Bittersweet

– Felix

Felix grinned as the pair took off and let out another huge burp he’d been holding in. Typical hens, assuming any feather-dresser’s had to be for them. He took a few steps to the edge of the branch, stinkbug shells crunching under his feet. Pumpkin. Strange name for a bird to have. He laughed to himself. It suits her—

Oh my hawk! She…she said—oh my HAWK!

He took an excited breath. If he’d just heard her right, then… He took a few more breaths and waddled inside the tree, forcing his feet to slow down and his wings to stay clenched by his sides, closing his mind to the colour and raucousness—the honeyeaters suddenly too bright, the wattlebirds too noisy, the seagulls too inevitable; everywhere movement and too much of it, and—he’d never thought he’d ever think the words—the smell of fish and chips too distracting.

Wiping drool from his mouth he rounded a knotted and whorled arc of the trunk. And there they were! The Eastern Curlews. His lower beak dropped, and he may have dribbled again. The actual curlews. The most elusive creatures this side of the black stump and he’d just found them.

He tried to take in everything at once. There were 113 of them, having their speckled feathers cleaned and readied for the long flight ahead, getting a final shine to their pale pink beaks, or giving nods of approval to their reflections in pieces of the glass exhibition. They were taller than he expected; when he stood his straightest his head only reached to the top of their legs, and considering most of the curlews had their backs to him, this gave him a dog’s eye view.

“Errrr…” his brain suggested out loud.

“Hello,” a curlew shuffled around to face him. “You must be a special bird then.”

“Errrr…” Felix repeated.

Another curlew did a tight shuffle in the crowded space. “Very special.”

Felix cleared his throat. “I’ve…errr…been looking for you.”

“For me?” the first curlew asked.

“No…errr…for all of you.” He frowned. “Why do you think I’m special?”

“Well,” the first curlew fielded the question, as the second was busy with a sudden coughing fit. “It might be because most birds think we’re too shy to want to talk.”

“Oh. Errr…”

“I’m Nikola. And this is Martin.”

Felix opened his beak but closed it again when he realised he would only be repeating himself.

“And you are?” Nikola asked.

“Errr…I’m Bumpy?”

“Are you sure?” Martin managed, through another apparent coughing fit.

“No.” Felix gave himself a mental slap to wake himself up. Don’t blow it, don’t blow it. “I’m Felix P Brown. And I have a dream.”

“That one day every hill and mountain shall be made low? Amen to that, little brother.”

Felix stared at Martin. “What?”

“Ignore him, Felix,” Nikola said. “You just said his namesake’s words. So what brings you here? What’s your particular dream?”

“Well.” Felix looked at the curlew-filled room. A sudden panic came over him. What if they didn’t like him? Or what if they did, but their henlings said no? Oh hawk! What if they made him take a test?!

Martin and Nikola were waiting for an answer. “I’d like to migrate with you,” he said in as firm a voice as he could muster, his wings rising in blush. “I’ve been dreaming of it all my life. I want to feel the wind in my feathers, and explore new places, and meet lots of interesting birds.” His relief was huge. His wings settled back down of their own accord.

Until he noticed the silence.

“Hmmm,” Nikola broke it. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but…errrr…your kind doesn’t exactly migrate.”

Felix’s heart thudded in his breast and a sting in his eyes made him blink.

“It’s the winds, you see,” Nikola explained. “You just weren’t born with the knowledge.”

“I can learn,” Felix pleaded.

“Migrating is a very serious business,” Nikola continued. “We’ve had others join us before—”

“The shearwaters in the Year of the Dust Storm,” Martin said.

A third curlew joined them. Felix was stunned to see it was a female, here, inside a cock’s feather-dresser’s. “The koels in the Year of the Bushfires.”

“—but they’ve always been in their collectives,” Nikola continued. “You know. A whole cluster of koels, and a whole…what do the shearwaters call themselves again?”

“A grace,” the new curlew said.

“Ah yes,” Nikola smiled. “And graceful they are, too. Never saw such fine flying so close to the water…anyway,” he glanced at Felix, “don’t get me wrong, we welcome newcomers; if nothing else it’s new conversation.” He looked Felix up and down. “And you look fat and healthy. But you just don’t know what we know. You wouldn’t survive the first day.”

“But…” he cried in desperation. “You haven’t even tested me!”

“Gotta admire your guts, too,” the new curlew said.

“Please?” Felix pleaded again. “Just try me. Go on, ask me anything.”

Nikola exchanged glances with the hen. Felix saw her give a faint nod, and a surge of hope left a flush of heat on his feathers.

“Alright, then,” Nikola said. “Let’s start with the basics. With a nickname like ‘Bumpy’ I’m assuming you already know about gravity?”

A tiny cold knot of fear formed in Felix’s belly. He made a movement that might have been a nod.

