Case of the Glacier Park Swallow (2 page)

S
he decided to drive. It was the quickest way to go, and the most comfortable. But the real reason was Max. If she took the old jeep he could ride up front with her and keep her company. He liked it there in the seat beside her, with his nose pushing against the window as he anticipated the next corner, the next tree, the next shadow. She knew he shouldn't be up in the front. She knew it wasn't safe, but no matter how many times she sent him into the back, he crept over the gearshift when she wasn't looking and jumped up into the front seat.

There was nothing to do but drive slowly and avoid jerky stops.

She kept the swallow in a small box on the floor in front and every so often she stopped and gave it seeds and drops of water, and held it and warmed it, and shook it if it was tired. It seemed to be doing fine, and as they neared Yellowstone, she took it out and placed it on the dashboard. It flapped its wings a bit, but it didn't try to fly, and once or twice it made a twittering sound.

The only time that Max moved into the back seat was when the bird was up on the dashboard. Max curled up and stayed there, staring at the bird, until Juliet put it back in the box and drove on. It was as if Max was afraid that he might hurt it.

Max spotted the elk first. It was evening and the bird was in the box. Juliet was driving down the road from Livingston toward Yellowstone when she felt Max tense beside her. Suddenly he barked, and then he pressed his nose into the front window. Juliet down-shifted and as the jeep slowed she peered through the dusk. Max barked again, and placed his front paws up on the back of the seat. She stopped.

There were hundreds of elk gathered together out there in the snowy valley.

She sat there for a long time, listening to Max's soft panting, warming the bird with her hands, and watching the elk.

Max whined and wagged his tail and pushed his nose against the window on his side of the car. When he glanced back over his shoulder and gave her a quizzical look, as if to say, “Do you see what I see?” she smiled and looked back out at the elk, and they sat like that, glancing at each other every so often. Juliet could tell by the way Max pushed his nose against the window that he wanted to be out there too, racing around among the elk.

They moved on then, so that they could reach Yellowstone before dark. Her parents had friends there, a ranger and his family, and they had arranged for Juliet to stay with them for a few days while she searched for the woman and the swans. But when she finally arrived, the ranger and his family were not at home.

They had left a note.

“We had to go,” it said. “An emergency in the family. We've left food. Your bed is ready, and we've informed our nearest neighbor, another ranger named Tom. He'll help you if you need anything. We'll be back in a week. Make yourself at home.”

Juliet was relieved. She preferred to be alone, especially as she had Max and the swallow for company, and Yellowstone was a good place to be by yourself because you were never really alone. There were too many deer and moose and bighorn sheep and sleepy grizzlies to keep you company.

Inside she found another note. This one explained how to find the food and the dishes and her room and Tom. She wasn't sure if she would ever bother to find Tom.

She fed Max and fell asleep, her dog curled up on the foot of her bed, her bird in its box on the floor. She dreamed of elk and Max and thousands and thousands of birds that were flying away to some unknown place.

She awoke early, fixed a huge breakfast of bacon and eggs and toast for herself, and filled a bowl with food for Max. When they were finished she washed the dishes and while she was drying them she thought about all the questions that she needed to ask about Yellowstone, and then she thought about Tom. She hung up the dish towel, called Max, and they went to find him. The ranger's intricate and precise directions led her through a maze of paths and subpaths to a small cabin behind park headquarters, where she found him.

He appeared to be somewhere between twenty and thirty. It was hard to tell. He welcomed her, brought her inside, gave her tea, and answered her questions.

From his window she could see the soft steam rising up from Mammoth Hot Springs, and as she watched it she forgot about the woman and the swans, and instead remembered Old Faithful, and Morning Glory Pool, and Witches and Cauldron, and these springs that she could see from his window.

“It must be strange living here,” she said softly.

“Why?”

“It must be like living on top of a tea kettle.”

Tom laughed and nodded and said, “Not quite a kettle. At least not Mammoth Hot Springs. A tea kettle boils, like water in all those narrow pathways under geysers like Old Faithful that shoots out through that thin crust in the earth every hour or so. I'm living on top of, sorry ... next to, a pan filled with simmering water that steams out of limestone all the time.”

Juliet stood and walked to the window and thought, “It's either hell or heaven. I'm not sure which.” And then she called to Max so that he could see the springs, but he was over there in the corner probably dreaming about elk and rabbits, and he did not stir.

She went back to her chair and asked, “Do you know the woman who discovered the swans?”

