The Complete Collection. William Wharton
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two months before I find her.
She’s in a large aviary in the back yard of a lady called Mrs Prevost. Mrs Prevost is fat and has little feet. She has aviaries in her back yard and breeding cages on the sun porch. She doesn’t care much about song or color or how her birds fly. I don’t think she particularly raises them for money either. She just likes canaries.
She goes into the aviary and all the birds come flying down to her and land on her arms or on her head. She’s trained the birds and has some who’ll hop up and down little ladders or ring bells to get food. She has some she can take out of the cage on a perch. They won’t fly off the perch even when she waves it around.
Mrs Prevost looks carefully for cats and hawks before she takes out a bird. She’s terrific; she should be in a circus.
Mrs Prevost lets me sit in the aviary and watch her birds as much as I want. It’s in her aviary I decide I like canaries more than pigeons. It’s mostly in the sound of wings. Pigeon wings whistle and have a crackly stiff feather sound. Canary wings make practically no sound at all, only the kind of sound you make with a fan if you flip it quickly, a pressure against the air.
I sit out there in the aviary with the females every Saturday for over a month. I never see Mr Prevost. Mrs Prevost brings me cups of tea in a thermos when it’s cold. Sometimes she puts on a coat and sits there with me. She points out different birds and tells me who the parents are and how many were in the nest and which ones got caught in the wire or were sick so she had to save them. She tells me which ones she’s thinking of breeding and why she’s choosing them. She’s going to breed thirty females that next year. She chooses them to breed just because these females are good mothers or come from good mothers. She isn’t trying to breed for anything special except more canaries. Mrs Prevost would sure make a good mother but she doesn’t have any children. I didn’t ask her; she told me.
She shows me one of her females who’s six years old and has given over sixty birds. This female comes and sits on Mrs Prevost’s finger. Mrs Prevost transfers her to my finger one afternoon. She perches there a few minutes while Mrs Prevost leans down and talks to her. Mrs Prevost talks to her birds. She doesn’t peep or whistle; she just talks in a low voice the way you’d talk to a baby.
Mrs Prevost hates cats and hawks. She has a continual war with them. There’re always stray cats coming in hoping for an easy meal. She’s tried fencing, but you can’t fence out a cat. She says she can’t get herself to poison them. A couple times there’re cats sitting outside the aviary, turning their heads back and forth watching the birds fly. Mrs Prevost’d dash out on her tiny feet and chase them. I tell her she ought to get a dog.
Once, when I’m sitting in the aviary, one of the cats comes and doesn’t see me. It must scare hell out of a bird having a cat with those little slit green eyes watching – twisting its tail back and forth. After a while, this one can’t wait and throws itself against the wire. It hangs there with its mouth open, pointed teeth against a thin ridged pink top of mouth. The sharp claws are wrapped into the wire. It almost makes me glad I’m not a bird.
I saw Birdie the first day I sat in the aviary. I actually keep going back just to watch her but I don’t tell Mrs Prevost this. The aviary is taller than it is wide either way. Birdie is the only bird who flies around the inside of the upper part of the aviary. The others fly from perch to perch or down to the floor to eat but Birdie flies around and around in banked circles. It’s the kind of thing I’d do myself if I were a bird and lived in that aviary.
Birdie is very curious. There’s a piece of string hanging from the top of the aviary. It’s not more than two inches long. Birdie has to turn herself upside down to pull it and she hangs there minutes at a time, pulling and tugging, doing her best to hang on and backing off with her wings, trying to pull it loose.
There’s another thing I like better about canaries than pigeons. Pigeons do a lot of walking. They swing their short bodies back and forth like a duck and walk around on short legs, or sometimes when they’re courting, they pull themselves up and take short soldier-like marching steps. Canaries never walk. If they move on the ground, they hop. Most times a hop means a little flit with the wings. It makes them look so independent. They hop in place, then hop to another place. I’ve noticed robins both running and hopping but canaries never walk.
Sometimes, Birdie’d just hop all over the cage. She’d pick up a tiny stone here and move it over there. She’d dig in the sand with her beak. She won’t bring anything out, just digging. It’s like she’s doing some kind of bird housekeeping.
Then, sometimes, she’ll hunch back and take a flying leap for the highest perch. This takes a careful aim because perches are spread all over the place. Mrs Prevost puts in lots of perches; she doesn’t think much about birds having long free places to fly. Birdie flies between the perches as if they aren’t there. She’s beautiful.
I go downtown and hunt around junk shops till I find a cage. It costs twenty-five cents. I take it home to fix up. First, I scrape all the paint and rust from the bars. There are two broken places; I repair them. I straighten and clean the tray in the bottom. I boil and wash out the food and water dishes. It isn’t a big cage, fifteen inches deep, thirty long and twenty high. I hate to think of taking poor Birdie away from the big cage and her friends to put her into this small cage, alone. I know I’ll make it up somehow.
After it’s all clean, I paint the cage white. I give it two coats till it looks practically new. I put some newspaper in the bottom, and bird gravel. I buy roller mix seed and put it in one cup and fresh water in the other. I’m ready to bring Birdie home.
I carry her on my bike in a shoe box with holes punched in the sides. I can hear her scrambling around inside, sliding on the slippery bottom of the box. I wonder what a bird thinks when her whole life is suddenly changed like this. She isn’t one year old and she’s lived her whole life either in the nest or the breeding cage, or in the aviary with other birds. Now she’s in a dark box with no perches, she can’t see and can’t fly. I speed home as fast as I can.
I go in the back door and up the back stairs to my room. I don’t want to show her to anyone.
I cut a hole carefully in the end of the box and put the hole next to the cage door. In only a few seconds she hops into the cage. She lands on the floor and stands straddle-legged. She looks around. She seems even more beautiful than she did in the aviary. I don’t want to scare her, so I back up to the other side of the room where I have my binoculars. I turn the chair around and rest the binoculars on the back of the chair so I can watch her without my arms getting tired.
After a few little hops, rattling sand on the paper, she hops up onto the middle perch and peeps. It’s a single note going from low to high and watery. It’s the first time I hear her voice. In the aviary, there’s so much sound you can’t hear any particular bird.
She cocks her head and looks from side to side. She knows I’m there across the room and she looks at me first with one eye, then the other. Canaries don’t look at any particular thing with both eyes at once. Most birds don’t. They only see with both eyes when they’re not really looking at anything. When they want to see something particular, they look with one eye and blind out the other. They don’t close it, just blind it.
Birdie moves lightly and quickly, heavy air means nothing. She hops up to the top perch and wipes her beak, sharpening it, checking, the way dogs sniff trees.
She’s yellow, the yellow of a lemon. Her tail feathers and wing tips are lighter, almost white. The feathers on her upper legs are lighter too. Her legs are orange-pink, lighter than pigeon legs, delicately thin. She has three toes forward and one back like all tree birds, and her nails are long and thin, translucent, with a fine vein down the center. She’s medium-sized for a canary and has a rounded, very feminine head; her eyes are bright black, her beak exactly the color of her legs. Small pink nostril holes are tucked under the feathers of her head at the top of her beak.
She peeps again and turns around on the perch to face the other way. She does this without seeming to use her wings. She springs lightly up, twists her body, and is facing the other way. It’s the same move an ice skater makes