The Comfort Bird

The Comfort Bird by Hylke Speerstra  [tr. H J Baron]

 

This is how the book starts, way back in the 1860s, when emigration promised deliverance from the bleakness of poverty and prejudice.

 

Excerpt 1

 

“Your mom passed away.”  Ytsje Wytsma is six when she hears these words from a neighbor lady.  The children in the village explain to her what that means:  “Your mom is dead.” 

A couple of days later the old squat tower tolls the bell indicating a woman’s death.  …   That evening her dad puts her to bed for the first time.  He promised to tell her a fairy tale, but it turns into a story without beginning or ending.  “My dear girl,” Sibbele Wytsma stammers while he tucks her in, “fairy tales aren’t real.  Our work is going to have to pull us through.”

 

“After the death of my mother, who in the end was suffering from severe cramps, I fortunately found a very good father,” Ytsje would describe it much later.

 

 

   All of this is part of the grief of Hichtum in the extremely wet, late winter of 1861.  The Leeuwarder paper reports that the high waters took thirty-seven lives.  It is the year that serfdom was abolished in Russia and President Lincoln took the first step in abolishing slavery in America. 

 

When Ytsje is ten, Wytsma takes her out of school in Burgwerd.  Now she can be her dad’s little housekeeper.

 

   She doesn’t get many carefree and sun-drenched days coming her way, but a few she will long remember.  Take that mild and bright September day in that same year of 1861.  In between her work she goes poaching through the fields for tufts of sheep’s wool that are hanging on field gates and barbed wires.  It amounts to little more than fouled little pieces of wool, but the freedom in an open field and the collecting and gathering yields such sweet satisfaction. At home she washes the wool, spins it into thread, and is even able to knit it into underwear for herself and Dad. 

 

   “What are you standing there dreaming!”  It is the child’s voice of Meindert Boorsma, her friend from Hichtum who was her classmate.  “Come on, Ytsje, two can do more than one.”

   Meindert is an orphan who has adopted the old people language of his grandpa and grandma who are raising him.  “Or are you not inclined to look for sheep’s wool together

with a neighbor boy?”

   “Yes, of course.”

   “Actually, a charming girl like you should be going to school!” the boy said like a little adult.

   “And what about you!”

 

   “A boy like me can learn a lot from nature, from the birds of the field, says Grandpa.”  The little man comes from a family of bird catchers.*

   And that’s how the boy and girl spend the whole beautiful September day searching for sheep’s wool. 

* In Friesland, trapping Pacific Golden Plovers was a century-old tradition.  These plovers, coming from Scandinavia and NW Russia, would take a breather in Friesland’s mild winters.

For some Frisians, catching them would become a passion and an artful sport, not unlike fly fishing for others.  They would use a unique device, called the wilsternet, a drop-down net.  These were large but light nets, approximately 4 x 25 yards with an arrangement of pivoting poles and tension ropes that released the net over the capture area when the pull string was tugged by the wilsternetter who sat behind a wind screen at a distance of about 32 yards.

The wilsternetter would attract passing flocks with a whistle that imitated their call, and birds were lured toward the net by stuffed decoys or a life, fluttering bird.

When the attracted birds were about to land into the wind, the net was quickly flipped over with the help of the wind.

For many a wilsternetter this supplemented his livelihood; he would sell the birds to a poulterer for about 50 cents a piece, who would then export the meat to England where it was prized as a delicacy.