His mother used to say the soul was a bird that lived in the nape of the neck. At night it flew out of the mouth, and when you woke it returned; and when you died, it flew away forever. The world outside the glass that night seemed entirely an abstraction, a dream. Here, in the drawing room, the living warmed their bones by the flame. Without, the dead were all looking in.

II

Eleven

During World War II high-flying pilots over the Atlantic often puzzled over phantom specks that showed up on their radar screens. “Radar angels” they dubbed them and wondered at the faint apparitions, only to learn years later that they were actually birds migrating over open water. Birds, like humans, are mostly moisture—they’re ninety percent water—and a flock of finches on a radar screen shows up like a small weather system: one or two green dots. On a night of heavy migration in autumn or spring, a radar screen blossoms with fleeting spectral dots.

There were nights in Manhattan when Ana Gathreaux and her husband sat in front of a computer screen and watched the NEXRAD images of migrating birds. Russell was never terribly interested in what he called Ana’s nightly “soap operas,” yet he indulged her. Putting aside an issue of The Auk or a paper he was preparing, folding his reading glasses, he joined her at the computer. Ana could never resist logging on during a particularly heavy night of migration and staying up watching, sometimes for research, sometimes for pleasure. There was something about the screen, the ghostly images, blooming, fading, appearing, disappearing, that—even after years of watching—still amazed her, to see what had been invisible to ornithologists for years: thousands of birds under cover of darkness, riding the wind like a wave. The seasonal scattering. The radar angels.

When Ana was eight years old, she asked her father where all the birds went in winter. Her father told her—mischievously—that they buried themselves in the bottoms of lakes until the weather grew warm. Little did Frank Gathreaux know he was repeating one of the oldest canards about bird migration, started by Aristotle and believed, amazingly, by Carolus Linnaeus himself: that migratory birds (swallows in particular) hibernated underwater in lakes. For Ana’s father, it was merely a convenient lie. They lived a half mile from Lake Ronkonkoma on eastern Long Island, and each afternoon when Frank Gathreaux finished his work at the bakery—exhausted, a cup of coffee in hand—he took Ana and her brother fishing at the lake. Ana wasn’t interested in fishing, but she did like birds. Telling his daughter that they hibernated under the water was a way of keeping Ana at the lake. Yet his plan backfired. She wanted to see the hibernating birds for herself.

When do they dive into the water? she asked.

At night.

I want to see.

You can’t.

Why not?