Night Calls
טקסט Storyboard
- I’d come home for the September holidays. It was hot, and the only other car at the small station pulled away. Suddenly I was filled with the smell of him: Borkum Riff tobacco, sweat, the sweet odor of cheap Cape brandy. Filled with his secrets, I felt like a thief and moved a little closer to the window.
- I ran outside with them and chased them up and down the cool stone lengths of the veranda, flying past the living room and the dining room, screeching past my father’s study and back again with the dogs racing behind me.
- The year that the park officials brought the bird to Modder River had been a difficult one. My mother was killed in a car accident just before my eighth birthday.There was no way I could stay at Modder River. It was too remote, and there was my schooling to consider; my mother had been my tutor. My father stayed on at Modder River, and arrangements were made for me to go to boarding school.
- He showed me articles from the local papers lauding the conservation efforts surrounding the bird, as well as articles from foreign countries in languages we couldn’t understand. He showed me the stamp that the South African government issued, and once he gave me a feather, a long, steel-gray feather from the tip of the heron’s wing, a flight feather, and it was smooth
- At 10, my father switched off the electricity generator and went to his study, where he slept. I heard another familiar sound, the creaking of the gate on the heron’s pen. Gently I felt my way down the hall and into my parents’ old bedroom. I hid behind the soft lace curtains, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the night, I saw my father move slowly across the compound carrying the heron gently under his arm, its long legs dangling at his side. It was like this for 9 days. Until one day, it stopped, and i knew what happened.
- Accidentally, I found the heron’s remains. I was out late one afternoon, looking for a snakeskin for my next school biology project. I had chosen a rocky area, where I’d seen cobras and puff adders sunning themselves, and as I moved slowly through it, poking into crevices with a stick, I came across a broken fan of bloodied feathers. I scratched out a hole with my stick and buried the feathers, pushing a large rock over the small grave.
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