Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers: Magical Tales of Love and Seduction

Bird Count Jane Yolen

IT WAS HIS WINGS I fell in love with first: feathers soft, wimpling; the strong pinions flexing. They weren’t white or yellow, but somewhere in between, like piano keys after years in a dark room. I dreamed those wings around me. I dreamed them against my breasts.

I dreamed them between my legs. But I never dreamed they could hurt so, the shafts scraping against my shoulders and back, leaving a deep imprint on my skin, as if I — and not he — had worn the wings.

When I saw him first, he was only a speck against the sky. I was by the fire tower at Mount Tom, one of the early risers for the annual hawk watch. I was there because my lover, Lewis, was an obsessive birder who thought nothing of spending hours in the field making lists that only he would ever care about or actually see.

Trying to hold on to a relationship that had nothing to recommend it but inertia and obsession, I had bought myself a pair of vastly-too-expensive field glasses. I would rise each weekend morning before dawn to accompany Lewis on his passionate activity — he saved his passion for birds alone. I had become a martyr to ornithology, a bird widow, even though I knew little about the birds we watched and cared less. I only wanted to get Lewis’s attention. He wasn’t much, but he was all I had at the time. And at thirty-two, time was the operative word.

My biologic clock wasn’t just ticking; it was sounding like a Geiger counter in an old sci-fi movie.

The thing about Lewis was that even when we were together I was alone. Or rather Lewis was alone and I was just some thing that happened to be occupying space near him. It wasn’t that he didn’t notice me; he didn’t notice anyone. If he was hungry, he ate whatever food appeared before him. If his laundry needed doing, he knew that the universe would somehow, mysteriously and wonderfully, get it cleaned. Before me there had been Lewis’s mother to deal with the mundane world.

I was the intern on call when his mother had coughed gently, said “Take care of my boy,” and died. Thinking she was talking about a minor child, I worried as I went out to the waiting room, afraid who I would find there. I was quite unprepared for Lewis, but relieved to find him an adult.

“Mr. Snowden,” I said, “I am afraid that your mother has just passed away.”

He seemed less shocked then confused, saying simply “She can’t have.” But his tone was not one of denial; rather he seemed put out with her, as if she had just gone on a trip without telling him.

And then he smiled a dazzling smile at me, and in all seriousness added, “I’ll need a white shirt for the funeral and I don’t know how to iron.”

So when my shift was over, I went home with him, did his shirts, and stayed. He was quite simply the most beautiful man I had ever seen and I, while not technically a virgin, was so focused on my medical career I hadn’t had much experience with men. Beauty in a man shook me, entangled me in a way for which I was unprepared.

When I say beautiful, there is no other word for it. He had a shock of dark hair that fell uncut — unless I cut it — over a clear, broad forehead. His eyes were like dark almonds and about as readable. He had a straight, perfect nose, skin that had the kind of ermine edging that is on a blackberry leaf — soft and slightly fuzzy to the touch. His ears, shell-like, were velvety and made to be touched, caressed, blown into. He was lean and well-muscled, but never had to work at it, so he did not have that false sculpting that men have who only develop their tone in a gym. And most important, he was totally unaware of his beauty. It was like his clothing — there for covering. I must have tried to write dozens of poems about him those first weeks with him, which was odd because I had never written anything before other than critical essays for school.

Even when his beauty lost its power over me, I stayed — and this will sound bizarre and slightly shocking, but is true nonetheless — because he smelled like summer, moist and hot and beckoning. He was not in fact any of those things. He was more winter than summer, arctic really. But he smelled as if he could be cultivated and might even blossom in time if only I could find the right tools.

So I stayed.

Which is how I found myself frequently on birding expeditions: tracking down errant wheatears along the stone abutments at the Quabbin Reservoir, chasing after odd rarities at feeders in Hadley and Montague, looking through snowstorms for an elusive snowy owl, spending a whole day and night driving Lewis around the Northampton meadows on the Christmas bird count. Of course he did not know how to drive. The universe supplied drivers.

