The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas

pricked out that he felt the same.
    It was easy to express oneself in bird language. There was so much they were going to tell each other. There were more footprints here now. To Mattis it looked like dancing. Something had made the solitary bird dance.
    But I mustn’t stay here spying.
    Mattis looked around him and said aloud: “Great things.”
    He used ordinary human speech. It felt coarse and commonplace. He would have liked to have started using bird language for good – to have gone back home to Hege and never spoken in any other way. Then she might have begun to understand some of the things that were now hidden from her.
    But he didn’t dare, he had a fair idea of what would happen. Most likely they’d lock me up. They’d refuse to have anything to do with the finest of all languages, they’d laugh at it.
    But with joy still bubbling through him he bent down and made a few more pricks. He could have filled the whole patch at this moment. But he mustn’t do that – there had to be room left for the woodcock as well. Each day they were going to come flitting in here with light, dancing steps, to prick down all that was in their hearts.
    The third day after the discovery it was the same, and the fourth day, too. Hege asked what he was doing over in the woods so often?
    “Hm!” he said.
    She didn’t pursue the subject.
    He felt an ever-growing temptation to lie in wait for the bird, but managed to resist it. He waited impatiently for each new day to begin.
    On the fifth day there was no fresh greeting for him. What had happened? And weren’t the woods quieter than usual too?
    Inside him the words were painfully taking shape: the woodcock is dead.
    No! No!
    After four days of exchanging written messages he had become so engrossed in it all that he pictured terrible disasters as soon as there was no new message in the bog. All the same he prickeddown something of his own before he went home. In the evening he sat outside the house waiting for the woodcock to arrive. Hege was asleep.
    Soft, rainy air, just right. A sudden realization shot through him: One day the woodcock won’t be flying across here any more. And one day there won’t be a woodcock any more.
    “Who’s moaning about disaster?” he said with sudden confidence into the rainy air, for there came his missing bird, familiar and wonderful, following the same path, uttering the same cries. Mattis only just managed to stop himself rousing Hege from her sleep.
    When he got to the meeting place the following day there was a new message for him, too.
    That’s the way it is with us, he thought.
    And there was still an empty patch waiting to be covered with pricks and dancing toes.

16
    BUT ONLY A couple of days later Mattis began to feel ill. All of a sudden. He kept on wandering in and out of the house. When Hege started asking questions he replied: “It’s my stomach, sort of. But only sort of.”
    “Is it something you’ve eaten, or is it the weather?”
    “Neither one,” he replied, wandering outside again.
    The woodcock was in grave danger, that was what it was.
    That morning he’d met a youngster up on the road who had asked if it was true that there was a woodcock flying right across his house? Yes, yes there was, Mattis had replied, happy that someone should ask. Up till now he had had to force his news on people.
    Then suddenly he felt a cold shudder go right through him, and regretted bitterly every word he’d said. From a sudden gleam in the youngster’s eyes he realized that he’d been talking to a fowler.
    “But it’s stopped now! It’s too late in the summer. I haven’t seen it for a long time.”
    The youngster had just laughed – he knew better:
    “Do you think I don’t know when that sort of flight stops?”
    Mattis’s little lie fell flat to the ground. Mattis wanted to ask him not to do the bird any harm, but he was too slow, as he so often was when important things were at stake.
    “Goodbye,” said the youngster