The Cormorant

by Stephen Gregory

  Archie waddled out into the yard. It was a cold, clean afternoon, lit by a watery sun. The sky was blue and empty of gulls. I left the rope slack, and the bird stalked into the garden, pushing its head among the long grass. It glanced up at the sky and shook out its wings, but it folded them again carefully, pushing away a few feathers with the preening of its beak. I allowed Archie to lead me further from the cage, towards the stream which ran past the foot of the garden. At the sight of the water, the cormorant increased its pace. There it stood on a slippery boulder and watched the tumbling brook. In a calmer pool, it trod boldly down and floated like a duck, paddling its feet to maintain position in the current. It put its head under the water and tugged at the weed. The stream brought along a clustered spawn of bubbles, leaves from the oak and ash which lined the water, twigs and acorns which the bird inspected and sieved with its inquisitive bill. Archie floated low in the current, the water ran across its back like mercury. The bird relaxed and filled itself with the half-remembered rhythm of tides.

  I sat down on a dry boulder a little way upstream and wound the rope a few times around my wrist, allowing a little slack so that Archie could move about the slower pool and venture into the swifter currents.

  I thought about Uncle Ian: a grey, anonymous man, embedded in a grey, anonymous school, a man whose features I had never really noticed. We had met so seldom, usually at a graveside, with our carefully polished shoes side by side in the soil, hearing the customary graveside words and the drumming of earth on a coffin of new wood. I knew little about him. He had been a teacher, but his heart was never in it; he was irritable with his boys and curt with the other members of staff. He had never married. He must have spent the long evenings after school in his musty flat, just a hundred yards from the Channel coast, where the spray spattered the window frames until orange tears of rust stained the building, where the salt gathered like frost on the panes of glass. In the holidays, he rubbed and painted the boat on the mudflats behind Denton island. When the rain came or it was too cold to work, he would sit alone inside the cabin, with his cigars and a bottle of beer. The swans came and demanded feeding, soaking the crusts of a sandwich in the water of a tidal pool before drawing them down and down the emaciated columns of their necks. He might flick them the butt of a cigar and watch them recoil, nauseated. It was Ian’s little joke. And in his final year, he had the cormorant to occupy him over a bitter Sussex winter. Whatever love he had stored up and barely touched in the recesses of his soul, he must have spent on the bird. He restored it to rude health. Somewhere within Uncle Ian, under the greyness of his disappointments, behind his gruff and apparently wilful gracelessness, there must have been a reservoir of love, as good as new, never sullied by the pitfalls of human companionship. The one time he had reached into this untapped fund, the cormorant had answered with such passionate kisses as tore away the flesh of his cheeks, his lips, his gums. The fresh soil had rained also on the wood of Ian’s coffin. I was at the graveside, with my shoes in mud. The rain trickled into the sparse hairs of my beard and poppled my glasses. My hands shook with the cold until I felt for the warmth of

  Ann’s fingers. Uncle Ian had thought of us in his last few months. Archie had come from Sussex to the mountains of Wales, like an orphan, lost and hurt in the company of strangers. It was a strange gift. Ours was a bizarre duty.

  The roar of a low-flying jet broke the peace of the autumn afternoon. At the buffeting noise, the cormorant sprang from the water as though an electric charge had been passed through it, landing on the grassy bank of the stream in a disarray of wet feathers. For a moment, Archie scrabbled to get a foothold and lay on its breast, unable to find a purchase with its unsuitable feet. The jet howled on its way and left behind a thunder of bruised air. The bird stood up. It blinked and came at me like a farmyard gander, the head held low, the beak agape, hissing. For Archie, the breach of its calm in the cold pool must be attributed to the presence of a man: the noise was a man-noise and the man was a threat. I jumped to my feet and retreated before the determined bird, cracking the length of rope and sending a loop like a wave along it, which finally snapped against the cormorant’s belly. This, and the size of the green wellingtons, was too much for Archie; backing off, it began to shake itself. A shower of icy water flew from its slick black plumage. I tugged the bird towards the wire cage. Again, it was a simple task to lure Archie into captivity with the replenished plate of cat food. Leaving the line attached to the bird’s ankle for future use, tying it through the mesh onto the kitchen drainpipe, I securely closed the hatch. Archie was back in the cage and no damage was done. I looked forward to telling Ann when she came in from work.

  It became increasingly easier to take Archie into the garden and down to the stream for his afternoon exercise. I enjoyed the hours I spent with the cormorant, and the bird began to treat me as though I were an acceptable part of its environment. I sat with my boots in the water and felt the teeth of the cold gnawing on my toes, through my feet and into my ankles. It was a marvel that Archie was content to float there, half submerged, to explore the depth of its pool without being affected by the temperature. At night, the bird returned to the white wooden crate in which it had been delivered, snuggling down into the pit of straw. There was once a visit from the executor of the will, one of my cousins. He was a suave young executive, disappointed not to have benefited under the will; it was quite clear that he would have been glad to find either that the cormorant was being neglected by the fortunate couple who had inherited the cottage or that the bird was proving to be a really intolerable addition to our family. In fact, he saw that Archie was thriving, growing into a sleek and haughty creature. Our routine had comfortably accommodated the bird. We did not mention the uproar caused by Archie’s first emergence from the box, nor the congregation of gulls. I smiled behind my hands to see the cormorant on its best behaviour: it lunged like a wild cat at the man in the city suit when he put out a hand to inspect the cage; it hung on the wire in a spasm of rage. As a peace offering to the astonished visitor, a steaming pellet was delivered after a second’s laboured retching, and a squirt of shit nearly reached the city shoes. Archie was on top form. I winked at Ann, who was watching from the kitchen window, but she turned away, rolling her eyes at the ceiling.

  The weeks passed. Autumn in the mountains, with its scent of pine resin and the damp decay of oak leaves, changed to winter. The air clenched its fists. There was a period of dry, crackling cold. Morning was a silent world of frost, when each clump of bracken was as brittle as glass, as sharp as a razor. In the afternoon, the sky turned darker quickly, discolouring like an old bruise. The cormorant waited in the corners of its cage, waited as though its bones would crack under the strain of the creaking frost. I piled up the straw and the bird sought refuge in it. I was tempted to stay inside and play with Harry, who was beginning to walk a few tottering steps. Ann came in each evening, and her kisses were the kisses of ice: her cheeks, her nose and even her metallic tongue were beaded with ice. We heaped up the grate with more coal and more logs as the night outside squeezed the cottage. Before it was bedtime, the little boy was encouraged to walk up and down the length of the hearth rug, collapsing at the end of each successful journey into the arms of his mother. But his concentration was sometimes broken by the crackling of the logs. He whirled round at the explosion of sparks and put up a hand to the smoke which was blown back down the chimney. Then he would sit down heavily, bemused by the fire. I had to lift him away from it, as his fingers went out in the direction of the flames. There was something more than a child’s ordinary attraction to the fire: Harry’s face became clouded over, he was lost to us for a second or two.

  The time came to take the bird out with me on my searches for firewood. I set up a partition in the back of the van, as the owners of dogs have for their pets, and drew the cormorant along on its leash before urging it, with a threatening movement of the boot, to hop up into the vehicle. Again, it was wonderful how easy it was to manoeuv
re Archie with the help of a plateful of cat food as the persuasive factor; apparently, it would sublimate any other desire to the call of its appetite. With the bird ensconced in the back, I drove down the Caernarfon road towards the coast. There were looks of dismay from the drivers of following cars as Archie flattened itself against the rear window, wings outspread, the mighty sea-crow raging against captivity. Stopping near the castle, I opened up the car and tugged out the cormorant, which collapsed at first on its chest in the puddles of the harbour car park. I led the bird firmly across the swing bridge, keeping it close to my green boots and shouting in advance to warn away curious pedestrians. Children, especially, evinced an extraordinary desire to offer themselves as targets for Archie’s beak: there was something in the whiteness of their hands and the chubby legs of toddlers which brought a glint to the cormorant’s eye. By the time we reached the beach, we had attracted a small but enthusiastic following. But there, among the seaweed and the rock pools, with the authentic smell of the sea, the salt in every sniff of the air, Archie was oblivious to its admirers. The bird went to the end of the rope and stretched itself until the sinews sang. It opened up the wings like the remains of an ancient gamp, buffeted the breeze from the Menai Straits. Archie croaked. It sent up a flock of oyster-catchers in a whirling cloud of black and white. The cormorant croaked again and conjured a fragile mist of dunlin. The old heron beat away towards the flatter beaches of Anglesey, a pair of crows set off to their place on the walls of the castle. Untangling the entire length of rope, I attached the other end to the weathered wood of the groyne. The cormorant was afloat in a matter of seconds, moving from the beach like a semi-submerged submarine, dark and sleek. I gathered armfuls of driftwood. Archie dived and surfaced with dabs from the sandy floors of the straits, its hunting instinct revived. The aching cold crept into another November afternoon, twilight fell over the shoulders of the castle and settled on the black water. Lights sprang up like fireflies all over the old town. I took the wood back to the car and returned for Archie. It was easy to draw the bird into the shore and over the seaweed-slippery rocks of the beach. Archie was tired. It lay in the back of the van, burrowed into the straw, barely moving as I drove from Caernarfon into the mountains of Snowdon. Full of dabs and sea air, the cormorant tumbled into its wooden crate, disappeared among the warm bedding. The driftwood was laid to dry in a basket in front of the hearth, breathing out the fumes of seaweed.

  Many times, we spent the hours of the winter

  afternoons among the boulders of the beach. The cormorant learned to follow me, in pursuit of the green wellingtons. The rope remained around Archie’s ankle, but it seemed, on those evenings when the scent of wood fires from seaside cottages mingled with the sweat of the falling tide, that the bird knew the value of staying close, as it had stayed close to Uncle Ian even as a dead man.

  There was firewood to be found, too, in the sheds of the mouldering old slate quarries of Nantlle. Here the bird could indulge another of its predatory instincts. I took Archie up to the mines one dismal day at the end of November. When the cormorant baulked at the bottom of the slate steps which climbed to the abandoned workings, I bent without thinking and picked it up under one arm. It was strange, I thought, I had never touched the bird before, always avoiding contact, always manoeuvring it with tugs of the rope or gestures of the boot. This time, Archie submitted to me and sat still in the crook of my arm as I walked up and up the grey slabs which wound between heaps of discarded shards. In a few minutes, we were a hundred feet above the village. From this vantage point, I could see up the valley towards the summit of Snowdon, smothered in its own private blanket of drizzle. On the lake, a flock of gulls was sprinkled like the ash of a forgotten cigarette. To the north, the sea spangled under a patch of sunlight. I put Archie on the ground again and led it over the miners’ track to the empty buildings of the quarry. The place had been deserted by its community for thirty years. It was peopled by the gentle ghosts of the village. In the sheds and the offices were the ordinary relics of the miners: a rusty kettle in a back kitchen; the china cups and saucers of innumerable tea-breaks; the skeleton of a typewriter, with a sheet of yellowing paper in place, as though its owner had been called away from beginning his letter; pencils and rotten elastic bands in the offices; abandoned tools in the warehouses, some with the initials of the owners marked in the wooden handles; the manager’s telephone on his desk, black and ugly as a charred bone. The rain through the roof had rotted the floorboards. Jackdaws had stubbornly dropped their twigs into the chimneys, persisting in their folly until the debris filled up the grates and overflowed onto the planks. I tiptoed through the empty rooms. Plaster blew from the walls, as fine as flour. Somewhere a door was banging in the wind, hammering its irregular beat, the ghost of an obsolete miner. A rat fled along the corridor.

  And it was the rats which sent a shudder of excitement through the cormorant. Archie bristled like a tom cat, clattered to the end of the rope. The bird flapped its wings and croaked the sea-crow threats. So I tied the leash to a window-frame in order to allow Archie plenty of scope for hunting, while I set to work collecting firewood, the splinters of abandoned pallets, old boards which I could split with my hatchet. In the next room, I could hear the patter of the cormorant’s feet on the floor, its manic cries. I went to the door to watch. It was only a game, it seemed, for the rat which emerged from the skirting was big and brave. Archie had no intention of closing with it. The rat stood on its hind legs, like a pocket grizzly bear, swayed and snickered. The cormorant beat the air with its wings, sending up a cloud of dust. The rat and the cormorant continued their threatening displays until honour was satisfied, and the rat slid back into the darkness. Archie rearranged a few dishevelled feathers. But the bird was curious, it trembled with the thrill of the confrontation and went from room to room as far as the rope would allow, hissing at the holes in the skirting boards. The rats were a challenge. They made the dabs seem tame.

  In spite of my growing confidence with Archie, Ann maintained a wary distance. She wanted nothing to do with the bird, leaving its cleaning and feeding and exercise entirely in my hands. Harry could now walk steadily around the house and showed a lively curiosity in any ornaments, books, pots and pans which his stubby fingers could reach. Ann was forever impressing on me the importance of keeping the boy away from the cormorant. Just because it consented to being stroked and even occasionally being picked up by its guardian did not mean that it would respect the tender little toddler. I knew this, I had seen Archie accelerate to the end of its leash in pursuit of small children on the beach at Caernarfon. Whenever the boy went into the garden, I had to manhandle him, struggling, away from the cormorant’s cage. Harry would learn, we hoped, to count the big black bird among the hazards of his baffling new world, but for the time being he headed straight towards the cage at the slightest opportunity. And at such moments, the child’s face became clouded over, his features seemed blurred in the overwhelming desire to reach out for the cormorant. Harry’s chuckles were ugly as I swung him back into the kitchen, chuckles which were answered by the rasping cries of Archie.

  Ann invited a number of her new friends from the village to see the cottage and the baby. Whenever I had the chance, sometimes to Ann’s obvious irritation, I would proudly mention our unusual pet, and in the backyard our visitors might manage an outburst of appalled laughter at the sight of Archie. So that was the cormorant, a bird like a caricature of goose and crow, the likes of which Ann’s friends had never ever seen, even on the screens of their televisions. It was mischievous, I knew, but I told Ann that the creature was a permanent feature of our life in the village and it did no harm to show it to the neighbours. I did not meet people so easily. I was either bent over the typewriter, feeding Harry in Ann’s absence, or out in the van with Archie. To the neighbours, I must have seemed rather an outlandish figure. They heard the clacking of the typewriter even through the thick walls of the terrace. Over the garden fence, I would be seen with th
e hose, directing the spray onto the droppings which spattered the slates. They would hear me sometimes talking to the bird, swearing loudly at the tangle of rope, they saw me emerge from the cottage with my ragged pet and lift it by the neck into the back of the van. Children and cats were warned not to stray into the Englishman’s garden. Only the gulls dropped down and cried into the face of the creature in its cage. I realised how odd all this must seem and smiled at the apparent eccentricity. I knew that I was only an escaping schoolteacher who had run from the routine of the suburban Midlands to bash out another ordinary textbook. But meanwhile I would enjoy my role as the man with the cormorant. Archie watched me with an enigmatic eye.

  In the afternoons, when Ann’s visitors were her young friends from the pub kitchen, who would come for endless cups of tea and the comparisons of different brands of baby foods, I excused myself and went out with the bird. There was ratting to be done in the quarry offices, firewood to be gleaned from the seashore. The women raised their eyebrows and shrank to the corners of the room as I came through from the yard with Archie under my arm. The cormorant obliged with a snaking of its neck, the issue of fish breath. Usually I could make it through the front door before Archie lifted the stiff feathers of its tail and shot the shit onto the pavement. The women squealed and put their hands to their faces. And then, at last, we could drive away in the peace of the little humming van, into the plantations for easy pickings of pine splinters, or towards the coast. Now Archie could be trusted to sit in the passenger seat beside me. The bird peered through the windscreen. It thrust its head into the slipstream and sucked in the rushing cold air. I always slowed down drastically when we were passing a cyclist, to give him or her the full benefit of seeing the jabbing face of the cormorant at close quarters. There was once the pleasure of unseating an elderly gentleman, who bellowed in horror before toppling from his bicycle into a bed of nettles. Archie and I laughed all the way to Caernarfon. Horses and dogs were also fair game. Archie beat its wings at the window, the great sea-crow on the way to its hunting ground. Any other beasts, on four legs or two, were best to quail before the cormorant. Only I could approach Archie without its frenzied threats.