Birds of Another Paradise
by Gillian Wiley Rose
It’s a dance. All three of them have the steps written in their bones. The first darts out to the side, its paws barely touching the ground, each paw on a spring, popping back up before it has come to rest. And then the next, the chubby one, darker than the other two, down the centerline and not so agile but still silent. The third keeps her body close to the ground. She slinks a woven path of curves.
They are red foxes, their fur rust colored, with delicate black paws and muzzles that disappear into the shadows when they freeze. They only come when I am not at home, but today I have attempted to lure them out with my stillness. With the smell of forest leaves rubbed along my collar and wrists I have erased myself.
I have been on the steps of the trailer a long time, cultivating a statue-like nature. It is worth sitting still, feeling claustrophobic in my own skin for almost forty-five minutes when the foxes melt from the shadows. I am the concrete picture of joyful.
I have named the foxes. Otherwise how could I tell you about each one as they parade across the grass? A gang of three, unstoppable. Still I wonder, are they biological family or chosen? Or have they made this posse for the express purpose of indulging in my perfect, round partridges? A marauding skulk of foxes. But I have locked the partridges up good and tight this time, installed a new layer of wire with bars stiff, firm, close together. Even my fingers hardly fit through them.
Valentine is the one who is light as a feather, practically drifting into the clearing on the tips of each blade of grass. And Patchka is round like a domesticated dog with too much to eat and not enough to chase, unusual for a fox. Their names were easy. But I pondered over what to name the third for several days. Medusa seemed too anguine a name, as did Ouroboros or Amduat, but somehow Eve fit her. A biblical reference of no significance to me, and yet if some still believe woman is the root of evil, I would venture to guess that Eve the Fox signifies all the reasons why. Stealth, cunning, fearlessness. Eve comes right for me. To distract? To threaten? To receive, perhaps, a nibble of the dog food I keep around?
I don’t want the partridges to be scared the way that they are, hunkering in on themselves, made into little balls of feather and bone the moment they sense the predators’ breath on the wind, but I am curious to test my handiwork. Will the foxes get through all my barriers to the succulent nesters? If it were not for their carnal indifference to the subtleties, the effort and love that goes into each partridge, perhaps I would be happier to share.
I will tell you how I like to eat the partridges, and then I will tell you how Valentine, Patchka and Eve like to eat the partridges.
Once the partridge is stripped of its feathers and emptied of its organs, I smother the carcass in olive oil. Light salt, rub a branch of rosemary against the prickled skin. I stuff the bird with 12 juniper berries, sage, garlic and butter and then wrap it in buttered paper, like a present just for me.
Or I cook it with duck liver and puffball mushrooms, stuffed again, with a good knob of butter.
Or I pat the gentle skin with Moroccan spices and lay it on a bier of roasted root vegetables. Complemented with dried apricots and almonds.
Roasted with thyme butter and wild morels, when I can find them.
Chargrilled with Bramley apple and whisky.
Honeyed and peppered, with pearl barley.
Valentine, Patchka and Eve eat the heads first. Half the partridge goes in each cavernous mouth, and when the fox drops the body, the head is gone. They smack their lips, smiling, shake their heads from side to side to assist their razor teeth in severing the breast, the wings, gulping down the bones and all. The partridge hasn’t time to bleed. In three minutes the bird is gone with perhaps a trace of feathers in the grass and the corners of fox lips, but maybe not even that. Do they appreciate the delicate flavors? Can the foxes tell how I have loved the birds, fattening them on fishmeal, high-quality grains, insects I find and feed them by hand? Is that why the foxes are so taken with my partridges? Do they taste ever so succulent and well cared for compared to the stringy wild birds? Or do these glorified dogs even taste the bird at all? Have I just raised them to be easy targets?
At least this is how I think they eat the partridges. Admittedly I have not actually seen it happen because they are smart enough not to taste their catch in the open. The time they ate every single partridge down to the last sinewy knuckle, it was the kind of dark that only happens on clear, new moon nights, on an island such as ours, mostly farmland and forest, where very few porch lights shine, and the horizon is lit only by the slow cycle of the lighthouse. I was sleeping so deeply I didn’t hear the avian pleas. I knew nothing until morning feeding time, my bare feet wet with dew, the surprise and sadness, the quiet flooding my ears and hands upon discovery of an empty, pillaged cage, the roosts scratched by clinging claws, the door off its hinges in the grass several feet from the scene. That massacre was the first, and most horrible. Since then I have once caught Valentine, Patchka and Eve each with a trembling bird between their teeth, creeping out of the trailer’s shadow and into the woods. I watched, the way a distant observer might, the course of nature playing out before me. There was no point in giving chase in the hopes that one of them might drop an injured bird. I know those iron jaws. I could only choose to suffer my losses and get smarter. Better door on the cage, tighter junctions between the bars. Not even vulpine fingers can unlatch the new rig. Will they be able to break through to the sweet captives or have I finally become good enough at protecting them to allow for the survival of all? Eve is already close to the cage when I hear the singing.
