakable face—which will lead to expectations of competence—I will have to explain my occurrence. That explained, I will have to explain my age, The Present, also known as “The Future” in the past. This is why I am studying our great inventions and advances: to be ready for questions.

  First of all, it seems imperative to understand modern bird migration, for birds used to fly to the moon in September and then back in spring. Now, why birds wintered on the moon is a good question, but this is what people realized was happening when they saw swallows flying toward the silv’ry globe. Birds nowadays usually just go to Brazil or Morocco for the winter. Thus I hope to be useful to the exhausted birds of the past by explaining how their posterity succeeds with much-abbreviated trips.

  One little bird, however, performs a migratory feat reminiscent of birds’ wintering-on-the-moon days: starting out from Alaska, the blackpoll warbler flies three thousand miles east to Nova Scotia. There he gorges himself on webworms and sawflies and gets fat while waiting for a strong northwest wind to blow him off his twig out over the Atlantic Ocean. Thus begins his two-thousand-mile transoceanic flight to Venezuela.

  But fat is a gross word for a trifle-sized bird—a four-inch-long sprite knit of feathers, hollow bones, and heart. Warblers are not beefy like geese; a goose on your head gets irksome, compressing your neck; but a warbler could spend the week there undetected, like a cherry or a shilling. Even with their enormous hearts, warblers weigh one-third of an ounce, which means forty-eight warblers to the pound!

  They spend their first three months eating insects in the spruce-fir forests of northern Alaska and Newfoundland, staying within an acre of where they hatched in June. But after this rather provincial upbringing, the tiny spirits are gripped with a restlessness to pitch themselves into a sixty-five-hundred-mile trip over unknown terrain, to arrive in an unknown land. Comfort does not fascinate warblers: even if you put them in a warm, wormy cage in Ohio, come September they’re still facing impatiently toward Brazil, hopping and scratching and frantic. “Only Brazil worms!”

  Terns and shearwaters also fly astonishing distances over water, but as they are flying and swimming birds, the whole ocean is for them a stopover. They can plop down on the water when they get tired and have some Fish Delight. Blackpoll warblers cannot swim, for they have tiny grippy bone-toes that do not serve in the water (try swimming across the pool with a fork in each hand). If they touch down they become Warbler Delight. They are not waterproof and they do not float; they get soggy, then sink. And so they must keep flying from the coast of Nova Scotia to the coast of Venezuela—flying for eighty or ninety hours straight! They do not glide tranquilly either, like albatrosses; they fly like this:

  If they are not flapping, they are dropping. With short wings, perfect for chasing those wickedly nimble Alaskan flies through thick mazy jumbles of spruce and thickety brush, warblers are vigorous and sparkling little flyers, but they do not soar. Daedalus did not build Icarus warbler wings. On long flights they sprint forward, then fold their wings back and drop—many times a minute.

  They find their way by the stars, they find their way by the sun, they find their way by little crystals in their heads that orient them magnetically. They navigate by landmarks, too, landmarks they remember every year—which is why young bi
rds who have nothing to remember might fly to Minnetonka. Migration doesn’t always go perfectly, especially the first time around. Sometimes inexperienced ounces flying over the ocean get blown off course and end up in Ireland. It must seem strange then, the whole plan: leaving the cozy thicket, flying halfway around the world to drizzly Glashabeg.

  On the beach in Venezuela, the warblers just lie there, feathers and bones, all the worm-fat spent. After they land they lie sprawling in the sand, dazed, following their four-day transcendence. People can walk right up to them and they don’t care, they’ve just crossed the ocean. But then they shake off the sand and the lassitude, they fluff up and eat some spiders and carry on for fifteen hundred more miles to Brazil for the winter—also known as “the summer” in Brazil. Except for a few Irish vagrants, modern warblers do not winter on Earth after all. We winter, we summer, we winter, we summer; while the warbler flies from summer to summer to summer to summer!

  Pea Madness

  If you have only one mind, or one cooking pot, you will be forced to entertain a hodgepodge. Many of the pre-Vikings only had one pot, so they ate their peas as part of a hodgepodge called Ärtsop-pa, with millet and sesame and panic and poppy. Ärt-soppa upgraded the pea—any fellow ingredients would have upgraded that ancient pea, musty and cartilaginous, good for filling silos or baby rattles.