Dar Oakley had been a player back home, and (he thought) not so bad a one either. The way to play was to pretend no interest, peck around nearby looking elsewhere, but ready to take flight as soon as the shell was dropped. The things the dirt-colored birds dropped were strange to him—black or gray, some like pebbles that seemed to contain nothing, others large and hard that needed a big fall, allowing time for a snatch: like that one just now.
He played it perfectly: the shell of the thing—whatever it was—cracked neatly on the flat rock, bounced once, and came apart, and Dar Oakley was there and had the salty bit and was away before the shrieker was close. It was too fat and sloppy to swallow in flight, and a fragment of shell was stuck to it, he’d have to settle somewhere out of sight—
Dar Oakley sensed more than saw the bird closing on him, not from above but from below—what? Who? Not the original possessor of the shellfish. Its head came into sight near his—a long white head, a bill hooked like a predator’s, it snapped at him as Dar Oakley banked away, evading. Were there birds here that caught and ate other birds? He hadn’t thought so. But this cold-eyed one was certainly big enough. Bill clamped on his morsel, Dar Oakley couldn’t cry threats at it; he dropped low, but so did the other, a strong flier, better than he. He banked, rose, fell. The big bird followed, harrying; when its face came unbearably close to his, Dar Oakley couldn’t help opening his mouth to shriek, losing his bit of breakfast, which the other bird snatched as it fell.
It instantly lost all interest in the Crow, and winged away. Dar Oakley glimpsed its yellow eye, dulled now, job done.
He had been chased out over open water by the robber, and turning back now toward the shore, he saw a band of the red-billed birds on a pillar of rock. They were laughing extravagantly—at him, Dar Oakley was sure.
Skua! they shouted. Skua! Then laughed some more.
Dar Oakley, exhausted, hungry, afraid of the sea below, let himself fall toward those rocks poking out of the waves like People’s towers. He’d seen birds of different kinds ganging together there; why not he? He got a grip on a perch slimy with white droppings, looked around, and laughed himself. Ka ka ka ka! Funny! Fooled me! He tried out the sound they’d made, and the red-bills, delighted, called back: Skua, they cried, and nodded at one another.
It was the first word of their language Dar Oakley learned; Skua, the name of the robber-bird. He’d learn more soon enough.
Skua is what my bird book calls that bird that lives by harrying others into dropping their catches. A Skua will take eggs and baby birds if it can, but what it’s known for is driving close to the head of a Gull or Puffin or other bird, causing it to shriek in fear or anger and lose what it holds. It might be a Norse name—but the red-bills’ own name for it, which Dar Oakley shouted in telling me the story, sounds enough like Skua to my ears that I’ve used it. The next name he learned—the name the birds called themselves—is one I can’t spell out, but I can give the name they have in Ymr: they were Terns. More exactly, they were Arctic Terns, pausing there on their long yearly voyage. The way they live, the story of their life, is as remarkable to me as it was to Dar Oakley learning of it then. It hasn’t changed. And unlike many other stories he’s gathered from here and there, from then and now, from People and from birds and beasts, theirs is true. If it weren’t, Dar Oakley would likely not have come across the sea to here.
He never could learn to tell one Tern from another, and wondered sometimes whether they could tell themselves; or, if they could, whether they cared, whether it mattered to them. Crows flock, Crows gang, but they have freeholds they defend and families they know. The Terns all lived together, flung in a great rippling swathe over the cliffs, calling together, ascending and descending in waves. They thought it was hilarious to have him among them on their whitened rocks, big and black and slow and stupid—for we always think that those who don’t know what we know are stupid.
What is your kind? they asked him, again and again.
Crow, he’d say.
No, no, not you, not you a Crow!
Yes.
A Crow of what kind?
My kind.
Where are your kin, your ones, your others?
Far away.
They laughed and laughed to hear that: far away. They called it to other Terns, and they laughed too. For what could any Crow know of far away?
When he began to learn their language and imitate it, he heard enough to know that they weren’t always here, that this wasn’t their home, only a stop on an immense journey from world’s end to world’s end.
Does the world have an end?
Yes, yes, they cried, oh yes, two ends, one end at each end, the end and the other end. Did you think you could go on forever ever? No, not!
They told Dar Oakley how Terns went from far to far, from one end of the world to the other. From the end they’d come from, all the way to the end to which they went.
They told Dar Oakley that if you go as far as they, you come at last to where billwise ends, and the land of the end of the world is all made of ice. And if you go the other way till the other way ends, a land all ice again.
Why not just stay here? he asked.
No! Too cold, too lean!
Then why go to lands of ice?
They told him—they argued and shrieked so that he could barely understand, much less believe—that in summer the ice lands are warm, and that’s because summer goes down the world day by day until it reaches the farthest lands. Did he know how the sun stays long in the sky in summer, or was he too dull to have noticed? Well, there in the ice lands, in the depths of summer, the days are so long that the sun never sets at all. They believed—though they are never there to see it—that in the days when the sun never sets in the billwise land of ice, it never rises at all at the world’s other end. Always day for Terns! Nice!
Dar Oakley said that such a thing couldn’t be, no matter how big the world was. It couldn’t be.
Oh yes! Great lands to billwise! they cried. Lands darkwise, too, that can’t be crossed, too big. So big a world. And Terns everywhere to tell about it. They laughed to see him baffled. Lifted by their laughter as on the sea-wind, they rose away from him to go to sea and feed, lifting his heart away with them.
It’s the longest seasonal migration in the kingdom of the birds: this I’ve learned. When autumn comes, the Arctic Terns set out from nesting grounds within the Arctic Circle, go out over the islands of the North Atlantic where Dar Oakley encountered them, down along the coast of Africa and out over open sea for a thousand miles to Antarctica, where spring will have just come. The seas are rich with food. There they molt entirely and regrow their plumage. As the days grow shorter in March, they return as they went, and reach the summer lands of the North. There, at the edge of the ice, they lay their eggs in scrape-hole nests on the ground, and when the young are fledged and the days grow short, they all fly south, adults and young, on their circling journey.
Summer does move down across the world, as the Terns told Dar Oakley. And the Terns move with it, and have done so forever.
Once long ago—Dar Oakley only remembered this for the first time there by the sea—he had told an older Crow that one day he, Dar Oakley, would travel so far from his demesne that he would come to a place where no Crows are. And the older bird had told him there was no such place. But there was, and it was more of the world than all the Crows everywhere possessed.