by Margi Prideaux

From behind came a sound, swish, phwom, swish, phnom. My heart fluttered inside my chest. Could it be what I had been hoping for since the first giant gardener’s space?

Years ago, I travelled to Thailand for a semester of study and the opportunity to explore the country. I am drawn to what is tangible and real in the world – wildlife that is wild and communities living as they have for eons. For me, chance encounters with wildlife carry more colour and texture than the canned experiences people buy. On this occasion, I had found a trek to visit a Karen-Thai hill tribe community in the Chiang Mai province. Our guides were members of the community we were to visit. They vibrated with political activism and a deep pride in their people. Their energy was magnetic.

We set off from Chiang Mai in a van at dawn, winding for hours through deep valleys between steep, densely vegetated hills. Lush plants sprang from every surface. The sight of such prolific vegetation can be difficult to absorb, at times so profuse it looks artificial. It’s as if you are travelling through a dense green cloud.

After an hour or so of winding roads, we stopped at an unmarked roadside point, in the shadow of a tall hill. I am sure the spot was easy to identify for locals, but to my eyes nothing distinguished this hill from the hundreds we had just passed. Still, with trust and a prayer, we collected our packs and dissolved ourselves into the trees to begin the upwards march towards the Karen village.

Pushing through thick vegetation, we wove around tree trunks standing in tight formation. At our feet was thick undergrowth. Over our heads was a dense canopy of low-hanging branches. Without the occasional bright flowers springing forward with ridiculous iridescence, it could have been a scene from a commando movie. Birds, which I could never identify, chattered and clanged in the sun shining on the other side of the ceiling of leaves. Insects took up arms as we moved forward. Some limited their interest to noting our passing, while others investigated if our flesh offered something more. Ahead, our guides moved steadily and ever upwards, swinging their machetes from side to side, clearing a path for our climb. They never faltered, swatted, or stopped, so neither did we.

Occasionally, the forest density would suddenly evaporate and we would stumble into small clearings ringed by trees with bare trunks. Through the high manicured dome of leaves, the mid-morning light glinted in the few spaces not woven shut. It was as if a giant gardener had crafted a private cocoon to sit and enjoy. Here, our band of trekkers could sit, gulp water and devour sticky Thai sweets. There was a clear track in and a clear track out, wider than the paths we were making, and distinctly worn into the ground. A guide explained the elephants and their mahouts, known as kwarn chang in northern Thailand, had created these spaces, for moments of rest from their work in the surrounding area. At that time, the teak harvest ban in Thailand was still young and illegal activity continued.

The thrill of knowing elephants were nearby was intoxicating. I strained my hearing to catch a sound of their presence, but the cacophony of birds masked my effort.

Our trek went on for hours, up and around hills and down through deep valleys. As the day matured it became hotter and the air cloyingly still. My clothes hung wet on my frame and a steady stream of sweat blurred my vision. The water we carried was lighter by the step.

Eventually, we crested the edge of a long, meandering valley. The wild forest gave way to signs of human toil. Our path was now bordered by crops fed by lengths of bamboo irrigation pipes. In the distance were a collection of bamboo and rattan huts. Colourful fabrics billowed in the breeze. This was our destination.

After hours of shade, the sun felt ferocious, blazing in its mid-afternoon posture. Tiny midges buzzed close by; a gentle hum tuned to the beauty of the day.

Of our small band, I was slowest. This is nothing new. I have never been a natural trekker; I love the destination, but often tire at the pace of the journey. I like to stop and explore new and wonderful discoveries along the way, to have moments where there is no human sound so I can soak in the aliveness of what surrounds me.

I was alone on the path when I heard a gentle swish then phwom, swish, phnom approaching behind me.

A thrill billowed inside me and I turned to face the titan. She was magnificent.

The relationship between humans and elephants in this region goes back a long way. It is too easy to assume the practices of the past, when elephants were pressed into the service of logging, land clearing or used as transport haulers, were the terrible times – to presume the new enlightenment of tourism oversees a better world for these gentle animals. However, this judgement is tinged with western bias and blinkered vision.