“Alright then,” Nikola continued. “What about V-formations. Do you have any experience leading one?”

“Errrr…no?”

“What about jet stream navigation?”

“I haven’t actually done any, no…”

“How’d you do in your studies?”

“Of errrr…jet streams?”

“Yeah. You pass at least?”

“I…errr…our class didn’t exactly…”

“What about your mean temperature deciles for New South Wales, Queensland, Northern Territory, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and Siberia? Do you know them all off by heart?”

Felix felt the knot climbing his throat. “Err…I’m really good at memorising things.”

“We’re leaving tomorrow after dawn chorus.”

“No worries. I can get that done tonight. Is that all?”

“Right after your navigation course?” The hen, who still hadn’t introduced herself, muttered.

“But you understand your basic structure of winds and fronts?” Nikola continued.

Felix wobbled his head non-commitally.

“And you do know how to measure your clouds in oktas, and understand the nucleation process of rain drops, how pressures generate wind flow, how changing the humidity makes everything else change, and how temperature acts like a brain for the whole system…?” Nikola left the sentence hanging.

Felix considered nodding again, but took too long to think about it.

“Sorry, Felix,” Nikola shrugged. “That’s basic stuff. I haven’t even gotten to the technical stuff yet.”

The cold crept higher, into Felix’s beak. He choked back a cough. “But I really am a quick learner. I can be ready, just wait and see!”

“I tell you what,” Nikola brightened. “If you can learn all this stuff by this time next year, then you can join us. It’d be tough, having none of your kind with you, but we’re a friendly bunch. How’s that sound?”

“But I really can get it done tonight.”

Even Nikola laughed this time. Felix did his best to keep a neutral face but he couldn’t keep his knees from buckling. Nor could he keep his cloaca closed.

“Ok, ok.” Martin cringed and Nikola choked his laugh in his throat. “How about we explain ourselves a bit better,” Martin continued. “Let’s start with wind. Have you thought what it would be like flying through an inversion? Where the clouds are spread thin and your lift formula doesn’t work? And you run the risk of changing the convection with your very passage, maybe even starting your own thunderstorm?”

“An inver-what?”

“Or the high level wind shear that carves ice crystal plumes,” the hen said. “And freezes the blood in your veins. Literally.”

“Or the way the wind in a Hadley cell picks you up, so gently. Her warm, invisible feathers caressing you,” Nikola said.

“Like a hen’s touch,” Martin added.

“An expensive hen,” Un-named laughed. “And if she’s anything like me, she’s up to no good.”

Felix had no idea what they were talking about.

Nikola continued. “Call her what you will, but she’s a subtle wind, the Hadley. She’s your friend. Your lover. You find yourself flying ever higher, so’s you don’t even notice the speed.”

“Still sounds like me!”

“So,” Felix tried to demonstrate at least some knowledge, “how fast are we talking, small-birds-forecast fast?”

“Oh, still only a hundred clicks or so,” Nikola shrugged. “But it’s the way she drives you, you see, further and further through warm and gentle slipstreams, like silken webs.”

Felix tried to imagine a world in which a hundred kilometres per hour could be shrugged at.

“And that’s when the danger hits you. Wham!” Nikola slammed one feathered fist into the other, and Felix jumped.

“What hits you?”

“The equator. Now that’s one mistress you don’t ever want to mess with.”

“But,” Felix was sure they were just hawking with him now, “how can…surely it’s just an invisible line? Like a…a…like a flight path.”

“What makes you think flight paths are invisible?”

“Errr…because you can’t see them?”

“Ha. City cocks,” Un-named said.

“You can see them alright, Felix. You just gotta think about it right,” Nikola tapped the side of Felix’s head.

“And it’s especially so with the equator. You can see her for miles and miles. She races up to meet you, faster and faster. And if you’re lucky—”

“She picks you up,” Martin interrupted again.

“And smashes you into the ocean,” Un-named said.

“Amen to that, sister. You get yourself a quick death that way, you do.”

“How in the hawk is that lucky?!” Felix asked.

“Well,” Nikola continued. “Your alternative is a slow death. To let Hadley keep picking you up, driving you higher and higher.”

“Sadly, it seems to be the more popular choice these days,” Unnamed added.

“Popular?”

“All the rage amongst your average juvenile,” Martin offered.

“They don’t listen, you see.” Unnamed tapped her long, curved beak.

Felix was puzzled. This hen didn’t even know where her ears were and she was trying to tell him he wasn’t smart enough to fly?! “It doesn’t sound like a bad option to me. It’s got to be better than being smashed into the ocean.”

“Does the word ‘death’ mean something different to mudlarks, brother?”

“Forgive him,” Nikola said. “We lose almost half our fledglings every year because of it.”

“All those moons they should have been studying really comes back to haunt them,” Martin added. “And oh, do the unlucky ones get plenty of time to rue that mistake.”

