Snowy egret, Egretta thula http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Egretta_thula1.jpg
The Tail of r. Egret
The brushwood rustled with the sound of new life. Leaves auburn with the season rubbed against each other; the scrawny twigs quivered with the tickling of movement – and it was then that the shell broke, right at the crack of dawn.
And another, and another and another.
He turned his head away, escaping the sudden inlet of brightness, wondering what he’d just done. Deciding that there’d be better place to not get deafened by the reverberations of his own tiny, piercing squeals, as he already did a couple of times, he turned back to face the mini-oculus he’d just made in the ceiling of his first ever home. Brushing away more sticky slime from the tip of a jet-black muzzle he’d found growing rather intrudingly from in between his eyes sometime ago, he aimed it at the walls this time, creating an even bigger hole. Armed with a brand new novelty, he continued, feeling quite clever. Not until the ground started shaking even more violently. Fortunately, it only lasted for a chirp.
As they harked, it seemed the branches bent in salute to the arrival of Mother, who was a full-grown snowy egret with magnificent white plumage; her elegant feathers seemed to sway and dance in the wind with the graceful foliage of the canopy above. She looked upon her new hatchlings with a tender eye of the simplest, purest motherly warmth. With a gentle shuffling in hope of not startling her cherished young, she bent down to place, at the side of the nest, a glistening emerald leaf.
He wasn’t yet accustomed to sudden jerks of the floor, nor sudden appearances of white, gi-normous, arm-flapping walls, yet had nowhere to retreat to but the remnants of his recently demolished three-hundred-and-sixty degree cave. However, overcome by a new sensation of utter dryness in the throat, he instinctively leaned towards the brilliant viridian palette a few shell-bits to his left. But no matter how hard he strained his neck, he couldn’t reach those sparkling crystals that was sure, he thought, to wipe that feeling completely clean. Suddenly, the palette tilted, and a few of the crystals converged into a petty stream that inched closer and closer to his eyes.
Mother slowly released her feathers upon the leaf, watching closely as her firstborn took a tiny sip of the morning dew. Before long, the rest bad begun to clamber clumsily, with the tiniest steps and flutters, out of their eggs, like the man she observed stumbling out of a tent clutching a black bottle not far from here that morning. She craned her neck for a better view at the babies.
He realized sound worked quite differently outside, worse than expected actually. For every short, sharp squeal he made, three others followed, and he felt he couldn’t stop until the crystals in his rotund belly would stop playing tag; they were making almost as much noise as he did now. But then the big white wall started lowering small supple, ashen pieces (later he would know as meat, meat of fishes – creatures who swam in the big blue diamond and meant for food) into his beak, and it seemed to cure it for a while.
Time was like the torrents Mother spoke about in one of the nightstories before sleep, where many many little crystals, ranging from brown ones to blue ones to greens ones, and everything in between, would race each other from the skies to the mountains then to the seas. Sometimes they came directly to the nest from up above, but this wasn’t happening very often now. Rarely in fact.
Naturally, he learnt that he was a snowy egret born in the springtime of youth (very late spring actually), and had three very similar siblings. Mama was apparently able to differentiate him from the rest because of his larger beak. (let’s call him Beaky shall we?) But that was just one part about Beaky’s “dissimilarities”.
You see, there was this once, not long after their birth, that Mama gathered the family around the usual leaf with morning dew. This one had so much crystals in the morning a pool of it was still there after nightfall, and it was under the moonlight that four of them appeared so…at home in the iridescent family photo cast off the shimmering surface. Mama called it “reflection”. Unfortunately however, it was at this point where she discovered that Beaky’s right talons were withering, like the sunflowers in autumn she witnessed three seasons ago with their late father. That time it was honey under the moonlight, this time it was pure death.
Since then Mama never looked at Beaky the same way again. Beaky never thought anything wrong about that, since he thought Mama was giving them lesser attention since they were to be independent soon. At least not until he realized he could no longer perform the “branch-hopping stunt” they used to dare each other to do in the past week. One round around the Big Ol’ Deci Dewers was his record, now he couldn’t even manage a traversing the balancing beam. He peered down at his legs for a explanation, and he got it. Just as his feathers were getting whiter and purer by the day, his right leg was becoming blacker and dirtier by the night. That was also the first time Beaky found out crystals could come out of a bird’s eyes.
There was a second, and it happened during the summer Solstice. The rest of them had already started flying lessons with Mama, but I was forbidden because she I said I would never be able to keep balance with control of over only one foot. The most I could do was to savour the envy of listening to my sisters’ tales of flight, of how Mama would throw them off Deci Dewers’ hightops and then swoop down and catch them at the last second, of how Mama would show off with her brilliant speed as the fastest bird of the flock. All I was borne to do was to clean the nest, to just be one of the rest.
That afternoon, the others were out practicing near ground level in the kind shade of the undergrowth, whilst I was left in the nest embracing the wrath of Summer’s eye. I never thought to glare back, and I never intended to. I was furthest from fit to even steal a glimpse at the perfect source of our cyclic verve. Nevertheless, summer was unrelenting, and I had been cooped up in the branches for almost two days without water. Mama returned with the familiar gust of her long white feathers, now almost lustrous gold in sunbeams. I averted her eyes; not more than once have I felt as if I was aging quicker than the one who borne and bred me, my presence was already parasitic. These thoughts didn’t but add to my searing throat.
Ma could tell Beaky was thirsty. But she never could look at him and give him all the love that he wanted and needed. Not with no prejudice; no it’d take more than a mother’s love to care for those broken bones, and she couldn’t afford to show that kind of favouritism in front of the sisters. But now they were alone, and she knew exactly what he needed.
