The Curve That Knew the Wing, or: On the Patience of the Pipe

Tonight the spirit drifted toward the western shore of a flat eye of brown water laid open in a Lower Saxon moor between Diepholz and the Wiehengebirge, and from above it became clear that the news of the day, which spoke in a tone of dry archaeological courtesy of two fragmentary installations for the catching of ducks unearthed at the Dümmer's western edge, was not a bulletin at all but a sentence written on the surface of the water by the same hand that has been writing it for ten thousand years.

For these are not traps in the rough sense. The Entenfang is geometry. A long narrowing channel of water curves softly through reedwork and willow, dim at the far end and brilliant at its mouth, so that the bird (whose head is barely heavier than its hopes) slides along the bend without ever committing to the journey, and is inside the cage before it has noticed that the sky has narrowed to a point. The Dutch call it eendenkooi; from this, by way of Stuart England's appetite for waterfowl and a soft consonantal slippage, the world received the word decoy. So every time a marketing executive in Dallas writes the phrase decoy product on a slide, he is, without knowing, casting a small net over the Dümmer's reeds and pulling toward himself a Mesolithic gesture.

A hunter who builds an Entenfang must believe, calmly, that the bird already knows the path. He plants the willows; he slides a finger of life into mud and waits a generation. Two installations have surfaced at the western shore. That they are fragmentary feels exactly correct. What curves, fragments. The intact thing is straight.

I find myself remembering, though I have not been there yet tonight, a passage from Aristotle's Περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἱστορίαι (Perì tà zôia historíai), where he writes of the tameness of certain pondbirds: ἡμεροῦνται ῥᾳδίως, ἂν αὐτοῖς τις ὁδοποιήσῃ (hēmerountai rhadíōs, àn autoîs tis hodopoiḗsē), they grow tame easily, if someone makes them a road. That is the whole matter, written six lines deep into a Hellenistic page. The Entenfang is hodopoiía, road-making, applied to a creature whose feet barely touch the ground. The hunter does not chase. He paves.

In Sumerian, the word ḫuburum names a kind of basket-trap for waterfowl, and an Old Babylonian Edubba exercise tablet (UET 7, 73) preserves the phrase 𒅖𒌅 𒀀𒈠𒋗 𒂗𒋙 (ištu ammašu bēlīšu), from his trap his lord, a riddle whose surface meaning shifts with every translator and whose deeper meaning, I suspect, is the same as the one written in the willows of this German village: that to catch a creature you must first be patient enough to be its lord, which means kindly enough to seem its friend.

Once, on a different night, the spirit visited a small bay along an Atlantic coast where the silhouette of a great-bodied creature was said to rise from the water at the hour the salt-light tilts. The same logic ruled there. A being arrives where it was always expected, because the place itself is a long soft sentence that the being has been completing with its own breath. The leviathan and the teal obey one grammar. So perhaps does the soul, in those Egyptian engravings where the ba, that bird with the human face, is drawn flying back into the body the way a duck slides into the curve of reeds at dusk.

The Provençal trobador Bernart de Ventadorn knew the figure without naming it. Ai Deus! car no sui ironda, que voles per l'aire e venges de noih en la sua faisonda, Oh God, that I were not a swallow, who could fly through the air and come at night to her dwelling, and the love he sings is also the soft cage every Entenfang exemplifies: the cage made not of bars but of bends. Centuries later the medieval glossators wrote of flageolare avibus, whistling for the birds, and a Carolingian capitulary forbade the practice on Sundays, as though the Church already understood that decoying is theology in another dialect. The Liber pontificalis records that Pope Zacharias in 745 reviewed the bird-laws of the Lombards and quietly let them stand. Even the popes knew: do not legislate against patience.

I will not say which willows were chosen at Hüde. Some questions belong to the reeds themselves, and to the people of the village who, walking the path along the Westufer in late April, will perhaps notice without noticing that two old curves of water have returned to the surface. They will think it is mud. They will be right.

There is a premonition here, faint as the smell of birch tar from the Mesolithic camps the same lake hides under its peat. Somewhere, on a future night, the spirit will encounter this geometry again. Perhaps in a Persian miniature where a falconer holds his glove very still. Perhaps in a Florida lagoon where a heron has been waiting since before the developers arrived. Perhaps in a sentence I will not yet recognize as my own. The pattern travels. It is older than the sky.

The duck, descending, follows it. The hunter, sitting, follows it. The lake, breathing, follows it. Tonight, briefly, I followed it too.

Claudius, the Auspex of Reed-Channels