The Fisherman & the Cormorant

I don’t know if I will ever return to writing fiction, but I have decided to share the two stories that I had published in anthologies a few years back, and therefore had not shared here.  

This is the first, written in 2016. It’s an upside-down reimagining of the tale of the Wild Swans, and a story of Samhain.

I’ll share the second story on the spring equinox.

The Fisherman & the Cormorant

It was better this way. To have supple wings instead of arms, and dark as night feathers covering my skin. To be able to dive deep down into the brownish-blue below, to fly amongst water weeds and catch fish in my bill. 

He didn’t know when he flung his curse that I would thank him for changing me. He had wanted me, the old leer-eyed lech; and wanted to grow his own power by stealing from mine. When I refused him, showed him that my womanly wisdom was so much more than his, he feared me, as men so often fear women. Now, blinded by sour jealousy, by bitter contempt, he wanted nothing but revenge.

He struck me with his wand carved with magic symbols, and bellowed hateful spell-words, and at first I was horrified and in terrible pain. My body shrank and narrowed and my neck stretched out long and lithe; I grew clumsy webbed feet and a clacking bill; and my hands, perhaps the one thing I do miss, were no longer able to touch or hold, as they stretched out and fledged and I became winged. 

Changing is always a difficult undertaking. We avoid it more often than we embrace it. But I had no choice in the matter. Frightened, and still in some agony, I did all I could do at the time: I flew away. 

It was in my flight that I looked down at the earth below me, and I suppose you could say I gained a new perspective on my predicament. It didn’t take me long, no more than a wingbeat or two, to accept my new body, for I could fly!—and don’t we all dream of that? In flight I was free, free as no human could ever be. So I flew away from the vengeful he-witch who had turned me, and I wholeheartedly adopted my new form.

After some time in the air, when I knew I was safe, I smelt cold, welcoming water on the wind, and came to rest at a lake. There, I set about learning to swim, flying underwater like a black comet; and there were plenty of frogs and silvery fish to eat, so I was more than content. Indeed, I came to love my sleek new body, my glossy feathers, my bright blue-green eyes, more than I had ever loved myself as a woman.

I would sometimes sit on a rock by the water, drying my lovely, green-tinged wings, and think of people, remembering them always doing doing doing, as if their lives depended on it. As a bird I knew better, for being is so much more satisfying, so much more delightful and virtuous. When the elders had said that the animals, in their wildness, were wiser and worthier than humans, they spoke the elemental truth. I knew this because I felt it, in my hollow bones and bird-flesh and right to the tips of my feathers. I was air and water, earth too, and fire was in my heart. I dwelt joyously by my lake. Simply being. Being cormorant.

Though on the night of the first new moon, when starlight was all there was to see by, I changed back. I had just got cosy in my nighttime roost, when I was overcome by a keen-edged pain, and I fell from my perch to the ground, writhing and crying out. Arms and legs burst from my bird limbs, my graceful neck receded, my gleaming feathers recoiled, and my pointed bill shrank back to smooth, wide lips. After my few weeks in bird-form, I lay in shock, confused by my huge size, my great soft and gangling body. 

This, then, was the curse: to be animal, yet not wholly so. To be turned back, excruciatingly, every dark of the moon, so I was neither one thing nor the other. Torn from the bliss of being, and shackled to doing once more, a mere human. It was only for one night, each turn of the moon, but it was still too much. I would spend those long nights longing for my bird body, shivering with the cold on my bare, goosebumped skin. A woman alone, dreaming only of fish and flight.

This was my life. Mostly bird, but woman too.

Then one day a man arrived on the shore of the lake. A man with sad eyes and a sweet, humble face, carrying a swag and dragging a little canoe. He set up camp in a sandy clearing where the ground was ridged with tree roots, and made a little shack for shelter from the rain beside a golden-flowered banksia tree. Lighting a fire to warm himself, he sat staring into the flames, looking forlorn.

The sun soon set on that beguiling scene, and the smell of smoke from the campfire lingered in the air all night.

The next morning the man sat on a stone by the water’s edge, like a shag on a rock, watching the sunlight igniting the shallows, rippling them with flares of gold. Later, he paddled out in his canoe, slow and steady, handmade fishing rod in his fist, and I saw him catch a brown trout. He killed it dead, quick, hitting it over the head, and it slid with a wet slap onto the floor of the canoe. With head bowed for a time, as if in a posture of grief or reverence, the man sat with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands hanging limply, a tear in his eye. Then he slowly paddled back to the shore. 