“And then she found meeeeee
With my hand in the cheeeeese,”
Oh no! Not now!
The foxes hear the singing too, all together as though they have one collective pair of ears. They stop their motley progress through the tall grass and listen for only a second. The singing is accompanied by a paced swishing through the grass at an accelerated rate, and in less than the time it takes me to let out my breath the skulk has melted back into the trees from where they came. Still on the steps of the trailer, my elbows on my knees, feet propped on the step below as they have been the last half hour, I drop my head in my hands.
Damn you, Houston.
Houston lives on the property next to mine. We’d been neighbors for ages before I chose to acknowledge his presence, and once done, I’d regretted it. He’s the sort of person who pops by at any hour and prattles on for ages, just because he has gotten bored with whatever it is he does on that land of his. We aren’t friends. But he’s the sort of person who thinks everyone’s his friend and I am the sort of person who thinks no one is. Houston would only notice a fox if he saw it positioned at the end of his shotgun. Houston thinks it’s silly that I raise partridges and the one time I mistakenly offered him a succulent culinary delight featuring said bird, all he had to say about it was, “All bone and no meat! Beef. Now there is a good meat to bone ratio.”
I’d been surprised he even knew what a ratio was. Not that he’s dull-minded, per se. It occurred to me that it was more like he didn’t care, not that he couldn’t. Houston, who pronounces his name YOU-ston, and walks everywhere singing a silly song right out of his head, and always carries a shotgun, an axe or a shovel over his shoulder, throws down whichever of those three he’s been carrying and sits next to me on the steps. He sits on the lowest step and even from there we are eye level with each other. I still have my head in my hands. I don’t want to tell Houston about the skulk of foxes. He’d seen me rebuilding the hutch for my hens, but when he’d questioned me about predators, I had tried my best at casual nonchalance. Fortunately, Houston is genetically self-absorbed, so he probably won’t think to ask me what I’m doing sitting here at dusk getting demolished by the mosquitoes that don’t seem to care for him as he sits here watching them feast on my thin arms.
By way of a greeting, this is what Houston has to say: “You know what I think, Missy? That you been wearing those overalls without washing them for weeks.” I have to admit my surprise that he has noticed my clothing at all. And it’s true, I also have to admit, I only own the one pair of overalls, and they fit easily over long johns and t-shirts or a bulkier sweater on cold days, so who would bother to change? I have one pair of nice jeans, and those I save for going into town.
“Who are you to talk?” I retort, “You always look filthy.”
“But you’re a guuurl. You do know, you’re, like, a girl, right?” Houston asks. I’d outgrown the word “girl” at least a decade ago along with my pigtails. And admittedly, I’d never felt much like one.
I don’t want to tell Houston about the foxes, but this conversation is pretty awkward as well, and my brain pecks at a variety of subjects trying to select an alternate conversation. Unsuccessful at this, I get up from the step and move away from Houston into the grass. Young birch and pine trees surround the clearing where my trailer is parked and beyond them a denser evergreen forest drops down to the water. The air is alive with buzzing, the grass vibrating with a steady hum.
It’s a shotgun he’s dumped at the bottom of the steps. He sees me looking at it.
“I seen some foxes lurking around. I thought I might protect those bony birds of yours by shootin’ one or two of em.”
He knows about the foxes. Damn.
“It’s probably them that got to your birds before, is what I was thinking. That time they were all eaten.”
I didn’t realize Houston had been aware my birds were eaten. I’d been able to buy a handful of chicks from Bill Overman down on the south side of the island, and some fertilized eggs. Two incubators and some tender mothering on my part and a couple weeks after the massacre the pen was full again. Houston hadn’t been by during those weeks, not that I’d known, so the subject never came up.
“Could be, Houston.” I make a point of pronouncing his name “HUE-ston” although that doesn’t seem to ruffle him. “But I like the foxes. Don’t shoot them on my account.”
“Like them?” he scoffs at this, pushing air out his cheeks. “They’re your enemy. They eat your birds, that you seem to love so much!”
I shrug. “But when you think about it, we’re the ones taking over their land. Here I am, holding a bunch of their favorite food captive, dangling it in front of their faces, practically. Who can blame them for taking the bait? And we’re not so different, them and me. We both like to eat partridge.”
“You’re a weird one, you know that? Don’t even know what’s good for you.”
“Hey! You definitely don’t know what’s good for me.” I resist the temptation to reach down and burl a fistful of dirt at him, the way I would a stray dog rooting through the trash. “Isn’t there something you should be doing right now?”
