The Complete Collection. William Wharton

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      The way my canaries have adapted to natural life is almost proof that a canary keeps many of its natural skills even after centuries of being in cages and generations of interbreeding with other types of birds. I feel that if my canaries could find proper food, they would probably survive alone, without me.

      The birds from the nest built in the tree over the roof are just getting up onto the edge of the nest and tottering when one day I notice a beat-up tomcat sitting on the porch roof and staring up at them. I’m not sure he can jump from the porch roof to the roof of the house, but I throw some stones at him till he goes away. It’ll really be dangerous when those young ones are starting to fly and flutter to the ground. I can’t think of any way to keep that cat out of the yard.

      The female flight cage has sixty-two young birds in it already and the new nests are filling. It looks like even more birds than the year before, and that’s not counting the babies of my fliers. The feed bills are enormous, but I have enough money. I just tell my father how much I need and he gives it to me.

      Those babies of the fliers are flying in and out of the aviary on their own. There doesn’t seem to be any trouble. They all come into the aviary to eat and roost at night. The mothers are generally onto second nests but the males fly with the young. Some of the young males have already started with their burbling, warbling songs. The father males still come when I whistle but the young don’t pay any attention to me at all. It’s marvelous that they’re so free; practically no strings tying them to the cage. Most of the females don’t go out much because they’re busy with the nests. I can still whistle down the one female who built her nest in the tree over the house. She’ll come for a brief minute and eat from my finger, but then fly back to her nest. It’s good to see how conscientious the birds are with their babies.

      The young ones are very much like wild birds. They’ve never known what it is to be closed in a cage. They fly farther from the yard than the others; they also tend to flock more than the parent birds. The parents don’t seem to have any instinct for flocking left, whereas these young ones flock almost like pigeons. They’re much more easily frightened and will spook up in a flock to the tops of the trees.

      All the birds have started eating the food I leave outside for Perta and the other young female. I decide to move that food inside. The only power I have left to bring them into the cages at night now is the food. After my evening feeding of the breeding cages I drop the wires of the outside door so when the birds come in to eat they can’t go out again. This way I can keep some count of them. As far as I can tell, there are already about twenty flier babies. The rate of reproduction is nothing like those in the breeding cages. There are more losses all along. For one thing, I don’t take out the eggs as they’re hatched. This means none of the nests have more than three or four birds.

      I don’t like it when the young fliers treat me as any other enemy. They’re almost like my own grandchildren, but they don’t recognize me. My dream is built on them but they are completely separate from it; they’re practically wild birds.

      – I probably built myself mostly to ‘beat’ my father; not just ‘beat him up’, but to be better at being what I thought he was. So, I became like him. We become like the people with whom we compete. It’s like cannibals eating part of an enemy warrior to absorb his courage. Crazy stuff!

      Then it happens. I’ve just come out to the morning feeding when I look up at the nest in the tree over the house. There’s that cat on the roof and he has one of the young birds in his mouth. He’s reaching out to knock down another of the young birds roosting on a branch just below the nest. The mother bird is frantic. She’s flying at the cat and the cat swings at her. I don’t see the other young one.

      I pick up stones and start throwing them. I yell, but he ducks and keeps pawing at the branch, or, when the mother bird comes near enough, bats at her.

      I whistle for the mother to come to me and she flies down to my finger but jumps away again before I can catch her. She flies back up to the tree. I run into the garage and get out the ladder. My father comes out. He helps me put the ladder so I can climb onto the porch roof. My mother comes out. She’s worried I’ll fall and that my father will be late for work.

      I climb up onto the roof. The cat is holding his ground but backs off a little when I stand and start reaching out for him. Now I’m up there, the mother bird is even braver in her attack on the cat. He still holds the body of the young bird in his mouth. The young one he’s been trying to reach has backed up the branch toward the nest where the other baby is looking over the side.

      I’m just scrambling onto the roof when the cat knocks down the mother bird with a swing of one paw. I jump to get there ahead of the cat but he gets her first. He drops the young bird and grabs her with his teeth before I can do anything. I catch hold of the cat by the front leg. He scratches at me while I shift my hold and get him around the neck. I pry open his mouth to get out the mother bird. It’s too late. She’s dead. I pick up the little dead baby bird. I’ve let go of the cat and it slinks back across the roof, then drops to the porch roof. My father is standing with a stick by the rain barrel. The cat leaps off the roof and past him. He swings at it with the stick but doesn’t hit it.

      I climb down and inspect the two birds. Both their spines are broken at the neck. A cat knows what it’s doing when it comes to killing a bird.

      Before we take down the ladder, I go up and get the two baby birds out of the nest. It isn’t hard to catch them, they can’t fly. I take them into the fliers’ cage with the other young ones. Maybe one of the males will adopt them. I stuff them with food before I go to school and hope for the best.

      When I come home, they seem all right and I give them another feeding. I’m sure somebody is feeding them. The fathers can’t remember all the birds, and one of them is father to these birds anyway.

      That night in the dream, I’m afraid for what will happen, but everything goes all right. Perta’s nest is fine and there’s no sign of a cat. The nest we have is too high up in the tree for a cat to see. I talk to Perta and try to tell her about the danger of cats, but she’s never seen one and can’t know what I mean. I almost want to move our nest back into the cage. I wonder what would happen if I climbed up into the tree in the daytime as boy and moved the nest. Would Perta abandon it in the dream? Would it stay in the same place? It’s too big a risk. I feel confident that if I’m careful nothing will happen. The dream doesn’t have everything happen that happens in the day. The nest of the little yellow bird isn’t even in my dream.

      It’s a week later and I’m feeling it’s all going to pass over, when, in the dream, I see the same cat climbing our tree. I’m perched just above and behind our nest where Perta is sitting. That day our babies have started standing on the edge of the nest. It’s what had to come about. The babies were too young before; now they’re old enough. It can happen.

      Perta still hasn’t seen the cat. Our first nest of babies for this year, all four of them, are off flying with their older brothers down where we used to have the pigeon coop in the tree. There’s nothing I can think to do. I wait and watch the cat. I see him very clearly. He has one ear partly torn off, a ragged dogear of a cat’s ear. I can see all the details of this cat. I didn’t know I’d seen him so well. I was so busy thinking and doing things I didn’t notice myself seeing the cat.

      What I must do is break the dream. I have to wake up. I need to become Birdy the boy and somehow work it out with this cat in daytime life. I can’t. I can’t make myself move out of the dream. I’m on the wrong side of the door; the key is in the other side. It’s like when you wake up and you’re not sure you can move your body and you’re afraid to try. I can’t make myself try. The bird in me is too strong. The bird doesn’t know it can make it all stop by going away. The bird СКАЧАТЬ