A Shade Too Light

by Edward Lear, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The bird weighed four hundred and thirty-eight grams, and it bit him.

It bit the soft web of skin between his thumb and first finger, and held on, and twisted, as a man twists a screwdriver that will not turn. Ellis Sowerby said nothing. He had been told that he would be bitten, and by whom, and where, and that it would not matter, and he found that all four things were true.

"Let it," said Huw. "It lets go when it's bored."

They were kneeling on the slope under the mountain, on the east side of the island, in grass that had been cropped by rabbits to the length of a nailbrush. It was a quarter past one in the morning and there was no moon. Huw's head-torch was covered with a red filter, so that it gave out a light the colour of the inside of a cherry, and in that light the bird in Ellis's hands was not black and white, as the book said, but the dark of strong tea above and, below, the dull pink of a sugar mouse. Every fifteen seconds or so, over their heads, the lighthouse at the south end of the island flashed red, a quick group of flashes and then the dark again, and the grass and the bird and Huw's hands all went red too, and came back.

The bird let go. It looked at him. Its eye was very dark and very round and had in it, high up, a small bead of red light which was the torch.

"Now," said Huw. "Wing."

Ellis held the body in his left hand, against his thigh, as he had been shown, with the feet tucked between two fingers. With his right he unfolded the wing, which was longer than he had thought anything so small could keep folded, and laid it flat on the steel rule with the stop at the end, and pressed the joint gently down until the feathers lay straight.

"Two hundred and thirty-three," he said.

"Sure?"

"Two hundred and thirty-three and a half. Call it two hundred and thirty-three."

Huw wrote it in the book. He wrote in pencil, small and upright, the way people write who were taught to fill in forms in the rain.

Then the ring. It was aluminium, the dull silver of a milk-bottle top, open like a letter C, with a number stamped along it. Ellis put it round the bird's right leg above the foot, and took the pliers, and closed it, and closed it again, and looked at it in the red light, turning the leg a quarter-turn in his fingers with great care.

"It's on," said Huw.

"It's not shut. There's a gap."

"There's always a gap."

"There's a gap I could get a fingernail in." Ellis set the pliers again and pressed, very slowly, and the two ends of the ring came together and met, and there was no gap at all. He let out his breath.

Huw put his own face close to the leg, and the red light went over the ring, and he said nothing for a moment.

"Well," he said. "That's a ring."

---

The island lies two miles off the end of the Llŷn peninsula, across a sound where the tide goes through at up to six knots and turns the water into something like the surface of a pan of milk that is about to come to the boil. It is about a mile long. It has one mountain, a farm or two, one road, which is a track, one lighthouse, which is square and painted in red and white bands like a stick of rock, one ruined abbey tower, and some houses, of which the bird observatory is one. It also has, according to the old writers, the bones of twenty thousand saints, and, according to the new ones, some twenty thousand pairs of Manx shearwaters, which come in from the sea after dark every spring and summer and go down into rabbit holes under the bracken, and call to each other from underground in voices like a cockerel being strangled slowly by somebody who loves it.

By the first week of September the calling is mostly over. The adults have gone. They have left their chicks in the burrows, very fat, and flown away to the coast of Brazil and the Argentine, and the chicks sit alone in the dark underground for a week or so, getting thinner and hungrier, and then on some night of their own choosing they come out, and sit at the mouth of the burrow, and stretch their wings in the air for practice, and go back in. And on another night, without anybody's leave, they walk down to the rocks and go.

That was what Ellis had come for. He had paid for a week in the observatory house, in a room with a sloping ceiling and two iron beds, of which he was using one, and a window from which he could see the sound and, across it, the mainland. On the form, under Experience, he had written None. Can hold things still.

---

At breakfast on the second morning there were five of them round the table in the kitchen: Ellis, Huw, a woman who was counting seals for the government and spoke to nobody before nine, and Gordon and Pauline Tilsley from Shrewsbury, who had been coming to the island every September for twenty-two years and had a list.

"Three hundred and eleven species," said Gordon, "between us. She's got two I haven't. I've got one she hasn't. She won't let me forget the Red-eyed Vireo."

"He was in the toilet," said Pauline.

Huw was standing at the stove with his back to them, frying bread. He was thirty-four, and from Aberdaron, which is the last village on the mainland before the sea, and he spoke English the way people from there speak it, as a good second coat over a first. He was not tall. He had black hair that grew straight up at the crown no matter what was done to it, and big square hands with the knuckles skinned, and a jumper the colour of wet slate with a hole in the left elbow which somebody had darned, at some point, in a brown wool that did not match.

