Toward the North Page 8

  One weekend afternoon, after I had taken a nap for two hours, I watched my wife through the screen door window. Once again, she was hunched over the grass, weeding a clump of dandelions. By this time, the marigolds and carnations that I had planted were in full blossom. Butterflies were fluttering about the yard, a few squirrels were sitting on the lawn nibbling some food, and the sun was shining in the spaces between the leaves, dusting the mottled ground below. For a moment, I had a sudden sense of detachment. In the yard, right before my eyes, the squirrels, the butterflies, and my wife had all become completely immersed in the act of living. The rainbow-coloured butterflies, the black-tailed squirrels, and even my wife were all in the same joyful mood.

  But I was uncertain whether this was merely a comforting but imagined facade. After all, up to now I have been unable to solve the mystery of the winter animal tracks in the snow. The snow in the backyard was able to record the footprints of the animals, but the grass does not reveal any footprints. I couldn’t tell whether or not the animals had been coming and going. Perhaps they were wandering about in the night or at other times when I was not aware of it. Perhaps, if I turned my head away for a moment, in that instant the animal might appear. This made me feel uneasy.

  At the very moment that I was thinking this, things started to happen. My wife suddenly jumped up and screamed for me. I lost no time in opening the door and running into the backyard. I felt sure that she must have been bitten by something in the grass.

  “What is it? What happened?” I asked as I ran over to her.

  My wife cried out in horror, flailing her arms about in panic. “Look! A dead bird. In the grass. I touched it!”

  “Is that all?” I said. “It’s nothing. Who told you not to wear gloves?” I could see a large dead bird in the grass. It was neither a robin nor a starling, but a relatively large black bird. Perhaps it was a North American mountain chickadee or a short-beaked crow. Its eyes were still open, and you could see the clouds in the sky reflected in them. The corpse had already started to decompose and gave off a foul-smelling odour.

  I consoled my frightened wife and pulled the hose over to rinse off the hand that had touched the dead bird. After she went back into the house, she locked herself in the bathroom, and I heard the tap running like mad. After about half an hour, she came out of the washroom and said to me, “You make supper tonight. My hand is not clean. It still stinks.”

  I thought the matter was over and done with, but this was not the case at all. In the morning, the letter carrier arrived. The white man was over forty years old, short in stature, and always very happy and talkative. Every day he had to walk to several hundred homes to deliver all kinds of mail. I was about to leave for work when I bumped into him, and so he handed me the mail. I quickly glanced at the letters and saw a piece of green cardboard among them. There were pictures of birds on the card. Although I can read English, I am very slow and sometimes need to use an electronic dictionary. So I took the opportunity to ask the letter carrier what this card was all about.

  The letter carrier said in English, “This is City Hall.” He explained that the card was issued by the municipal government to warn citizens about an infectious disease. I approached him and asked him what kind of infectious disease the card was taking about.

  He said, “The West Nile virus. It’s a terrible disease transmitted from birds to humans.” The virus relied on certain species of birds to spread the disease. The name West Nile sounded familiar. I immediately thought of my neighbour, Mrs. Swanny. She had fallen ill with the West Nile virus.

  Listening to what he said, my heart sank. I tucked the card into my pocket and put the other mail in the mailbox. Just then, my wife came out of the house. We have a family import business, and I usually drive my wife to the warehouse with me. This day was no different.

  All day I was unable to concentrate. I kept thinking about that green card in my pocket. I kept thinking about the birds that were pictured there. Before my wife learned about this, I wanted to have a complete understanding of the contents of the card. So, taking advantage of the time when my wife was in the back of the warehouse sending out some merchandise, I took out the card, and with the help of the dictionary, carefully read it. The information I gleaned from the card made me a little bit nervous.

  The West Nile virus was first isolated in 1937 when it was discovered in a woman’s blood in Uganda’s West Nile region. It was then confirmed to be one of the most widely spread pathogens—the flavivirus. It is distributed throughout Africa, the Middle East, and the southern temperate and tropical regions of the Eurasian continent. In the 1950s, it was estimated that forty percent of the population in Egypt’s Nile River Delta tested positive for this pathogen. Of all the populations, the largest prevalence of the virus occurred in 1974 in Cape Province, South Africa. At that time, nearly three thousand clinical cases were reported.

  The West Nile virus is mainly carried by infected birds and then transmitted to humans by mosquito bites. This resulted in the West Nile fever. It can also be transmitted among people through blood transfusions, organ transplants, breastfeeding, and so on. In 1999, the first case of West Nile virus in the United States was discovered in New York. Soon afterwards, the virus spread throughout the whole country with the epidemic becoming ever more virulent. In the same time periods and regions, people began to notice a coincidence between the outbreak of this disease in human populations and the deaths of a large number of birds. By the middle of March, thousands of crows and other birds had evidently died from the virus in New York City and its environs. A large number of dead wild geese in the Canadian prairie provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan were also found. The infection of birds and people occurring during the same time period in different regions caused epidemiologists to conclude that infected birds act as hosts for the virus and pass it on to the mosquito. The infected mosquito then spreads the virus to other hosts, ultimately infecting people. Several kinds of birds, mainly migratory, had become the chief medium for the transmission of the virus. According to the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s statistics in 2003, forty-five states had more than 9,000 people infected with the West Nile virus, 240 of whom died. Last year there were 2,470 cases with 88 deaths. Canada currently has more than 1,000 cases of infection, of whom 47 have died. And to date, there is no vaccine to prevent the West Nile virus.

