The traveller had been following the birds for several days.
He had begun to recognise their movements.
When they flew low, the forest seemed open.
When they rose into the canopy, something had changed.
When they became still, he became still.
But he did not yet understand their cries.
One morning he was walking beneath the trees when the flock suddenly scattered.
A sharp sound passed through the forest.
The traveller stopped.
He looked around.
Nothing had moved.
The branches were still.
The leaves were still.
The path was empty.
Then another bird cried.
The flock disappeared deeper into the trees.
The traveller looked upwards.
At first he saw nothing.
Then, high above the forest, he caught sight of a dark shape moving between the clouds.
A great bird of prey.
It passed silently overhead.
The traveller watched it vanish.
“So that was what the cry was for,” he said.
But he immediately corrected himself.
For.
That sounded too much like intention.
He waited.
The birds did not return.
By afternoon, the forest had become quiet again.
The traveller walked on.
The following morning he heard the same cry.
This time he was ready.
He looked towards the sky.
Again, he saw nothing.
Yet the birds fled.
He remained where he was.
A little later, the predator appeared.
The traveller stared upwards.
He had not seen it when the bird cried.
But the bird had somehow made the danger relevant before he could see it himself.
He began to wonder what had happened.
The forest had not changed.
The predator had been elsewhere.
The sound had been here.
Yet the possibility of the predator had crossed the distance between them.
The traveller followed the flock.
He found them gathered in a dense part of the forest.
One bird called.
Another moved.
Then another.
Soon the whole flock was shifting through the branches.
No bird touched another.
No branch moved because of them.
And yet each seemed to alter what the others could do.
The traveller sat beneath a tree and watched.
He thought of the garden.
There, a plant had turned towards light.
A root had grown around a stone.
The world had changed what the plant could do.
Then he thought of the bird.
The branch had made landing possible.
The forest had made flight possible.
But this was different.
One bird had made something absent relevant to another.
The traveller looked towards the empty sky.
Nothing was there.
And yet the birds were acting as though something were.
He wondered whether the cry itself was dangerous.
He listened.
It was only a sound.
The wind made sounds.
Branches made sounds.
Water made sounds.
None of these sounds caused the flock to flee.
This one did.
The traveller began to understand that the important thing was not simply that the cry was connected to the predator.
Many things were connected to many things.
The important thing was that the cry participated in the lives of the birds in a particular way.
It could alter what they did.
It could bring something distant into the possibilities of those who heard it.
The traveller picked up a fallen twig.
It had a footprint pressed into the mud beside it.
He looked at the print.
Something had passed through the forest.
The print told him so, in a manner of speaking.
But the animal had not made the print in order to tell him.
The twig beside it had no relation to the animal at all.
The traveller began to see a difference.
The footprint could indicate that something had passed.
The cry could do something more.
It belonged to a world in which one bird could alter another bird's possibilities.
He looked towards the flock.
One bird flew.
Another followed.
Then another.
The first bird had not carried the predator with it.
It had carried only a difference.
And somehow that difference was enough.
The traveller sat quietly.
Perhaps, he thought, this was how the world began to become larger.
Not because more things appeared in it.
But because things that were elsewhere could begin to matter here.
The predator could be absent and yet enter the flock's world.
A distant event could alter a present action.
A sound could mediate between one creature and another.
The traveller felt the old temptation returning.
“Then the bird means predator.”
He stopped.
He had learned enough by now to distrust that sentence.
Perhaps the cry meant nothing in the way a word meant something.
Perhaps no bird thought a thought that could be translated into human words.
Perhaps the cry simply belonged to an organised pattern of relations in which certain differences could alter what other birds did.
That was enough.
More than enough.
For something new had happened.
The bird had not merely responded to the world.
It had altered another bird's relation to the world.
The traveller stood.
He looked across the forest.
The landscape was unchanged.
The same trees stood in the same places.
The same paths wound between them.
The same sky stretched above.
But now the possibilities available to the birds could be changed by something another bird did.
The traveller smiled.
Until now, he had thought of affordances as things the world offered to creatures.
Now he wondered whether creatures might afford things to one another.
A bird could make flight possible.
A cry could make hiding possible.
A warning could make an absent danger present.
And perhaps this was the beginning of a different kind of country.
A country in which possibilities did not merely arise between a creature and its surroundings.
They could travel between creatures.
The traveller followed the flock into the trees.
Behind him, the forest remained unchanged.
Ahead of him, something invisible had already arrived.