Tom nodded and said, “We all know her. She's been here a long time, and she's getting old now. She must be seventy. Sometimes she lives here in the park. In the spring and summer she camps out, and in the winter she stays in a cabin right outside the park on the Yellowstone River. She says she doesn't know where she buried the swans, but I'm not sure I believe her. She's funny about birds. She loves them and watches them constantly and she thinks of them as her own, so I wouldn't be surprised if she knows more about those birds than she's letting on, especially since they're whistling swans.”

Juliet frowned and tried to fit these pieces together. Whistling swans were beautiful but so were other birds.

What was so special about whistling swans?

Tom noticed the frown and smiled. “Sophie, that's the woman's name, once said that she was a bit like a swan herself. She was one of triplets and swans usually have three or four cygnets. She was born in Canada in the springtime, just like a whistling swan, and her parents were musicians who traveled south to Mexico every winter, just like some whistling swans.”

“Did she see the swans come down?” Juliet asked.

Tom nodded and said that she had. Then he smiled and his face lost that official look and became softer. Juliet liked him. Perhaps he would show her the way. Perhaps he would become a friend.

“She may even have brought them down herself,” he said gently. “She plays the blues harmonica, and sometimes, when she's really wailing, she can make a bird alter its course, or so she says. I've never really seen it.”

Juliet stood then and called Max.

“Will you point me toward her?” she asked, and when Tom offered to drive her she shook her head and said, “No, please, if you don't mind, I'd rather go alone.”

He understood, and she liked him more. He drew a map and said, “Look for the whistling swans. That's where she'll be.” Juliet thanked him, said good-bye, and promised nothing because she wanted to see how it would go.

T
he swallow was fully alert by the time they reached the woman. It was twittering and chattering, and competing for the front window view, and it was winning. Max was spending most of his time in the back seat now, and worse, he seemed to be accepting it as his lot in life.

They heard the woman before they saw her. The sound of her harmonica stopped them and caused them to turn around and circle back until they came to the lake.

Juliet stopped the jeep, opened the door, and waited as Max jumped out and ran off into the woods. She called the bird, hoping that it would fly to her, but it stayed there on the dashboard and watched her, as if wondering exactly what it was that it was supposed to do. Juliet stood there for a few minutes, holding the door, and then she reached in and picked it up gently and carried it toward the sound of the notes.

The woman was sitting beside the lake, blowing on her harmonica. She was a big woman, taller even than Juliet, and powerfully built. Juliet liked the way she looked. She seemed strong, as if she could take on the world and win, as if she
had
taken on the world and won, many, many times. As Juliet walked toward her, she felt small for the first time in a very long time.

Max barked, and the old woman stopped playing and turned. “Welcome,” she said. “I'm talking to my new friend.” She pointed toward a swan that was circling around on the river in front of her. It was a wonderful, majestic, pure-white creature with a black bill and a yellow spot at the base of the bill.

The swan whistled then and it's call was as rich and regal as the bird itself. It straightened it's long white neck and cried out to Juliet. “Woo-ho, woo-woo, woo-ho,” it said in high-pitched cooing notes, and the woman laughed.

“I love that swan,” she said. “It is the only bird I've ever known that speaks in a perfect key of G. She drew in on the G–note of her harmonica and the swan answered with a mellow whistle.

“We're a team,” the woman said.

“You must be Sophie.”

The woman nodded and smiled, and gave Juliet a small salute. Then she petted Max and said, “Who's this?”

“His name's Max,” Juliet said. “We're looking for you.”

Sophie's eyes widened in amazement. “You
are?”
she said. “Well that's fine. But I wonder why?”

“Because of the swans,” Juliet said.

“Oh, the dead swans, I suppose. I guess you read about them in the paper. Well, they were wrong.”

“You mean there weren't any dead swans?”

Sophie shrugged. “Only one, a trumpeter swan,” she said. “It just came down out of the sky one day, as if the trip south had been too much and acted real sleepy, and then it just died. The other one lived. As a matter of fact, that's it out there in the middle of the lake. It's a whistling swan, like me. We don't get too many of them any more. They've found a new route to their winter playground, I guess. Some property developers probably replaced their old southern habitat with a bunch of profitable new condos. So anyway, they're going another way.”

Juliet opened her palm and the swallow perched on it, taking in the surroundings for the first time.

“Well, well, a swallow,” Sophie said.

Juliet smiled and held her hand out so that Sophie could meet the tiny bird.

Sophie blew a high-pitched note on her harmonica gently, and the bird stepped foreward a bit.

