She awoke during the heat of a lazy afternoon and poked her head out of Joseph’s pocket; they were in the shade of a magnolia, and Joseph was sketching.
Celeste casually looked to the north and saw a massive cloud off in the distance. It spread low against the horizon, like a gray smudge. A storm is coming, Celeste thought, looking at the sky as it darkened and thickened.
“That’s odd,” she heard Joseph murmur to himself. He had noticed the same cloud. “No thunder or lightning flashes.”
They sat watching the cloud swiftly approach. There was an eerie quality to it that Celeste couldn’t quite put her paw on; it wasn’t like the storms that she had seen come and go during the summer. There was no scent of rain pushing ahead of this cloud, no distant rumbling or shifting of air pressure. This cloud undulated and twisted. It spread and waved and rippled.
They heard yelling. Several men were racing across the yard, pointing and gesturing at the approaching cloud. “Here they come!” they shouted. A few of them were hauling logs and dead branches to an open field one after another, making huge piles.
Still the cloud came closer.
The men dotted themselves across the field, and Celeste noted now that they were all carrying guns. “Get ready!” they called to one another.
And then suddenly the cloud was upon them. Celeste looked up, mesmerized, as it became a living thing, the endless puffs of cloud becoming enormous pulsing flocks of birds, millions and millions of them. The flocks stretched from horizon to horizon; Celeste gaped openmouthed as she saw the entire sky filled with layer upon layer of flapping wings. Their droppings pattered to the ground like a wet snow. Some flew near enough for her to see them clearly: graceful and strong, with rapid wing beats and long, pointy tails. Their feathers were a beautiful mossy gray with iri-descent highlights that shimmered violet, green, and copper.
The beating of millions of wings created a rush of wind. The sound was astonishing, too—just like the wind from a thunderstorm.
Joseph seemed just as excited. “Hello! Hello!” he called up, waving at the huge flock; and Celeste waved, too. The sight of it so exhilarated and amazed her, she wanted to be a part of it.
Then they heard the guns. They were firing from every direction, with blasts of buckshot that brought down several of the beautiful birds at once. Celeste saw hundreds, then thousands of them dropping from the sky every minute. The flock never changed its path. It kept moving in the same direction, seemingly never ending. A river of birds kept flowing overhead; wave after wave were shot, and the birds fell like hailstones.
Celeste smelled smoke. Looking down, she saw the piles of logs had been set afire. Thousands more of the birds were being choked as they flew through the smoke from the fires, and were dropping to the fields below. Their bodies were being collected and thrown onto wagons. The men were laughing and shouting, “We’re going to eat good tonight!” and “Nothin’ I love more than fried pigeon!”
Joseph had heard stories about the massive flocks of pigeons—the birds were called passenger pigeons—but he’d never witnessed one. And he’d seen hunting before, of course, but never as part of a wholesale slaughter like this. “I’m sickened, Little One,” he said to Celeste.
Celeste burrowed down in the pocket and tried covering her ears; but still she could hear the sounds of the wings, and the shots, and the shouts.
The flock flew overhead all night and most of the following morning.