Free The Snow Geese by William Fiennes

see bats. Eleanor parked the caramel Mercedes close to the river. She was wearing a navy blue anorak with a chunky white zip up the front, and her white hair seemed oddly contingent on the zip, like a bloom at the tip of a stalk. We walked out across the Colorado River on Congress Avenue Bridge, stopping at the midpoint of the span, looking north up the avenue to the domed capitol, and west downstream towards another bridge and the cedar-covered hills far beyond it. A small plane flew across the hills, trailing a banner whose commercial message or surprising essential truth wasn’t quite legible in this fading light.
    ‘This is a good spot, right here,’ Eleanor said. We stood at the balustrade, looking east over Town Lake. ‘We’ve got bats right under our feet.’
    In 1980, reconstruction work created expansion joints in the deck of the Congress Avenue Bridge – parallel inch-wide grooves, each more than a foot deep, which Mexican free-tailed bats soon took to roosting in, the temperature and humidity just right for raising pups. Four or five inches long, dark grey-brown, with big forward-pointing ears and wrinkles on their lips along the muzzle, the freetails winter in Mexican caves and return to Austin each spring. Like birds, bats have internal circadian and circannual clocks, entrained to the natural year by Zeitgebers, triggering migratory behaviour at appropriate times.
    ‘I haven’t come down here to watch bats for I don’t know how long,’ Eleanor said.
    People were gathering on the bridge and in the small public park on the south side of the river, sitting on rugs on the grass bank, taking up positions either side of us at the balustrade. A boy wearing a plastic black Batman cape argued with a girl in a bat’s ear hairband. Two women led Great Danes along the riverside path, the dogs attired like conscientious bicyclists in fluorescent yellow collars and sashes. An oarsman moved silently beneath us, sculling upstream, feathering the blades as if they were his own palms held above the water, his seat rolling back and forth on greased coasters and rails, the dips of the oars leaving a series of paired circles like a shoe’s eyelets in his wake. We felt the shudder of the asphalt panels as traffic crossed the river on Congress Avenue.
    ‘Those bats’ll be coming out any minute,’ Eleanor said.
    Spars of red and white shimmer lay across the water, thrown off the city lights. Everyone was waiting. A dark blue sedan pulled up behind us, pausing on the bridge just long enough for an old man to step gingerly on to the kerb, assisted by a male nurse dressed in a white, dog-collared hospital tunic. The old man wore a dressing-gown over a green hospital smock, and the thin shins visible below the hems of these robes were sleeved in the white compression stockings that prevent deep vein thrombosis in the bed-bound. He wore bright purple slippers with pineapples surprisingly embroidered on their topsides, and his face was gaunt, pared of all substance, with cheekbones showing like stanchions under pink, brittle-looking skin, and a tuft of white hair like a wisp of smoke off his scalp. He moved shakily with anxious inch-long steps to the edge of the bridge and took his place at the balustrade to my left.
    ‘How are you holding up, Mr Mitchell?’ asked the nurse, who had short black hair.
    ‘Pretty good, I guess,’ said the old man in a weak, high, trembling voice.
    He was just in time. Without warning, bats began dropping from the grooves under our feet, streaming past the live oaks and cypresses of the southern shore. People said ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ as if at fireworks as the freetails accelerated away from the bridge, a tube of shadow sloping upwards into blue-grey light, vibrant with points of agitated air – as if the bridge were sighing them out, a gasp of breath in which each atom was figured by a bat. Their wings made a papery flutter, the rapid soft flutter of banknotes hurrying through a counting