Anyone to whom books are of interest is familiar with the curiosity they awaken when one sees them in other people′s houses, lining the walls or stacked precariously so that the top ones have to be moved in order to inspect what is underneath. A hint of sinful indulgence, akin to memories of skipping school and the imaginary taste of forbidden fruit, haunts such inquisitiveness, even under roofs where the visitor has been warmly welcomed and made to feel at home. The less accustomed to their place the books seem to be, the more intriguing they appear, as though they might be about to leave again before they had been noticed. They are survivors when others of their race have vanished all around them.
In the late summer of 1994 I was visiting friends who had recently moved to the island of Kauai. There were still stacks of books in the entrance room off the garage, and in the rooms where I was staying the shelves were only partly filled. The books there, I realized, had been sifted again and again. I came to a small paperback, cheaply produced and of undistinguished appearance: Last of the Curlews, by Fred Bodsworth, with drawings (by T. M. Shortt) that reminded me of an edition of Aldo Leopold′s Sand County Almanac.
I could not tell at a glance how serious a book it might be, what kind of reader it had been intended for. I wondered whether the title referred to the Eskimo curlew, one of the creatures that I had learned I was too late to see, for it had become extinct in my own lifetime while I was a child in a city turning the pages of books with pictures of birds. All of the migrants, and the phenomenon of migration itself, from the time I first knew of them, seemed to possess a dimension and radiance of their own. One of the things that we late arrivals on the earth sense, and in turn portray as legendary, is an awareness much older than our own. In each of the migrants we are afforded glimpses of beings in whom the turning of the earth, its axis and magnetic fields, day and night and the seasons, the winds and all that we call the elements, and the motions of the celestial bodies themselves are the pulse of a heart and the illumination of a consciousness.
Where I live, in Hawaii, in the latter part of the century, the Pacific golden plover is such an emanation. When the plovers return from Alaska in August, the rising call notes as the birds flash overhead are like the touch of a wand. There is no land between the Alaskan coast and here, and those wings have covered the distance in a single flight. All winter the plovers streak above the slopes here in the late afternoon or at night in the moonlight, calling the same call they sent into the sky over the huge empty sea. In the morning I see a single plover on the open grassland or along the same section of dirt road, standing still or walking, like a shadow. When I realize in the spring that the plovers have gone, there is always a breath of fear in their place—from a ghost not theirs, of course, but my own. Among the migrants, those that will not return inhabit a farther eminence, and the Eskimo curlew is high among those. Its route, I had learned, had been the most enormous trajectory of all: from the arctic to the antarctic every autumn, and in the spring the entire transit north again. The curlews′ shape, their wings and feathers, had been incomparably elegant, their flight swift and tireless, and their vast flocks had been obliterated without hesitation in the course of little more than a century by the greed and indifference of a species that considers its own withering arrival an improvement and that managed to believe it was winning the West.
Their destruction was part of a process that has been accelerating in a sort of geometrical progression all through our age until the rate of species extinction has become a regular topic in the news. From time to time, with a frequency that is hard to assess, the figure of the last representative of some kind of life, some way of being—a palm, a rhinoceros, a sparrow, a fish, a word from a language, a speaker of a language—presents itself to us for a moment like a recurring dream in another form, and then goes out, leaving us to make of it what we can. Whether we acknowledge it or not, this last figure, in whatever guise it returns, is a single irreducible warning, and we know it even as we continue to organize our restlessness and our demands around the assumption of our own unending growth.
I opened the book.
I was standing in the living room, which was filled with afternoon light. Mr. Bodsworth wrote with plain, succinct evocation and beauty of the arctic autumn and the dwindling of the once enormous assemblies of curlews that for so long had gathered at that season to begin the journey south. During the past century, while the extinctions of species have continued to pick up speed, we have been taught to eschew the delusions of anthropomorphism, the temptation to project our own evaluations, responses, and personalities onto the actions and gestures of other forms of life. It has been an essential and complex cleansing and is never likely to be complete. But in the usage of some it has been turned into a new superstition and obscurantism, a tempered reinforcement of human arrogations, and a justification for denying any continuity between the consciousness and sensations of our kind and all the rest of life. Some part of the suffering of each creature is incommunicable and solitary. I cannot believe that humans are unique in this, and I am convinced that when we forget it we mistake ourselves. Mr. Bodsworth is a scientist, a trained observer of natural phenomena from the viewpoint of post-eighteenth-century biology with its creed of objectivity, and he was obviously determined to avoid, in his writing, the specter of anthropomorphism. But he was describing behavior and the expression of overpowering urges, drives, passions, and he had only our own language with which to do it. Besides, it is obvious that he cared about the fate of the protagonist of his narrative. Making use of all the knowledge and reasonable probability available to him, his book is an articulate ornithologist′s account of how the migratory flight of the last, or one of the last, of the Eskimo curlews might have taken place.
I was caught from the beginning, and for the rest of the visit I returned to the story whenever I could. I had not managed to finish it by the time I was to leave, and I was not sure of being able to find another copy. My hosts lent me theirs, and I came to the last page on the way home, in the air.
The account seemed to me a classic and I wondered how I had managed to miss it. I learned almost at once that Jack Shoemaker, after running North Point Press for a decade, was starting a new publishing house, and I told him about it. He and his assistant managed, with some difficulty, to get a copy from the Library of Congress, and their response to the narrative paralleled mine. They sought out the author and began plans for the present edition.
None of us, at that point, knew of Fred Bodsworth′s continuing attention to the curlew since he finished the book, and the cautious, fragile hope that he had to offer in his epilogue. And of how we would be left, for the time being, clinging.
March 1995