Olor de Pájaros

Back to Part I, Continental Drift

"It was like a scene out of 'Heart of Darkness,'" Dad's e-mail continued, "Remember that movie? Only rather than forcing me to take a long dangerous boat ride up the river, in this case the mystery figure, Señor Bozeman, met me late last evening at the airport, a small, bald man in a canvas hat who waved a hand-lettered cardboard sign as we deplaned.

"Dr. Barron--UNAFTF"

"I told you I was working for United Nations, now, didn't I, Barry? More or less the whole time since I've been away...To tell you the truth, I don't know who it could have been that came up with the idea that it was a good idea to sink UN money into ag subsidies for aviculture in Uruguay. Maybe me. I don't remember, but it sounds like something I'd suggest. Anyway, here we are, stuck with maintaining the program." From the aeropeuerto, even though it was nearly eleven, Bozeman insisted on taking me to a local restaurant, El Avestruz, (The Ostrich), which specializes in preparing the birds from his rancho.

"En mi vida, yo tengo tres memorias," Jaime Bozeman confessed drunkenly to me much later, after we had left Montevideo, weaving slightly as we drove northwest along the Silver River, the pearl of morning sky beginning to wash out the radioactive green instrumentation of his Mercedes' dashboard. Barry, I'm not used to drinking beer like you guys in college can--the two of us had eight or ten or twelve "Nortenas," with dinner--it's the name of the national beer of Uruguay--it's got a picture of a rhea on the label. Anyway, you know how bird men are, one thought led to another, and we got to be headed upriver sooner rather than later, to where both a national refuge and Señor Bozeman's bird farm were located.

He was a heavy smoker, and though he frequently touched an automatic control to slide the driver's side window a few centimeters open and shut to suck the ash from his dark cigarillo, and at least once opened it completely, the atmosphere inside the sedan was still stifling.

"The first was when I accepted Christ into my life," the bird farmer told me, exhaling uncertainly, as though my existence as a scientist might somehow be calling his faith into question.

I cleared my throat to comment, but he already was continuing. "The second memory was from when my eldest son was born, many years ago. Do you have children, Dr. Barron?"

"Two of 'em," I told him. I could visualize your faces in front of me right then, Barry, as clear as though they were reflected from the inside of the windshield. I know we haven't been as close as we should have been. "A boy and a girl, Barry and Christine."

"And the third time?" I asked. I had a feeling I knew what was coming... Señor Bozeman stubbed a final cigarillo into an ash tray and wrestled the Mercedes away from the freeway and along a district road.

"The third was when my birds began to die."

He pulled to a stop, and, as the day dawned around us, the sounds of a thousand giant flightless rhea beginning to wake surrounded us, the birds staggering upright on their long legs, emitting a guttural whickering roar, and we smelled their damp smell.

Part III, 'H5N1"