Travelling.

• Author: Danticat, Edwidge
• Position: Animal cues

There is a Haitian folktale that I have known all my life, yet it had never occurred to me until a few days ago that it might be about, among other things, climate change. Beautifully recorded and retold by Diane Wolkstein in her groundbreaking 1978 folktale anthology, The Magic Orange Tree and Other Folktales, it involves a group of animals who are desperately trying to migrate to New York from Haiti, a kind of self-motivated Noah's arc, where the animals appear to be trying to save themselves rather than waiting for the humans to do it for them. What's driving them away? We are only left to speculate, which is where the climate change comes in.

Is it the pounding hurricanes?

"There's no more rainy season, just the hurricane season," a Haitian farmer told Oxfam International in April 2009.

Is it the deforestation that's led to unsurvivable mud slides? Is it because it is getting hotter and hotter all the time and people and livestock cannot possibly survive extreme temperatures?

As most of us know, it is often wise to observe the animals and follow their cues, especially when it comes to inclement weather. If the rats start flooding the upper deck of a ship, we're told, it's time to bail. The same is true if you see island animals surveying, even in a folktale, the horizon. It does not bode well when a flock of birds and one last surviving turtle decide to flee. And because the turtle could not swim all the way across the ocean and also could not fly, one of the birds offered to tug the turtle along with a piece of wood that the turtle would hold inside...