As for why he stayed with me, there is no mystery in that. I was as comfortable for him as his furniture. He did not expect his furniture to up and move away. Nor did I.

Until.

Until the hawk watch when something extraordinary happened. And only I seemed to have noticed it.

A bird as big as a man, a man with wings, came down from the sky and took me in a feathery embrace. And only then, after I had been well and truly fucked by some otherworldly fowl, did I begin to understand real beauty.

I do not expect you to believe me. I expect you will say I had been drinking. Or smoking funny cigarettes. I expect you to say I was hallucinating or dreaming or having an out of body experience. I expect you to say the words “alien abduction” with a breathy laugh, and suggest I was having a breakdown.

I was not. I was awake that day as I am at this moment. The morning was still and chill. I had dressed warmly, but evidently not warmly enough for I could feel the cold through my chinos, like a light coating of ice on my thighs. My earlobes were numb.

Lewis was with the ardent birders high up on the fire tower. I was down below, my field glasses in my hand, thinking about my caseload and praying that my beeper would signal me to make an early and unanticipated visit to the hospital. My relationship with Lewis had reached the point where I could not just leave without a summons, but I spent a lot of time praying that one thing or another would demand my time away from his side.

I heard a noise. Not my beeper, but a kind of insistent high pitched cry. When I looked up, I saw this speck in the sky hurtling toward me. I put my glasses to my eyes, twisted the focus, and then dropped the glasses on the ground. $2,500 worth of Zeiss and I simply let it fall from my hand without thinking. But I was too shocked to notice. What I had seen was not possible. How quickly it moved was not possible. I scarcely had time to raise my hands to ward off the thing when it was hovering over me, the wind from its wings literally taking my breath away so that I could not have screamed if I wanted to.

No one else seemed to have noticed anything wrong and I, even as I was stunned by the quickness of the bird-thing, wondered how that could be. The best birders in Western Mass were crowding the high platform of the fire tower: Gagnon and Greene and Stemple and the rest. They were taking notes and talking hawks and comparing counts from the year before. At any one moment, eight or nine pairs of eyes were scanning the skies over the valley. Those birders missed nothing. Nothing! Yet not a one of them had seen what now landed in front of me, scarcely a yard away.

For a long moment I stared into the bird-thing’s eyes. No, not a thing. A man. He had the fierce beaked nose of a hawk and a feathery brow, white and black and brown intermixed. His eyes were yellow; his mouth a generous gash. He was naked except for the feathers that curled around his genitals, that encircled his nipples, that streaked across his flat stomach and bare chest like ritual scars. His wings arched and beat back and forth and we were both caught in the swirling winds from them. I could scarcely stand up to those winds, even thought for a minute I might be swept off the mountain, even hoped I might so that he could rescue me and take me off into the air with him. I felt drunk with the thought.

He stood still for another long minute, with only those wings beating. Then he moved his shoulders, up and down, turned away from me and opened his wings even wider, then turned back. The feather-scars on his chest rippled like little waves, the white feathers like foam on top of the dark. His long, black hair stuck straight up in front like a cock’s comb and he was deadly serious as he stared at me. Then suddenly he threw his head back and crowed. Not like a rooster or any other bird I could name. But it was certainly some kind of triumphant cry.

Then he pumped those wings again and took off into the air and was gone.

I was stunned. It took me a while to realize that he had been doing a mating display. And by the heat in my face, by the burning between my legs, by that odd sensation in my stomach that was part nausea and part longing, I know I had responded to it as he had meant.

There was a sudden odd clatter above me as the birders descended the iron stairs. I reached out to one of the railings. Cold iron, I thought. Proof against fairies. I tore off my glove, touched the icy metal. But it did nothing to banish the picture in my head of that glorious creature — man, bird, whatever. It did nothing to discourage the flush on my face, the weakness in my groin.

