Stork Mountain by Miroslav Penkov Page B

with my sweat. For a long time, eyes closed, I tried to shake off a dream so vivid I could still hear the girl’s laughter, the screaming of the birds. A dull, anxious heaviness settled in my stomach and I rushed out for Grandpa.
    He was smoking on the terrace, leaning against the banister. “Good afternoon, sleeping beauty,” he greeted me, but didn’t turn. “Don’t you know there is no memory from sleep?” Then he pointed the tip of his fuming cigarette at the sky. In his mind, this moment allowed no room for words.
    High up above the ruined houses, a dozen storks spun their wheels. Some glided clockwise, others counter. They called to one another, shrill, loud screams.
    Grandpa kept quiet. He smoked his cigarette and watched the storks and I couldn’t tell if his old, tired face showed joy and pleasure or worry and regret. But when he turned to me his eyes glistened like a child’s.
    â€œThe storks are here,” he said.
    He’d brought a bottle of rakia and two small glasses, which now he filled to the brim. “I’ve lived to see them one more year.”
    We drank bottoms-up, to welcome.
    *   *   *
    These were the scouts. The first of a giant flock of white storks that would arrive in waves. It was the old birds who returned home first. The males. Then came the females. And finally, a few days later, arrived the young.
    Their home was here in Europe; here were the nests in which their babies hatched. But when the end of August neared, the storks flew south to Africa, where they waited out the winter months, from Egypt to Cape Town. Once it was time to fly back home the storks gathered in the savanna and in flocks of thousands headed north. Some chose a western route, but most took the eastern: they tracked the valley of the Nile, traversed the Levant, and crossed the Bosphorus from Turkey. And then it was the Via Pontica they followed—that ancient Roman road along the Black Sea, which started in Constantinople and continued north into Bulgaria: the towns of Sozòpol, Burgas, and then Nessebar. It took the white storks fifty days to make their journey.
    Why didn’t they fly over the Mediterranean? To conserve their energy, the storks depended on thermal columns, and thermal columns formed only over firm land. The sun warmed the ground, which in turn warmed the air above it. The warmer air expanded and rose and with some steady wind these thermal columns aligned in rows to form a highway. It was these thermals the storks used as lifts, this highway that they traveled. Three-quarters of all European white storks flew over Bulgaria. Two hundred and fifty thousand birds.
    They flew the days and rested at night. There was this place near Burgas, Poda—caught between the sea on one side and three giant lakes on the other—that Grandpa had gone to visit last year. By the time he completed his hike the sun had set. All night, huddled in a blanket on the ground, he heard the clattering of bills, could hardly sleep from the excitement. He saw them with the dawn. Hundreds of thousands of storks and pelicans and cranes and herons and ibises and egrets and other birds whose names I’d never heard before. When the storks rose, the sun vanished, the sky disappeared, the earth dissolved, and only sound remained. By that time Grandpa was weeping like a little girl with fury. Furious, he threw his peaked cap to the ground; furious, he stomped on it. To hell with this life, he told himself. How many years had he lived and never seen a thing so pretty as the sound of rising storks at dawn? And how many other beauties would go unseen?
    Now on the terrace we watched the sky. Before the day was over, three more waves of birds had arrived like a chaotic school of fish, spinning in opposite directions, passing so very close to one another. Some were here to rest; others had returned to their homes. One after another the nests on the ruined houses were