Fly Away Peter

While working as a birdwatcher for Ashley one day, Jim spots Miss Harcourt. This happens when he’s watching a sandpiper, a bird from “Northern Asia or Scandanavia.” He’s “amazed” to think that he can set his eyes upon an animal that was “on the other side of the earth” only “weeks ago,” and wonders if the creature remembers all the places it’s seen “so many darknesses ago.” As he lifts his binoculars away, he momentarily sees a woman in a “sun-bonnet” standing before a tripod with a camera placed atop it. The camera is pointed in his direction, and Jim realizes that this woman is photographing the very same bird that he himself has been observing.

Later that day, Jim goes to a local bar for a drink and learns that the middle-aged woman he saw is named Miss Imogen Harcourt. Having found out where she lives, he pays her a visit in her run-down cottage. “Anyone home?” he asks. “Who is it?” replies a voice with a British accent. “Me,” he says. “Jim Saddler. I works for “Mr. Crowther.” Sounding as if it’s strangely faraway, Miss Harcourt’s voice returns, telling Jim to let himself in and that she’ll be with him in a moment. “I’m in the dark room,” she explains. Once inside, he analyzes her voice, thinking that it has the sound of a younger woman.

When Miss Harcourt finally appears, Jim says, “I’ve come about that sandpiper. I seen you taking a picture of it.” He then explains that he’s Ashley’s “bird man,” saying, “I keep lists”—something Miss Harcourt  says she already knows; she saw him the yesterday. Jim finds himself unused to Miss Harcourt’s straightforward manner of speaking, since he has found that older women normally aren’t so forthright. As they sit down to some tea, she offers him her story. She came to Australia from England six years ago, when her brother wanted to make a fortune as a gold-miner. Unfortunately, he failed and returned to England, but she decided to stay. Since then, she has been living in this cottage and earning a small supplemental income by sending her “nature photographs” to a London magazine.

Miss Harcourt takes Jim into her darkroom, saying that she works “here and out there. The light, and then the dark.” When Jim looks at the photograph Miss Harcourt took of the sandpiper, he’s impressed by how vividly she has captured the bird, which stands in tight focus at the center of the portrait. Even though he knows that his own body should be visible in this picture, he’s surprised to see that his form is completely undetectable, out of focus and obscured by the grass and flowers: “To the unenlightened eye there was just the central image of the sandpiper with its head attentively cocked.”

Jim loves Miss Harcourt’s photograph of the sandpiper, finding it appropriate that his body has been obscured by composition’s focus. It is, after all, “the sandpiper’s picture.” He resolves to show this to Ashley, and from this point on, he, Miss Harcourt, and Ashley become “partners.” A week later, Jim tells her about the “sanctuary,” slightly embarrassed by the word’s serious connotations. In fact, he never says this word again, finding it unnecessary because both Miss Harcourt and Ashley understand what he’s doing and thus don’t need to label it in such lofty ways. Moving forward, the three of them simply talk about “the birds.”