"I'll walk with her to the 'bus," he said, "I don't go to the farm today."
And while the child was washing in the scullery he said to his wife, "Keep all the windows closed, and the doors too. Just to be on the safe side. I'll go to the farm. Find out if they heard anything in the night." Then he walked with his small daughter up the lane. She seemed to have forgotten her experience of the night before. She danced ahead of him, chasing the leaves, her face whipped with the cold and rosy under the pixie hood.
"Is it going to snow, Dad?" she said. "It's cold enough."
He glanced up at the bleak sky, felt the wind tear at his shoulders.
"No," he said, "it's not going to snow. This is a black winter, not a white one."
All the while he searched the hedgerows for the birds, glanced over the top of them to the fields beyond, looked to the small wood above the farm where the rooks and jackdaws gathered. He saw none.
The other children waited by the 'bus stop, muffled, hooded like Jill, the faces white and pinched with cold.
Jill ran to them, waving. "My Dad says it won't snow," she called, "it's going to be a black winter."
She said nothing of the birds. She began to push and struggle with another little girl. The 'bus came ambling up the hill. Nat saw her on to it, then turned and walked back towards the farm. It was not his day for work, but he wanted to satisfy himself that all was well. Jim, the cowman, was clattering in the yard.
"Boss around?" asked Nat.
"Gone to market," said Jim. "It's Tuesday, isn't it?"
He clumped off round the corner of a shed. He had no time for Nat. Nat was said to be superior. Read books, and the like. Nat had forgotten it was Tuesday. This showed how the events of the preceding night had shaken him. He went to the back door of the farm-house and heard Mrs. Trigg singing in the kitchen, the wireless making a background to her song.
"Are you there, missus?" called out Nat.
She came to the door, beaming, broad, a good-tempered woman.
"Hullo, Mr. Hocken," she said. "Can you tell me where this cold is coming from? Is it Russia? I've never seen such a change. And it's going on, the wireless says. Something to do with the Arctic circle."
"We didn't turn on the wireless this morning," said Nat. "Fact is, we had trouble in the night."
"Kiddies poorly?"
"No…" He hardly knew how to explain it. Now, in daylight, the battle of the birds would sound absurd.
He tried to tell Mrs. Trigg what had happened, but he could see from her eyes that she thought his story was the result of a nightmare.
"Sure they were real birds," she said, smiling, "with proper feathers and all? Not the funny-shaped kind, that the men see after closing hours on a Saturday night?"
"Mrs. Trigg," he said, "there are fifty dead birds, robins, wrens and such, lying low on the floor of the children's bedroom. They went for me; they tried to go for young Johnny's eyes."
Mrs. Trigg stared at him doubtfully.
"Well there, now," she answered, "I suppose the weather brought them. Once in the bedroom, they wouldn't know where they were to. Foreign birds maybe, from that Arctic circle."
"No," said Nat, "they were the birds you see about here every day."
"Funny thing," said Mrs. Trigg, "no explaining it, really. You ought to write up and ask the Guardian. They'd have some answer for it. Well, I must be getting on."
She nodded, smiled, and went back into the kitchen.
Nat, dissatisfied, turned to the farm-gate. Had it not beenfor those corpses on the bedroom floor, which he must now collect and bury somewhere, he would have considered the tale exaggeration too.
Jim was standing by the gate.
"Had any trouble with the birds?" asked Nat.
"Birds? What birds?"
"We got them up our place last night. Scores of them, came in the children's bedroom. Quite savage they were."
"Oh?" It took time for anything to penetrate Jim's head, "Never heard of birds acting savage," he said at length. "They get tame, like, sometimes. I've seen them come to the windows, for crumbs."
"These birds last night weren't tame."
"No? Cold maybe. Hungry. You put out some crumbs."
Jim was no more interested than Mrs. Trigg had been. It was, Nat thought, like air-raids in the war. No one down this end of the country knew what the Plymouth folk had seen and suffered. You had to endure something yourself before it touched you. He walked back along the lane and crossed the stile to his cottage. He found his wife in the kitchen with young Johnnie.
"See anyone?" she asked.
"Mrs. Trigg and Jim," he answered. "I don't think they believed me. Anyway, nothing wrong up there."
"You might take the birds away," she said. "I daren't go into the room to make the beds until you do. I'm scared."
"Nothing to scare you now," said Nat. "They're dead, aren't they?"
He went up with a sack and dropped the stiff bodies into it, one by one. Yes, there were fifty of them, all told. Just the ordinary common birds of the hedgerow, nothing as large even as a thrush. It must have been fright that made them act the way they did. Blue tits, wrens, it was incredible to think of the power of their small beaks, jabbing at his face and hands the night before. He took the sack out into the garden and was faced now with a fresh problem. The ground was too hard to dig. It was frozen solid, yet no snow had fallen, nothing had happened in the past hours but the coming of the east wind. It was unnatural, queer. The weather prophets must be right. The change was something connected with the Arctic circle.
The wind seemed to cut him to the bone as he stood there, uncertainly, holding the sack. He could see the white-capped seas breaking down under in the bay. He decided to take the birds to the shore and bury them.
When he reached the beach below the headland he could scarcely stand, the force of the east wind was so strong. It hurt to draw breath, and his bare hands were blue. Never had he known such cold, not in all the bad winters he could remember. It was low tide. He crunched his way over the shingle to the softer sand and then, his back to the wind, ground a pit in the sand with his heel. He meant to drop the birds into it, but as he opened up the sack the force of the wind carried them, lifted them, as though in flight again, and they were blown away from him along the beach, tossed like feathers, spread and scattered, the bodies of the fifty frozen birds. There was something ugly in the sight. He did not like it. The dead birds were swept away from him by the wind.
"The tide will take them when it turns," he said to himself.
He looked out to sea and watched the crested breakers, combing green. They rose stiHly, curled, and broke again, and because it was ebb tide the roar was distant, more remote, lacking the sound and thunder of the flood.
Then he saw them. The gulls. Out there, riding the seas.
What he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands… They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the wind, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide. To eastward, and to the west, the gulls were there. They stretched as far as his eye could reach, in close formation, line upon line. Had the sea been still they would have covered the bay like a white cloud, head to head, body packed to body. Only the east wind, whipping the sea to breakers, hid them from the shore.
Nat turned, and leaving the beach climbed the steep path home. Someone should know of this. Someone should be told. Something was happening, because of the east wind and the weather, that he did not understand. He wondered if he should go to the call box by the bus stop and ring up the police. Yet what could they do? What couldanyone do? Tens and thousands of gulls riding the sea there, in the bay, because of storm, because of hunger. The police would think him mad, or drunk, or take the statement from him with great calm. "Thank you. Yes, the matter has already been reported. The hard weather is driving the birds inland in great numbers." Nat looked about him. Still no sign of any other bird. Perhaps the cold had sent them all from up country? As he drew near to the cottage his wife came to meet him, at the door. She called to him, excited. "Nat," she said, "it's on the wireless. They've just read out a special news bulletin. I've written it down."