When he turned round with the pan and laughed at the vireo, Ellis saw his teeth.

Ellis Sowerby was forty-four, and for twenty-three years he had made teeth. He worked at a dental laboratory in Halifax, on the first floor above a carpet shop, at a bench by a north-facing window, because north light does not change colour through the day the way south light does. He made crowns, and bridges, and veneers, and sometimes whole sets, and what he was known for, among the dentists of the Calder Valley, was colour. A dentist would send him an impression and a photograph and a note which said A2, and Ellis would look at the photograph and ring the dentist up and say, "It's A2 at the neck, it's A1 in the middle, and there's a bit of grey translucency at the edge you'll want, and a white fleck mesially, here," and the dentist would say, "Is there?", and there would be.

There are sixteen shades in the standard guide, which come in four families, A, B, C and D, from reddish-brown to grey, and every human tooth is one of them, or between two of them, or several of them at once from the gum to the edge. Ellis did not need the guide. He had looked at it for so long that it had gone behind his eyes.

Huw's upper left central incisor had at some time lost a corner. It had been built up again with composite, quite neatly, by somebody who knew their job but had been in a hurry. The tooth was A2: a warm ivory, the colour of a piano key that has been in a front room for thirty years. The repair was B1: a clean, cool, rather pleased white, the colour of a new piano key. The join ran in a diagonal line from the middle of the biting edge to a point two millimetres short of the side. In the kitchen light it showed as a little window of a different weather.

Ellis looked at it for perhaps a second, and then at his plate.

"You'll be married, Ellis," said Pauline, passing him the marmalade, "and she's no birder."

"No," said Ellis. "Neither."

"Neither?"

"Not married. Nobody's a birder."

"Oh, well," said Pauline, kindly, as if he had told her he had missed a train, and there would be another, "there's plenty of time."

Gordon said that there was a Wryneck reported down by the Narrows and was anybody coming. Ellis said he would come. He went upstairs for his boots and sat for a while on the iron bed with one boot on, looking out at the sound, where a fishing boat was going across very slowly against the tide, standing still on the water and wagging its bows like a dog that has been told to stay.

---

In the afternoon Huw took him up to the study plot.

It was a square of slope on the side of the mountain, marked at its corners by four orange-painted posts, and under it were sixty burrows which had been fitted, years ago, with inspection hatches: a hole dug down from above into the nest chamber, lined with a section of drainpipe, and closed with a square slab of slate with a number painted on it in white. You lifted the slate and looked down into the dark, and whoever was at home looked up at you.

Huw went from slate to slate. He lifted each one, and put his torch into the hole, and wrote in the book, and put it back. Most of them were empty. In two of them there was a chick, sitting in its chamber like a tea-cosy that had been left in a cupboard, all grey down with the black and white feathers coming through underneath, and both times Huw put his hand down the pipe, lifted the chick out, weighed it in a cloth bag on a spring balance, and put it back.

"Three hundred and ninety," he said, of the second one. "Lost forty since Tuesday. Two more nights and it'll go."

"How does it know?"

Huw put the slate back and sat on his heels and thought about this, which Ellis liked.

"It gets light enough to fly," he said, "and hungry enough to want to."

Burrow forty-one was at the top of the plot, under an outcrop of rock with yellow lichen on it in rosettes the size of half-crowns. Huw lifted the slate and shone the torch and there was nothing there but a bowl of old dry grass and some down, and three or four white feathers caught in the side of the pipe.

"Gone," said Huw. "Gone on Sunday, I'd say."

He opened the book back to the front and ran his finger down a column, and turned it round on his knee so that Ellis could see.

The male of forty-one, said the book, had been ringed in this burrow as a breeding adult in the May of 1981. Since then he had been caught in it, and weighed, and let go, in thirty-one of the forty-five years since. The female had been ringed in it in 1996. Every year since then, as far as the book could tell, they had come back to it.

"They winter apart," said Huw. "Or they don't go together, anyway. They leave at different times and they come back at different times, she's usually a week after him. He gets here and does the housework. He clears it out. Then he sits in it and calls. Then one night she's there." He shut the book. "Then they take it in turns, the egg. One sits, one goes off to sea. Six days, eight days. Out to the Irish Sea, down to Biscay sometimes, for sardines. She comes back, he goes. Fifty days of that. Then they feed it, both of them, till it's fatter than they are. Then they go."

