Broken Wing Read online

  The deep snows of winter were shrinking fast now, and The Man had begun going every day down to where the white spruce tree stood alone in the little meadow below the house, to look for the body of Broken Wing. Every day, sometime during the day, he made his way down there to look around. He wanted desperately to find the body of his little friend before someone else, some scavenger, did.

  Then, one day, as the snows of winter shrunk under a warm rain, there he was, revealed by the melting snow: the frozen body of Broken Wing preserved perfectly, not far from where The Man had left him the evening of the storm.

  The Man picked him up and carried him into the house and laid him down carefully on the mudroom floor. He got a large, airtight plastic bag from the kitchen, came back to the mudroom, put Broken Wing in the plastic bag, sealed it, and put the bag with the dead bird in it in the freezer. When spring was fully here, when the ground had thawed, when summer was on the verge, he would bury his little friend.

  Now all but the last patches of the winter snow were gone. Now only here and there, hiding in those shaded and dark north-sloping dingles, did there remain a little declivity of dirty snow littered with twigs, bark, hemlock needles and cones, and the other detritus of winter. Yet, even now, two months since The Man had found the body of Broken Wing, even now, sometimes the burgeoning spring sunlight would fall at a certain angle on a blue jay at the feeder, so that the blue jay looked black. Then The Man’s breath caught in his throat as he stared out the kitchen window in the morning, waiting for the water for his tea to boil, and he would think he saw Broken Wing. But Broken Wing was never there. All spring, again and again as he moved through his springtime chores in his apple orchard, there would come a moment when The Man’s heart stopped as he thought he saw Broken Wing out of the corner of his eye, flitting into a tree.

  That was a sad spring for The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains. Everywhere he went, he expected to see, wanted to see, Broken Wing, even though he knew the body of the bird lay in his freezer.

  Dear Howard,

  Gray and rain and chill here today. Oh, how I love this cold rain, this gray spring. I love the chill that keeps me indoors and the fire going in the stove all day. I love this last nod toward the passing cold and dark. I love all that is depressed and sad and sullen. I love all that is empty, slothful and withdrawn. Summer yesterday, the end of winter today, just right for the way I feel, just right for a letter to you.

  I buried Broken Wing yesterday.

  Spring is here, at least it was yesterday. It was a beautiful, a perfect, spring day. The sun was high and warm, the birds, just returned from their wintering grounds, were alive with song, everything was swollen with the juice and hum and song of new life. What better day than one like that for a funeral?

  And the ground is finally thawed. So I went out to my workshop in the woodshed and built a little box just big enough for him out of some half-inch stock of white pine I had up in the rafters. I even hinged the lid. A little coffin for my little friend. I made a little sign out of the same half-inch stock of white pine, and nailed it to a stick. Then I went around the place, over the side hill, and gathered up some stones. I dug a little grave out at a far corner of the garden, so he could be close to all those garden insects he went after so diligently in my dream. I came inside and got Broken Wing out of the freezer and put him in the little coffin, took the coffin out to the grave, and put it in. I covered him over and filled in the grave; then I used the stones to make a little stone cairn to cover over the earth-scar, and also to keep off the grave robbers like the skunks. I drove the little sign on its stick into the ground just behind the stone cairn. The sign said:

  Here Lies

  BROKEN WING

  † † † † † † †

  A

  Small and Brave

  Life

  Then I read a little poem over the grave. A little coffin, a little grave, a little cairn, a little sign, a little poem… for my friend.

  I read D. H. Lawrence’s:

  SELF PITY

  I never saw a wild thing

  sorry for itself.

  A small bird will drop

  frozen dead from a bough

  without ever having felt

  sorry for itself.

  That’s out of The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence that you gave me all those years ago; do you remember? That huge book of his poems, 965 pages of poems, and from a novelist. I don’t think there could be a more appropriate poem for Broken Wing.

  Then I sang a song, a little ditty, I made up:

  Broken Wing, Broken Wing, where is Broken Wing?

  Alive or dead? Still here or gone away?