Houston peels his lanky body up off the steps and flings the shotgun back over his shoulder.
“Alright,” he declares, “I can take a hint.” And then he farts, gives a good laugh, and trudges back toward the tree line that separates his property from mine. This is how most of our impromptu hangouts end. I basically kick Houston off my land, back across the fence. And then I usually feel bad about it. He’s not a bad guy. Probably lonely.
Houston and I are both sort of anomalies out here. Most of our neighbors are families that have owned their land for generations. They have a history on this island. They have a community formed in their ancestry. Our properties once held a farmhouse and barn that had been abandoned and derelict for years and then burned in a fire. The great-grandchildren of the original farmers divided the property and sold it in two parcels, first to me and then to Houston. Perhaps we should have been natural comrades because of our status as solitary outsiders. A spark of guilt ignites in me, but I shake it out with a little flailing of the arms.
“Come back later for Crates!” I call after him. If he hears me, he chooses not to reply.
*
One thing Houston and I do together is we play Crazy 8’s. Just some nights when we’re both in the mood. Sometimes we drink sage tea and sometimes we drink whisky. He comes over at dusk, chucks a couple pebbles at the plastic siding of my trailer to announce his presence “In case you aren’t decent.” He never bothers to chuck rocks at my trailer to announce his presence any other time. I could be indecent in the daytime, although I never am.
Houston likes to call the game “Crates” and I don’t know if that’s another name for it or if he just likes the way it sounds. That night when Houston comes back around he brings a bottle of whisky. So I guess he did hear me shout after him. He settles himself at the table in the middle of the trailer and I go into the kitchen nook to grab a couple jelly jars for the whisky. Houston shuffles the cards. He’s already a little drunk. I come back in with the jars and Huston fills them too high with amber liquor. He deals. My mind zeros in on the numbers.
Just a couple games in and Huston starts to talk about his past, his family, something we have up until now had a silent understanding about not doing.
“It’s not that she didn’t love me. Although she did say that, whenever she got mad.” He’s talking about his mother. Talking about how she left him at the grocery store, left him at a neighbor’s house for days, would forget to pick him up from school and he’d end up walking the three miles home. “Even when I was a little thing, five, six.” I resist an impulsive, inappropriate crack, “Oh, you went to school all the way until you were six?” But obviously he’s baring his heart to me and I get the feeling he doesn’t do that often, so I stay quiet and pour more whisky. His mother sounds like she was a few bricks short, if you know what I mean. There’s no mention of a father.
The Crazy 8 tournaments go like this. First one to negative five hundred loses. Seven cards each and Houston has a rule that I can’t count the cards. But by the end I always know what he has in his hand so I pretty much always win. This angers Houston and that’s why he made the rule that I can’t count cards. But there’s no way of enforcing it, so as he tells me about how his mother sometimes started making dinner and then left the house to go buy milk or chicken and just didn’t come back for hours, I figure out that he has a four of hearts, a seven of both spades and clubs, two queens, I’m not sure which, and that there are no more diamonds in the deck. I can’t help the counting, it’s just what my brain does. And anyway when we drink whisky we make up our own rules. It isn’t that I don’t care about what Houston is saying about his past, it’s just that my mind does better processing two things at once, especially if one of them is complex, like the stories erupting out of him. I know that in the morning he either won’t remember what he’s said or that he will feel ashamed and stay away for a few days. I figure, although I like the idea of a few days peace, it’s better if he doesn’t remember.
I pour more whisky in his glass. He looks at it and drops his cards, puts his head down on the table. From around the pool of shadow that halos his head I can see that I was right about the sevens and that the queens were a heart and a club. I can’t tell if Houston’s crying or asleep or just thinking.
A last sip of whisky winks from my glass. I quit drinking it a while ago, but now I slurp it down. I put my cards on the table and for a moment we’re both silent. Which is why I hear the gentle alarm of clucking hens. There’s a scraping sound, metal on metal, and then another one and the cacophony intensifies. Houston shoots up from his stupor, scaring me into shattering my jar on the floor.
“I reckon those mongrels are back,” he says, squinting at the dark window from which the noise is coming. “Damn shame I forgot my shotgun!”
I lunge for the screen door and am out into the night, but I can still hear Houston talking inside the trailer.
Around the corner of the trailer, tiny white feathers fill the air like bits of ash. The gate to the coop is flung open, bent at the corners. Several birds dot the grass below, vermiculated peonies in bloom, stunned, fluffing their petals around them. I see no sign of the foxes. The smack of the screen door, perhaps, or Houston’s yelling gave them fair warning. I begin scooping up birds, counting them, nestling them safely back into the cage. Three missing. Four, but I find her limping off toward the woods, a broken wing and a gash in her leg. That one I bring back toward the trailer, where Houston fills the doorway, looming, scowling into the dark that surrounds us.
