A Storm of Pigeons

Them Bones, 10-25:

(For the previous entry in this series, click here.)

Madison Leake, the viewpoint character for much of Waldrop's novel, first appears on the stage leading a horse through a time portal, from the war-ravaged future (the early twenty-first century) to the relatively undamaged past. He stumbles at the outset, landing with his horse in a meadow several unexpected inches below their old datum level. Leake expects to arrive sometime in the mid-twentieth century, right before construction began on the military base from which he and his human companions would later depart. He expects his 140 well-armed colleagues and their horses and gear to arrive shortly. He at least expects the landscape to look the same as it did back home, with some evidence of human habitation and a bayou nearby. (He finds neither.)

Leake doesn't expect a great roaring cloud to come out of the south, traveling at 60 miles per hour. He initially fears it is a tornado, but quickly realizes the cloud is a massive flock of birds, a kilometer wide and 120 miles long. They fly overhead for more than two hours, filling the sky with sound and covering the ground below – and Madison – with bird poop, thick as snow. And Leake realizes something has gone very wrong with his time-travel jaunt. The birds are passenger pigeons, extinct since 1914, and no-one has seen a flock this large since the nineteenth century.

Good for Waldrop, by the way, for including this detail in his book. Few people realize the density of wildlife in pre-Columbian North America, a feature Waldrop underscores later in the chapter when Leake, exploring a bit, sees countless deer, small mammals, and several other species of birds. No author writing about the passenger pigeon, incidentally, has reflected on the experience of standing beneath one or two billion of them (not an uncommon number in their heyday). Leake realizes he will need a bath fairly soon, and so will the other members of his Special Group, if they ever show up.

They don't.

Madison supposes he would find his separation from his team more alarming if he hadn't already seen some harrowing things, first in the Cyprus War (1992 – the author's near future) and then in the nuclear war that destroyed his world. But after waiting four days near the time portal exit, and deciding then to search for his companions at an alternate location (Baton Rouge), the scout heads eastward and finds something that does rattle him: the Suckatoncha Bayou, which has flowed southeastward since La Salle's day (1680), is “presently” flowing due eastward. Bayous flow slowly, and take centuries to shift their course. Madison Leake has accidentally traveled very deep into the past – not to 1942 as planned, nor to the 1880s, but several hundred years further back. Whoops.

After so many shocks, Madison seems unfazed when, a few days later, he comes across a human footprint, or more precisely moccasin-print. Not his own people*, apparently, but American Indians.

Coming next: is it Moe, Larry, and Curly, or Manny, Moe, and Jack?

* A relative term here. Leake tells us he has Choctaw and Chickasaw ancestors and appears phenotypically Indian himself, but notes that his own predecessors assimilated into the American mainstream in the nineteenth century. He himself speaks no Native languages.