I don’t mean to suggest that teak harvesting should resume – far from it. The scale of harvest caused terrible damage across Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, but unintended consequences flowed from the ban. Communities that had built generations of identity and skill around raising and training mahouts and elephants crumbled. An elephant, which may have spent its life as a member of a mahout’s family, became a burden to feed if the family’s income disappeared. Many mahouts were similarly cast adrift. Starvation for both was a very real threat. Elephant tourism – elephant rides and elephant performances – filled a gap for some. But this can be a pitiful existence for the elephants and the men, made worse by the knowledge that elephant infants, wrenched from their mothers in Myanmar, are regularly smuggled across the border into Thailand to be presented as orphans in need of care. These youngsters are the innocent victims of the tourism machine. In some ways, the situation for elephants is worse now than it was at the peak of teak harvesting.

The ears of the elephant walking towards me waved softly, eyes creased in a gentle smile, her trunk swayed with the rhythm of her long, slow stride. Swish, phwom. Swish, phwom. Swish, phnom. Each step began as a gentle touch that flowed into heavy softness.

She was more than magnificent. She was heart wrenchingly beautiful.

I knelt on the path when she was still a few lengths away and took a photograph. I knew it would fall short of her presence, but it would remind me of this moment in years to come. Even today, as I hold it in my hand, I remember each swaying stride. Swish, phnom.

Behind her head sat her kwarn chang, tenderly patting her neck and whispering soothing sounds behind her ears. I stepped from the path as her trunk tenderly reached out, then yanked a clump of grass and flowers from near my feet. I was enveloped by the rich, deep smell of her skin and wet vegetation. Her eye tracked me for a moment, pleating at the edges with delight as she placed her spoils in her mouth to chew.

My heart slowed to the beat of her footsteps. An ear and then a shoulder glided by. Swish, phnom. I glanced at her kwarn chang, now above my head, and he returned a shy nod. The round swell of her abdomen pressed the space between us, drawing my attention back to her magnificent presence. A rumble inside her body made me smile, then the switch of her tail drew my attention to her hip moving past.

I drank in another dozen swaying steps before she rounded a corner and melted into the treelike.

She was gone, but her presence could still be felt, like an echo in the space on the path.

One of the guides called my name from the edge of the village. I drew in a breath at the wonder of the world and took off at a trot to catch up with the group. The next adventure of meeting the Karen people was ahead.

Margi Prideaux is a writer, negotiator and independent academic, with a PhD in wildlife policy & law. In her 27 years in the conservation movement, she has worked on conservation projects in the Pacific Islands, South East Asia, Africa and Latin America, and always with the goal of protecting wildlife through communities. She has published three books: Birdsong After the Storm, Global Environmental Governance, Civil Society and Wildlife, and All Things Breathe Alike: A Wildlife Anthology that is co-authored with Donna Mulvenna and Jessica Groenendijk. Her fourth book, Wild Tapestry: Weaving Wildlife Survival, will be released in late 2017. She is on Facebook and Twitter @WildPolitics. www.wildpolitics.co

by Michael Engelhard

The scene on the highway’s exit ramp caught me off guard. A stout woman, in her sixties perhaps, with glasses and frizzy brown hair, dressed in sneakers, jeans, and a sweat-shirt, stood near her parked truck, transfixed by something in the grass. Bicycling closer, I noticed she was Native American and the object of her attention was a bird plump as a chicken and glossy as obsidian. Fascinated by all wildlife and fond of aerobatic corvids clowns in particular, I stopped on the gravel shoulder. The raven’s left wing dragged; feather tips skimmed the grass. The chisel bill hung ajar, as if its owner were panting, displaying the mouth’s soft lining. With each blink, white nictitating membranes closed on the bird’s eyeballs like camera apertures freeze-framing the world.

“It’s injured,” the woman offered, stating the obvious. “I’m trying to take it to a vet.”

I asked if she needed a hand, and she went to the truck, returning with a sweatshirt. Noon sun ironed my back, undeterred by clouds like gray paunches that sagged toward the horizon. As cars sped by, curiosity flickered across the drivers’ faces. Oblivious to the streaking of traffic and pain, the bird focused on the more imminent threat we represented. Each time the woman approached, it hopped beyond reach, tucking the hurt wing close to its body, as a person would a dislocated arm. Circling around, I distracted it long enough for the woman to throw the shirt over it. She stooped, nimbly for somebody so compact, and scooped up the raven before it could wiggle free.

We walked to her truck and I opened the door.