  I spent more than half an hour deliberating over this flyer, and all the while I had a sinking feeling growing in the pit of my stomach. City Hall was asking its residents to pay close attention to the developments in the West Nile virus situation. In particular, if a dead bird is found, residents should inform the authorities at once. Then someone from the epidemic prevention centre will come and collect a bird’s carcass and inspect it to determine whether or not it was infected with the disease. The green card didn’t say anything about what they should do after coming into direct contact with the bird carcass. This was what concerned me most. Clearly, the body of the bird found in our backyard had to be reported to City Hall. My concern was, since my wife touched a dead bird, could she be infected? From the information I read about the transmission of the West Nile virus, the disease is spread when a mosquito sucks the blood of an infected bird. Therefore, merely touching a bird should not be a problem. But I know my wife is sensitive and timid, so I had to be careful not to scare her. Just as I was thinking this, I realized my wife had already come into the office and was staring at me.

  “What are you reading?” she asked.

  “Nothing.… A flyer…. A flyer about birds.” I stammered. I had not finished determining how to approach her about this matter.

  “What? A flyer about birds?” She came over and looked at the green card on my desk. She snatched it up and quickly glanced at it. Her English is not as good as mine, nor is her basic reading comprehension, but her intuition is sharper than mine by a long shot.

  “What does
it say?” she asked me, her voice a little too high-pitched.

  “It’s about an infectious disease. You know about our neighbour, Swanny’s disease? This is exactly the same kind of disease that she has.”

  I had my wife sit down and poured her a glass of water. I explained the contents of the card to her, stressing that, for sure, not all of the dead birds had contracted the West Nile disease virus. And, as far as I could understand it, even if the dead bird were carrying the virus, it still could not spread the disease through contact. The only mode of transmission is through the bite of a blood-sucking mosquito. She listened intently to my explanation. Never before had she listened to what I had to say so earnestly. Our discussion resulted in deciding that the first thing to do was to report the dead bird in our backyard to the authorities. So I called the number that was on the green card and reported the incident. The young woman on the switchboard said that Ministry of Health inspectors would come tomorrow to investigate, and at the same time recommended that we should go to the doctor for an examination. I immediately gave our family doctor a call to make an appointment. The secretary arranged for us to see our doctor the next Monday morning.

  During supper that evening, my wife seemed pensive and spoke little. I also noticed that she changed the way we had customarily eaten for the last ten years. Now she put a pair of chopsticks on each dish so that we could pick up the food and place it in our own bowl separately.

  I said, “There is no need for this. Why be so sensitive?”

  She said, “It would be better to do it this way, just in case there is something wrong.”

  Before going to bed, I saw that she had taken a quilt from the closet. She had me help spread it on her side of the bed, so that we could sleep under separate quilts. That night she couldn’t sleep. She just kept talking, going over and over details as if she were preparing to go on a trip to a place a long distance away.

  Thanks to my wife talking until the early hours of the morning, we woke up when the sun was high in the sky. It was the weekend. I got up, opened the door, and looked out to see a strange van parked in the driveway. The van doors were closed and on its side were many pictures of all sorts of birds. It was quite attractive. Over a flock of birds was a line of print: NORTH AMERICAN BIRDMAN. In English, this refers to people who are interested in observing the habits of the birds of North America. I heard the singing of a sweet-sounding bird outside. I opened the outside glass door, and from the threshold saw a red-beaked bird perched in the crown of our giant pine tree. It was singing with singular excitement. Then, a short string of birdsong broke out from the ground in response to the bird in the tree. After that, a burst of birdsong came from the tree. I couldn’t see the bird on the ground because the unfamiliar van obstructed my view. I came out, walked around the van, and saw a man sitting on the lawn. The man was looking toward the top of the pine tree, and the sounds of a bird singing were coming out of his mouth.

  “Hello. How are you?” I greeted him.

  “Not bad,” the man responded, keeping his eyes on the bird at the top of the tree.

  “I suppose you are a North American birdman, eh?” I said.

  “Yes, you’re right,” he said and stood up. I could see that this man looked a lot like a bird himself; in fact, he actually resembled a crow. His head was small with two round eyes similar to a bird. His nose was pointed like a crow’s beak. I don’t know if he possessed these bird characteristics, or if this was just my own fancy. He introduced himself. His name was Youssef, and he was employed as a contractor by the Ministry of Health for the North York municipality. He was specifically responsible for the investigation of dead birds. Before going into the backyard, he asked me some questions about the circumstances, jotting down notes in a huge well-used notebook. I noticed that he had already drawn a pencil sketch of my family’s house on the page. Presumably he had drawn it during his conversation with the bird.

