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By Root 496 0

world on its ass. Over the next few days he and Hernan built a blind of bunch grass and palm fronds, and Blair settled into the grind-it-out fieldwork mode. He charted the foraging grounds, the potential nest holes, the roosts and flyways across the valley; he identified the mated pairs within the flock and noted the species’ strong affinity for wax palms—Ceroxylon andiculum, itself endangered—and surmised a trophic relationship. They talked constantly, with complex repertoires of sounds, chattering in an offhand, sociable way as they clambered about the canopy or sputtered from tree to tree, their short shallow wing beats batting the air with the noisy ruction of windup toys.

Within weeks Blair had a basic ethological profile. In exchange for the privilege of fieldwork he had to do camp chores every afternoon, but three years of graduate school had inured him to slave labor and subsistence living. In some ways this was better than school: he got room and board, worked with minimal interruptions, and was furnished a local guide-bodyguard free of charge. Hernan proved adept at tracking the birds on their feeding rounds, leading Blair through the forest as they listened for debris tumbling through the leaves, then the fuddles and coos that meant Crimsons were overhead. At the blind he usually lay back on the grass and dozed, rousing from time to time to say amazing things about himself.

“I used to have a girlfriend,” he once confessed to Blair in a sleepy voice. “She wouldn’t let me kiss her, but she’d bite me on the ear.”

In the same vacant drone he told all manner of terrible stories: battles he’d fought, prisoners he’d executed, patrols where his column had come across peasants burned to death or babies nailed to planks. The stories were so patently nightmarish that Blair wondered if Hernan was talking in his sleep, channeling dreams that rose like swamp gas out of his wounded subconscious. Hernan’s whole family had been killed when he was twelve, their village wiped out by autodefensas for electing a former insurgent as mayor.

“Sometimes I see them,” Hernan murmured in a half-doze, one arm thrown over his eyes, feet crossed at the ankles. “Sometimes I’m lying on my cot at night, and I look up and all my family’s standing there. And it’s like I’m lying in a coffin, you know? My family’s alive and I’m the one who’s dead, and they’ve come to my funeral to tell me good-bye.”

Blair was so horrified that he had to write it all down, the ba roque, spiraling cycles of murder and revenge mixed with his notes on allopreening among the mated Crimsons and the courtship dances of the unattached males, the way they minced around like fops doing a French quadrille. Sickness, he wrote in the margin of his notes, there’s a sickness in the world, along with parrots the most intelligent and beautiful of birds, also the most threatened—a clue to the nature of things(?) He wrote it all because it all seemed bound together in some screamingly obvious way that he couldn’t quite get. Tramping through the woods he and Hernan kept coming across giant cocaine labs, the thuggish workers warning them off with drawn machetes. The coca fields around the camp kept expanding; radio reports of the fledgling peace talks took on a spectral air, with the MURC insisting on prenegotiation of themes that might be substantively negotiated at a later time. Every few weeks Hernan would go off on a mission, and after three or four days he’d drag in with the other survivors, skinnier, with corpselike shadows under his eyes but otherwise the same, and the next dawn he and Blair would be at the blind, watching the birds greet the day with gurgling chatter. In March the males began to hold territory, and when the females developed brood patches Hernan offered to climb the trees for a look at the nests, a job they both knew was beyond Blair. After a year in the mountains he was a rashy stick-figure of his former self, prone to fevers and random dizzy spells that made his head feel like a vigorously shaken snow globe. Sometimes he coughed so hard that his nose bled;