27
The storm her brothers had weathered caught Touchwit halfway across the river. A wind funneling out of the north plucked the tops off the waves and hurled them downriver in a blinding spray. Then the sky dropped, pinning her to the surface. Halfway Island shot by in the rain. The far shore vanished. She tried to swim at a right angle to the current, but it outwrestled her and spun her towards the concrete supports of the railway bridge. She closed her eyes and braced for the blow of the pylon. But at the last second the current chose to take her around it. When she opened her eyes, the bridge was in the past. The river was getting tired of her and considered throwing her into a wooden walkway lining the shore at the back of a hotel. But a second current joined the contest and decided otherwise. Cascading out of the Crosstown Creek spillway, it muscled her right back to the middle of the river. And now to get through a narrowing between the two shorelines, all the currents of the river were squeezing together and moving faster. They wanted to carry her through the narrows to the Lake and leave her there, too exhausted to paddle to shore. Wait! What was this? A harbour for boats. If she caught a back eddy and used up the last of her effort, she might just escape the hold of the currents.
Touchwit bounced along the side of a yacht rolling violently in the wind. Behind it was a small pocket of water. She bobbed with the weeds and flotsam, wondering how to climb the rusted metal siding of the dock.
She had no idea how she did it because she lost consciousness once she reached the top. She rolled up in a fetal ball under the rain and forgot everything. The great sea that flows across the sky had descended and joined one of the rivers of Earth. There was only a narrow strip of existence between them. That is where she lay until dawn.
***
An eye gazing down at her. A yellow eye holding the knowledge of the atmospheric sea and its earthly child, this river. A strong bill hooked at the end for prying out soft tissue like the flesh inside a clamshell. The storm had left behind one of its wind spirits in the likeness of a Gull.
“I’m alive,” Touchwit hissed. “Don’t think about plucking out my eye or I’ll make you wish you were back inside your egg.”
The bird pulled in its wings which it had outstretched when she hissed at him. Was that a chuckle? She wasn’t sure. It could have been a cough. Grey wings. A Herring Gull then. A male. Hard to tell.
“I have seen some things wash up in my time, but never a raccoon dumb enough to swim across a river in a storm. Where were you headed?”
“That’s my business. Yours is to go to a garbage dump and lick Primate baby diapers.”
“Good one!” the Gull said.
Touchwit felt her hackles collapsing, and anyway the bird wasn’t a threat. He was one of those retired Seniors who had a lot of leftover attitude and nothing to do.
“I have three homes,” the Gull said in his wizened voice. “And none of them is a chimney.”
He knew where her den was!
“A chimney,” he repeated. “You know, having only one home gives a person mundane ideas about territory. You River people think your place on the river is ancestral. Now you want to take over the West Bank. You think all the other creatures who have lived there longer than you lot can shove off.”
“If you have several homes, you don’t have any home,” Touchwit responded.
The Gull waved her interruption aside and went on with his comment. “Then, the next thing you do is start to brawl among yourselves for territory.”
“Gulls fight over a single French fry in a parking lot.”
“We are free individuals. Differences of opinion about who has first right to a French fry is an exercise of our freedom.”
“Where are your homes?”
“My homes are in the elegy of winds and weather and turning of the year. They are not in space. My homes are in time.”
Okay, there’s something to be learned from this bleached, weather-wise piece of driftwood. But not now. What stuck out wasn’t his attitude but the fact that he knew where she lived. No one should know where she lived. Yet it seemed reasonable that a seagull would know. He spent part of the day soaring in circles over the city. And he had an eye for detail. He must be a flying encyclopedia. Time to be deferential. But she wasn’t going to lose her edge.
“I understand your wider picture. But I won’t be able to appreciate it fully until you lend me your wings.”
“Flying Raccoons! Good one!”
Again that series of choking rasps, as if a spiky sunfish had gone down his throat sideways. He was laughing. No. Something was wrong with his bill. And he kept turning his bill away so she couldn’t see the defect.
“Maybe I can fix that,” she said. “Raccoons don’t have wings except in old tales, but they have really clever hands.”
The Gull considered her offer. Then he bravely turned his head to reveal the other side of his bill. A metal fish hook. It was firmly embedded where the bill met his cheek which was scarred and featherless from his futile scratching.
“I got it going fishing.”
“It’s preventing your bill from fully opening. It must be hard for you to swallow fish now.”
“I would be glad to swallow a whole fish again.”
“Try not to squawk until I’m finished. This is going to hurt.”
“I’d also be glad to have a good head-in-the-air squawk again. I haven’t squawked in ages.”
Getting the hook out was a matter of going in the direction of the barb, not against it. She estimated the angle correctly and slid the object out in one easy motion. The Gull didn’t even blink.
“Thank you,” the Gull said. “Now, I must persuade breakfast to come to the surface.” With that, the bird hopped into the wind, glided to a flower bed close by, and began stamping his feet, first one then the other.
“What in heaven’s name are you doing?” Touchwit asked.
“I’m getting a worm to come up.”
“You eat worms?”
“No, of course not. Raccoons eat worms. I eat seafood. Worms are for bait.”
“I see. But what’s the point of the ritual dance? Is it supposed to compel a worm to rise by magic?”
“Exactly. I’m pretending to sound like rain hitting the soil. That will get a worm to come up. Like magic.” The seagull gazed at the ground severely. “Ah-ha!” He tugged the worm out and walked back to the dock with it twisting in his mouth. The bird dropped the worm into the lake and waited. Suddenly in a flash, he opened its wings and alighted on the water below. He quickly ducked his head under and returned with a fish in his bill. Holding it against the dock with one leg, he bit off its tail, tilted his head back, and swallowed it in a series of spasms. “Part for you,” he indicated.
