The Sea Inside

dog or a fox done that? Every now and then it tucked its head round to the injured site, pecking at the disconnected bones, unable to understand. Why couldn’t it do what it usually did? It could not comprehend the malfunction. I could, but I ignored it, and cycled home, thinking determinedly about lunch instead.
    A year or so before, I’d been cycling along the beach when I saw a pair of mute swans, a common enough sight here, running their belisha-beacon beaks through the shallows. The Nordic historian Olaus Magnus wrote in 1555: ‘The swan, as everyone certainly knows, is a placid, good-natured bird.’ He noted that it derives its name,
Cygnus
, from its singing, sounding sweetly from its long, curving neck, although he added that in old age, it sings with one wing over its head, its swansong ‘as it departs from life. Plato says that it sings not from sadness but from joy as its end draws near.’ Like the ermine, said to prefer to die rather than soil its white winter coat, the swan is pledged to maintain its whiteness, as immaculate as the newly laundered shirt of an African schoolchild.
    But one of these swans was not preening itself. It was tugging with its wings at a near-invisible thread: a micro-filament of discarded fishing line which threatened to trap the bird till it was trussed up in its own panic.
    A man with a weather-beaten face was also looking on, concerned. I suggested we try and do something. We waded out towards the pair, but they moved off, out of reach. My comrade, as I now regarded him, made a suggestion. He owned a rib, and would fetch it from the pound. Moments later we were in the boat, in pursuit of a swan. The powerful outboard motor took us out into the channel. Our prey, meanwhile, was doing its best to evade us. Circling to cut off its escape route, we drew close to the entangled bird. Ignoring what I’d been told – how a swan can break a human limb with its wings – I leaned over and gathered it up in my arms.
    I felt its whiteness in my embrace, sturdy and warm and downy. It didn’t struggle at all. Indeed, it seemed quite at home, although that may have been merely fear: captured animals will play dead, as a last resort. It was like holding a living musical instrument – or, perhaps, putting one’s arm around a ballerina. Its head swivelled to face me indignantly. I thought of Alice’s flamingo mallet as I gripped the slender, muscular neck. My fellow rescuer pulled out his penknife and cut the line. It was all over. I opened my arms and felt the bird’s tension release and the life return to its body. It swam off for a few yards, stretched its wings, turned, and honked.
    Only later, reading Tag Barnes’s
Waterside Companions
, would I see another side of the story. Barnes, an angler since he was a boy, wrote his book in 1963 to enlighten fellow fishermen about the creatures they might see around them. Moorhens, cormorants and grebes all get their admiring page or two; even water voles, toads and coypu are given their due. But when it comes to the swan, Barnes appears to lose his temper: ‘I simply bristle with annoyance when one moves into my swim.’ He certainly does not agree with Plato’s lyrical tales. Swans, he says, are ‘the most aggressive, persistent and arrogant birds we have and can be extremely dangerous’.
    It was refreshing to read natural history from the predator’s point of view; in Barnes’s words the mute animal becomes almost malevolent. No amount of stone-throwing or shooing would deter these waterborne thugs, he says. ‘They will often hiss back at the “shooer” and sometimes threaten him with violence.’ He suggests that dirty water might be thrown over the miscreants – perhaps on the basis that these vain creatures would be humbled by their besmirched plumage. His other remedy is to ‘cast a line over their backs’. Is that what happened to ‘my’ bird? Barnes convicts himself in his final blast, as deliberate as the second discharge from a twelve-bore. Having admitted that swans eat only aquatic plants, he concludes: ‘I can recommend the cygnet as being a really tasty dish!’
    Faced with the plight of the gull and its broken wing, I returned to the beach that afternoon. I’d last seen the bird running into the bushes, seeking shelter from predators; I’d watched other injured birds retreat into the same undergrowth, as though they were choosing a place to die. But now it was back on the shore. Dumbly, it declined to