“It’s okay, they only got three.” Three. Their signature number. I wipe my nose on a sleeve, placing the wounded bird in the circle of light that falls from the lamp onto the table. It’s warm under that light and the bird shudders, settling in on herself. Her eyelids close in their funny way, from bottom to top, tiny white petals that they are, almost translucent.
I send Houston home after that, and watch from the steps as his drunken form ambles toward the fence, trips over its rotten wood and falls softly sprawling into the tall grass on the other side. He’s a long time getting up and grumbling all the while, and I hope he will have forgotten the whole ordeal by morning.
Inside, the hen remains in her circle of light. I push the forgotten playing cards into a pile and leave them on the edge of the table, sweep up the broken jar with a rag. There’s a shoebox lined with flannel that I keep around for sick or injured birds and I settle the hen inside the box under the lamp before getting into my nook of a bed, clothing and all. Perhaps I should just kill the hen and eat her tomorrow. Although I have no problem killing the partridges for food, something tugs my guts at the thought of killing her. That unsettled feeling follows me to sleep.
*
I have to be in town the following morning and for most of the day. First there’s the market where I sell fresh birds, killed and de-feathered the day before. Then I have a meeting with a partridge breeder on the other side of the island. He’s the only other breeder on the island, but he sells his birds as stock birds for hunting enthusiasts. Do they not see the ridiculousness of taking domestic, captive birds and releasing them into the wild only to chase them around and shoot them down? It seems inhumane to me, to fill them with fear before a needlessly violent death. I’m also of the opinion that fear poisons the meat. Changes the aftertaste to something bitter, acrid, the way one tastes fear at the back of the mouth. But I do not share these thoughts with Bill Overman. We just talk shop: feeding, breeding and prices in town and beyond. The joys of raising galliformes. We both breed gray partridges, good for eating and appropriate game, found in the wild and reasonable in captivity. Bill has to keep his birds flying so they’ll be strong enough to give the hunters a good run for their money. He has a flight pen between the barn and his tool shed.
I sell my birds plucked and pink and ready to cook and yet Bill pulls in twice the money for his. He says he’d tell me I’m a fool and should sell them as game birds but he doesn’t want the competition. This is always followed by a fatherly wink. Bill is probably my closest friend on the island. Only friend. And all we talk about is birds. He’s older, solidly built, bearded, always in quilted plaid with the collar up.
*
The sky silhouettes everything in shades of royal blue by the time I pull the truck onto my road and let it coast along the bumpy driveway. I have left the heat on in the trailer, left the hen under the lamp on the table in her box where she nested contentedly when I left. But I know she’s dead when I let the screen door bang behind me. Not so much as a shudder from the box. Perhaps the shock of the attack was too much for her avian heart, beating too rapidly, overwhelming her delicate bones. On the table next to her box is a note from Houston and a bouquet. The note is almost illegible and before I attempt to decipher it, I turn to the bouquet. Only the bouquet isn’t flowers. It is a crude corsage of fox tails. Nausea rises into my throat at the realization.
I can tell which one belonged to each of my foxes. Valentine’s tail is regal, upright, the hairs at the tip a bright white. Patchka’s tail is fluffy and thick and rounded, each hair darkening into a lovely warm black. Eve’s tail is as serpentine as she was, long and narrow, winding around the other two. The note says only, in a loose scrawl on the back of a receipt, “Got um for ya.”
I am blinking rapidly, tears dotting the table under me, staring and staring at my four dead friends. The oafishness. The carnality. Houston’s probably over there now roasting the skulk over an open fire. But can I blame him for this any more than I could blame the foxes for preying on my partridges? And yet my hands are in fists and the tears keep coming and I am out the door and down the steps. I picture myself flying over the fence into Houston’s field, where I seldom go. I picture myself at a run, “How could you?” I would yell at his shack as it comes into view, a rosy glow from within leaking through the windows and into the tall grass. “How could you?” I would yell again, wanting to fling words at him, meaningful words, about the beauty of the natural world. About loving the predator and the prey.
But I have not made it far beyond the trailer steps when the fight goes out of me. I sink down to the bottom step, planting myself there in a heap. There is the soft coo of partridges. There are the night sounds of the island. And here in my hand the bloody bouquet.
GILLIAN WILEY ROSE lives with her dog somewhere between the Cascades and the Salish Sea. She practices Chinese medicine, dreams up experimental feasts, and sometimes dances on the moon. She has had work published in Cottonwood Review, Denver Quarterly, and Sonora Review, where this piece first appeared.