In any event, the early morning walkers who also play a major role in the saga are Helen and Ed. Ed still has long hair and looks like he was at Woodstock in the summer of 1969. He's the guy who found the dead bird on the rocks and took the first picture of it. Dead bird was then hurried two blocks to our house. I had to work quickly to take an arty still-life photo of the twisted yellow fishing line knotted around his paws.
“Hurry up, you can't stuff a rotten bird," Lynn shouted a few times. (I only listen to her when she screams a few times.) Then the bird was wrapped in soft Christmas paper, then in newspaper, then in a bright cyan plastic bag. And with that Black Bird was stored in the freezer, fishing line, grains of sand, the whole bloody lot.
Dan and Linda were then called at their beach house in Still Bay. Linda's delighted cheers and screams came loudly through the phone. Far behind came Dan's voice, stuttering: “But, but, it's only a black bird?"
An affidavit
In every saga there is a time of quiet swaying and turning, and that was while our dear black bird lay frozen solid in our freezer.
Contact was made with Philipp Schultz, a taxidermist from Blueduiker.com in Woodstock. He immediately asked where and how the bird died, and insisted on a full affidavit from the park board.
While we waited for a lift to Cape Town, the stories buzzed among the 100 permanent residents, all of whom, except for a few, are very old. I wrote on our Nature's Valley WhatsApp group that I'd suddenly had a visit from an old friend from Germany. A fire was lit, beers were opened and it was a “prost" here and a “prost" there all over the place. I wrote that after a time of gemütlichkeit we searched in vain for the chicken and then I simply put the black bird on the fire. When it was burnt even blacker, we went to have fried chicken at the Nature's Valley Inn while the bird cremated on the coals.
The next morning I called the lead actress with the news that we had braaied the bird. I can still hear her screams down the line, and when she came up for breath, Dan's voice interjected: “Shut up, it's just a black bird."
In any event, Ed and Helen then decided to take the tobie to the Cape themselves. The next morning a crowd gathered to say goodbye. Ed put on his father's old Stirling Moss cap so he could drive faster and Helen was dressed in her grandmother's sedate black frock. Tobie was rushed from our freezer to an ice-packed cooler in the car. And so, with Ed revving his engine, the shedding of a tear or two and a wave of canes, the bird's journey to resurrection began.
“Thank the dear Lord," said the tannie who runs the prayer circle. I rolled my eyes and lifted them up to the Tsitsikamma Mountains.
When the determined Ed and Helen reached their home in Muizenberg, it transpired that their freezer had packed up due to persistent load-shedding. What a nightmare for the two of them to run through the streets looking for a freezer. But a friend came to their aid and our bird was safely freezing again.
After a few days' rest, he was joyfully taken to the taxidermist.
“Come and get him in a week," Philipp shouted nonchalantly over his shoulder, disappearing into his office with the frozen black bird.
Linda sat quietly staring at the ocean that week. A week later they could fetch their bird and take it to its final resting place in Still Bay.
Linda sat in the back of the car with her tobie finally on her lap. She would not sit in front because in the event of an accident she did not want her bird to be crushed by exploding airbags. The chances of a crash with smartass-Dan as driver are real. So she sat in the back seat, talking sweetly to her precious bird while caressing his shiny feathers. In front, our thinker frowned all the way, his knuckles white and tense on the steering wheel thinking about the shit state of the country.
But eventually the bird arrived home.
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