“Would you like to come to the vet?” she asked. “You could hold it while I drive.”

I wedged my bike and backpack full of groceries into the truck and got in. En route to the opposite end of town, she rang a friend who had worked in bird rehabilitation. She already had called that friend for advice as soon as she spotted the bird.

“I got it and am driving to the vet now. A guy is helping me.”

Through fabric my fingertips sensed the bird’s heart. Unable to tell terror from resignation, I listened to its labored breathing, worried that it might suffocate or overheat. A scaly leather foot, tipped with lacquered claws, had escaped from the wrap, and pressed against my belly. Occasionally, as frost heaves or cracks in the pavement shook the truck, wings brushed against my breastbone like spruce boughs or a book page. I had never been that close to a raven before.

My grandmotherly accomplice, Margaret, recalled how she had trapped a raven by accident when she still lived in her village up north. She had been setting snares to catch rabbits; to her surprise a raven stepped into one of her loops. She released it and, getting stabbed in the process, came to respect the bird’s moxie and imposing bill.

Research for a school paper she had to write turned up little scientific information about corvid-human interaction, but Margaret unearthed a wealth of raven lore, knowledge rooted deeply in time, accounts and beliefs that branched far beyond North America into Siberia and Europe.

She could have learned about charcoal sketches in the caves near Lascaux that depict corvids and imply their importance to early humans as messengers or even as human souls. Or that, in Norse mythology, two ravens named Thought and Memory perched on Odin’s shoulders, gleaning news of the world on daily excursions. And that without stars to guide them through summer’s nacreous midnights, Norse settlers released hrafnar and trailed the black scouts landward in their single-mast ships.

Throughout the northern hemisphere this bird attended shamanistic flights of trance. It was teacher and totemic ancestor. It stared bug-eyed from the limbs of family trees along the Pacific Northwest coast, populating genealogies hewn into cedar trunks. Kwakiutl dancers acknowledged the bond by wearing masks with four-foot-long bills that closed with whip crack sounds. Crow-walking under the spell of gourd rattles, they became birds. Other raven masks split like seedpods, revealing a second mask and thus the deception of first impressions, the hidden nature of things. In the mythology of Margaret’s own people, the Gwich’in of the Yukon and northeast Alaska, Raven acted as trickster and transformer. In the course of his exploits, he often suffered violence or deformity, comparable to the bird I was cradling. Vulgar and petty, scheming and greedy and often not very smart, he embodied the sacred and the profane, the light and the shadow inside each one of us. At the beginning of “Distant Time,” he created not only humans, but also animals, some of which looked after people as guardian spirits. As part of a bargain between species, people honored obligations, obeyed unwritten rules, and offered gestures of attentiveness, feeding dried fish to a wolf they had killed, or not disturbing a raven on its nest, lest the weather would turn cold. In a mythical age that for believers is present to the same degree that it is past, Raven stole daylight for his creations, which until then scrambled around in the dark. Inspired perhaps by the bird’s love for shiny objects or by a solar eclipse, one tale told around midwinter fires recounts Raven’s theft of the sun. A chief in the sky had given the orb to his child as a toy. When the toddler dropped it and it rolled into the room’s corner, Raven covered its glow with his wing. Then he flew back to earth with it, illuminating the world of people. His benevolence is believed to assume the form of actual ravens that guide hunters to fresh wolf kills, moose or caribou, the bounty of which feeds entire families. Villagers in Alaska pay close attention to the living environment, and a raven rolling onto its back in midair is “dropping a package of meat,” announcing good fortune for the observant.

I told a few anecdotes of my own. On a snowy Fairbanks sidewalk I once found evidence of a raven meal: a scuffle of rune prints, banded feathers, and at the display’s center a grouse foot. During a Grand Canyon trip, fat twin marauders in search of food hacked into my backpack and pulled out smelly socks. (I had been mad enough to fling rocks at them.) Similarly, a mile above timberline on Denali’s buttressed heights, ravens had made the connection between bamboo wand markers and the food caches climbers left in a snowdrift, excavating peanuts, cheese, and beef jerky with great gusto. While many climbers consider them flying rats, many other Alaskans, like myself, have a soft spot for them. In downtown Sitka, I saw car drivers wait patiently for ravens to grab a meal on rain-slicked Harbor Drive instead of honking their horns or trying to squeeze by or to run over them.