"Separately."

"Separately."

Ellis looked down the hole, at the white feathers.

"He'll be about fifty," he said.

"More. They don't breed till they're five or six."

"Who rang him? In 1981?"

Huw turned to the column. "S.D.R.," he said. "No idea. Somebody with good pliers."

---

On the Friday the wind went round into the south-west and freshened, and by the evening it was blowing seven, and the sea in the sound stood up white in rows, and the radio said there would be no boat on Saturday.

The Tilsleys took this calmly, having done it before, and Pauline produced from the bottom of her rucksack a fruit cake in a tin, which she said was for exactly this. The seal woman took it badly, and spent most of the evening in the porch with her telephone held up at arm's length towards Wales, as if it were a lantern. Ellis went upstairs and rang the laboratory and told the answerphone that he would be in on Tuesday, probably, and that the Haigh bridge was in the drawer under the furnace and only wanted glazing.

There was no ringing that night or the next; the birds do not come out in a gale, and you could not have heard them if they had. On the Saturday morning Huw made pancakes.

He made them on a bakestone, which is a round flat iron plate without a lip, on the biggest ring of the gas stove, and he made them in the Welsh way, which is small and thick, a little bigger than a saucer and the thickness of a man's thumb, with buttermilk in the batter so that they came up full of small holes like a bath sponge. He made them one after another, three at a time, with a palette knife that had lost its handle and had a wad of tape wound on instead, and turned them when the holes on top stopped bubbling and stood open. The underneath of each one, when it came over, was a deep even brown with a ring of paler gold round the rim, like a penny that has been polished only at the edges.

They ate them with butter, which went into the holes. Gordon ate seven. The seal woman ate two, and said they were very good, and seemed surprised to have said so.

"My nain's," said Huw, of the recipe. "She did them every Saturday till she was ninety-one. Big plate in the middle of the table. If you were in the house you got pancakes. Didn't matter who you were." He turned three more. "My brother brought home a girl from Bangor once, a vegan, Saturday morning, and Nain looked at her and went in the back and came out with a pancake made with water. Never said a word. That was the welcome."

"And when you brought somebody home?" said Pauline.

It was the kind of thing she said. It went into the room and stayed there, as the butter stayed in the holes.

Huw slid the pancakes off the iron on to the plate with the taped knife.

"She'd died," he said, "by then. My mam did the pancakes. She's not as good." He put the plate in the middle of the table. "She did him one, though."

Pauline took a pancake, and buttered it, and did not look at Ellis, and Ellis did not look at anybody, and Gordon said that in his opinion the wind would drop by six.

---

It dropped by nine. At ten Ellis went down to the porch, where Huw was sitting on the bench in his coat with the door open, cleaning the ringing pliers with a toothbrush.

The porch faced north-east, away from the worst of it. There was a smell of wet stone and of the sea and, under them, a smell of fried batter which had got into the coats on the hooks. Every fifteen seconds or so the red flash came down from the south end, and lit the wet flags of the path, and went.

"Was it always red?" said Ellis.

"No. White, till 2014. Big white beam, went round." Huw held the pliers up to the porch bulb and looked through the jaws. "On a night like this one, misty, after a blow, in the autumn, they'd come to it. Migrants. Thrushes, warblers, starlings. Thousands of them. They'd fly round and round it in the beam and hit the glass and the tower. Morning after, you'd go up and it was all round the bottom, like leaves. The old wardens used to keep the count." He put the pliers down. "Then they made it red. And they don't see it, or they don't care, or it doesn't call them. They just go past."

Ellis sat down at the other end of the bench.

"Can I tell you something about your tooth," he said.

Huw looked at him.

"Your front tooth. The left one. Who did that?"

"Dentist in Pwllheli. I was fifteen. A ball in the mouth, rugby." Huw put his tongue to the back of it, as people do when you talk about their teeth, as if to see whether it was still there. "Why? Does it show?"

"Only to me," said Ellis. "It's the wrong colour. The tooth's A2, it's a warm one, it's got a bit of yellow in it at the neck and it goes greyish at the edge, that's normal, that's very nice, you've got nice teeth. Whoever did the corner used a B1. That's the whitest one in the guide. It's like putting a new pane in an old window. It's two shades out and the wrong family." He stopped. "I'm sorry. I do it to everybody. I do it on the bus."