Felix gulped. He couldn’t bring himself to ask.

Nikola explained anyway. “You see, you’ve got to understand the thing about Hadley. Very smart ape that one. Seems like him and this Newton character got together real good on this wind—”

Felix hoped the look on his beak showed complete understanding.

“—you see, the air we’ve just been so picturesquely and figuratively flying in is a cell. And, being cellular, means it works in all dimensions, right?”

“Ok, now I get this bit. You mean ‘what goes up must come down’ right?”

Nikola shook his head. “You are only precisely one third of the way there, little buddy.”

“I am?”

“You missed backwards…” Martin said.

“And across,” the hen said.

Felix’s beak dropped. “You mean…”

“Yep,” Nikola looked pensive. “By now, the cell has taken you all the way up to the stratosphere where you’ve frozen like the proverbial domestic chook in a NASA wind tunnel. Then it rips you through near-space, throws you back further south and east of where you took off by a few hundred clicks or more, then casts you down towards some strange patch of ground you’ve never met before.”

“Or ocean,” Martin added helpfully.

“Sharks,” the hen said.

“New Zealand,” Nikola said in a flat voice.

“Unlucky,” Felix managed.

“So you’ve got to start all over again,” Martin picked up the story. “Only worse because now you have further to go. So you have to eat more, and recalculate your formula again because of the extra weight, although you’re too late by this time anyway, so you’ll probably freeze in the southern winter.”

“Then of course, there’s really, really, unlucky,” Nikola said in a bright tone. “That’s where you made it down near the equator—”

Felix kept his beak closed this time.

“—and now you’re stuck in the Ferrell cell. That’s when your troubles really start. You’ve got to fly against that one, because it’s all opposite…”

Felix tried to imagine this figurative flight so far, being carried across the vast continent at break-wing speeds. And up—he’d managed to forget that part already. And frozen by the time the equator knocked him out of the migration route, sucked out over the ocean, flying against winds he’d never heard of just to get back to where he started and do it all over again. He would have lost the curlews, be starving and battered.

Worse. He’d have to face his friends as a failure. The cold spread to his whole body. He resisted the urge to curl up in the egg position.

“…which is the greatest trick anyone will ever teach you,” Nikola was saying. Felix opened his beak to ask what he’d missed—

“I probably shouldn’t go around sharing it, actually.”

—and closed it again. The cold disappeared, leaving a sickening hot feeling in its place; the air in the tree now stuffy and stale. Felix glanced around for a spot to throw up in.

“And about now, those fledglings are really wishing they’d paid attention to their lessons.” Martin grinned.

Unnamed shuddered. “Yep. About the only winners are the crows.”

“Don’t forget the sharks.”

“So,” Felix drew from the tiny centre of hope he still, impossibly, harboured. “All I have to do is get through that Hadley cell the first time, and I’ll be right, right? Sounds tough, but I can do that part.”

“Oh, good hawk no!” Nikola said. “Even if you make it that far first go—which you won’t—you’ve still got your equatorial storms to contend with. Now they’re fast, I can tell you. Up to four hundred clicks, those little breezes. ‘Course, you could end up with the unlucky option again: there might not be any storms at all.”

“Ok. Now surely that really is lucky? I mean, lucky in the sense that I’ve always known it to mean before today…”

“Well, I guess so.”

Felix felt another surge of hope—

“If you consider moons and moons of doldrums ‘lucky’.”

—dashed against the rocks of reality. “Doldrums?”

“No wind,” Nikola explained.

“And remember there’s nothing to eat until you make landfall,” Martin said.

“Nothing to eat?”

“Not a bite.”

Felix sighed. “Well, that’s the worst of it, then.”

“Would you get a load of this cock?” Unnamed said to Martin.

“Love his sense of humour!” Martin agreed. “You’re alright, you are, Felix! Such a shame you’re not a migrator.”

Felix beaked a weak grin.

“You see, you’ve still gotta go through the cells on the other side. They go the opposite way again of course—”

“Coriolis effect,” Martin explained. “Not exactly a force to be reckoned with, but a minx of a mistress nevertheless.”

“—and cross the most ape-ified land masses on earth—”

“Where we supposedly taste great,” Unnamed chimed in.

“—ah, but then you reach the wide open plains of Siberia!”

“Yep,” Unnamed said. “That’s when you truly know you’re finally home. One of your homes, that is.”

Felix sighed. “I see. So that’s everything, is it?”

“Oh no! We haven’t even started telling you about the wildlife! Let’s see, I spose we should start with the flies. Burrow right under your skin they do, to lay their eggs inside you.”

“Then there’s the mossies.” Martin’s eyes lost focus, his stance softened, and he smiled. “Clouds and endless clouds of the little blighters, forever biting your eyes and burrowing into your ears…”