As our conversation progressed, Margaret and I realized we had common acquaintances in a city of seventy thousand that can be as tight as a village, among them my former Native-language teacher. Our conversation, which had begun as a trickle, meandered from the invalid bird to its kin until the current widened, roiling raw stuff to the surface.

Between raven stories nestled Margaret’s confession that she was a recovering alcoholic. She hinted at divorce, at a step- or adoptive parent. Her children and grandchildren lived as far away as Tucson, and she rarely saw them. Beadworking had given her strength to pull through. “It keeps my hands and mind busy all the time,” she told me. She talked about her style, how she kept seeing images and patterns in nature, which she then translated into art. Craft and expertise ran strong in Margaret’s family. Her mother had passed on the gift; at age fourteen, she had fashioned a fringed, shell-and-bead-encrusted hide shirt for Margaret’s great-grandfather, a chief. It now hung in a display case at the university museum on the hill above town—a snippet of culture enshrined.

When we finally reached the clinic, the raven felt heavy and warm, like a swaddled, if damaged, foundling. The bird’s weight on my belly released feelings that, for a non-pet person sworn to childlessness, welled up unexpectedly. I imagined how easily an observer could have mistaken our trio for a family rushing its infant to an emergency room.

There was an entrance for dogs and another for cats, but none for birds. We stood in the air-conditioned office’s neon glare, with sterile surfaces and posters that advertised pet health care. I sweated where the cotton bundle touched my body. Margaret tugged on her T-shirt, admitting coolness to her skin. While a receptionist had her fill out some paperwork, my arms tired and I braced them on the Formica counter. The bird squirmed again and let out a rusty squawk; I tried to keep a good grip, mindful not to break feathers or injure it even more. Before long, a veterinarian’s assistant took it into another room. She returned to hand Margaret her soiled sweatshirt.

“I’ll have to wash this,” Margaret said calmly.

“What will become of the bird?” I asked the receptionist before we left.

“The vet will see what she can do,” she said. “We’ll check with a rehabilitation place here in town, and when the bird is ready it will be released where you found it.”

Back at the truck, Margaret volunteered to drive me home. On the way there, we talked some more. I wondered aloud if it was even legal to pick up or keep wildlife. “Let ’em come find me, if they want,” was all she said. Before I stepped from the truck, Margaret showed me photos of her traditional yet innovative beadwork, paraphernalia of many-hued glass that she sold at church bazaars: garlands offsetting inspirational poems, necklaces culminating in bear pendants, tanned-hide discs blushing with floral designs, and wall hangings embroidered with the sign of her people’s adopted faith. I asked for her phone number in case I ever needed a customized gift.

I intended to let Margaret know the outcome of our rescue mission, but, for personal reasons, I also needed to follow this story to its end. At the time, my writing, if not my curiosity, had almost ground to a halt. The world did not seem to provide any new plots. Words did not come easily anymore and, when they did, mimicked flowers pressed in a book more than the green fertile mess that threatened to swallow my yard. But the minute I closed the cabin door, I grabbed pen and paper, and sentences began to form.

The next day, I rang the clinic to inquire about the patient’s condition. The diagnosis was bleak and the outlook even more so. As the result of heavy trauma, typically caused by collisions with cars or windowpanes, the raven had broken a wing bone and dislocated a shoulder and would never fly again. It shared the fate of many residents-turned-trespassers, an opportunistic lot that includes ants, magpies, rats, coyotes, deer, and here in Alaska, gray jays, bald eagles, and bears. Often lacking familiarity with technology’s traps, as well as the luck to dodge development, these camp followers glean from our tables, our henhouses, our backyards, our interstates. We’ve created predator-free havens filled with tidbits and trash, and they flock to them. An attentive observer can witness a trick bag of raven slyness outside of supermarkets, or marvel at how they dive into greasy Dumpsters, haggle over scraps, or, heads cocked sideways, gauge the speed of traffic before dashing onto asphalt to peel off mangled rabbit flesh. Such scavenging devalues them in the eyes of some people who regard them as vermin. But is the ravens’ defiance of human plans and conventions not a kind of wildness?

