What the Mist Reveals

It was the kind of damp, mist-clinging daybreak that seemed to even deter the dawn chorus. Midsummer, or almost, thought Dora, as she stepped out into the garden, but it feels more like November. Except of course, it November, it would not be light at just gone three o’clock in the morning. For despite the mist and the cool, it was light. Light with the East coast’s middle of the night summer dawns. The birds have more sense than I have, Dora thought, not being up yet, and if I had any sense at all I’d go back to bed. One of the advantages of being relatively newly single was that she didn’t have to worry about adjusting to others’ hours, but that didn’t mean that she had to stand there shivering in the garden at just after three in the morning to prove a point, did it?

     There wasn’t a complete absence of birdsong – or at any rate, she thought at first, of bird sounds! She could hear the calls of the circling gulls, but even that seemed oddly muted and plaintive, and she could understand why some folk still believed they were the souls of dead mariners. She could hear the sea, too, which was usually impossible in the daytime, and catch the salt-breath mingling with the mist and the dew.

     And she could hear the cuckoo! Make the most of it while you can, she thought, remembering the old rhyme about the cuckoo flying away after he had “sung in June another tune”. She realised that the cuckoo was very near, and did not just seem so because there was so much stillness and silence around.

     Without really knowing why, she looked up into the chestnut tree. She had been warned about that tree. Told it had been planted too close to the house and was undermining the foundations, and ought to be cut down. But she loved that tree, without even truly knowing why, for its memories were by no means all happy ones.

     Yes, that was where the song of the cuckoo was coming from. From the chestnut tree. There was no doubt about it. Despite the mist, she could see the cuckoo too, sitting on its nest.

     But cuckoos don’t have nests, thought Dora. It was one of the absolute givens, one of the sayings that were true, and not just mythology but biology. The cuckoo, the bird with the beautiful song and the cruel heart, the plunderer and even slayer of other birds. The youngest schoolchild knew that the cuckoo laid its eggs in other birds’ nests. True, TV naturalists encouraged you to recognise that it was not cruelty, merely nature and evolution, but even they sometimes seemed to struggle to hide their fascinated revulsion at the baby cuckoos almost methodically evicting the rightful inhabitants of the nest. 

     Still, she couldn’t deny what she had seen and heard. Even someone who thought ornithology was the worship of antlers recognised the song of the cuckoo. And that was a cuckoo. And the cuckoo was sitting on its nest in the chestnut tree. 

     “You’ve made a nest!” she exclaimed, without wholly realising that she had spoken aloud.

     “Full marks for observation!” 

     Now that was another thing. Birds could, of course, talk. In itself that was nothing out of the ordinary. Parrots and parakeets and mynah birds and (if you were very lucky) budgies, and even starlings. But not cuckoos. And though she had heard of birds who embarrassed their owners by swearing in front of the vicar, she had yet to hear of one who was capable of sarcasm. 

     “Anyway,” said the cuckoo, “You are impinging on my territory!”

     Dora, despite evidence proving to the contrary with Colin, still held to a belief that the best way to deal with a ludicrous situation was to indulge in a sensible conversation. “I beg your pardon,” she said, “But I would like to point out that this garden is MY territory!”

     The cuckoo did not quite say “Pah!” but it was definitely the cuckoo equivalent of it. “At the risk of sounding like some tiresome new ager, I would like to point out that nature, even with that fence of yours that doesn’t delude anyone that it was built by the hands of a rustic craftsman, does not actually belong to anyone. But I was referring more to the time of day.”

     “And time doesn’t belong to anyone either,” she observed, “But what do you mean?”

     “No, but this time, in this season, and with this kind of weather, the kind that deters most of you humans, still generally gives us a chance.”

     “A chance for what?” queried Dora.

     “You truly can be obtuse. Observe the anthill.” Dora hadn’t even bee aware, and wondered how she could not have been, that there was an anthill in the garden, and rather wished she had not found out as apart from not being very nice it raised all sort of awkward moral questions in how to deal with it. 

     Still, cautiously, she did as the cuckoo said. “Well, not a lot is happening,” she said, not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed. 

     “That is the whole point. And no, they are not sleeping. They are awake, but merely indolent. Lazing around. Behaving, I’m sure you would say, in a most un-antlike manner.”

     “Maybe I just have lazy ants,”

     “It’s a possibility I suppose,” said the cuckoo, as if humouring a somewhat slow infant pupil. “You have that pretty little pond in your garden. Take a look at it.”

     She looked, and inside it, she saw her neighbour’s cat Silky, taking a morning dip swimming cheerfully along, one minute with a contradictory doggy paddle, the next turning onto his back. But cats hated water. Of course, all cats hated water, but Silky hated it more than most. Normally a placid and equable animal, he was rendered a mixture of snarl and self-pity if he so much as got wet in a shower. Moreover, Silky, who was more than partial to a fish supper, was happily and gently playing with the fish in the pond with not the slightest hint of appetite and they were quite content to let him do so.

     “I know what you’re thinking,” said the cuckoo. Somehow a telepathic cuckoo was no more surprising than one who tended to its own nest. Anyway, it was just a turn of phrase, wasn’t it? “That you are having a dream, though you know perfectly well you are not, or that you have moved into a parallel universe, although you know perfectly well that you haven’t. You are in your own garden, with your pretty little pond, and with your pretty little fence, and the resin model of a meerkat, and you’re thinking it’s very cold for June and you wish you’d never come into the garden this morning.”

     This was so accurate that there was really no comment to make. She did ask, “And this talking business? Can you all do that, too?”

     “More of us than you think, but not all of us,” the cuckoo said, calmly. “It goes without saying that we lead the way. The mist is beginning to clear now, which is a shame, really. Just think on this. I presume you believe in evolution. I also presume that on those nature programmes you love you have heard the experts talk about it “trying things out”. Well, this is the time we try things out. You people do it too, you know. I’ll admit, not so much right now, it tends to come in fits and starts. But is it really so hard to accept that before walking on two legs became the norm for humans, some brave souls, for some reason they couldn’t quite understand, lumbered out on a cool and misty morning to see if it were a good idea.”

     Things ran a very normal course for the next few days. Dora was aware that something strange had happened, and that it had really happened, and that if she concentrated and made the effort she could bring it into focus, but she did not quite wish to. The cuckoo’s nest was still there, or at any rate, a nest was still there, but there were no eggs in it now. The anthill, to mix a metaphor, was a hive of activity, and Silky spat and caterwauled when it rained. 

     It was one of those “and finally” stories on the evening news. Naturalists had drawn attention to perplexing evidence in eastern England of cuckoos appearing to build their own nests. Much of it was still anecdotal, and there was certainly no cause to rewrite the textbooks yet, but it was a most interesting development …..