“He that steals the Eggs of Swans out of their nests, shall be imprisoned a Year & a Day, and fined at the King’s Pleasure.” —English Common Law
It must have been spring. There must have been cygnets, because when my grandfather ignored the hissed warnings and insisted on hand-feeding his M&Ms to the swans, the big cob puffed himself up and came after him. I was only three or four at the time, but it was not lost on me which one of those big males had just lost his dignity. This may or may not have been a formative moment in my lifelong tendency to side with animals against the patriarchy. But it is certainly my first memory of swans.
In the just-barely-United Kingdom, swans are the property of the monarch. Until 1998, to kill one was treason. For centuries, they were raised for the royal dinner table. One of Henry VIII’s favorite recipes was roast swan stuffed with numerous smaller birds and then returned to its feathered skin for presentation. But now they are no man’s supper, living freely, protected, wherever they choose. Lots of them choose to live here in Edinburgh. I like being near them. It’s impossible not to fall into their poems.
A pair in early spring, far along the canal, sitting on the opposite bank in tall grass. They are clearly reflected in the still water below. Between them, a space where their nest is being constructed. When it is finished it will be three feet high and six feet across. They have just begun to build. Their bodies do not move — only the necks, in slow counterpoint, reach back far behind them, plucking grass and bringing it forward to add to the growing pile. Their duet is mirrored in the water, four swans making ballet, knowing nothing of Tchaikovsky.
Twilight, winter. The canal has frozen over. A loud, rhythmic crunching coming from around a bend, inexplicable. The sound nears and now the valiant cob is visible, surging forward on the ice, lifting his body high and then letting it fall hard, breaking the frozen surface, foot by foot, while his wife follows behind in the narrow path of open water, smoothly in the dark.
High summer near Holyrood Palace, where dozens of swans live, moving between the green slopes of Arthur’s Seat, that high volcanic remnant, and the loch at its base. A rare hot sunny day and I lie on my back in the grass, not intending to sleep, but I do. When I wake, the sound of a Japanese paper fan unfolding beside my ear. I open my eyes to see the neck towering above me against the blue sky and hear the wing folding back in. All around me swans are sleeping, grazing, preening. A dream that came on waking.
Impossible good fortune! Cygnets long since hatched, and I think I see an egg in the abandoned nest on the other side. If I cross the bridge, make my way along, and lower myself I might be able to reach it. This is accomplished, with the dreadful feeling of committing a crime. It is a crime! Heart pounding, I pick up the beautiful big jade-colored egg, imagining the Queen’s guard hauling me off to the Tower, hide it in my bike basket, and hurry home.
It takes up residence on my mantelpiece. The most exquisite contraband. Until the day when, before even opening my front door, I am accosted by a stench so foul, so overwhelming and putrid, I want to kill something. It’s demonic. The egg has exploded. We will forgo the details here. Suffice it to say I have had a good whiff of one of Dante’s circles of Hell. The carpet had to be thrown out and a bottle of bleach poured into the wooden mantelpiece. The Queen’s revenge?
Midwinter sunset up at Dunsapie, the wee lochen halfway up Arthur’s Seat. It is frozen over except for a bit of open water here at the edge. A swan is sleeping out on the ice. White on white. The sky is overcast but clear on the horizon in the southwest where the sun is going down. There is no wind. A fine snow is falling with that quiet and delicate persistence of windless snowfall. The swan wakes and makes her way across the ice to the water at my feet and peacefully drifts there. Somehow, miraculously, the low light coming through the snow, reflected by the water, sends wavering rainbows up the white side of the swan. Violet, red, green, turquoise, blue, dancing wildly on the slow spinning cloud of her body while snow crystals pause in her plumage.
Which causes me to wonder, and not for the first time, if feathers are meant not so much for flight as for catching light.
Carey Morning is an American living in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she is a psychotherapist, writer, and painter.
