Free The Snow Geese by William Fiennes Page A

machine, twenty-five notes per second, and I tried to imagine beneath the flutter the click-din of echolocation, the drumfire of ultrasound pulses that allowed bats hurtling at a cypress tree to hear the fact of it and bear away, upriver.
    During the Second World War, the US Armed Forces developed a scheme known as Project X-Ray, in which large numbers of Mexican free-tailed bats were fitted with small incendiary bombs, attached to their bellies by a short string and a surgical clip. The idea was that cages of bats would be parachuted over enemy territory and open at a particular altitude, releasing teams of explosive bats that would quickly disperse to buildings in the immediate vicinity. Once in their roosts, the bats would chew through the strings and release the bombs. But the scheme was dropped because the bats never dispersed; they stuck together, gathering at one or two roost sites. On one occasion hundreds of armed Mexican free-tailed bats escaped their test range in the south-western desert and blew up several military buildings and an elevated gas tank in a nearby town.
    The last bats dropped from the grooves beneath us, unencumbered.
    ‘There they go,’ said Mr Mitchell.
    ‘We didn’t get here a moment too soon,’ said the nurse.
    ‘I told you, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you?’ His bony pink hands gripped the balustrade; his whole body was shaking.
    ‘Yes, you did.’
    Eleanor didn’t take her eyes off the bats. The stream disappeared into dim light, a thick rope pulled by a stevedore. Mr Mitchell, truant from his ward, stood trembling at the balustrade. Eleanor’s white hair was faintly luminous. Red lights glimmered on radio masts in the hills. The statue of Saint Francis was in place beside the door, the limestone slab beside the cedar tree. Birds were flying north according to inherited programmes. Cars passed back and forth on Congress Avenue. The crowd began to disperse, heading home. The dark blue sedan appeared on the bridge for the second time, and the nurse placed his hand gently on Mr Mitchell’s head as the old man stooped into the open door.

3 : GREYHOUND

     
     
    T HE PROSPECT OF moving north across America as spring itself was moving north and millions of migrant birds were moving north with the warmth to their breeding grounds as the North Pole tilted gradually closer to the sun – this prospect was so exciting that when Eleanor knocked on the door before dawn, with the lines of the birdcage picked out by the streetlight, I almost jumped out of bed. Electric light jarred off the white-tiled kitchen floor and glinted off the piano magnets and off the corners and hinges of the fridge, and when Eleanor opened the fridge to get some milk I saw all the bowls with their tight foil skins like a range of drums – a set of small, tuned timpani on the white racks. We made tea, jigging the strings, and then I fetched my bag from the wood-dark bedroom, breezing through the slatted swinging doors, hearing them
thwup thwup thwup
to a halt behind me. Eleanor was waiting in the living-room, one hand on the table of tortoises, the other sprucing up her downy white hair. We drove through Austin to the Greyhound terminal, yawning in canon, and Eleanor parked the Mercedes at the entrance to the terminal building.
    ‘Have a good time,’ she said.
    ‘Thanks for everything.’
    ‘Don’t mention it. Say hello to the geese for me.’
    I watched the old caramel Mercedes leave the parking lot,
There’s No Place Like Narnia
disappearing in the traffic stream.
    Buses were berthed on the far side of the terminal: a fleet of silver-styled Americruisers basking under arc lights, decked out in sprinting blue greyhounds with thin, tapering snouts you could clasp in your hand like ice-cream cones. Automatic doors opened on a waiting area with bare beige floors and the featureless walls of transit zones, and luggage heaps, sleeping figures, illuminated vending machines, and ranks of screwed-down seating units,