Some creatures become so familiar that our perception of them dulls. They blend into the landscape as if plumage or fur were a camouflage coat. When we do take notice, we sometimes label them “common” or consider them vulgar, but there is nothing common about this rogue bird, except for its manners. Of all my wild neighbors, it is the one that seems the most human.

At Prudhoe Bay’s oil fields, ravens begin to nest in late March, at minus thirty degrees. With no twigs free of snow, they requisition unusual nest-building material: welding rods, plastic cable ties, copper wires, survey stakes. Some assemble to meet incoming cargo, waiting at the airstrip for the plane’s arrival. During the unloading, they raid food crates, rip open the packaging, and sometimes hide loot in industrial structures, away from patrolling foxes. As soon as the snow melts, they waddle after lemmings; they pilfer eggs and chicks from migratory birds. They mostly ignore oil field workers but will avoid a researcher who previously trapped them, recognizing the enemy even when she wears borrowed coveralls and a hard hat in disguise.

Ravens handle cold snaps of minus fifty degrees or below far better than they do cars. Their physiology enables them to prosper anywhere between the Sonoran Desert and the Arctic Ocean. Reminiscent of Raven’s mythic coup, they capture minute amounts of sunlight with their dark, absorbent plumage and fluffed up retain precious body heat. Sheer size, combined with stockiness, helps these largest of passerines to preserve life under winter’s harsh cloak. On clear winter days, you can surprise ravens with spread wings that are sunbathing on the ground or rolling exuberantly in heavenly down. If you sit still enough, long enough, in a Fairbanks parking lot, vignettes of urban raven life will accumulate: Seven birds aligned on the back of a truck, eyeing its garbage-strewn bed and clucking at the sudden bonanza. A pair locked together in midair, tumbling tails-over-heads, scattering feathers as if in a pillow fight. A scruffy loner extracting ketchup packets from a plastic bag, stashing them in snow piled around the foot of a parking meter for future consumption. They live like street bums or heroes fallen from grace; some people take this as a sign that the ancient spirits no longer care for their animal manifestations. But not me. Fledged under Alaska’s raw skies, the birds still belong more in this place than I, a transplant from afar.

In Distant Time stories, Raven as the trickster and culture hero often tripped over his own appetites. Left alone, its descendant, the specimen Margaret and I had brought into the clinic, also was likely to meet a bad end. Without the use of a wing, it would starve or fall to the next predator crossing its path. The vet was still trying to contact the only qualified bird rehabilitator in town. If that person could not give it refuge, the raven would be euthanized. Appalled by the news, I wanted to take it home but discovered I needed a permit and an appropriate setup for keeping a wild animal. The vet refused to free the bird and, detecting my frustration with clinic protocol, reminded me that I had interfered with nature’s workings when I helped retrieve it. But, I wanted to shout into the phone, I’d stepped in only because our kind caused the accident in the first place.

I called again the following day, a Sunday. The receptionist kept me in a limbo of Muzak laced with commercials. When she came back on the line, she informed me that the bird had been put down. I pictured the vet thrusting a syringe through the iridescent mantle into warm flesh I had held. As jet black button eyes lost their luster, I wished for one less story to tell.

When I phoned Margaret at work the next morning, she had already heard about the mercy killing. “Too bad,” she said while I gripped the receiver. Regret and compassion colored her voice, and an entire people’s weight rested upon those two words.

Michael Engelhard is the author of Ice Bear: The Cultural History of an Arctic Icon and of the essay collection American Wild: Explorations from the Grand Canyon to the Arctic Ocean, from which this essay has been excerpted. He lives in Fairbanks, Alaska and works as a wilderness guide in the Arctic. michaelengelhard.com

 

Header image – Raven at Dawn. Photo by Bryant Olsen, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