Huw had his hand over his mouth. Above the hand his eyes were doing something, and it took Ellis a moment to see that he was laughing, and then that he was not only laughing.

"Nineteen years," said Huw, through his fingers. "Nineteen years I've had that, and nobody's ever looked."

"Well," said Ellis, "I looked."

The red light came, and went.

Ellis's hands had been steady with the bird, and with the pliers, and they were steady all week at the bench in Halifax with a sable brush the width of three hairs. They were not steady now. He put them between his knees.

Huw took the hand off his mouth. He moved along the bench, not hurrying, the way he had moved along the slope towards a bird sitting at the mouth of a burrow: in a straight line, without fuss, so as not to be the kind of thing that a bird takes fright at. When he got there he did not say anything. He put one big skinned hand on the back of Ellis's neck, as a man puts his hand on the warm side of a teapot to see if there is anything left in it, and kissed him. He tasted of salt, and of butter, and very faintly of the oil in the pliers.

When they stopped, Ellis put his finger, very lightly, on Huw's lip, just below the line where the white corner met the ivory tooth. He did not mean to. It was the place where, at work, he would have pointed.

"There," he said.

"There what."

"That's where it's wrong."

Behind them, in the kitchen, somebody put the kettle on, and then, a moment later, after looking through the porch door, took it off again, very quietly, and went back up the stairs.

---

On the Sunday night it was calm and black and the stars were out to the edge of the sea, and they went down to the slope under the mountain at midnight and sat in the bracken and waited.

You wait, for shearwater chicks, by sitting still in the dark and listening. For a long time there is nothing. Then there is a small dry scratching, like a match not quite striking, and a shuffle of grass, and if you put your torch on, low, with the red filter, there will be a chick at the mouth of a hole two yards off, sitting up on its tail with its wings held out on either side of it like a man showing how big the fish was, and beating them, quite slowly, in the air. It does not see you. Or it sees you, and you are not on the list of things it is afraid of. It is thinking about something else.

They got four between midnight and two. Huw held the book and the torch. Ellis did the rest. He weighed them in the cloth bag on the spring balance and read the weight off in a whisper. He laid each wing on the rule. He put on the rings and closed them, and closed them again, and turned each leg in the red light, and there was no gap.

The fourth one was heavy, four hundred and fifty-two grams, and quiet, and did not bite him. When he had finished he did not give it back to Huw to let go, as he had done with the others. He knelt with it in both hands, against his chest, and felt its heart going against his palm, very fast and very small, like a watch in a drawer.

"Brazil," he said.

"Off Brazil. The Argentine. Down past the River Plate." Huw put the pencil in the book to keep the place. "It'll go tonight, I'd say. Look at it. It's decided."

"And then it'll come back here."

"Four years. Five. Back to this slope. Same few yards, very likely. Looking for a hole and somebody to clear it out."

Ellis held the bird.

"I've got a bench," he said, "by a north window. In Halifax. Above a carpet shop. I could do you a veneer. Proper one. A2 at the neck, A1 in the middle, with a bit of grey at the edge. You'd have to sit still for it. Two appointments. Three if I'm fussy, and I'm fussy."

The red flash went over them, and the bird's eye took it and kept it for a moment, as the sea does.

"Is that a proposal," said Huw, "or a quote?"

Ellis thought about this.

"It's a quote," he said. "It's free. You'd have to bring your own pancakes."

Huw laughed, out loud, on the dark slope, and a long way off in the bracken some old bird that had not yet left for the south, or some young one that was not yet sure of the way, answered him from underground, in a voice like a cockerel being strangled slowly by somebody who loves it.

Then Ellis opened his hands and set the bird down on the grass. It sat for a moment. It shook itself, from the head backwards, the way a dog comes out of a river. Then it walked, quite fast, with its feet slapping, down the slope towards the rocks and the sound of the sea, and they lost it in the dark at the edge of the torch, and neither of them put the light on to look for it.

Huw wrote the weight in the book. Four hundred and fifty-two.

"Pencil," he said, holding it out.

"What for?"

"Initials. Who rang it. In case anybody wants to know."

Ellis took the pencil, and leaned over the book in the red light, and wrote, very small and very upright, E.S., and after it, because it seemed to him only accurate, the date.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ab Eduardō Lear per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Edward Lear, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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