Sigurd Our Golden Collie and Other Comrades of the Road Part 13

"I wish no living thing to suffer pain."

HOW BIRDS WERE MADE

Above his forests bowed the Spirit, dreaming Of maize and wigwams and a tawny folk Who should rejoice with him when autumn broke Upon the woods in many-colored flame.

Pale birches, maples gleaming In splendor of all gold and crimson tints, And dark-green balsams with their purple hints Of cones erect upon the stem, awoke In his deep heart, Though thought had yet no words, Beauty no name, Creative longing for a voice, a song Blither than winds or brooklet's tinkling flow, His own joy's counterpart.

He breathed upon the throng Of wondering trees, and lo!

Their leaves were birds.

The birds do not forget, but love to fellow The trees whose shining colonies they were; Else wherefore should the scarlet tanager Fling from the oak his proud, exultant flush Of music? Why mid yellow Sprays of the willow by her empty nest Lingers the golden warbler? Softly drest In autumn buffs and russets, chorister Sweetest of all, Angel of lonely eves, The hermit thrush Haunts the November woodland. In them bides Memory of that far time, ere eyes of men Had seen the tender fall Of shadow or the tides Of silver sunrise, when The birds were leaves.

TAKA AND KOMA

"What madness is it to take upon us to know a thing by that it is not? Shall we perswade our selves that wee know what thing a Camell is, because wee know it is not a Frogge?"

--Barckley's _Felicitie of Man_. 1603.

To console me for the loss of the chicks, Joy-of-Life went into a Boston bird-store one day and, in defiance of all her principles and mine, bought me a j.a.panese robin. When she presented him, the daintiest little fellow, mouse-color, with touches of red and gold on wings and throat and the prettiest pink bill, I met her guilty look with one of sheer astonishment.

"A Robin Redbreast in a cage Puts all Heaven in a rage,"

I quoted.

"But he was in a cage already," she weakly apologized, "and we'll be very good to him."

"Good jailers!"

"But liberty here would be his undoing, and I can't take him over to j.a.pan. Come! It's time that you said thank-you."

But Taka, named after a j.a.panese boy of Joy-of-Life's earlier acquaintance, proved a dubious blessing. He was in angry temper from the first, and a brilliant new cage, fitted up with all the modern conveniences and latest luxuries, failed to appease him in the least.

He would thrust his head between the gilded bars so violently that he could not draw it back, and while we were doing our clumsy best to extricate him he would peck our fingers with furious ingrat.i.tude. He upset his porcelain dishes, declined to use his swing and, as a rule, rejected all the attractions of his criss-cross perches, fluttering back and forth and madly beating against the bars or huddling in an unhappy little bundle on the floor. It was a matter of weeks before we could coax him into conversation, and then his abrupt, metallic chirps were so sharp that Mary, who scorned and disliked him as a foreigner, was scandalized.

"Don't ye talk with him. It's all sauce that j.a.p is giving yez."

Even Robin Hood, social little fellow that he was, tried in vain, later on, to make friends with this ungracious stranger. The East and the West could not meet. In response to Robin's cheery chatter, Taka would bristle, turn away and maintain a stubborn silence.

I used to carry his cage out of doors with me and set it up on the bank, where crocuses followed snowdrops, and tulips followed crocuses, beside the steamer-chair, hoping that he would feel more at home amid the blossoms and bird music of the spring. But there little Lord Sulks would sit, bunched into a corner of his palace, deigning no response whatever to the soft greetings of the bluebirds, those "violets of song," nor to the ecstatic trills of the fox sparrows, nor even to the ringing challenge of Lieutenant Redwing, as he flashed by overhead on his way to Tupelo swamp.

A calling ornithologist examined Taka carefully and concluded that he was an old bird, although the dealer had glibly represented him as being in the very pink of youth. So our poor prisoner was perhaps not born in captivity and may have had more than ancestral memories of spreading rice fields, tea plantations and holy bamboo groves. Our brave blue squills, our sunny forsythias, our coral-tinted laurels could not break his dream of flushing lotus and flaming azalea. What was our far-off glimpse of silvery Wachusett to the radiant glories of sea-girt Fujiyama? I hinted that a pet monkey might solace his nostalgia, but to such suggestion Joy-of-Life remained persistently deaf.

The children of the neighborhood found him, sullen though he was, a center of fascination, and would crowd about his cage, pointing out to one another the jewel tints in his plumage.

"Cutest bird I ever seed 'cept the flicker," p.r.o.nounced Snippet, whose straw-colored hair stood out like a halo.

"Chickadees are nicer'n flickers," protested wise little Goody Four-Eyes. "A chickadee eats three hundred cankerworms in a day and over five thousand eggs--when he can get 'em."

The boys gave a choral snort.

"Who does the countin'?" demanded Punch.

"Wish _I'd_ been born with all the learnin' in me," scoffed Snippet.

But Goody, who had gathered many a pinecone for our feeding-boxes and, her snub nose pressed snubbier yet against the window pane, had watched the black-capped rolypolies twitch out the winged seeds, stood her ground.

"Does, too," she averred stoutly. "Boys don't know about birds. They stone 'em."

"And girls wear feathers in their hats."

"I don't, but Snippet's mamma does."

"Doesn't neither. She jes' wears regrets on Sunday."

"You don't say it right, but you're nothin' but a small boy."

"I'm seven," bl.u.s.tered Snippet, "and I think I'd be eight by now, if I hadn't had the measles."

"Where's Taka?" I exclaimed.

In the jostling of the children about the cage, the door, accidentally or not, had been slipped ajar, and Taka, taking advantage of the heat of the discussion, had escaped.

The youngsters raised a whoop that might well have scared him to the Pacific, but not the stir of a bird-wing could be perceived anywhere about.

Cats!

"Run to the house, Punch, please, and call out everybody to help us find Taka."

I had selected Punch as the boy of longest legs, forgetting his partiality for Mary's doughnut jar. He chose the route through the pantry with the result that when, after a suspiciously long interval, the rescue party arrived, Mary was dancing with wrath.

"Shure," she panted, "that gossoon would be a good missenger to sind for Death, for he wouldn't be after gitting him here in a hurry at all at all."

We hunted and we hunted and we hunted. We hunted high in the trees, which the boys and Goody, too, climbed with an activity that surprised the woodp.e.c.k.e.rs; we hunted low in the gra.s.s, interrupting a circle of squirrels gathered around a toadstool, as around a birthday cake; but no sign of Taka. We searched hedges and shrubbery, but no Taka. We chirped and we whistled, though well aware that even if Taka heard us he would not answer.

The western sky was a brighter red than Goody's hair-ribbon before we sat ourselves down, discouraged, on the piazza steps to wait for Joy-of-Life.

One by one the children had been summoned home, all but Wallace. He had by telephone directed his parents, who used to be older than he but whom he now watched over with solicitude, to eat their supper without him and go to bed as usual in case he should be detained.

"I don't like to think of that little goldy head out in the big dark all night," I said.

"Maybe a star will suppose it's another star and come down and stay with it," suggested Wallace, trying to b.u.t.tress my sagging courage.

"His winglets are so wild and so weak."