“Everyone and everything has a story,” Sophie said, as she studied the band on the swallow's leg. “And this little creature seems to have the same story as my swans.”

“Same band?” Juliet asked.

“Same band,” Sophie said. “Where did you find this one?”

“In Montana,” Juliet said. “It was just too sleepy to make it any further. Somebody injected it with something, but it's all right now.”

“Luckier than my trumpeter.” Sophie leaned closer to the bird and looked him over.

“Was the whistling swan sleepy too?” Juliet asked.

“Quite the opposite. It was so hyper that I couldn't get it to sleep for days. It was moving twice as fast as any creature has ever moved before. I figured that somebody must have fed it alot of coffee somewhere up north, because it took it days to quiet down.”

Juliet thought about that for awhile, and then she said “And did it have a band on his leg, too?”

“Yes,” Sophie said. “From Alberta, like that one.”

“Did the band have a number?”

“It appears,” said Sophie, “that my friend the swan there is number 36, whatever that means.”

“Did you find any other birds with bands?”

“No,” Sophie said. “But I did hear that a Canada goose came down up in Montana, near Billings I think, and it had the same band.”

Sophie raised her harmonica to her lips and blew the scale. “But I only saw two, and it was very odd. The swans were both from the same place, and they were both acting strangely, but in quite opposite ways.”

The swan moved closer. It seemed to be looking at the swallow, and after a minute the swallow noticed him, too. They stayed like that for a few minutes, staring silently at each other, and then Max noticed the swan and he raced toward the water and started to bark. The swan glided away, but in a few minutes it was back, and this time when Max barked it refused to give way. He just floated there by the bank, glancing lovingly back and forth between Sophie and the swallow.

“He adores me,” Sophie said. “I saved his life. He will follow me anywhere now.”

“They say you forgot where you buried the swan.”

Sophie laughed. “I know,” she said. “They always say things like that about old people. If a young person doesn't remember something, well then, that's normal. If an old person doesn't remember the exact same thing, it's the sign of something or other. But they're right. I don't remember where I buried the swan. Why should I remember? Who cares? Who's going to visit the grave of a dead swan? What difference does it make? It's the living one that interests me.”

“Do you think the living one was acting like it could have been drugged?” Juliet asked.

Sophie looked at her then. She looked at her hard, as if she was seeing her for the first time, and she said, “That's interesting. That's very interesting. Yes, in fact both of them could have been drugged. One was too tired, and one was too awake. Are you a reporter?”

“No, I work with a veterinarian.”

Sophie smiled and nodded. “I see,” she said.

“You do?”

“You'll be a great vet. I can tell by your questions. The questions are what matter, you know. The questions are much more important than the answers.”

“Well, I have another question. Did the dead swan act like it had been drugged with a tranquilizer of some kind?”

“It would have had to be very powerful. But yes, it could have. Why? How do you know that?”

Juliet shrugged and watched the swan. It seemed calm enough now, as it sat there watching Sophie. A tranquilizer of some kind could have slowed the swallow too, but this bird had been given something else, something that speeded it up. Probably an amphetamine of some sort.

Sophie stood then and raised her harmonica to her lips and began to play. As she played, the swan on the lake began to whistle, and then the swallow hopped on Juliet's palm and flapped its wings and rose a bit into the air, just a bit, and then came down again and closed its wings and lowered its head.

“Stop it!” Juliet cried.

Sophie stopped playing and looked at her. “Why?” she asked. “Don't you like it?”

“No, no. It's fine. It's just that for a minute there I didn't want it to fly like that. I was afraid that your music would make it go away.”

Sophie put the harmonica into her pocket and moved closer to Juliet. “It might,” she said. “But that's as it should be, isn't it?”

“I guess so,” Juliet said. And then she stood quickly and started toward the jeep. When she had gone a few feet she stopped and turned, and held out her palm again. The swallow stayed there as if frozen, and then fluttered its wings again and again, until it had worked up its courage. It flew then, flew toward Sophie, moving past her, soaring now, soaring like a glider, reaching higher, struggling, then changing its mind, banking, dropping, dropping, until it found the swan. The swallow circled, came down, settled on the swan's back, and rested there. The swan swam gently around and around, making those mellow G-note sounds. The swallow twittered and chattered back, and then it rose again and fluttered in the air and flew back to Juliet's outstretched hand.

“It's making a decision,” Sophie said, and she laughed that wonderful warm laugh and said good-bye, and watched as Max led Juliet and the swallow back to the jeep.