"The smell's awesome, too," he added aloud, to hear himself talk and bring things back to a human scale. "Like the Mother of all Henhouses."
He raised his binoculars, peering through the vision slit of the plank-and-brush hide and suppressing the slight quiver in his hands. Big brownish birds with white-banded necks, Canada geese right enough. Ducks… mallards and canvasbacks and big black ducks, ducks beyond all reason, more varieties than he could name. On land… Some sort of pigeon, he thought; enough of them to outnumber the waterfowl, which he wouldn't have believed possible if he wasn't seeing it with his own eyes.
"Martha," he said, "what sort of pigeon is that? Foot long, sort of a pinkish body, blue… no, a blue-gray head, long pointed tail."
"What?" she shouted, and snatched the glasses out of his hands.
Cofflin stared at her; it was about the most un-Martha-ish behavior he'd ever seen from her. Martha Stoddard did not lose her composure.
"Passenger pigeons," she said, after a long moment's study. "Passenger pigeons, as I live and breathe, passenger pigeons."
Hairs stood up along Cofflin's forearms, and he felt them struggling to rise down his spine. I'm seeing something no human being has seen in over a century, he thought with slow wonder. Then: No. I'm seeing something common as dirt.
"I almost hate to do this," Cofflin said softly.
Part of him did. The rest of him, particularly his stomach and mouth, was downright eager. Roast duck, crackling skin, dark flavorful meat with a touch of fat that fish just didn't have… Jared Cofflin swallowed and gave the lanyard lying by his right hand a good hard yank.
Bunnnf. Bunnnf. Bunnnf. Bunnnf.
The modified harpoon guns had been dug into the fields at a slant. Now the finned darts shot into the air, dragging coils of line behind them… and then a rising arc of net soaring up into the sky, catching the birds as they flung themselves aloft in terror. All across the fields around the pond other nets were rising. From the edge of the water itself came a deeper sound as giant catapults made from whole sets of leaf springs flung weighted nets out over the waterfowl.
If the sound of the birds at rest had been loud, the tumult that followed was enough to stun. Cofflin dove out of the hide, waving his arms and yelling. The shouts were lost in the cannonade thunder of the rising flocks, but hundreds of islanders saw his signal. They ran forward, waving lengths of plank, golf clubs, baseball bats, leaping and striking at birds-the vast majority-that had escaped the nets. The air was thick with feathers and noise, thick with birds in numbers that literally hid the sun, casting a shadow like dense cloud. It drifted through the sky like smoke; bird dung fell from the air and spattered his hat and the shoulders of his coat, falling as thick as light snow. He ignored it, looking at the carpet of feathered wealth that lay around him… and there would be others waiting to take a similar harvest at Gibbs Pond and Folger's Marsh.
"I hope they don't take off elsewhere for good," he said. A broken-winged pigeon fluttered across his feet; he struck at it automatically, to put it out of its pain.
Martha came up beside him, brushing at her sleeve. "I don't think so," she said. "Bless their hard-wired little brains, they migrate pretty automatically. Unless we did this every day… and for that matter, it's not the same flocks every time-we're seeing a segment, like a moving rope touching down once a day. At that, this is just the edge of the main flight path down the coast."
Cofflin nodded, looking at the islanders standing and panting. "Now we've got to collect all this up," he said. "Hope we can store it all-didn't expect this much."
"Who could?" Martha said, shaking her head. "I still don't believe it, and I'm looking at it… Well, we can make more ice, I suppose. There's plenty of salt, they can be packed down in oil, pickled in brine, smoked, the offal will go on the fields…"
He sighed and shook his head in turn, feeling a little of the wonder of it leaving him.
"Let's get to work," he said, pulling up his sleeves. "Big job today."
"It's stolen, isn't it?" Doreen said quietly. "All the things we're… buying."
Arnstein nodded, not taking his eyes away from the scene he was watching, a historian's secret dream made flesh. Every once in a while he would snap another picture.
An Iraiina chief was wheeling his chariot about in the open space before his gathered warriors, its wooden wheels cutting tracks dark green and soil-black through the silvery dew on the grass. The dyed heron plumes on the horses' heads bobbed and fluttered, the bronze and gold of the trappings glittered, and the chief's cloak blew back from his shoulders like the wings of a raven. The chief sprang up, his feet on the rim between the holders for bow, quiver, javelins, and long thrusting spear with its own collar of feathers.
Arnstein had read once-and now seen, these past few days-that chariot riders could run out along the pole that linked the horses' yokes at a full gallop.
Studded shield and leaf-shaped bronze long sword shaped the air as he harangued them. At first they cheered and waved arms and spears and axes. After a few moments they screamed, hammering their weapons on their bright-painted shields, roaring into the hollows of the shields until the sound boomed across the camp. When the chief leaped back into the body of his chariot and the driver slapped the reins to spur the horses forward, they poured after him in a leaping, shrieking mass. Before they passed out of sight among fields and scattered copses of oak they had settled down into a loping trot behind the war-cars, silent and all the more frightening for that.
Doreen went on: "They're going out to kill people and take everything they have and sell it to us! Why don't you do something, or tell the captain-"
Arnstein rounded on her: "Because there isn't anything I can do, because we need the food or we'll starve, and because Captain Alston knows both those things perfectly well!
"Sorry," he added after a moment, as they turned and trudged through the tumbled, rutted confusion of the Iraiina camp. They were getting used to the smell, a thought that made his skin itch-although to do them justice, it probably wasn't so bad when they spread out in their normal fashion. In fact, some of the subchiefs had already moved out, up or down the coast, or inland.
A naked brown boychild ran up to them, a four-year-old with a roach of startling tow-white hair. Daring, he reached out and touched the stranger's leg and then ran away, shrieking his glee. An Iraiina woman scooped him up and paddled him across the bare bottom, then tucked him under her arm and walked away, casting an apologetic smile over her shoulder as she headed back to her tent.
"Sorry myself," Doreen sighed, and tucked her hand through his arm. "I…" She shrugged. "I don't want to quarrel. There are too few of us for that sort of thing."
"Agreed," Arnstein said, and patted the hand. And so few of us who can hold an intelligent conversation. Captain Alston, of course, but her interests were rather specialized, and in any case she was… intimidating, that was the word he was looking for.
Doreen gave his arm a squeeze and changed the subject. "I'm surprised they've gotten so… casual about us so soon," she went on.
"We're marvels," Arnstein said, relieved. "But they live in a world of marvels, magic, ghosts, demons, gods who talk to men in dreams or father children on mortals-they don't just tell folk tales, they believe them, more so than any Holy Roller back home. Like a dancing Hasid drunk on God. We're friendly marvels."