The Birds
(Daphne du Maurier)
A short but powerful story about one man?s attempts to save his family from a freak act of nature.
It is a cold December on the peninsula and Nat Hocken becomes increasingly aware of the growing flocks of seabirds that surround his home.
At night, fifty or so small garden birds attack his children in their beds.
The radio warns that the whole country is being invaded by aggressive deluges of birds of all kinds and advises people to board up their windows and to stay indoors.
The gulls are beginning to circle and Nat rushes to collect his daughter from the school bus stop. He urges the other children to hurry home and the cynical farmers to barricade their homes. By the time he reaches his door the birds are diving at him and at his house. Thousands of gulls and gannets hurl themselves at the boarded windows and doors. The onslaught goes on until the tide begins to ebb. Only then does the family have time to gather resources from a nearby farm to help them sustain the next siege at the flo of the tide. They find that the rest of the village have not survived. Families lie dead in their homes, the postman and animals torn to pieces outside.
Nat?s family have fortified themselves in their kitchen. The upstairs rooms have already been invaded and the scratching of the birds can be heard. Piles of dead birds surround the house, their kamikaze dives against the building shattering their skulls.
Nat hopes that help will come soon from the mainland but as his family sleep he lights his last cigarette and listens to the sound of the hawks thudding against the door and the sound of splintering wood.
The juxtaposition between the solitude and peace of the natural surroundings of the peninsula and the ensuing onslaught of nature itself is striking and alarming. Du Maurier's use of understatement and the quiet beauty of her writing creates a haunting atmosphere. The reader is left to form his/her own imagined conclusions and this is ultimately more frightening than any shock-horror tactics sometimes used in more contemporary works.
A timeless classic. Beautiful and terrible, and well worth the read.
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