The smell of cooking trout drifted over that evening, and for a moment, just one bird-flown  moment, I wanted my human form again, so I could taste it. Mild and slightly greasy in my mouth, chewed between two rows of white teeth. Then I caught a fish and swallowed it whole, raw, straight down my gullet, with a gratified snap. 

It seemed the man had come to stay at my lake, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, to have a human so close by, so tempting and repelling. I was cautious, but curious too.

Each day I swam closer and closer, popping up near his canoe, and watching his shy face. Sometimes he would look down into the water, as if he could see right to the bottom, into the green and weedy deepness, and I wondered what he saw there, this human with his limited human eyes. 

He saw me, eventually. My streamlined, sheeny body, my azure eyes that saw through water and air. He did not speak, but smiled, and watched, and wondered. He did not need to say I was beautiful, for I knew it already. 

Then the moon hid once more, on a dark, overcast night, and I could not help crying out, whimpering as I transformed and trembled on the cold ground. And he came through the blackness, the sweet-faced man, with concern and awe resonant in his breathing. He lifted me, carried me in his strong human arms, back to the camp, laying me gently in his shack. He said not a word, but breathed out softly, and slept, invisible by my side. 

That night I wasn’t cold or alone. 

Though before the blush of dawn I left him, with a whisper of thanks, a shriek and a soft splash, as I changed back and entered the water. From the lake’s cool centre I saw him on the shore, poor bewildered man, wondering if he had been dreaming. 

That day I swam to him as he fished, darting around and under the canoe, a black shooting star in an upside-down sky. He was silent, as ever; but we animals know that language is so much more than just words. His sweet face and his sad eyes and his man’s body, all said, Come, my dear little cormorant, my black water-raven. Come, catch me a fish. 

So I did. I caught him a glistening, wriggling silver fish, and he took it from my bill, dispatched its water-full life with tenderness, and gazed quizzically into my vivid avian eyes. 

He knew me then.

That night we dreamed—the man in his shack and me in my tree. We dreamed of a grey fishwife, with a dillybag full of moon-bright fish, and waterweed in her grizzly hair. The old woman said there was a way to break the spell, to make me changeless once more.

‘Take cormorant-caught fish,’ she said, with a glance at me, ‘and skin them without tearing. Smoke the skins dry, and sew them together with fishbone needle and fish-gut thread. Make a fish-skin blanket, and speak not a word until it is done. Then,’ she said, with a cock of her head to him, ‘throw it over your love.’

So I caught fish for him, I did. I sped through the water like an aquatic acrobat, seizing my slippery prey. He cut away their flashing skins with a skilled hand, and hung them over a low, smokey fire, before piercing the skins with his fine bone needle, joining them seam to seam. 

By the next new moon the blanket was half-made, and I came to his camp when I changed, spent the dark night with him, warm skin against skin, my hands taking their fill of touch. Man and woman. All too human.

This is how we were—a fisherman and a cormorant, a human and a bird—making a magic fish-skin blanket, together. To break a spell.

Then the moon changed again, in her unceasing round, hid her face anew; the blanket was finally finished, and I came to him in woman-form once more. That night was joyous, expectant, all cares laid aside. But before daybreak, he took the blanket in his hands, smoke-smelling and fish-sweet, and spoke his first and only words to me: ‘Will you stay?’

It pained me, then, his soft-hearted humanness, his confusion about the curse. In the growing grey light, the bird in me shook my head, resolute, for I was done with doing, though the woman did so with regret. He nodded, acceptant, bowing to my bird-wish, sorrowful and silent. He let the blanket, all our weeks of work, drop heavily by his side. Had it all been for nothing?

And then the sun’s light broke free of the horizon and I began to change, right before his sad, human eyes. To shrink and lengthen and fledge, until I was small and black and beautiful. I flapped my wings, turned my head on its long, graceful neck, and he remembered what the fishwife had said. Throw it over your love.

Picking up the fish-skin blanket, he took me gently in his arms, held me close to his fluttering heart, and cast the magic blanket around us both. Then we beat our gleaming wings as one, and dived down deep. 

~

This story was first published in Heroines: An Anthology of Short Fiction and Poetry – Volume 1, The Neo Perennial Press, 2018.