by JoeAnn Hart

White caps rolled in sideways from the ocean, little waves hello from a storm tossing around in the Bahamas. A chill wind pushed a mist over Port Ellery; not enough to make Duncan close his truck window but enough to soften the world. It might be mean weather for early October, but inside, he was radiating a tropical front. Orders for the spring season were pouring in from nurseries around the country for Go Kelp! fertilizer, his new mix of dehydrated fish waste and seaweed fertilizer he’d created at his family business, Seacrest Ocean Products of Maine. This bounty, this unexpected burst of sales, this lifesaver thrown to him as he was going down for the third time, he owed to a seagull. They’d saved one another. The bird had a six-pack holder wrapped around his neck, strangling himself on the beach, but Duncan was able to catch him in a feat of daring that had been caught on camera and posted on YouTube, making them both minor celebrities, the bird a symbol of hope in hopeless times. The gull was still convalescing at Seagull Rescue, where Josefa had named him Kelp, inspiring the name of the fertilizer. Seacrest’s marketing consultant was considering putting the bird’s picture on the label since their fate seemed spliced together now. Fans had been leaving offerings at Seacrest’s for Kelp and Josefa’s other rescued gulls: Cases of sardines, medical supplies, stuffed animals, and most important, checks. Leaf peepers swung through town to see the beach where Kelp had been saved, with hopes of meeting Duncan, the gull’s savior. His maintenance man, Wade, kept them out of the factory, but profited by selling photo-copied directions to Josefa’s for $2.00 a pop.

“Don’t take advantage of their devotion like that,” said Duncan.

Wade mocked insult. “A public service,” he called it, and perhaps it was. The city’s streets had been laid out in the 1700’s on top of mule paths, then randomly marked as one-ways, so getting into the center of downtown was a challenge even for natives. Duncan wished he had one of those maps right now as he found himself trapped on multiple dead-ends or driving against one-way traffic as he tried to navigate the inner world of Port Ellery, a grim corrective to its public face of beaches and clam shacks. Narrow streets rose up sharply from the water, joining at the top to create a high mound of old brick buildings. Altitude had protected them from the sea over the years but the salted wind and reflected sun had aged them. A wet day like this gave them a dark luster. Josefa lived on the other side of the hill where the newer housing—meaning built sometime in the last century—looked older still. Vinyl clapboards were chipped and bent back exposing foil innards, and satellite dishes sprung from eaves like warts. Dirt yards were landscaped with swing-less playsets and the only color in the neighborhood came from plastic flowers at the Madonna bathtub shrines. As he circled the streets, lace curtains opened, then closed, and he felt himself being scrutinized. With some sense of accomplishment, he pulled up to Josefa’s at last, a single-family home that was this side of complete dilapidation and had the acrid smell of penned birds. The lawn was white with droppings. On the locked, chain-linked gate, there was a sign: “Sshh, Kelp is sleeping.” Josefa was nowhere to be seen but he heard her dogs barking inside. In the course of looking for sick gulls, she often picked up other needy animals, especially in the weeks after Labor Day when the summer people left, abandoning their pets. She found homes for them all eventually, but this time of year she still had a full house of dogs, cats, cockatiels, guinea pigs and even a ferret. When he climbed down from the pick-up, a half dozen cats were sitting in the branches, as solid as sandbags, staring at him.

He took his cell phone out of the zippered pocket of his windbreaker and dialed Josefa. She opened the upstairs window and even though they were only twenty feet apart they continued to use the phone. Josefa had a mild speech impediment which caused her to talk in stops and starts, and raising her voice would only make it worse. “Mrs. Delaney called to say you were … on the way over,” she said. “So did Mr. Potts. Guess you were driving around. In circles.”

Duncan looked down the street. If they all knew where he was going, why didn’t anyone bother to show him the way? “And then you locked the gate?”

“Oops,” she said. “Forgot I did it. They won’t leave us alone.”

“They?”

“Kelp’s admirers. Dear souls. Money’s pouring in through the web site. If this keeps up …. I’m going to have my dream. A proper seagull rescue home.” She looked wistfully down at the yard. A blinding white cockatiel came up behind her with a flurry of wings and settled on the windowsill. Josefa, a child of the 60’s, did not believe in cages and even the ferret ran free.

“I have checks for you,” said Duncan. “Does that let me in?”

“Goody,” she said, and she clicked off the phone. She brushed the cockatiel back in the house with her arm and closed the window.

As he waited for her to come down he examined the yard. A few gulls were in cages, some stood still, hunched up, deep into themselves. The healthier ones limped around trying to maneuver around the piles of flotsam Josefa had assembled over the years, a maze of buoys and lobster pots, tangles of driftwood and buckets of seaglass. There was a mountain of seine nets—ghost nets, she called them, the ones that floated free to entangle whales and diving gulls. She took what she could off the beaches so they could not be washed back out again, then found homes for them during tomato season as trellises.

