Читать книгу Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation - Curtis LeBlanc - Страница 11

Whoever said kill to a young boy first is probably to blame for this shotgun settled on my shoulder,

barrel pointed to the sky above my back. Earlier we blasted a robin’s-egg-blue recliner to strips, waiting on breakfast.

Hangover sweat collects in the bottoms of our gumboots. We’re set to shoot ourselves a grouse—

haven’t even seen one yet—but we heard how the blood dripped from the chin of Dan’s white bichon frise

after it got into the entrails of a fresh roadside kill near the neighbour’s barbed-wire fence.

Nick, camera hung like a kettle bell around his neck, tells me the two best birders in Edmonton never leave

their minivan. Not until a bay-breasted warbler or a northern goshawk has been identified as perching

on a branch. We bushwhack into Crown land at the south edge of Jared’s Flatbush ranch. In the bare wafer-board shack:

German pulp westerns, The Glass Bees by Ernst Jünger, interspersed with smut on the shelves of tenants past.

Man-made pond dyed a deep green to keep algae from blooming, escaped rabbits remembered by fur caught

in the chicken wire of their cages. Smartphone held high, Nick repeats a mating song with his Bird Calls app.

Be still, he says, and listen for the clack- clack, clack-clack. Spruce grouse will be on the forest bed, but taste

like the bitter red buds they’re named for. Ruffies, with their rumpled black necks, gorge themselves on clover.

I’m out of focus, feeling it again, a fugue I haven’t felt since I smoked Sage of the Diviners in undergrad,

lost a second summer to derealization and my first clean hard hat. The trees are a thick mesh screen,

the sky a steep slide to vertigo and I feel it’s best I shut my mouth rather than explain this, gun in hand.

Jared raises his twenty-two, takes a crack at another squirrel to sell to a man who makes keychains from their tails,

but misses high again. It’s almost noon. I let a hare off easy. We’re the renewed embodiment of that old debate: