The Cormorant

by Stephen Gregory

  I took the bird to the quarries at Nantlle that afternoon, for its first taste of real freedom. Perhaps I should admit that I was looking forward to the two weeks on my own, to see what could be made of the cormorant. The quarries would be better than the beaches for the initial attempt at giving Archie its head: there would be no distracting people. I carried it up the winding staircase of slate and deposited it on the grassy track on top of the grey mountain. On the way, Archie had waved its bill uncharacteristically close to my face, so I was relieved to put the bird down. I was nervous, and possibly my apprehension was transmitted to Archie. When I bent to untie the slip knot from around the cormorant’s ankle, it snaked at my hands, reddening the skin with a nudge of the beak. There was no blood drawn, but an aching contact of bone on bone, the sort of dazzling pain which is felt from a blow on the fleshless surface of the shin. I swore, put up my arm to fend off the bird’s face, stood up and stepped smartly aside when the knot was free, seething and rubbing my fist. Very angry, I strode away towards the empty buildings. As I coiled up the rope, I walked and listened for the sound of the pursuing bird. Archie stretched the tattered wings before springing along behind me. When I turned to look, the cormorant was coming, calling breathlessly lest it lose sight of the green wellingtons.

  I went from room to room with my hatchet, determined to behave as though there was no bird. I worked at the floorboards and skirting, carting it back to the manager’s office where the telephone sat in one corner. There, I chopped the wood into smaller pieces suitable for kindling and easily packed for the return trip down the steps. I had a rucksack which I filled with the fuel. Deliberately shutting out any thought of Archie, I concentrated on the job until I had amassed enough wood to make the expedition worthwhile. The light was fading fast. In the shattered old buildings, the gloom fell like a curtain of purple velvet. There was no sound of the cormorant. I stood still and listened. Somewhere, a door was banging in the wind. A few twigs fell into the grate, the ruin of a jackdaw’s nest. Otherwise, there was silence.

  Taking up the rucksack and the length of washing-line, I went out of the manager’s office and into a long corridor which gave onto a number of other doors. Now it was very dark. It was a mistake to work too long and mistime the passage of dusk in the December afternoon. I wished I had brought a torch with me, but felt that I knew my way around the abandoned building. Stopping sometimes to listen, I stepped slowly from room to room. With the rucksack on my back, I could feel with both hands at the frames of the doorways, find my way into each little office or kitchen. I instinctively ducked to avoid hitting my head on any sagging lintel, calling softly for the bird and clicking my fingers. A rat sent up the dust from an empty room. It was silent again. But when I felt another rat brush past my legs, scrabbling with its feet to get a purchase on the smoothness of my wellingtons, I must have jumped in alarm. I heard my own voice cry out sharply just before I cracked the top of my head on a jutting slate. The darkness was filled with an explosion of shooting stars. Both hands went to my skull, the fingers feeling for blood. A prodigious pain …

  And outside, among the rusted wheels of the quarry, the mounds of unwanted slate, only the second-hand luminosity of the street lights in the village below gave any definition to the relics of the mine. A breeze moved the heads of the dry nettles. The willowherb trembled.

  I stood still in the enveloping shadows, waited for the fireworks in my head to subside.

  And then there was a sound.

  From along the corridor, the tread of footsteps.

  ‘Archie?’

  Something shifted the remains of a rotten floorboard, back in the manager’s office which I had left behind. My head throbbed and another flare went off before my eyeballs. I turned carefully and faced along the corridor.

  ‘Archie? Come on, Archie … come on …’

  I strained to see into the gloom. Something was moving towards me, picking its way among the debris. Not the pattering of rats, a weightier tread, irregular and halting over the uneven floor, working its way closer and closer.

  ‘That’s it, Archie … come on . . I hissed into the shadows.

  And the footsteps came on.

  Heavier and heavier, crushing the dried-up splinters, scuffing the layers of dust. Louder and louder, the footsteps increased their pressure and volume somewhere within the spangled recesses of my skull. Involuntarily, as they bore down the corridor, I screwed my eyes tightly shut, saw another shooting star blaze across the darkness, and I stepped to one side …

  The footsteps went past me, slowly, inevitably, over the rubble of plaster, along the corridor, fading and fading until once more there was only a rumbling, electric silence.

  I remained still. I was frozen in stillness.

  Until the cormorant cried from the yard outside.

  I shuddered myself awake and burst from the building. There was Archie, shaking a cloud of dust from its wings.

  I breathed deeply the freshness of the night. I sucked in the cold air. I gulped and sucked and gasped, to erase from my nostrils the clinging scent of a dead cigar.

  From that time, there was no question that Archie could be trusted to follow me without the leash.

  I stumbled past the bird and along the rough, grassy track to the top of the flight of slate steps. Down I went in the treacherous darkness, down the steps as quickly as possible without waiting or turning for the cormorant. At the bottom, I tore the rucksack from my back, flinging it with the hatchet into the van, and I leapt into the driver’s seat. My hands on the steering wheel were moist and clenched; the knuckles stood up white in the glare of the street lamps. There was no traffic through the village, nobody walking the pavements. I sat in the van under the orange lights. Above me there loomed the mountain of slate, tufted with the feathery silhouettes of rowan. In the daylight, a colony of herring gulls scavenged there. Now, in the wet blackness, it was silent and still. I breathed deeply and studied the backs of my hands, the dust from the quarry offices, the sweat of my race down to the van, the wounds inflicted by Archie. The crown of my head was thudding.

  The village slept.

  And then the tapping on the door.

  Bone against metal. The cormorant was there on the pavement, ringing its beak on the van door. Before I could get out and open up the back (for I did not want to share the cab with the bird), Archie was working to a panic of impatience. It beat the black wings. It reared up, goose-like, to rap on the window. Hoarse cries clanged along the empty street as the bird threw its tantrum. So I waited. I would not jump to attention for Archie, like a flunky, opening the doors of the car like a liveried chauffeur. Until a few lights began to appear in the upstairs rooms and porches of the terraced cottages, I waited and allowed the cormorant to exhaust its anger. Or was it afraid? Ashamed of my own retreat from the quarry, my overwhelming urge to reach the security of the van, I got out. As soon as the back doors were opened, Archie sprang up and folded its wings. We drove back, over the winding road from Nantlle, and stopped outside the cottage. Archie went unhesitatingly to the white crate, once I had attached the line to its ankle again. This time, the bird stood still, it allowed my hands on its feet, ignored my face close to its own. There was no threatening gesture of the beak. Archie disappeared into the box with a few seconds’ shuffling and the rearranging of its angular limbs.

  I too slept.

  Without doubt, Archie was dependent on me. The length of rope was not necessary on our expeditions. For the first time, the cormorant swam free on the Menai Straits as I collected wood on the shore. It set off from the beach in determined fashion, as though late for an appointment, swimming low in the water, the beak tilted slightly upwards. Away from the land, it began to dive, shooting smoothly from the surface, clear of the water for a split-second, before vanishing without a ripple. Thirty seconds later, I saw the bird reappear. Through my binoculars, I watched the struggle with the dabs, the manner in which Archie tossed them this way and that before it was ready to begin swa
llowing. Then the working of the throat. Eels were brought writhing to the surface. They coiled themselves around the cormorant’s bill, defying it to lure them into the rapacious gullet. A big eel wound itself with the snake-neck of its attacker, and Archie was forced to dive again to get free of its sinuous opponent. I watched and I gathered fuel. I trod among the seaweed-slippery rocks, the litter of dead crabs. Lights came on along the further shore of Anglesey. So I sat and saw the sun go down behind the trees of Newborough warren, the gulls rising from the dunes. Behind me, the castle was no longer floodlit in the evenings, for all the tourists had gone. It rose like a boulder from the harbour side, alive with the roosting of jackdaws and starlings, the hysterical laughter of gulls. They too became quiet. Archie came up on the beach, suddenly clumsy on the stones in comparison with its effortless diving, stumbling towards me through the twilit cold. It was holding something in its beak. Together we returned to the van. I put down my collection of wood.

  ‘What is it, Archie? What’ve you got?’

  The bird waddled forward and held up its bill to me. I instinctively withdrew my hands. In the halflight, I could not be sure what Archie was carrying, and I would never really trust the hooked beak. Archie craned forward again and put down a fish by my green wellingtons. It was a dab, still alive and convulsing, its gristly body arched with cramp. I bent to pick it up.

  ‘Thank you, Archie. Thank you very much.’

  All the way home, the fish kicked on the floor of the van. Archie stood on the passenger’s seat, watched the hedgerows lit in the headlamps, the trees which fled from the passing of the car. It blinked at the lights of oncoming traffic. Once again the vehicle smelt of the bird. There was weed on the mats, the slime of eels on the windows. Archie left its signature in shit on the upholstery.

  And in the house, only the second time since its arrival in the white wooden crate, Archie came into the living-room. I banked up the fire. I was still cold from the seashore, my feet ached when I took off my boots. The lights of the Christmas tree sparkled in their corner, the flames from the dry and salty log spat upwards to the chimney. Archie stood before the fire, its wings held out a little way from its chest, not stretching them, but draping them out like a fashion model in a Parisian cloak. I put down newspapers to avoid having stains on the rug. But the cormorant slept in the warmth, still standing, its wings mantled and its head turned downwards onto its breast. It slept, while the room was filled with the scents of the Straits. A little steam arose from its plumage and from my thick, woollen socks. My own head began to nod. In the warm room, Archie and I were asleep.

  When I awoke, the cormorant was no longer there. I sprang up and shouted, shivering suddenly from the memory of a dream and glancing at the dying fire. I must have been asleep for hours. In my dream, there had been a frantic pursuit down the slippery staircase of the quarry: something, some grey presence was behind me, there were heavy, relentless footsteps, the whiff of smoke in the dark air … But then I was awake, trembling a little in my stockinged feet before the embers in the grate. And Archie had vanished.

  Again I heard my voice cry out. The bird appeared at the doorway from the kitchen. It had retrieved the dab which it had given to me on the harbour front at Caernarfon, and which I had subsequently wrapped in paper and put in the dustbin. Archie came into the room to meet me, with the fish held in its beak.

  ‘What the hell have you got there? Here, give it to me, let’s put it back in the bin. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but . .

  The cormorant allowed me to take the dab, followed me through the kitchen and into the backyard. In its search for the fish among the other rubbish, Archie had strewn the yard with pieces of paper, the broken sections of cardboard boxes, discarded vegetables.

  ‘Bloody hell, Archie . .

  I stooped to recover the debris. This time, I put the dead fish at the very bottom of the dustbin. But the bird’s determination to offer its prize to me had given me an idea. We returned to the front room. I closed the door to the kitchen and resuscitated the fire with more logs. Some gentle music on the radio, the twinkle of the lights on the Christmas tree; the black cormorant, sea-scented, staring into the flames.

  ‘Here, Archie, have a look at this …’

  The bird snapped from its daydream, drawing its eyes from the golden caverns of the burning logs. It turned its face to me, numb from the heat. I had found the little collar which Ann had once bought for the cat, a flimsy thong just strong enough for a kitten. Sitting on the edge of the sofa, I reached out for the cormorant and put the collar around its neck, adjusting it to the diameter of the bird’s throat and marking the leather with my thumbnail. With scissors, I made a couple of new holes in the collar and tried it again. Archie was submissive in my hands, mesmerised by the fire, standing still with wings relaxed, like a gentleman being measured by his tailor. The collar fitted snugly, neither too tight for Archie to swallow nor slack enough to slip downwards. The cormorant craned to reach it with its beak, but could not. It brought up one foot and scratched vigorously at the collar for a few moments. Then it turned once more to its scrutiny of the fire, stunned by the flames. The bird forgot the collar, as it had forgotten the cat which had worn it.

