In August, at our Chilmark house by the woods, the air is full of sounds we didn’t hear in June and July. We first heard the cry in mid-August, a declamatory screech that faded westerly toward the dance colony known as The Yard. Did the white peacock still live there, we wondered, remembering its harsh voice when it landed on the roof during dance performances.

“Could it be a turkey?” I asked when we heard it again the following day.

“They’re not that loud,” Ray said.

Right. The bunch that hung around here paraded mutely back and forth across the road like an academic procession. Even when one landed on the lowest, thick oak branch after a lumbering liftoff, only a faint croak accompanied the effort.  

The visitor settled in, sounding off daily at 3:30 like an afternoon rooster. A shrill screech, lonesome, brief, sad, but not in pain. Sometimes during the cry we ran outdoors to look for it, but never saw a bird start up or flutter.

“There goes the 3:30 bird,” one of us would say, pleased to have mystery in our unremarkable landscape. Maybe it wasn’t a bird, but a small beast that had hitchhiked daringly to the Island, and now called for its ilk. A pioneer mongoose up from Puerto Rico? A pet ferret brought along by a house guest? I recalled from childhood a widow whose marmoset went everywhere with her, even out to dinner. At the table, the small monkey draped itself across the old lady’s shoulders; we children clamored to sit next to her. Maybe someone like her had visited recently, and the marmoset, seduced by trees, had abandoned bourgeois security.

But the more we heard that piercing cry, the less it seemed like a mammal. An animal with a voice like that had to be as big as a cat, and leave fresh signs or tracks. Also, the call lacked a mellowness you hear even in coyotes. It had to be a bird.

We knew a woman whose house on the coast of Maine was attacked for three seasons by a seagull pecking fiercely at her bedroom window. Though the 3:30 bird didn’t attack, it certainly persisted. Walking the Menemsha piers we listened to the gulls: a vocal variation in that flock might give us a clue.
One afternoon we sat on the deck with a friend. “What’s that?” he exclaimed. Picking up the binoculars he scanned the trees. “God, it’s loud! Like a Bombay crow.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Never underestimate a crow,” said our friend.

We began to pack, a ritual that always spoils a fair part of our dwindling Vineyard days. I chopped and transplanted pachysandra, brought decades ago from a city window-box that now thrives here in liberated abandon. One afternoon the cry rang out as usual, but faded off southerly toward the ocean, at right angles to its normal trajectory. It sounded different, a shrill, pinched squawk diminishing to a chirp. Perhaps it was hurt. We scrambled around the outside of the house, but found no injured bird.

We shipped books and clothes in boxes and spent afternoons saying goodbye to places and people, and then there was the ferry, and the drive to New York City, and the apartment whose best feature is a terrace providing a glimpse of the Hudson River and occasional sightings of a red-tailed hawk.

FedEx delivered boxes, sentencing us to winter. We unpacked and replaced departure blues with back-in-town frenzy.

One windless, bright afternoon we stood on the terrace watching a tanker being nosed upriver by a tug. Overhead were five gulls and a helicopter on patrol. The call of the 3:30 bird jolted us. The last time we heard it, the cry had ended feebly. But this – squawk, screech, trill – was as full-throated as ever.

We went inside, shut the windows, and conferred. Ray and I have experienced things we could not believe – successful dowsing, for example, and a mirror frosting over, which made us shiver in a house said to be haunted. We thought of Hitchcock’s The Birds, Poe’s monotonous raven, Prometheus and the eagle eating his liver, vultures at the Parsi Towers of Silence, and – omitting no avian cliché – the old sailor’s albatross.

Had the Island bird regained vigor and followed us, or was it a different one? Were there more to come? On the Vineyard the bird had seemed weird but appropriate, and we had become fond of it. But if it had followed us, something unsettling was going on. Later, walking to the market, I crossed the street to avoid a gang of pigeons.

The next afternoon Ray opened the last box. A plastic case slid from between a sweater and a thesaurus. He lifted the lid.

“That’s the ugliest watch I’ve ever seen,” I said.

“You’re telling me? It came with something I ordered.”

“A ‘free gift,’ as they say?”

“Crummy. But I thought it might come in handy.”

He was reading the instructions when the watch vibrated in his hand. Screech, trill, squawk, came the 3:30 call, flooding us with late-summer memories and helpless laughter.