  Broken Wing, Broken Wing, where is Broken Wing?

  Alive or dead? Still here or gone away?

  Broken Wing, Broken Wing, where is Broken Wing?

  Broken Wing, Broken Wing, will I ever see you again?

  Broken Wing, Broken Wing, where are you Broken Wing?

  Broken Wing, Broken Wing, here you are my friend,

  Buried in this ground. Alive or dead? Dead, oh, dead.

  And never will I see you again, Broken Wing.

  And never will I see you again, Broken Wing.

  Broken Wing, Broken Wing, where are you Broken Wing?

  The ceremony was short, and I was the only one there. I’m glad I did it. Maybe I’ve been up here in this mountain wilderness living alone too long. Do you think I’m crazy for having a funeral for a bird?

  On my way back to the house after the burial, I remembered a poem by Ikkyu, that 15th-century Japanese poet, which goes:

  I found my sparrow Sonrin

  Dead one morning

  And dug his grave as gently

  As I would my own daughter’s.

  Maybe if I hadn’t spent my life alone in this lonely place, maybe if I had married and had had a daughter, I might not be so obsessed with a bird, or feeling so sorry for myself, either. But I didn’t, and I am.

  Maybe D. H. Lawrence is right. Maybe birds never do feel sorry for themselves, but men do, especially this man right now. I’m having a hard time this spring. I can’t seem to get that little bird out of my mind. Not that I’m trying all that hard. Actually, I think I’m not trying at all to forget; rather, I’m trying to remember, to cling to the memory of that small life. There is something about Broken Wing’s life and his death, and our time together before his death, that’s become some kind of symbol, a sign or something, for me. There is something in his life and death that draws me to him.

  And it’s not pity, either. I learned a lot about the uselessness of pity this past fall and winter. It’s something else, something about how well he struggled, how strongly he resisted, how courageously he fought. Maybe it’s courage I’m talking about. I don’t know. There is something in Broken Wing’s life and death that is important to me.

  And it’s not just courage. It’s resistance, too. A will to fight, fight back; struggle and not give up, survive. Maybe that’s it.

  Oh, I know, people will say there is no will here, no fight or resistance, or anything conscious at all. They will say there is only instinct. They will say that Broken Wing was just unconsciously following his instincts; that he didn’t actually know or decide to struggle, fight, resist. So what? Call it what you will! He still did what he did for whatever reason or instinct that drove him on. I know I can’t read a bird’s mind, and I know everyone thinks these so-called lower creatures are unconscious, but I’m not so sure. I lived with that bird day in and day out, lived with his struggle to live, for all those months, every day, and all I can tell you is: I could swear I could see in his eyes, in his body and his life, a conscious—I mean conscious in the way you or I would be conscious—a conscious struggle to stay alive, to survive, to stay here and live.

  His life and death haunt me, Howard. They are with me constantly. I need to find some way to do something about all this, with all this, but I don’t know what that something is.

  Maybe it’s
the weather today, or burying Broken Wing yesterday; I don’t know what it is, but something has gotten me thinking about the deaths of other birds I’ve known. It’s like all these other bird deaths are marching through my mind today, a parade of deaths.

  I spent a long time earlier today remembering a scene I’d witnessed years ago up in northern Canada: on a lake, a big lake, a lake with hundreds of miles of shoreline and thousands of islands in it. I was up there fishing, camped out on one of the islands. Early one morning, very early, just after sunrise—which, at that latitude, was about 4:30 at that time of the summer—I climbed out of the tent, built a fire, boiled some water for tea, made my tea, and went out onto a little jut of rock that stuck out into the bay on the island where I was camped. I remember I was all bundled up. It was summer, but it was cold; it might have been in the forties. I was sitting on this jut of rock, just watching dawn break. There were some herring gulls in the air and on the water, a few loons calling in the distance somewhere, and maybe a great blue heron behind me in the back of the bay.