  And that left a week for fishing, a week before Ann would be back with Harry. I had to go into Caernarfon to do all the Christmas shopping, and I took Archie on every trip. There were presents to buy, food and drink. I left the cormorant in the van while I went from shop to shop, wanting Ann to be pleased when she came back, impressed that I had made such an effort to prepare for Christmas instead of tinkering at the typewriter or playing with the wretched bird. I found a special gift for her, a slender gold necklace with a dangling butterfly which would flutter prettily at her throat. And a sackful of presents for Harry, things which clanked and whistled and chimed, things to occupy his mischievous fingers and distract them from the ornaments on the mantelpiece. I queued in the off-licence, wrote a disconcertingly big cheque, staggered out with my burden of Christmas spirit. Meat and vegetables, fruit and dates and nuts: more cardboard boxes to squeeze into the van. Each time I returned, Archie battered at the windscreen. It tried to spring from the van but I forced it back. As usual, people stopped to stare, aghast at the big bird beating the windows of the little car. I smiled at the spectators and answered their questions politely: no, it wasn’t a goose; yes, it was quite tame but don’t go too close; it was a cormorant, but no, sir, I didn’t have a licence … until the shopping was done for the day. Then I changed into the green wellingtons, put on my waterproof jacket, took out the length of rope and attached it to Archie’s ankle. The leather collar was in place around the bird’s throat. Keeping the cormorant close to my feet, I led it over the swing bridge, along the sea front away from the castle, and dropped down to the stony beach. A few people paused in their walking to watch me and the bird. I let the bird have more slack on the rope, went to the water’s edge. The tide was coming in over the sand flats, creeping into the channels of the estuary, licking with its creamy tongue at all the dry clumps of weed, the salt-encrusted rocks. It was midday, mid-December, with more of a bite in the air, a taste of frost. It would be colder soon, the sky was bruised. The cormorant stepped gingerly through the high-water line of seaweed, bottles, whitened spars, and came to the sea. The line was secure, the collar too. Archie floated out, miraculously transformed from the clumsy goose to a purposeful, menacing submarine. I paid out the rope and the bird began to fish.

  ‘Go on, Archie. Get busy …’

  The cormorant dived. For half a minute, there was nothing but the secret trembling of the rope in my hands. Somewhere in the brown water, decked in silver bubbles, with a stream of mercury pouring from the horny bill, the bird jinked and swerved in pursuit of fish. Using wings and feet as power, flying through the water, Archie was hunting. Before the shriek of the jets had ever shaken the sky over the Straits, before the churning of sand by the propellers of fishing boats, long before the first arrows sped around th
e battlements of the castle, Archie had been twisting through the tides of the estuary. The dabs fled, as they always fled, raising up the puffs of sand. Eels wriggled in the hope of reaching the safety of deeper water, they flashed a little grey metal and made for the shadows. In the air, the black-headed gulls circled petulantly and wondered at the world of the rumbling depths. Oyster-catchers whistled among the boulders of the shore. A pair of crows went overhead to the further land, to search the pools for the crusts of a cuttlefish. The jackdaws ate chips and crumbs in the castle courtyard. Archie was lost to the open air of the Menai Straits, connected to my hands by the twitching rope. I waited and watched the sea for the reappearance of the cormorant.

  And when the narrow, black head surfaced, it was gripping the slimy sides of a dab. I saw its flatness, the size of a child’s hand. Archie was fighting the fish, wrestling it, manoeuvring it, to bring it round to face the entrance of the throat. I drew in the line, very slowly. Archie continued to juggle the dab, while I took in the line and the bird was pulled towards the beach. Quicker and quicker, and the cormorant approached the shallow water. I went in to the top of my boots, winding the rope around my arm until I could reach forward and seize the bird firmly by the neck. Still Archie was preoccupied with the dab; it seemed oblivious to the rope around its ankle, even to the grip of my hand. The collar constricted its throat just enough to prevent the fish from sliding down. I dumped Archie on the beach and snatched the dab from between its jaws. By the time the bemused bird had found its bearings, peering round at me and again at the water, the fish was in the pocket of my jacket.

  ‘Good lad, Archie, you daft bird! Go on, try again. There are lots more out there …’

  Casting a glance at the movement of my jacket pocket, the bird turned back towards the sea and paddled away. I paid out the rope with one hand and felt for the writhing fish with the other. From behind me, on the sea wall, there came a little dry applause, some spectator impressed by my feat. I did not look round, being busy with the tangles of line in the rocks and about my boots, but I managed to take the dab from my pocket and wave it in the air above my head. The clapping became brisker, slowed down and stopped. The fish went into the bag which I had brought with me. By the time I turned to the sea wall, there was no-one there watching, only a few children cycling by.