But as the morning dragged on, his certainty faded. The trees were filled with Variegated Antpittas, Fuscous and Boat-billed Flycatchers and White-throated Hummingbirds—all birds he’d seen before. As if to taunt him, a second Pale-faced Antbird darted across the path in front of them. But no sign of the Woodcreeper or the Barbet.
“We should stop and rest,” Welch said, coming up behind Martin when he stopped to train his binoculars on a bird overheard. A Glittering-bellied Emerald, its iridescent blue and green feathers shimmering in a beam of sunlight.
“Just a little farther,” Martin said, letting the binoculars hang loose around his neck again. “We’re close.”
“It’s like a steam room out here.” Welch wiped at his neck with a crumpled bandanna.
“Is it?” Martin hadn’t noticed.
He’d known this feeling before, this sense that the bird he sought was nearby. He only had to look at the right location at the right moment and it would be his.
And that was how it was again. He turned his head slightly, prepared to argue with Welch, and he saw the flash of color in the trees. He froze and brought his binoculars up to his eye, his spirits soaring as he zeroed in on the distinctive straight black bill. “That’s it!” he shouted, adrenaline surging through him. “I told you it was here.”
But the last words came out muddled, and the next thing he knew, he was sinking to his knees in the thick forest muck, the world whirling around him, until he was staring up at a wavery patch of sky framed by leafy branches. Welch was saying something to him, something he couldn’t hear. All he could think as he slipped into blackness was Only one more bird to go….
CHAPTER 1
Life is good only when it is magical and
musical… You must hear the bird’s song without
attempting to render it into nouns and verbs.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Works and Days”
When Karen MacBride first saw her father in the hospital, she was struck by how much this man who had spent his life pursuing birds had come to resemble one. His head, round and covered with wispy gray hair, reminded her of the head of a baby bird. His thin arms beneath the hospital sheet folded up against his body like wings. Years spent outdoors had weathered his face until his nose jutted out like a beak, his eyes sunken in hollows, watching her with the cautious interest of a crow as she approached his bed.
“Hi, Dad.” She offered a smile and lightly touched his arm. “I’ve come home to take care of you for a while.” After sixteen years away from Texas, she’d flown from her home in Denver this morning to help with her father for a few weeks.
That she’d agreed to do so surprised her. Martin Engel was not a man who either offered or inspired devotion from his family. He had been the remote authority figure of Karen’s childhood, the distracted voice on the other end of the line during infrequent phone calls during her adult years, the polite, preoccupied host during scattered visits home. For as long as she could remember, conversations with her father had had a disjointed quality, as if all the time he was talking to her, he was thinking of the call of the Egyptian Goose, or a reputed sighting of a rare Hutton’s Shearwater.
Which of course, he was. So what kind of communication could she expect from him now that he couldn’t talk at all? Maybe she’d agreed to return to Texas in order to find out.
He nodded to show he understood her now, and made a guttural noise in his throat, like the complaining of a jay.
“The doctors say there’s a chance he will talk again.” Karen’s mother, Sara, spoke from her post at the end of the bed. “A speech therapist will come once a week to work with him, and the occupational therapist twice a week. Plus there’s an aide every weekday to help with bathing and things like that.”
Karen swallowed hard, resisting the urge to turn and run, all the way back to Colorado. A voice in her head whispered, It’s not too late to get out of this, you know.
She ignored the voice and nodded, smile still firmly fixed in place. “The caseworker gave me the schedule. And Del said he got the house in order.”
“He built a ramp for the wheelchair and put hand-rails in the shower and things.” Sara folded her arms over her stomach, still looking grim. “Thank God you agreed to come down and stay with him. Three days with him here has been enough to wear me out.”
“Mom!” Karen nodded to her dad.
“I know he can hear me.” Sara swatted at her former husband’s leg. “I’m sure it hasn’t been any more pleasant for him than it has been for me.” Sara and Martin Engel had divorced some twenty years before, but they still lived in the same town and maintained a polite, if distant, relationship.
A large male nurse’s aide filled the doorway of the room. “Mr. Engel, I’m here to help you get dressed so you can go home.”
“Karen and I will go get a cup of coffee.” Sara took her daughter by the arm and pulled her down the hallway.
“You looked white as a ghost back there,” Sara said as they headed toward the cafeteria. “You aren’t going to get all weak and weepy on me, are you?”
Karen took a deep breath and shook her head. “No.” It had been a shock, seeing Dad like that. But she was okay now. She could do this.
“Good. Because he’s not worth shedding any tears over.”
Karen said nothing. She knew for a fact her mother had cried buckets of tears over Martin at one time. “What happened, exactly?” she said. “I understand he’s had a stroke, but how?”
“He was in Brazil, hunting the Pale-faced Antbird, the Hoffman’s Woodcreeper and the Brown-chested Barbet.” Sara rattled off the names of the exotic birds without hesitation. Living with a man devoted to birding required learning to speak the language in order to have much communication from him at all. She glanced over the top of her bifocals at her daughter. “If he found those three, he’d have ‘cleaned up’ Brazil, so of course he was adamant it be done as soon as possible.”
“He only needed three birds to have seen every bird in Brazil?” Karen marveled at this. “How many is that?”
“Seven thousand, nine hundred and something?” Sara shook her head. “I’m not sure. It changes all the time anyway. But I do know he’s getting close to eight thousand. When he passed seven thousand, seven hundred and fifty, he became positively fanatical about topping eight thousand before he got too old to travel.”
Ever since Karen could remember, her father’s life—and thus the life of his family—had revolved around adding birds to the list. By the time she was six, Karen could name over a hundred different types of birds. She rattled off genus species names the way other children talked about favorite cartoon characters. Instead of commercial jingles, birdcalls stuck in her head, and played over and over again. To this day, when she heard an Olive-sided Flycatcher, she could remember the spring morning when she’d first identified it on her own, and been lavished with praise by her too-often-distracted father.
“He’d just spotted the Woodcreeper when he keeled over right there in the jungle.” Sara continued her story. “Allen Welch was with him, and he’s the one who called me. He apologized, but said he had no idea who else to contact.”
Karen shook her head, amazed. “How did you ever get him home?”
“The insurance paid for an air ambulance. All those years with Mobil Oil were worth something after all.” Martin had spent his entire career as a petroleum engineer with Mobil Oil Company. He always told people he kept the job for the benefits. They assumed he meant health insurance and a pension, but his family knew the chief benefit for him was the opportunity to travel all over the world, adding birds to his list.
They reached the cafeteria. “I’ll get the coffee, you sit,” Sara said, and headed for the coffee