  Suddenly, a bald eagle came barreling into view from out of nowhere, and hit one of those herring gulls that was on the wing square on the back so hard, it knocked the gull out of the sky and into the water. Before the eagle had time to dive down and hit the gull again, all the other gulls began crying and harassing the eagle, the way little nesting birds do crows, and crows do owls. Within seconds, there were, there must have been, a hundred gulls, maybe more, in the air over that bay, crying and screaming and attacking the eagle.

  But it was as if the eagle didn’t even see all those gulls. The eagle dove down again and hit the wounded gull, who was now floundering on the water. Then the eagle rose up and dove, again and again and again, each time hitting the now-helpless gull with his talons as hard as he could. By now, one of the gull’s wings was splayed out across the water, and with the other wing and his feet, the gull was trying desperately to paddle away from the attacking eagle; but he could get nowhere.

  Again and again, the eagle dove and hit the gull. Over and over, he pummeled the gull. It was a messy scene. More and more, now, there were blood and feathers all around the gull. People think large predatory birds like hawks and eagles swoop in, grab their prey, kill it—and that is that. Wishful thinking is what that is. This whole attack and killing took the better part of twenty minutes to complete.

  At some point, the hundreds of gulls who had been circling and diving and crying in the air could see that the wounded gull was beyond hope, and as suddenly as the gulls had arrived, they all disappeared. I wonder if they had been there to save the gull, or just to be with the gull as it died. Maybe they knew full well it was hopeless from the start. Maybe they knew the eagle would have his way. Maybe they stayed there, circling and crying, just to keep the wounded gull company as it died. Which makes me think of Broken Wing, and how he had to die alone. Well, in the end, the hundreds of gulls left, and the wounded gull died alone, just as Broken Wing died alone; just as you and I will die alone, also. That last job we do is a lonely one any way you slice it, no matter how many people or birds are around.

  After the gulls left, the cacophony of their cries left, also; and the silence they left behind was frightening, because now I could hear the eagle plummet to the water, hear the impact of the eagle on the now hopelessly wounded gull, splayed out and bleeding on the water. Again and again, the eagle pummeled the gull, and each time he hit the gull, I could hear the thud of the impact. He’d hit the gull so hard the gull would go under water from the force of the blow, then bob back to the surface. By now, the gull couldn’t even make a pretense at trying to paddle away somewhere. It just twitched and shivered there on top of the water.

  Finally, when the eagle had decided that the gull was near enough to dead and beyond any ability to resist, the eagle came down much more slowly than he’d ever done before, grasped the gull in his talons, and laboriously rose up into the air. He got about twenty feet into the air and lost hold of the gull, which fell limply back onto the water. Again, the eagle came down, took hold, and took off, and again lost his grip, and again the gull fell to the water, and again the eagle came down, took hold and took off; and this time, winged off across the bay to an island on the far side with his breakfast.

  I watched where the eagle headed, and later that morning, I took the boat and outboard, and went over to the bay into which I thought I’d seen the eagle glide. After a lot of looking around, I found a rock at the water’s edge, some feathers, a few bloody bones, and two gull feet—nothing else.

  As bloody and difficult as the slaughter of that herring gull that day had been, there was something inevitable about it. As upsetting as such a thing is to watch, it is not wanton, meaningless, or cruel. In the end, it was the preparation and consumption of a meal, and little more.

  The way that bald eagle killed the herring gull that morning made me think, for some reason, of all the pheasants and quail I killed when I was a boy and lived on the farm and went hunting in the fall. The deaths of those pheasants and quail were somehow linked in my mind to the death of that gull. I, like the eagle, intended to kill them—for sport, yes, of course, but for food, also. I wonder if the eagle knows a sense of sport as well as food when he kills a gull or catches a fish. In any case, for both the eagle and for me, there was some kind of usefulness in those deaths. We got to eat them because we killed them.

  Before I was old enough to use a shotgun and go after game birds, I had a BB gun, and I, like all the other boys around there, learned to hunt by hunting and killing songbirds, which has got to be different from the eagle killing that gull or my older self, killing pheasants and quail. I know Indian kids learned to use their bows and arrows by killing songbirds, also, but still, thinking back on all of that, it doesn’t seem right. Yet killing all those songbirds with a BB gun or bow and arrow doesn’t bother me all that much. We were all learning to hunt. It bothers me, but not that much—not as much as the time I killed a great horned owl. I’ve never told anyone this story before. Never.

