Dagmars Daughter by Kim Echlin Page B

so he found his way south into the scattered dream-rounded islands of the Pacific. He made his living playing in smoky bars where no one knew that his bass was three centuries old and few noticed it was tuned in fifths. He played a perfect intonation few could hear, and was absorbed in the inexplicable mystery of his sound. For three and half decades he picked up with small bands and played in exchange for a bed, a meal, his next passage out, settling with the unsettled on the Pacific Ocean. He played whatever was popular with Japanese and Indonesian and American expatriates, filled his lonely impermanence with their bar-room stories. He sailed on coconut ships and outriggers and supply boats, and protected his bass from Pacific salt and humidity and damp. He played against the rushing of tides and his highest notes drew whales up to the surface. He sleepwalked through the years and only his night dreams reminded him where he had come from and what he had hoped for. They tormented him with the incorporeal cries of lost seamen but each morning he shook away those dream hollies as if they had not revealed themselves.
    He possessed nothing to keep him anywhere. One night Donal sailed with an itinerant birdwatcher who had a parrot that spoke fifty-three words of an extinct language acquired from its last living speaker. He was studying an island where everything was dying. Birds that had displayed themselves fearlessly had begun to dwindle in number and disappear. First to go was a flightless bird called a rail. The flycatcher, the bridled white-eye, the honeyeater became rare. Then the squawks and songs and coos of the kingfishers, crows and even the plentiful white-throated ground doves faded from the air. The birdwatcher puzzled over the disappearances.
    Donal was wandering in the island forest late at night when he heard an unearthly cry and frantic wings beating above his head. He shone his light toward the roof of the trees and spotted a hapless crow stuck in the wide jaws of a common brown tree snake, genus B. irregularis . The bird’s pinfeathers were disappearing into the snake’s jaws, swallowed alive inside the muscled coil, slowly poisoned with each chomp and chew. Soon only the desperate beak of the bird poked out, squeaking like a baby. Donal stood and watched the snake slowly close its jaws over the tip of the beak, then drop its head in postprandial fatigue. The snake’s eyes stared unconcerned into Donal’s. He swept his light across the canopy of the forest and saw what had been there all the time. The night treetops were inhabited by a writhing mass of snakes in a constant agitation to eat. Thousands of them wound deliberately through the canopy, hunting birds and eggs. They had already eaten all the ground life—rats, skinks and geckos. Their slender muscular bodies stretched great distances between branches, and the birds who had no inkling of danger continued to build nests on the sturdy thick branches their omnivorous neighbours preferred. The snakes ate anything— Hedmidactylus frenatus, Gehyra oceanica, Lepidodactylus lugubris, emoai slevine, emoia caeruleocauda and emoia atrocostate . They ate the last Micronesian kingfisher on earth. They even ate the birdwatcher’s pet parrot and those last fifty-three words.
    Night after night Donal watched the snakes gracefully stripping off the life of the island, live winding sheets coiled round living bodies. They had no predator. They worked the roof of the forest like foreign cod-fishers, hardy, fearless and cryptic. They succeeded at the expense of others.

    W e cannot choose whom we are free to love.
    Together Nyssa and Norea, wearing her yellow hat, waded along the shore, the young girl describing to her grand-mother all she saw. Nyssa said, Nana! A huge spider nest hanging under the wharf, full of babies.
    Reading the girl’s tone Norea answered back, Let’s kill them! There’ll be hundreds of those nasty things.
    She handed Nyssa one of her shoes