“We’re going for coffee,” Lewis told me, “You can go on to the hospital. Dave will get me home.” And they walked on by me without another word, going down the path, leaving me to follow as best I could with shaky knees and a head full of odd ideas.

I did not go out birding with Lewis the next morning before hospital rounds because I did not dare. And, quite frankly, because I thought it would mean being disloyal to Lewis. I had spent the night dreaming of the bird man, the hawk king. I had even fantasized about him while Lewis and I made love. Normally I just kept my eyes open and watched Lewis who goes through the mechanics of love-making with his eyes closed, without a single change on his beautiful face. This time I closed my eyes — not that Lewis would have noticed the difference — and fancied he had wings and feathers on his chest. It made my breath come quicker, and I climaxed as soon as he entered me, which was unusual enough for him to open his eyes and say, “Something’s different.” Lewis likes things to be the same.

“Pre-menstrual,” I said.

“Oh,” he answered. And that was all.

He went off birding with his friends and I lay in bed thinking about nothing. Or trying to think about nothing. Burying my face in the feather pillow. Trying to remember if any of my close relatives had recently gone mad. Then I got up, took a long, leisurely shower, and dried myself in front of the window. Not that anyone could see me. The bathroom overlooked an old abandoned tobacco field. The house was surrounded by trees.

I saw many specks in the sky, some easy to identify, some too far away for casual naming. But nothing that fell to earth like a feathered star.

So I put on my terry-cloth robe and made myself a cup of coffee, went out onto the deck to drink it, though the morning was even colder than it had been the day before. I was hoping, you see, for something. I was trying to keep alive the belief that I was not crazy. I was afire, giving off signals I suppose. Pheromones, they’re called. I put my head back and tried to imitate the sound the hawk man had made right before diving to earth. “Kreeeeeeee!” I cried. But I was embarrassed to call out very loudly even though the nearest house was about a quarter mile away. “Kreeeeee!”

I turned to go back into the house when I heard something above me, looked up, and saw the speck, my feathered hallucination, falling out of the sky to my feet. I opened my arms to him and, without more foreplay than that, he embraced me with his wings, the shafts scraping my back, and then thrust himself in me. First from the front, a hot searing pinning, leaving me still weak with desire. Then he turned me around, pushed my robe up, and mounted me from behind. The feathers of his breast emblazoned themselves on my back, sticking into the raw scrapings his wings had made. I felt the pain and yet it was sweet, too, as if I were growing wings.

Then he lay me down on the cold boards and did it twice more, front and back, and I was hot and wet with him and cried, a sound more like the call of a loon than a hawk, throaty and low. He gave me love bites on the neck and shoulder and buttocks.

Then he stood, shook himself all over, pumped his wings, which covered me with wind, and fled into the sky with that defiant, triumphant cry.

I lay on my back, my robe half around my waist, till I shivered with the cold. When I got up at last, I found a feather he had dropped on the deck. Whether it was from our love making or after, when he had gave that odd shaking, I didn’t know. I held the feather so tight, the shaft made a mark on my palm.

I went back inside and took another long shower, called in sick to the hospital, and went to bed. I dreamed the hawk man fucked me over and over and over, and as I dreamed, I ran the feather across my breasts and over my stomach and between my legs. The dreams were so real, I had an orgasm each time.

When Lewis came home, he didn’t seem to notice anything, not my flushed face, not the marks on my back and neck and arms. He heard me when I said I thought I was pregnant. He insisted he wanted to marry me. He did not understand when I moved out.

I live now on the top floor of the highest building in Springfield. An aerie, I call it. I have made a bassinet and lined it with down. I am a doctor, I will know how to attend to my own delivery. I do not trust anyone else, for my child might look like his father. I am not certain that the attending physicians at Cooley Dickinson are ready for a baby born with pin feathers. I have practiced lullabies, especially the one about the baby in the tree tops. It seems right, some how.

I am alone now. But that does not matter. I am sure the hawk man will come back next season. One thing Lewis taught me: The big hawks mate for life.

And so do I.

So do I.