Attack Of The No-wings

All is calm on Lundy Island, until suddenly the sentinel gannet would stop and abruptly scream out a terrible "Bir! Bir!" that meant, "Look out! Danger!" Instantly the baby Marga's mother (for except at night her father was mostly at sea, fishing) would throw herself upon Marga the baby gannet, covering her head, but not until Marga had seen the terrible white wings of an advancing host of gulls hungry, as wolves, hoping that somewhere just one mother gannet had been careless and left her fat juicy little baby helpless on the rocks.

And there was always the dreadful menace of the cliff's edge. Marga's mother had explained all that—how she would fall into the sea and be drowned or seized by a gull, or drop on the rocks and have her head smashed. Ironicallty, Marga’s father intended to push her out of the nest if she didn't learn to fly soon. And one other fear, vaguer but more awful than all the rest, had the whole colony in its’ grip. It was the fear of the No-Wings. Marga had heard about them many times from her mother ami father, but she could not imagine any animal, except a fish that had no wings. All she could learn of the No-Wings was that they came from across the water on a calm night when the moon was in its last quarter, and landed on Gannet Rock.

Then very quietly they stole up the rocks (though at times one of them slipped on rotting seaweed and had his brains dashed out on the rocks, a cause for rejoicing among the gannets). Of course there was a sentinel on watch, but of all the birds in the world the gannet finds it hardest to stay awake. The No-Wings crept up on the sentinel, and threw a noose around his neck, and strangled him before he could raise the cry of "Bir! Bir!" that would save his fellows. Or they struck him with a long stick on the head. With the sentinel once dead it was easy for the No-wings to kill every gannet in reach, silently clubbing them.

The No-wings came to get juicy young chicks to sell in the city markets, and the feathers of the old birds, the beautiful white plumes, they might save and dispose of for a few pennies. Sometimes they came only for eggs, but they took those in broad daylight, and many were the tales of heroism that Marga heard recounted, of mother birds who had sat on their nest defending the egg till knocked over the head. As autumn came on and it was nearly time for Marga to try that exciting and terrifying plunge from the cliff, the whole colony grew more and more restless and frightened, and if they could, all the gannets would have stayed awake the night through, but not even the Awful Feeling could keep away drowsiness when the sentinel chanted his soft "grog-grog."

By: davidbunch

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