Free Frogmouth by William Marshall Page B

happening to me ?"
    He glazed out. He became stone. He said in a sort of thin bubbling sound between his set stone lips, ". . . bibblebip . . . burb . . ."
    He seemed happy. Sometimes, as his lips moved from side to side and dribbling noises came out, it seemed almost as if he was smiling . . .
    It was the aloneness of the bird over the harbor that had fascinated him: the total, complete self-containment that over and over had sent it wheeling and climbing and riding the currents of air.
    If there was no hunting or watching and their bellies were full, why did they do it?
    They did it because it was their pleasure. There was no other reason. Maybe that was why people watched, why, when they watched there were no thoughts to it, but only the watching. Maybe it was something too simple to be thought of or a hunger too deep to be recognized. Maybe it was simply the pure beauty of what birds did, what they were designed for and nothing else, or just the pure pleasure of what they were that the person watching was not and never would be.
    When he watched birds high and silent in the air, he—perhaps like the birds themselves—had no thoughts except the thoughts of the stillness and the air.
    It was not the Bambi syndrome. The Bambi syndrome meant that the birds never killed or tore their prey apart with their talons or beaks. They did tear their prey apart with talon and beak. That part of them, the killing, was not part of their pleasure, but merely a necessity.
    They were the things of dreams, high, silent creatures in the air, looking down.
    All he had was a single, unidentifiable feather.
    On the steps of the Hong Bay library on Aberdeen Road, waiting for opening time, Feiffer watched the birds high out over the harbor.
    He had in his pocket the address George Su had given him. Watching the birds, he touched at it with his hand to check it was still there.
    He looked at his watch.
    In Yat's, someone dreaming, perhaps for a long time, had awoken.
    Far out to sea, there was still lightning from the typhoon on its way to Taiwan.
    The dreams were of chaos and mutilation and death. Now, awake, they were no longer dreams.
    He saw the birds wheeling and gliding and wondered what he thought.
    He wondered what whoever it was who had suddenly awoken —he wondered what, now, at this moment, he was thinking of.

5
    B ehind a garbage skip in Annapura Lane off Old Himalaya Street, Spencer, scuffling around in garbage no one had bothered to put in the skip, said definitely, "He fired from here." He had the two squashed .177 caliber pellets from Sagarmatha Hill in a glassine envelope and he held them up and tapped them at the side of the metal box. "It was an air pistol"—he was stepping back, going through aiming motions against the side of the metal judging the height—"Not a rifle. He rested the barrel against the skip here to keep it firm and he swiveled it against the corner, bending down a bit to follow the moving targets."
    One of those moving targets, Auden, looking not at the garbage around the skip, but at the hamburgers at the end of his ankles, said, "Hmm."
    Spencer said, "See, here." There were two little splashes of what looked like vaporized oil on the gray metal of the skip. "Yeah, it was definitely an air pistol. He dieseled the weapon with a drop of oil in the breech to give it more range." He wondered if he had Auden's full attention. Auden was mouthing something out of the corner of his mouth. Maybe he was just taking in the information. Spencer said, "Actually, to say you 'fire' an air weapon is totally wrong. It's like a bow and arrow: you don't actually fire an air gun or a bow and arrow because there isn't actually any fire—what you do is shoot it." He leaned against the side of the skip and shot his finger in the direction of the hill. Spencer said, "It was a shot of almost forty yards, the one that got the Tibetan, and you, you were almost thirty yards—" He saw Auden about to say something. Spencer said