The Names of Birds
by Morris Collins
When I was a child I learned, by accident, or if not by accident by circumstance, and also a little bit of trial and error, but certainly not any kind of scientific process or zoological inquiry, that I could call any bird by its name. Who names birds? Not me, I don’t think, but I don’t know. I imagined that my success had more to do with a sympathy of sound and expression, a rightness or an affinity in my tone, rather than the absolute accuracy of the specific syllables uttered. Otherwise, almost two thirds of the birds on this planet are named George. Which feels unlikely, and yet for years I thought I could summon birds by the way they came when I looked at them and shouted George! and then I realized, perhaps incidentally or perhaps absolutely relevantly, that I was dropping bread crumbs as I walked. I’d done it since the time as a child that I became lost during a family bike trip through the Black Forest, where I wandered for several days, trying to leave a trail I knew I could follow, and though it didn’t work—I was instead rescued by a clockmaker travelling on horseback with his daughters—it became, in those lost hours, a security blanket where, as so often happens, the emotional significance of the action subsumes its purpose and it had acquired permanence as a habit or tic, like biting your nails or coughing when you wash your hands, and I continued throughout my life to do it when I felt uneasy, which was, and is, often.
So, perhaps I hadn’t discovered anything. This was hard for me to accept since I had cherished this novelty for some time, but later when I told my wife that I wasn’t the man I thought I was, that whatever had set me apart in this world was just a scar carved into my psyche as a child, which is as common as it comes, she took off her falconer’s glove and landed her hand on mine and led me out into the fields to watch the starlings.
At this point they were asleep and listless in the trees. She shouted George!, and they swirled into a cyclone of murmuration, awake and still dreaming, and it was such a gift she was giving me, I thought, reminding me of my own power, but my wife was the kind of falconer whose favorite moment was when she lifted the blind from the bird’s eyes and saw the raptor’s surprise, that startled charge before it shed its patience and burst into the sky, and she raised her shotgun, a shotgun I hadn’t noticed or had mistaken for a walking stick or baguette—I don’t know, the memory now is tainted by its consequences—and fired into the cloud and watched the starlings fall out of the flock’s coherence—individual, suddenly lonely, and mortal—and then went to pick them up and put them in her taxidermist’s satchel like the old woman pursuing me through the Black Forest had picked up my bread crumbs before I came upon the clockmaker and his daughters and I realized again why I cherished my ability to call birds in the first place, how I wanted some simple intimate communication of my own that wasn’t swallowed up by another’s desire for escalation.
Which I learned as a boy when we reached the clockmaker’s cabin and he fed me and gave me a place to sleep and at that point in my life, which was not so much different from this one, I was not used to such kindness and I wondered why his quiet family, his blond and silent sons and his lovely daughters, Rhine and Klotild, showered it upon me, kept giving me food off their table even as I crumbled and dropped pieces of it on the floor—so quickly entrenched was this habit—but I soon found out when, after the meal, the clockmaker put a manacle around my wrist and led me to his barn wherein he was indulging his great fantasy since his wife’s death—the construction of a living cuckoo clock.
What he wanted was for me to step out of the little gingerbread cabin he’d built in the shed with an axe over my shoulder at the exact moment that I’d see Rhine, the younger of his daughters and also part of this tableau, turn and dip her bucket into the well. Perfect timing was the expected goal, but I was limited by several factors such as that I was chained in his giant clock and exhausted, that at night I heard the wolves harrying the stable horses, and that his daughter was naked, though her modesty was protected by the length of her golden hair, but still she turned and we watched her, the clockmaker and I both, he with an eye for precision and I for the space where precision vanishes into the wildly particular.
And as I failed in my duties he forced us to continue our practice, over and over, Rhine turning and bending, and me stepping out from beneath the cupola, and she began to sweat and her hair clung to her body and, while I was mostly upset by the sounds of whatever his boys were doing to the mule, I also began to watch her with more desire and less timing and the clockmaker became enraged. But in his rage there was also, I presume, disgust because when I finally escaped, a month later, I do not think they pursued me, even though it would have been easy because I dropped breadcrumbs as I ran, and because I wanted to let any possible beneficent search party know where I was—but all I knew was that I was in a forested mountain valley, green and dark, wolf-laden and shadow-damp, too terrible for the word valley—I shouted gorge!—gorge, gorge, gorge—as I ran and the birds went wild in the trees, though of course no one could ever believe a bird would be called gorge, and all the clockmaker and his menacing idiot sons, Hans and Rudolph, would have needed to do was follow the breadcrumbs, or my voice, or the birds flushed by it, though by then it was late autumn and they might have all been drinking lager or sleeping, or making more regular clocks, as they always did that time of year, for the Christmas Market.