An Embarrassment of Riches. James Howard Kunstler

and minute by minute this noise grew louder and more alarming. Uncle and I (I had resumed my duty) stopped poling. Our entire company looked at one another in apprehension of danger.

      “Set the anchor at once,” Bilbo ordered. The noise increased in volume.

      “Indians?” I turned to Uncle.

      He only shrugged his shoulders and searched the endless verdure, as we all did. The cacophony rose yet higher, a clacking that evoked in my mind the story of the Egyptian plagues.

      “Locusts?” I ventured.

      “Wait….” Bilbo growled with a look that combined both horror and awed expectancy. “Wait … wait …!”

      To the west, a shadow seemed to fall across the sun, though there was not a wisp of cloud in the slot of sky above the river. The noise grew deafening.

      “… They come!” Bilbo cried, and from over the treetops swept a flock of flapping, chirruping creatures in numbers so vast as to paralyze the imagination. The sky turned blue-black with them. Day became the meanest twilight. It was actually a matter of some minutes before I realized the cloud was composed not of ravening locusts, but of sleek, winging birds.

      “Passenger pigeons!” Bilbo shouted above the pandemonium.

      One could only encompass this spectacle with the awe that greets the most fundamental mysteries of existence. For so immense was the multitude of birds that any calculation of their total was like unto that schoolboy’s riddle of trying to reckon the grains of sand on the Great South Beach.

      I cannot say how long we stood upon the deck gazing at this spectacle, but it could not have been more than a minute, for no sooner did the inexhaustible flock begin to darken the sky, than the white rain of their droppings commenced to splatter the deck of our craft and ourselves. Bilbo cried, “To the cabin, quickly, everyone!”

      Here we huddled in the most intimate, odious, and fearful confinement for the remainder of that day, the night, and most of the following day. There was no telling exactly when night did fall, so utterly did the birds blot out the sun, but as the hours crept by we could detect a definite change in the character of the noise they were producing—from the flap-flap-flap and chirrup of mass flight to a different racket of snapping twigs and crunching foliage, as though they were devouring the entire wilderness. Then they commenced a chorus of cooing that resounded like a March gale.

      “Listen, my lambs: they’re roosting,” Bilbo said. His daughter was whimpering with fear. “Don’t worry. Don’t cry, my pearl. That cracking and snapping is just the branches breaking under the weight of these vermin. So stupid and prolific are they that they pack themselves hundreds to the branch, and the branches give way and break and fall upon those a’roosting likewise beneath, and so on, killing these birds by the thousands.”

      The din went on all night long, the forest creaking and crackling as though it were aflame, while the cooing gradually desisted. Then, dawn shining through the rough planks of our cabin roof, the cooing recommenced, built to a fantastic hullaballoo, and transmodulated into the creatures’ flight song. With a turbulence that compared to one of the nor’easters that rake my coastal home, the incalculable flock rose out of the trees as a united body, once again blotting out the sun, and began a new day’s journey. Again the white rain fell, nattering upon the deck most of the day. It was not until late afternoon, when sunlight shone down the companionway, that we dared venture outside. And when we did, O, what a noisome, desolate sight greeted our squinting eyes.

      I had no sooner climbed up top when I lost my footing and fell into the viscid white slime that coated our deck an half-inch deep all over like some diabolical frosting on a cake. So disgusted was I, that with not a moment’s hesitation I leaped overboard into the river, itself polluted with the guano to a cream and coffee color. Dead pigeons by the hundredfold floated feet up in the sluggish current like so many sops in a gigantic consommé.

      “Are you all right, old fellow?” Bilbo cried to me from the deck, ever more solicitous of my weal.