Last of the Curlews by Fred Bodsworth

Author:Fred Bodsworth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

The wind slackened at dawn and the male knew they had to fly, for there could be no lingering here. When the snow changed to fog again and the sun pierced it feebly in a faint yellow glow, they took off and spiraled upward into the flat cloud layer that hid the peaks above. In a minute they were entombed in a ghostly world of white mist that pressed in damp and heavy upon them. They spiraled tightly, climbing straight upward into air so thin that their wings seemed to be beating in a vacuum and their lungs when rilled still strained for breath.

In the cloud layer the air was turbulent. Occasionally there were pockets where the air was hard, and their wings bit into it firmly and they climbed rapidly, then the air would thin out again, and for several minutes they would barely hold their own. Once the light brightened and the curlew knew they were close to the clear air above, but before they could struggle free of the cloud a sudden downdraft caught them, they plunged downward uncontrollably and lost in a few seconds the altitude that had taken many minutes to gain.

They broke free of the swirling cloud mass finally and came out into a calm, clear sky. It was a weird, bizarre world of intense cold and dazzling light that seemed disconnected from all things of earth. The cloud layer just below them stretched from horizon to horizon in a great white rolling plain that looked firm enough to alight upon. The sun glared off it with the brilliance of a mirror. A mile away a mountain peak lifted its cap of perpetual snow through the cloud, its rock-ribbed summit not far above. In the distance were other peaks rising like rocky islands out of a white sea.

The curlews leveled off close to the cloud layer and flew toward the peak. Flight was painful and slow. They flew with bills open, gasping the thin air. Their bodies ached.

As they approached the mountaintop, the wind freshened again. Stinging blasts of snow swirled off the peak into their path of flight. They struggled through and landed for rest on a turret of grey rock swept bare of snow by the wind. Now a new torment racked their aching bodies, for the dry, rarefied air had quickly exhausted body moisture, and their hot throats burned with thirst.

Fifty miles away there were orchids and cacti blooming vividly in the late South American summer, but here on the rooftop of the Americas four miles above the level of the sea was winter that never ended. Not far below their resting place was an eerie zone of billowing white in which it was difficult to distinguish where the snow of the mountainside ended and the clouds began. Yet even here where no living thing could long endure, life had left its mark, for the very rock of the mountain itself was composed largely of the fossilized skeletons of sea animals

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