  I was hunting squirrels down on the farm in the fall, down along the river that ran through our place. I was maybe sixteen. It was a warm, sunny autumn afternoon. I was working my way slowly up the river, sycamore trees on my left hanging out over the river and a mixed stand of oak and beech trees on my right. Some of my parents’ corn and soybean fields were less than a hundred yards away, beyond the oaks and beeches. It was a kind of paradise for squirrels: plenty of water in the river, nuts in the beeches and oaks, and corn and soybeans nearby, as well. For some reason, I wasn’t seeing any squirrels that day. Probably it was because it was the middle of the afternoon, and all the squirrels were asleep in their leaf nests, high up in those oak and beech trees.

  I’d been hunting up the river for some time when I looked up through a kind of tunnel of trees, and there, about twenty yards ahead of me, on a low branch of a sycamore tree, sat a great horned owl looking right at me, right there in the middle of the day. Why he was out in the middle of the day, this night wanderer, I’ll never know; but there he was, just sitting there on that branch. He just sat there and looked at me.

  I put my shotgun to my shoulder, aimed, and fired. He fell backward off the branch like a wad of dough falling from the kitchen counter to the floor. He didn’t flutter or squirm. He just fell over and hit the ground and lay there.

  I came up to him, and he was dead, completely dead. He wasn’t twitching at all. He was big, much bigger than I imagined he would be, but when I picked him up to look at him, he was also much lighter than I imagined he would be. Birds are always lighter than they seem. I picked him up, and when I did, his head fell backward, totally limp, as if his neck were broken. All of him was limp, dead.

  One shot had killed him. One wanton, meaningless shot had killed him. What was it in me that had made me do that? What purposeless, random, destructive part of me had killed that bird? Did I kill him just so I could look at him, touch him, pick him up?

  The lit
tle boy in me who’d killed all those songbirds could almost be excused from his actions, even though he knew what he was doing was wrong. For him, it was the adventure of the hunt, those old, those ancient urges rising up in that little boy. And he was young; maybe he didn’t completely know, quite yet, that what he was doing was wrong. But the murder of that owl was another matter. There was no hunt involved. The boy wasn’t little anymore, and he knew better; he knew clearly that what he was doing was wrong. Yet he did it anyway. That dark urge, that urge to kill just for the sake of killing, for the fun of killing—I carry that around inside of me all the time. I still do.

  That moment was more than forty years ago, and I can still see it, to this day, as clearly as if I were there, at this moment. I can feel what kind of day it was, what the sky was like, how the sky looked up through and above the branches and leaves of those huge, old sycamore trees. I can smell the day. I can hear the river, and I can see that great horned owl sitting on that branch. I can see myself putting the gun to my shoulder, aiming, firing. I can see the owl falling to the ground. I can see myself standing over the owl, bending over, picking up the bird. I can see myself standing there, holding that big, dead bird, its head dangling limply off its shoulders.

  I’ve also been thinking of other wanton deaths, not as deliberate as the death of the great horned owl, but no less useless and stupid.

  Last summer, I came around the back corner of the house, and there, lying on the ground, was a black-billed cuckoo. It had been dead for days. Another meaningless accident. Another death caused by my desire to look out a window. I’ve been listening to black-billed cuckoos for thirty years in this place, and I’d never seen one until that day. You know, they are so secretive. I used to try to sneak up on them and get a look at them. I’d follow the call to where it was, being as stealthy as I could be, and when I got to where I heard it, it would be just ahead of me on the right. Then I’d sneak up there, and it would be just ahead of me on the left. Clearly, the cuckoo knew I was stalking it, and it was playing with me. It would move off just far enough so I couldn’t get a look at it, but then it would stop and call to me to tease me. After many futile attempts to glimpse a cuckoo, I gave up. Now, I just listen to them, and I’m grateful.