Here, in the blue half-light before dawn, we find one of nature's most bewildering gatherings: the pre-dawn terminal, where hundreds of the creatures converge in a vast fluorescent clearing, drawn by forces none of them fully understand and all of them resent.
Observe our subject. She has not slept. This much is written across her: in the way she clutches a paper vessel of scalding bitter liquid to her chest like a talisman, in the great grey pouch slung across her body, in the slow, hoofless shuffle toward a line that does not appear to be moving. She has arrived, as instinct demands, three hours early, and now she must simply endure the interval, as her ancestors surely endured the long dark.
Watch now. She removes her outer coverings. Her shoes. Her belt. She surrenders these to the machine and the uniformed guardians who preside over it, offering up her possessions with the weary devotion of a creature who has done this many times and expects no reward. She does not question the ritual.
She raises her arms above her head inside the glass chamber and holds perfectly still, a posture found nowhere else in her behaviour, a moment of total surrender to a power greater than herself.
And now, reunited with her shoes, half-dressed, blinking, she drifts toward a wall of glass and stares out at the great metal birds sleeping on the tarmac. She sips. She waits. Somewhere a voice calls a name that is not hers.
She will migrate today. She does not know why she keeps doing this to herself.
Neither, in truth, do the geese.