  Then we went into the backyard to find the dead bird. After my wife stumbled upon the bird the day before yesterday, I used a shovel to move it to the secluded west corner of the backyard and covered it with some leaves. I brushed the leaves off lightly and found the thing with no effort. It was very strange; the day before yesterday, the bird appeared to be decayed, but after being buried in the leaves for two days, it seemed to have a fresh appearance. The birdman, Youssef, wearing a pair of latex gloves, picked up the bird and moved it from hand to hand to get a good look at it. The bird looked as though if you blew one breath into it, it could fly away. He said that the bird was a raven, about four years old. After that, he placed the bird in a transparent, hermetically sealed plastic bag, and, using a marker, wrote on the bag the collection site, an identification number, and so on.

  “Do you think that this bird has the West Nile virus?” I asked him tentatively.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The laboratory at the Ministry of Health will discover the cause of death.”

  “What might have caused this bird to die?” I asked.

  “Birds die for many reasons; just as people die for many reasons. But birds die for straightforward reasons—at least not from murder. I come into contact with dead birds all the time; you can see all kinds of them in my van. The freezer at the top has dead swans, wild geese, quail, black-headed gulls, and grey herons.”

  “Can you tell me how birds usually die?” I asked. “When I was young I saw so many birds in the trees and in the hills, but I never saw a single dead bird apart from those killed by people.”

  “That’s a good question. Birds usually die in a place that is not accessible to people. For example, I know a seagull graveyard in a bay in Rice Lake that is more than two hundred kilometres from Toronto, and where there is a large forest that few people visit. I have seen many old seagulls flying in a fixed direction toward that lake and forest where they go to die. Most birds will fly into the deep woods when they are ready to die. After they die, their dead bodies will be eaten by other animals or insects. The bird dying in your garden is not a normal death.”

  “If this bird had the West Nile virus disease, will touching it cause infection?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it will; maybe it won’t. I am not a virologist. I’m just a birdman,” he said.

  “Have you met anyone suffering from West Nile virus ?” I asked.

  “What did you say?” He turned his head and stared at me with his wide-open eyes and pointed face, really looking like a bird. Then he responded, “I have seen too many. In my hometown, which is on the bank of the Nile River, there are many people who have been infected with the West Nile virus. Once when I was young and still in Egypt, a British research team gave all the people in my village a blood test. The results showed that half of the people had contracted the West Nile virus, including me. However, we are still alive and in perfect health.

  After Youssef had collected the dead bird, he didn’t seem inclined to leave. He asked me if he could sit and eat his lunch in the backyard. Although I was not very pleased, I was too embarrassed to refuse. He took an engraved tin lunchbox out of the van. There were several pieces of round flat bread in it, the same kind that I had seen on the streets in Cairo. Youssef continued to talk about the Nile while he tore the round bread into pieces. “The ancient Egyptians believed that after death the soul would turn into a bird and fly up to heaven,” he said. “Therefore, we believe that when we see so many birds flying, we are seeing people’s souls. Since the birds have the West Nile virus disease, then, it is not strange that people are infected as well.”

  “The Nile River people and the West Nile virus have always coexisted peacefully. But this is not the case for outsiders. The most notable example occurred in 323 BCE, when Alexander the Great, the king of the ancient kingdom of Macedonia, died while in the prime of his life after coming to Babylon. At that time, he was only thirty-two years old. In the city of Babylon, a large number of crows had died a mysteri
ous death, just as it happened last year in New York State where a great many crows died. From the day it started, Alexander the Great’s persistent high fever would not subside. Finally, he succumbed to mental confusion and died in agony. Nowadays, many people believe Alexander the Great died of the West Nile virus.”

  I only half believed what he had said, but I felt there might be some truth to it. Perhaps the Indigenous people along the Nile have antibodies and are infected with the virus without getting the disease. But there was one thing that I still didn’t understand: since this was an ancient disease, what caused the outbreak within the last few years?

  Youssef could not answer this question. However, he mentioned something else. He said that in the winter before last, North America had hardly any significant snow falls, and the weather was unseasonably warm. As a result, the brown bears in the northern forests could not hibernate; since the temperatures were too high, they woke up. When they crawled out of their dens, they were unable to find something to eat, and so broke into people’s residences and injured several people. Higher winter temperatures allowed many insects that would have usually been frozen to death to survive, and this gave rise to increased numbers of insects everywhere, harming the forest trees. More insects attracted more birds, and as the birds spread, so did the West Nile virus. Youssef pointed to a big tree in my yard and said, “Look, this tree is covered with green caterpillars.”

  I looked up but couldn’t see anything because the tree branches were rather high. Youssef handed me the binoculars that he used for bird watching. I took a look and saw many long, hairy, green caterpillars crawling along the tree branches. Their density was utterly astonishing.

  “How can this be? This is extraordinary. How could I not have noticed this?” I gasped.

  “Isn’t it on the local TV every day? And in the newspaper?” Youssef said. I was embarrassed. Since I am not able to understand English programs very well, I nearly always watch channel 4, a Chinese TV station on satellite TV. Every day I watch the familiar faces of Li Ruiying and Luo Jing.1 I only watch the local channels once in a while for the local weather forecast and, of course, the NBA basketball games.