Storks

Storks are at once migratory visitors, signs by which villagers read fortune, and the focus of Lekh’s specialized craft. Their yearly arrival organizes local belief around the seasons; their choice of roofs is treated as a judgment on the people beneath them. Yet Lekh’s tale of a nest shows a more unsettling side: stork life, as he recounts it, contains conflict and exclusion as well as order. Through his patient explanations and stories, the birds become an independent subject of village knowledge and a vivid counterpoint to the narrator’s confinement among the cages.

Seasonal Visitors and Village Omens

Lekh tells the narrator that flocks of Storks arrive from beyond distant oceans on St. Joseph’s day and stay until St. Bartholomew drives the frogs into the mud with hop poles. The villagers’ account gives the birds’ migration a precise seasonal boundary: when the mud plugs the frogs’ mouths, the storks can no longer hear them croak and cannot catch them, so they must depart. The explanation links the birds’ movements to a village calendar and to a chain of causes involving saintly intervention, frogs, and feeding. It is presented as local lore, not as an observation detached from belief.

The birds’ presence also carries meanings for the people who host them. A nest on a house is thought to bring good luck, and seeing the first stork of spring in flight is a favorable sign. Seeing that first bird sitting instead portends a year of trouble and misfortune. The distinction makes the omen depend not simply on whether the stork has returned, but on the posture in which it is first seen. Storks are thus woven into a system in which small details of animal behavior can be read as forecasts of human fortune.

Their return is also treated as evidence about the household below. According to the belief Lekh shares, Storks will not come back to a roof if someone has committed a misdeed there during their absence, or if the people living under it have lived in sin. Their nesting choices become a kind of public moral testimony: the birds’ presence promises luck, while their refusal to return implies a stain on the household. The account does not explain how villagers distinguish one cause from another; it emphasizes the confidence with which animal behavior is made to speak about human conduct.

Lekh’s Nest-Building Craft

Lekh is the only man in the area said to know how to prepare a nest for Storks in advance. Because he charges high prices, only the wealthiest farmers can afford his work. The craft therefore joins the birds’ reputation for bringing luck to a particular local economy: access to a prepared nesting place is a costly service, not an ordinary task available to every household.

His method is careful and practical. On the chosen roof, Lekh first sets a harrow halfway across as the framework. He angles it slightly toward the west so the prevailing winds will do less damage. He then drives long nails halfway into the harrow, giving the birds’ own collected twigs and straw a secure anchorage. Just before the expected arrival, he places a large piece of red cloth in the middle to catch their attention. The finished structure depends on both human preparation and animal labor: Lekh provides the frame and draws the birds’ notice, while the Storks furnish the nest with materials themselves. His work is successful often enough that his nests are never without tenants.

This expertise sits within a larger devotion to birds. The narrator listens avidly as Lekh speaks of them; elsewhere, Lekh’s hut is crowded with birdcages, and the narrator is given a narrow space at the bottom of one. That setting makes his lessons intimate and sharply situated: the narrator hears about the Storks from a man whose life and home are organized around birds, while remaining physically enclosed among them.

The Nest Story and Its Judgment

Lekh also recounts a conflict that begins when a female stork pecks him as he tries to correct the position of her nest. In response, he places a goose egg among the stork eggs. When the eggs hatch, the storks are astonished by the unlike chick: it has short bowlegs and a flat beak. The male stork accuses his mate of adultery and wants the gosling killed. The female insists that the young bird should remain in the nest, and their argument continues for several days.

The hen ultimately acts without her mate’s agreement. She saves the gosling by rolling it onto the thatched roof, from which it falls harmlessly into straw. The episode briefly appears to end with the chick safe and the quarrel finished. But the apparent resolution does not last. At the time of departure, the Storks hold their customary conference. After debate, they judge the hen guilty and decide that she cannot accompany her husband. Before the flock leaves in formation, the others attack her; she dies beside the house. The peasants find the gosling next to her body, weeping.

The story sets a mother’s protection of a vulnerable young bird against a collective decision to punish her. Its conclusion refuses the comfort of the earlier apparent settlement: saving the gosling does not restore harmony or protect the mother. The narrator receives this episode as part of Lekh’s account of Storks, and its humanlike terms of accusation, debate, sentence, and exclusion make animal society legible through village social language without turning the ending into a simple tale of good fortune.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The Storks occupy two registers in the account. The villagers treat them as seasonal signs whose arrival, posture, and return can disclose luck or wrongdoing; Lekh’s practical knowledge, meanwhile, describes the material work required to attract and shelter them. His elaborate preparations coexist with beliefs that assign moral meaning to where the birds choose to nest. The result is a portrait of a community that reads nature both practically and symbolically.

Lekh’s nest story complicates the idea that the birds merely confirm human hopes. They are not only emblems of spring or lucky tenants: in his telling, they have their own family dispute and a severe collective judgment. The tale’s shift from the gosling’s rescue to the hen’s exclusion overturns the expectation that the household will simply return to peace. Across the migration lore, the omens, and the nest episode, Storks connect seasonal cycles to human ideas of fortune and morality, while their stories retain an unsettling independence from the reassurance those ideas might offer.