She looked weary when she stood away from me. I put out my palm and she climbed into it, to be carried back to the nest.
She did not talk to me tonight, nor eat, but she gave a reason, coming out from Camilla’s feathers long enough to turn her back and show me the wing stubs. The protective sheaths have dropped off; the wings are rapidly growing. They are probably damp and weak. She was quite tired and went back into the warm darkness almost at once.
Camilla must be exhausted, too. I don’t think she has been off the nest more than twice since I brought them into the house.
June 4
Today she can fly.
I learned it in the afternoon, when I was fiddling about in the garden and Judy was loafing in the sunshine she loves. Something apart from sight and sound called me to hurry back to the house. I saw my angel through the screen door before I opened it. One of her feet had caught in a hideous loop of loose wire at a break in the mesh. Her first tug of alarm must have tightened the loop so that her hands were not strong enough to force it open.
Fortunately I was able to cut the wire with a pair of shears before I lost my head; then she could free her foot without injury. Camilla had been frantic, rushing around fluffed up, but—here’s an odd thing—perfectly silent. None of the recognized chicken noises of dismay: if an ordinary chick had been in trouble she would have raised the roof.
The angel flew to me and hovered, pressing her hands on my forehead. The message was clear at once: “No harm done.” She flew down to tell Camilla the same thing.
Yes, in the same way. I saw Camilla standing near my feet with her neck out and head low, and the angel put a hand on either side of her scraggy comb. Camilla relaxed, clucked in the normal way, and spread her wings for a shelter. The angel went under it, but only to oblige Camilla, I think—at least, she stuck her head through the wing feathers and winked.
She must have seen something else, then, for she came out and flew back to me and touched a finger to my cheek, looked at the finger, saw it was wet, put it in her mouth, made a face, and laughed at me.
We went outdoors into the sun (Camilla, too), and the angel gave me an exhibition of what flying ought to be. Not even Schubert can speak of joy as her first free flying did. At one moment she would be hanging in front of my eyes, radiant and delighted; the next instant she would be a dot of color against a cloud. Try to imagine something that would make a hummingbird seem a bit dull and sluggish.
They do hum. Softer than a hummingbird, louder than a dragonfly.
Something like the sound of hawk-moths—Heinmaris thisbe, for instance: the one I used to call Hummingbird Moth when I was a child.
I was frightened, naturally. Frightened first at what might happen to her, but that was unnecessary; I don’t think she would be in danger from any savage animal except possibly Man. I saw a Cooper’s hawk slant down the visible ray toward the swirl of color where she was dancing by herself; presently she was drawing iridescent rings around him; then, while he soared in smaller circles, I could not see her, but (maybe she felt my fright) she was again in front of me, pressing my forehead in the now familiar way. I knew she was amused and caught the idea that the hawk was a “lazy character.” Not quite the way I’d describe Accipiter cooperi, but it’s all in the point of view. I believe she had been riding his back, no doubt with her speaking hands on his terrible head.
And later I was frightened by the thought that she might not want to return to me. Can I compete with sunlight and open sky? The passage of that terror through me brought her back swiftly, and her hands said with great clarity: “Don’t ever be afraid of anything—it isn’t necessary for you.”
Once this afternoon I was saddened by the realization that old Judy can take little part in what goes on now. I can well remember Judy running like the wind. The angel must have heard this thought in me, for she stood a long time beside Judy’s drowsy head, while Judy’s tail thumped cheerfully on the warm grass.
In the evening the angel made a heavy meal on two or three cake crumbs and another drop of sherry, and we had what was almost a sustained conversation. I will write it in that form this time, rather than grope for anything more exact. I asked her, “How far away is your home?”
“My home is here.”
“Thank God!—but I meant, the place your people came from.”
“Ten 1ight-years.”
“The images you showed me—that quiet valley—that is ten light-years away?”
“Yes. But that was my father talking to you, through me. He was grown when the journey began. He is two hundred and forty years old—our years, thirty-two days longer than yours.”
Mainly I was conscious of a flood of relief: I had feared, on the basis of terrestrial biology, that her explosively rapid growth after hatching must foretell a brief life. But it’s all right—she can outlive me, and by a few hundred years, at that. “Your father is here now, on this planet—shall I see him?”
She took her hands away—listening, I believe. The answer was: “No. He is sorry. He is ill and cannot live long. I am to see him in a few days, when I fly a little better. He taught me for twenty years after I was born.”
“I don’t understand. I thought—”
“Later, friend. My father is grateful for your kindness to me.”
I don’t know what I thought about that. I felt no faintest trace of condescension in the message. “And he was showing me things he had seen with his own eyes, ten light-years away?”
“Yes.” Then she wanted me to rest a while; I am sure she knows what a huge effort it is for my primitive brain to function in this way. But before she ended the conversation by humming down to her nest she gave me this, and I received it with such clarity that I cannot be mistaken: “He says that only fifty million years ago it was a jungle there, just as Terra is now.”
June 8
When I woke four days ago the angel was having breakfast, and little Camilla was dead. The angel watched me rub sleep out of my eyes, watched me discover Camilla, and then flew to me. I received this: “Does it make, you unhappy?”
“I don’t know exactly.” You can get fond of a hen, especially a cantankerous and homely old one whose personality has a lot in common with your own.
“She was old. She wanted a flock of chicks, and I couldn’t stay with her. So I—” Something obscure here: probably my mind was trying too hard to grasp it— “…so I saved her life.” I could make nothing else out of it. She said “saved.”
Camilla’s death looked natural, except that I should have expected the death contractions to muss the straw, and that hadn’t happened. Maybe the angel had arranged the old lady’s body for decorum, though I don’t see how her muscular strength would have been equal to it—Camilla weighed at least seven pounds.
As I was burying her at the edge of the garden and the angel was humming over my head, I recalled a thing which, when it happened, I had dismissed as a dream. Merely a moonlight image of the angel standing in the nest box with her hands on Camilla’s head, then pressing her mouth gently on Camilla’s throat, just before the hen’s head sank down out of my line of vision. Probably I actually waked and saw it happen. I am somehow unconcerned—even, as I think more about it, pleased…
After the burial the angel’s hands said, “Sit on the grass and we’ll talk…. Question me. I’ll tell you what I can. My father asks you to write it down.”
So that is what we have been doing for the last four days. I have been going to school, a slow but willing pupil. Rather than enter anything in this journal (for in the evenings I was exhausted), I made notes as best I could. The angel has gone now to see her father and will not return until morning. I shall try to make a readable version of my notes.