Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary - By David Sedaris Page 0,1

and simply kissing it?

The Migrating Warblers

The yellow warbler would often claim that she was fine until she hit Brownsville. “Then—wham!” she’d tell her friends. “I don’t know if it’s the air or what, but whenever we pass it on our migration, I have to stop and puke my guts out.”

“Indeed she does,” her husband would say, laughing.

“An hour or two’s rest is all I need, but isn’t it strange? Not Olmito or Bayview or Indian Lake, but Brownsville. Brownsville every time.”

The birds she was talking to would try to sound sympathetic or, at the very least, interested. “Hmmmm,” they’d say, or, “Brownsville, I think I have a cousin there.”

From the southern tip of Texas, the couple would fly over Mexico and then into Central America. “My family’s been wintering in Guatemala for as long as I can remember,” the warbler would explain. “Every year, like clockwork, here we come by the tens of thousands—but do you think any of those Spanish-speaking birds have bothered learning English? Not on your life!”

“It’s really horrible,” her husband would say.

“Well, funny too,” his wife would insist. “Horrible and funny. Like one time I asked this little Guatemalan bird, I said, ‘Don day est tass las gran days mose cass de cab eyza?’ ”

Here her listeners would cock their heads, confused and more than a little impressed. “Wait a second, you speak that stuff?”

“Oh, I’ve picked some up,” the warbler would say in that offhand way of hers. “I mean, really, what choice do I have? I guess I’m a pretty quick study. At least I’ve been told I am.”

“She’s terrific with languages,” her husband would boast, and his wife would raise a wing in protest: “Well, not always. In this particular case, for instance, I thought I’d asked where all the big horseflies were. A reasonable question, only instead of cob ayo, which is “horse,” I said cab eyza. So what I really asked was ‘Where are all the big head flies?’ ”

Thinking that this was the end of the story, her listeners would quake with polite laughter. “Head flies, oh, that’s rich!”

“But no, wait,” the warbler would say. “So the Guatemalan bird makes a motion for me to follow him through the thicket. I do, and there in this field are, like, three hundred heads rotting in the afternoon sun. Each one with about fifty flies on it. And I mean huge, the size of bumblebees, every one of them.”

“Oh my God,” the listeners would say. “Rotting heads with flies on them?”

“Oh, they weren’t bird heads,” the warbler would reassure them. “These belonged to humans, or used to anyway. Flesh bubbling off, hair all tangled with bits of goo in it. I don’t know what they’d done with the bodies, burned them, maybe. Then they used the heads to make a wall.”

“Actually, it was more like a counter,” her husband would say.

It was a wall if ever there was one, but what could you do, ask everyone to stop up their ears while you and your ridiculous mate—someone who had never even seen a counter except in pictures—scream at each other for half an hour? No. It was best just to breeze over it.

“So we see this wall, this counter, be it, made of human heads, and I mean to say, ‘This place stinks like the devil,’ but what I actually say is…” And here, snorting with laughter, she would pass the baton to her husband.

“What she actually says to this small Guatemalan bird is ‘The devil smells me in my place.’ Can you believe it? My mate, Ladies and Gentlemen, or, as we like to call her south of the border, ‘Satan’s sexy stinkpot!’ ”

The listeners would crack up, and the warblers, husband and wife, would enjoy the sensation of having an audience right where they wanted them. This was the reward for spending three months a year in an inferior country. And when the light fell a certain way, when the laughter surged and melded into a harmonious song, it almost made up for all the hardships—the stomach flus, for instance, or the times when, rather than uniting you and your mate, the strangeness of another culture only made you feel more separate, more despicable and alone.

Back in their element, the two warblers were a well-oiled machine. “You want funny, try getting work done down there,” the husband would say, opening the door to their hilarious tales of lazy natives, of how bumbling they were, how backward and superstitious. This begged