And the Seventh Dream of Horus is Tagaro

A short short story by Felice Quail

I dreamed last night that I was standing by Tikapa Moana o Hauraki, the ancient airport of this island, the place where millions of kuaka gather every autumn, waiting for a mysterious order to fly to Kamchatka & Alaska.

It was the sound I had noticed first, as I sloughed through the mangrove mud off Miranda Road. Instead of the quick soft trochees of the kuaka's call I heard a loud, continuous whining. I emerged on the stone beach & crouched. Kuaka startle easily. These birds did not. Big black lidless eyes watched me indifferently. The birds were taking off one at a time.

I made for the caravan Bernard parks by the beach this time every year. He did his PhD out here, a lonely nerd amongst the pot growers and dairy farmers like my dad. I helped him with his manuscript. He could count kuaka but not words. I remember his fingers better than his face. Those fat pale fingers, that couldn't roll a joint or undo a bra strap, but which suddenly became slow and steady when they held a bird ring. The chicks might have been dead, they were so still when he slipped those rings over their little claws. How long is it since I'd seen him? Twenty years? And what was he doing out here again?

He was standing on the caravan's steps, holding a joystick instead of his normal camera & notebook. His beard was gone, his smile seemed toothier. 'You needn't look so surprised' he said. 'What do you think we were watching every year? They weren't flying north for the fun of it, you know. They were deployed. It was a mission. The telenchephalon, that little bit of nerves & brain, was a tyrant.'

I didn't know what to say. I started counting the squares on his old tartan swandri as he went on, in a high-pitched, excited voice I didn't remember.

'Thirty thousand kilometres, think of it, right over the Pacific all the way to Russia. The poor birds overflew all those tropical islands, Fiji, Hawai'i, all those islands with trees loaded with fruit and their warm sand, and they couldn't land, not even for an hour. It was a non-stop flight to Siberia, mate, the same place the Tsars and Bolsheviks sent their enemies. Did you think they wanted to go?'

His eyes were moving between me & the joystick, as he yanked it back & forth. I noticed he wasn't wearing those big black-framed glasses I remembered. Contact lenses?

'Kua kite te kohanga kuaka? Do you know what that means? Who has seen the nest of the kuaka? Māori thought they flew to Hawai'iki, when actually they flew to hell, not to some lush paradise. Imagine it, there aren't even trees to nest in where they go. They strip lichen off rocks with their beaks and use it to line their nests.'

'They evolved to take that route, to breed up there.'

I had to say something. If I said something perhaps Bernard wouldn't finish what he was going to say.

'Oh, right, evolution is good, right? Evolution is god? Darwin is god's prophet? Evolution gets it wrong, mate. Evolution fucks up. The koala was a primate, a predator, it stalked the forest floor, it ripped little roos apart. Now where is it? Up a tree all day stoned on eucalyptus leaves. There's no reason to fly to Siberia. It's a forced march, mate.'

A drone dropped down quickly, landed at Bernard's feet. 'Good boy! Do you want a treat?' His voice was hard, sarcastic, someone else's voice.He pulled the joystick violently and the metal bird shot straight up. The sky was full of whines & drones. Bernard watched me watching the steel birds.

'It's Jurassic Park, mate. We've recreated the giant mosquitoes, the ones that used to bite the ass of a brontosaurus. Half a metre across. Big bloodsuckers.'

I didn't want to hear anymore. I turned to walk back to the beach, to the mangroves. I wanted to sink into the mud there, to disappear, to become a crustacean, a still, sunken thing, something that doesn't need the sky.

Bernard's voice followed me. 'We're part of evolution, remember? We've made these, therefore they're natural. Have a good look at them while you can, mate. There's no return flight.'

I turned on the stones. Bernard held the joystick up in the air, the way one of the old men on the marae up the road would hold a cane.

'Where are they going, Bernard? Where are they going?'

'They're going everywhere mate. Well, sort of. They're going everywhere they want. These birds are autonomous. We put them in the air, that's all. They choose where they go. They light their own fires.'

Then the whining was louder, and I was running over the stones of the beach, and the steel bird's shadow was on the stones.

_

RS: Reef Shark is interested in publishing poetry and short short stories—oceanic, ludic, and multilingual material is preferred. Payment by negotiation. Email us at scott.hamilton@reefshark.online or send a hard copy to: Reef Shark, P.O. Box 21, Warkworth 0910.