The Once and Future King

Chapter XIV

But there was a growing excitement among the host. The young geese flirted outrageously, or collected in parties to discuss their pilots. They played games also, like children excited at the prospect of a party. One of these games was to stand in a circle, while the young ganders, one after another, walked into the middle of it with their heads stretched out, pretending to hiss. When they were half-way across the circle they would run the last part, flapping their wings. This was to shew how brave they were, and what excellent admirals they would make, when they grew up. Also the strange habit of shaking their bills sideways, which was usual before flight, began to grow upon them. The elders and sages, who knew the migration routes, became uneasy also. They kept a wise eye on the cloud formations, summing up the wind, and the strength of it, and what airt it was coming from. The admirals, heavy with responsibility, paced their quarter-decks with ponderous tread.

‘Why am I restless?’ he asked. ‘Why do I have this feeling in my blood?’

‘Wait and see,’ she said mysteriously. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps, or the day after …’

And her eyes assumed the expression of dreams, a look of far away and long ago.

When the morrow came, there was a difference about the salt marsh and the slob. The ant-like man, who had walked out so patiently every day to his long nets, with the tides fixed firmly in his head, because to make a mistake in them was certain death, heard a far bugle in the sky. He saw no thousands on the mud-flats, and there were none in the pastures from which he had come. He was a nice little man in his way; for he stood still solemnly, and took off his hat. He did this every spring religiously, when the wild geese left him, and every autumn, when he saw the first returning gaggle.

How far is it across the North Sea? In a steamer it takes us two or three days, so many hours of slobbering through the viscous water. But for the geese, for the sailors of the air, for the angled wedges of heaven tearing clouds to tatters, for those singers of the empyrean with the gale behind them – seventy miles an hour behind another seventy – for those mysterious geographers – three miles up, they say – with cumulus for their floor instead of water: what was it for them? One thing it was, and that was joy.

The king had never seen his friends so gleeful. The songs they sang, hour after hour, were mad with it. Some were vulgar, which we shall have to leave for another time, some were sagas beautiful beyond comparison, some were light-hearted to a degree. One silly one which amused him was as follows:

We wander the sky with many a Cronk

And land in the pasture fields with a Plonk.

Hank-hank, Hink-hink, Honk-honk.

Then we bend our necks with a curious kink

Like the bend which the plumher puts under the sink.

Honk-honk, Hank-hank, Hink-hink.

And we feed away in a sociable rank

Tearing the grass with a sideways yank.

Hink-hink, Honk-honk, Hank-hank.

But Hink or Honk we relish the Plonk,

And Honk or Hank we relish the rank,

And Hank or Hink we think it a jink

To Honk or Hank or Hink!

A sentimental one was:

Wild and free, wild and free,

Bring back my gander to me, to me.

While, when they were passing over a rocky island populated by barnacle geese, who all looked like spinsters in black leather gloves, grey toques and jet beads, the entire squadron burst out derisively with:

Branta bernicla sits a-slumming in the slob,

While we go sauntering along.

Glory, glory, here we go, dear.

To the North Pole sauntering along.

But it is no good trying to tell about the beauty. It was just that life was beautiful beyond belief, and that is a kind of joy which has to be lived.

Sometimes, when they came down from the cirrus levels to catch a better wind, they would find themselves among the flocks of cumulus: huge towers of modelled vapour, looking as white as Monday’s washing and as solid as meringues. Perhaps one of these piled-up blossoms of the sky, these snow-white droppings of a gigantic Pegasus, would lie before them several miles away. They would set their course towards it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth; and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed. Then, in a moment of time, they would be in the jewelled world once more: a sea under them like turqoise and all the gorgeous palaces of heaven new created, with the dew of Eden not yet dry.

One of the peaks of the migration came when they passed a rock-cliff of the ocean. There were other peaks, when, for instance, their line of flight was crossed by an Indian file of Bewick swans who were off to Abisko, making a noise as they went like little dogs barking through handkerchiefs, or when they overtook a horned owl plodding manfully along, among the warm feathers of whose back, so they said, a tiny wren was taking her free ride. But the lonely island was the best of all.

For it was a town of birds. They were all hatching, all quarrelling, all friendly nevertheless. On top of the cliff, where the short turf was, there were myriads of puffins busy with their burrows; below them, in Razor-bill Street, the birds were packed so close, and on such narrow ledges, that they had to stand with their backs to the sea, holding tight with long toes; in Guillemot Street, below that, the guillemots held their sharp, toylike faces upwards, as thrushes do when hatching; lowest of all, there were the Kittiwake Slums. And all the birds – who, like humans, only laid one egg each – were jammed so tight that their heads were interlaced: had so little of this famous living-space of ours that, when a new bird insisted upon landing at a ledge which was already full, one of the other birds had to tumble off. Yet they were all in such good humour, all so cheerful and cockneyfied and teasing one another! They were like an innumerable crowd of fish-wives on the largest grandstand in the world, breaking out into private disputes, eating out of paper bags, chipping the referee, singing comic songs, admonishing their children and complaining of their husbands. ‘Move over a bit, auntie,’ they said, or ‘Shove along, grandma’; ‘There’s that Flossie gone and sat on the shrimps’; ‘Put the toffee in your pocket, dearie, and blow yer nose’; ‘Lawks, if it isn’t Uncle Albert with the beer’; ‘Any room for a little ’un?’; ‘There goes Aunt Emma, fallen off the ledge’; ‘Is me hat on straight?’; ‘Crikey, if this isn’t arf a do!’

They kept more or less to their own kind, but they were not mean about it. Here and there, in Guillemot Street, there would be an obstinate kittiwake sitting on a projection and determined to have her rights. Perhaps there were half a million of them, and the noise they made was deafening.

The king could not help wondering how a human town of mixed races would get on, in such conditions.

Then there were the fiords and islands of Norway. It was about one of these islands, by the way, that the great W. H. Hudson related a true goose-story which is liable to make one think. There was a coastal farmer, he tells us, whose islands suffered under a nuisance of foxes; so he set up a fox-trap on one of them. When he visited the trap the next day, he found that an old wild goose had been caught in it, obviously a Grand Admiral, because of his toughness and his heavy bars. This farmer took the goose home alive, pinioned it, bound up its leg, and turned it out with his own ducks and poultry in the farmyard. Now one of the effects of the fox plague was that the farmer had to lock his hen-house at night. He used to go round in the evening to drive them in, and then he would lock the door. After a time, he began to notice a curious circumstance, which was that the hens, instead of having to be collected, would be found waiting for him in the hut. He watched the process one evening, and discovered that the old wild goose had taken upon himself the responsibility which he had with his own intelligence observed. Every night at locking-up time, the sagacious old admiral would round up his domestic comrades, whose leadership he had assumed, and would prudently assemble them in the proper place by his own efforts, as if he had fully understood the situation. Nor did the free wild geese, his some-time followers, ever again settle on the other island – previously a haunt of theirs – from which their judicious captain had been spirited away.

Last of all, beyond the islands, there was the landing at their first day’s destination. Oh, the whiffling of delight and self-congratulation! They tumbled down out of the sky, side-slipping, stunting, even doing spinning nose-dives. They were terrifically proud of themselves and of their pilot, agog for the family pleasures which were in store.

They planed for the last part on down-curved wings. At the last moment they scooped the wind with them, flapping them vigorously. Next, bump, they were on the ground. They held their wings above their heads for a moment, then folded them up with a quick and pretty neatness. They had crossed the North Sea.