Excerpt 3

…about the need of a “comforter”

 

The young Meindert Boorsma is not only named after this grandpa, he also bears his nickname: Meindert “Birdie.”

   On the day that the old Meindert became Grandpa, he made a very special bird whistle for his namesake.  The material consisted of an ancient cow rib from the Hichtum terp,*  a couple of tin copper plates, and a nail-hard knot of ebony wood.  From that wood he carved the mouthpiece.  When he tried it out he knew that it was good.  The old man was already known then as the Stradivarius among bird whistle carvers.  The little instrument was placed in the cradle of the little boy with the hope that he would become just as sharp a field man as his forebears.  …  

When the old man first heard how his grandson could imitate the lapwing so lifelike and later also the godwit and the redshank, he didn’t believe at first that he wasn’t listening to a real, living meadow bird.

For Ytsje and the boy Meindert the day of wool gathering comes to an end.  It turns toward evening when the two saunter toward home with a bagful of sheep’s wool.  And then Meindert hears in the distance the call of the golden plover.  “Come, they must not see us, let’s crawl behind the field gate over there.”  The boy digs up his bird whistle and gives a kind of shy answer to the plover.

   “Ytsje, I pretend to be a kind of uncertain plover.  I say that I don’t dare to travel alone, that I’m a lost soul in need of help.  I want them to take me along on their flight.”  Again Meindert puts his whistle to the lips, and then quite another song emerges.

   “What are you doing now,” Ytsje whispers sharply.  “You’re not imitating the golden plover but the lapwing.  Why did you all of a sudden become a lapwing?”

   “It’s like this, with the bird migration another kind of bird accompanies nearly every flight of golden plovers.”  He’s hardly got the words out of his mouth or a whole flock of birds streaks over them.  “Look, this time there’s a lapwing among them.  Such a solitary one goes along as a comfort-giving bird.  It’s like Grandpa said: ‘On dangerous travels one cannot do without a comforter.’”

 

* In Friesland, an artificial dwelling hill is called terp (plural terpen). Terp means "village" in Old Frisian and is cognate with English thorp.
Historical Frisian settlements were built, as far back as 500 BC, on artificial terpen or mounds up to 15 m height to be safe from the floods in periods of rising sea levels. During the 18th and 19th centuries, many terps were destroyed to use the fertile soil they contained to fertilize farm fields.  But some are largely preserved to this day.