The door to the house opened in an explosion of dogs who stormed the gate. When Josefa swung it out, two little ones still clung on for the ride. Duncan stepped in and Josefa pushed the dogs back with her foot as she latched the gate again. “What are you wearing?” he asked.

She pulled the bottom edge of her baby blue sweatshirt out so he could admire the words “Go Kelp!” superimposed over a soaring gull.

“Nice advertising for both of us,” he said. “I’ll sponsor the next batch.”

“Look who’s talking… money,” said Josefa. “Sponsoring no less.”

“It’s good having money again,” said Duncan. “I just hope it stays this way. You’re doing pretty well yourself.” He pulled a wad of envelopes out of his pocket, all filled with checks.

Josefa took the envelopes and splayed them out like a hand of cards before putting them in her back pocket. “My daughter, Lavinia … the architect? Wants to come home. Plans to make her name designing my ‘facility,’ as she calls it. She sees a white building with arched wings to create shade for the outdoor cages.”

“Seems like a lot of design for a place gulls come to die,” said Duncan.

“You’ll be glad for good design when it comes your time,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be all that matters.” She pushed the dogs back into the house so Duncan could bring the supplies in. “We’ll even have a crematorium …. which should warm your heart. We won’t have to dispose of them at Seacrest’s.”

Josefa could not possibly dig enough graves for all her failed rescues, so she sometimes threw them down Seacrest’s waste chute that led to the grinder, the first step towards dehydration. It was more nitrogen for the fertilizer mix but it made Duncan very uneasy.

“In the end, it’s all about disposal, isn’t it?” he said. He filled his arms with cases of sardines and carried them over to the storage shed. He put them down and picked up a sign. Buoys, $10.00. “Since when have you started to sell your collection?”

“When people started to buy it,” she said, pawing through a bag of stuffed animals. She pulled out a red plush crab and tossed it to a wiry dog who caught it mid-air. “I’m selling eel heads these days too.” She pointed to a white five gallon bucket that sat up on a cage, out of reach of the dogs. Scrawled on the bucket were the words, Eel puppets—2 for $5.00.

“Gross,” said Duncan, peeking in.

“I get them for free down at the dock … dry them out in the sun. The kids love them. The heads don’t hardly smell after a while.” She picked one up and stuck it on her finger. “Hi Duncan,” she said in an eely little voice. Then she gave it a good sniff, but there was no trusting a nose that lived with that many animals. She put it back and picked up a box of white and gray feathers. “Their favorite is still seagull … feathers” She lowered her voice. “I say they’re all from Kelp.”

“How is my boy?”

“Oh, he’s fine.”

“Can I see him?”

“Duncan, when you’ve seen one seagull … you’ve seen them all.”

This was not like Josefa. Usually she bombarded him with minute differences between individuals. He looked over by the fence, and in the finest of her cages was a gull and a thickly-lettered sign saying “Kelp.”

“There he is,” he said, and walked toward him.

“Oh … Duncan,” she said, then turned to busy herself with creating order in the shed.

Duncan squatted next to the cage and greeted the bird, who stood in profile, looking rather noble with its blunt beak. He thought of the bird’s beginning, its dramatic break out of its isolating shell to discover itself in a cozy nest with other young gulls and doting parents who brought food, and in time, freedom, showing it how to lift its wings and leave that nest, off to lead the life of a bird, floating over land and sea, swooping like an angel over this earthly existence. To think that a creature so intricate and grand could be brought down by a lowly piece of plastic.

“Hi Kelp,” he said. The bird looked at him with a dark eye, turning its head from side to side to bring him into its vision, appraising him with no recognition. Some gratitude. It moved a step closer to the wire and tilted its head with a look that read: Food? When it saw that Duncan had none it turned its back. Its feathers were dirty and the injured wing still hung limp by its side. There was not much that could be done for badly damaged birds. If they weren’t already in shock when they were picked up, aggressive treatment might stress them into it, a point from which very few returned. Sometimes the only thing to do was to give them a quiet place to wait it out and hope they would heal themselves, which seemed to be the ticket for Kelp’s head. Around the beak where the six-pack holder had dug in was completely healed over. In fact, the feathers were fully grown in. A miracle.

“Maybe too much of a miracle,” he said out loud. He considered the wing hanging by the bird’s side and thought back to the month before when he held Kelp under his arm. He was sure the bad wing had been on the left. This was the right. He stood up and turned to Josefa.

“That’s not the gull I saved,” he said.

“Isn’t it?” she asked, continuing to stack boxes.

“No,” he said. “It’s not. Unless he healed one wing and then broke the other.”

She put her finger to her lips, leaving her work to join him by the cage. She looked around and spoke in a whisper. “I have something to tell you Duncan. It didn’t heal. Kelp died.”

Duncan looked at the bird and felt a stab of sadness. Even though he knew the chances were slim, they were chances nonetheless, and now they were gone.

“Then who’s that under the sign that says ‘Kelp’?”

“Let’s call him …. Kelp the II. You have to swear, Duncan. Not a word. People will lose enthusiasm. I won’t ever get the new place.”

“You’re lying?” Duncan asked. “About a seagull?”

“People have gotten very attached. No one can know.” She reached her hand through the cage and the gull pecked at it. “I’m on the alert for gulls that looks like Kelp … or can be made to look like Kelp. Like this one. I’m going to need a really good bird in a few weeks that’s only a little injured. I can tidy him up and set him free. I’ve talked to the mayor about calling it Kelp Day. A national TV station wants to cover it.”

“Josefa, I’m sort of surprised.”

“Why? A little lie to benefit an entire species? It’s not like I’m taking the money to live in Aruba. Keeping Kelp ‘alive’ is going to help … everyone. New clean housing, medicine, veterinary care, a flight cage. All the things I could never afford. Hard to be in a position to want to help only to have your hands tied by lack of money. We’ll bring seagull rescue to a whole new level. I have a crew of volunteers now who search the beaches and help feed and clean. I’ve been swimming hard to keep up with the tide … now I want to float in with it.”

Duncan put his hands in his pockets and made fists. Of all the people he knew, Josefa had seemed the most honest and trustworthy. What did it say about the human species if even she could be tempted by money and fame? “It’s the thin edge of the wedge, Josefa.”

“Think about the greater good. Speaking of which.” She turned away, back to the storage bin and took out a lumpy trash bag. A webbed claw broke through the plastic. “Could you dump this at Seacrest for me?”

“No!” Duncan said. “With all those tourists hanging around waiting for me to rescue another gull and you want me to dispose of one?”

“Two,” she said. “It was a bad day. That’s why I put the ‘closed’ sign up … so I could move bodies around. Go ahead. Do it after closing, who’s to know?”

“I’ll know,” he said. “And lately everything that I do the world seems to know. I couldn’t even drive here today without a constant report on my progress. I can’t do it.”

And yet he followed Josefa out of the yard and through the gate to his pick-up, where she dropped the bag on the ground. “Duncan, I’ve never seen a man fret so much over the silliest things … It’s a couple of dead gulls. Give them a useful afterlife.”

“Josefa, I’m worried enough about the new mix as it is. My lab guy tells me he’s finding traces of plastic.”

“Plastic?”

“The fish eat plastic granules thinking they’re food, and then the plastic ends up in the guts I process for fertilizer. Now we have to somehow separate these microscopic bits out, because if the fertilizer is used in food production, the plastic continues to break down and causes hormone disruption. You’d think fish and seaweed would be completely clean but there’s nothing pure in this world anymore.”

“I don’t think nature can still produce a pollutant free fish,” said Josefa. One of her seagulls squawked and they both turned to look at it. “Goodbye, Duncan … do what I say. Take care of that bag.”

The mist had changed to spitting rain and he put his hood up. Josefa went back into the house, joyfully welcomed by the dogs, with their muddy paws and muzzles caked with seagull dung. She loved them anyway, and her love for them would find them homes. He looked over the yard to the cage that held the false gull. It was love that fueled her lie about Kelp. After all that effort to save him and he’d died anyway. It was hard to pin too many hopes on life, considering the competition. He stood for a moment as the wind tunneled up the hill from the harbor, whistling around him. High above, seagulls wheeled in the air, crying like lost souls. He picked up the bag of dead birds and threw it in the back of the truck. “There’s nothing pure anymore,” he said to the lifeless bag.

“Nothing pure but death.”

JoeAnn Hart is the author of the novels FLOAT and ADDLED, and her short fiction, essays, and articles have been widely published, most recently in Orion magazine and Design New England.