I didn’t dare look her in the eye, she was sure to return the stare with an iciness to amplify the burning pain in my gorge.
Ma had looked everywhere for water but none was to be found, and all she could do was to gaze at Beaky with a broken heart. But then something struck her.
Then I saw her take off again, diving into the scrubs below, probably calling the my sisters back up. I knew it, I was different, and there was no pity nor impartiality in the animal world.
Ma couldn’t risk staining her beak because fish had no blood, and she’d never want to be accused of attacking another bird. She arrived back at the nest just to find Beaky huddled in the same corner just as she’d left him.
What?
Clasped tightly in her beak was a smooth, slim, and sharp rock sharper than the sharpest talons she once had and used to catch the biggest garoupa for the flock feast. Beaky saw that Ma was shivering slightly, and it caught his attention. With a sudden action, Ma struck herself just under her left wing using the lethal edge of the cracked pebble. Her poised sinews grew tense immediately, and she stumbled towards the borders of the nest, sending an ominous tremor throughout the branches, but then she clung as tight as ever to both sides of the stemmy bowl to keep it in balance, safe from tipping over. Maintaining her open wingspan only served to widen the crimson gash at her side now, and her breathing was quick but heavy, her heart palpitated like the rattle of a venomous snake waiting at the prowl. Struggling desperately with the pain, she limped toward Beaky.
Ma knew it’d work from the moment she picked up the rock.
With Beaky staring up at her in shock, but resting in her bosom, Ma relented to the blazing pain, and let the crystals well up and then fall and slide of her eyes, downwards, glistening drop by glistening drop, carefully like how the morning dew was sparking that dawn of spring.
And all I could do was gape.
Then, recovering slightly from that ordeal, Ma said that she’d let me try flying next week, when her wound got better. I was to keep it a secret.
Ma and Beaky were at the top of Big Ol’ Deci Dewers. They’d taken a slow long walk from the nest all the way up here, but the view itself, exquisite as it was, was already worth it. On the right was a brotherhood of mountains with their snow-white hair and enigmatic mist around their eyes. At the base of the skyscrapers and continuing on to the left was the beautiful evergreen sea of swaying lungs that renewed the air everyday, made it fresh every morning, made it even more pleasant to look at Ma as she danced in the wind.
Beaky was scared, but Ma said he’d shown an incredible sense of balance while climbing to the top, and that him flying was actually quite possible. Under the sweltering scrutiny of the sun, Ma went through the routing one last time. She would grab Beaky, throw him off the branch, and he was to flap his wings as hard as he could, and then she would catch him and bring him back up. Beaky was still scared.
Ma grabbed Beaky at the collar with her beak, just around the skin so her jaws wouldn’t crush his soft bones, and with a swift flick, she hurled his white-grey body flailing into the open air, swimming with the tide of gravity.
Beaky dreamed of this, but never did he dream that it’d be such a nightmare. Everything around him was a mosaic of blur, green – brown – green – brown, and an occasional blue as he spun to face the sky. The leaves weren’t going to cushion his landing, the branches weren’t going to catch him if he couldn’t land, no, his locomotion was beyond control, he shouldn’t have taken the flight, he shouldn’t have even thought about it.
Green – brown – green – brown – green – brown.
The noise was a medley of a wind-and-leaf spar and the silence of death within him. Then he remember that there was supposed to be one more sound. And he started flapping, and he wasn’t about to give up, because Ma said not to.
There was a focusing peace.
The leaves and trees were elucidated to his eyes with each passing second. He was surprised that the he hadn’t met with the ground yet; Deci Dewers was indeed the tallest tree in the precinct. Beaky started to build a momentum with the rhythm of his breath and the beating of his wings. He was slowing down, yes! He was rising, slightly!
Ma was watching from above as she glided down slowly behind him, letting Beaky pacemake. There was something unusual about her faith in him that she couldn’t attribute to anything but primal instinct. Something unusually steady. And then, as Beaky alternated between plummeting and levitation, the gale sent a vine colliding square into his chest with a soft, thudding crush.
I didn’t know what that was. But it made me dazed. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I couldn’t move for the moment, at least not for now. I needed her help but I was just too close to the ground.
Ma never failed to walk the talk. She thrust her wings backward and created an aerial-V, propelling what was once the drift in the wind to a cutting thrust through forest air. She spiraled downwards along the inflictor-vine with full resolve in her scintillating eyes, even if she broke a bone or two superceding the threshold it’d be well worth it. The vine was now kept so still because of the circling wind currents in orbit of its stem throughout Ma’s lightning wake.
“There she is! That’s the one I saw, go!”
With my half open eyes I saw Ma right above me, and I couldn’t believe it. She was the light, all along, at the end of this tunnel. But then I heard the most horrible sound I’d ever heard and ever remember in my entire life. I didn’t know what it was then, but it left the cruelest, most deadly, and most mechanical echo resounding throughout the entire forest. The canaries and sparrows scattered around the lower ground took flight immediately. And I was still falling just to notice this.
“Got her.”
“Her feathers are mine.”
“Her beak’s mine.”
“Shut it.”
The brown floor was just a few branches away. Ma overtook me, but as she continued her nose-dive she left a trail of innocent red blood joining us in the downward journey like rubies you would find if you went to the centre of the sun. I was aghast, but I was too mute.
My wings were recovering from the temporary paralysis, and she, now under me, spread her silver feathers wide and closed in upon my body, wrapping around me, engulfing me, for the first time in my life, in the warmth of a Mother’s love. Then she closed her eyes. It eased away the numbness in my limbs.
She landed hard, but I soft, in her cherry bosom. My eyes were stinging because I knew the face of death when I saw it, but upon such a beautiful creature! The strangling sound of footsteps were approaching close and I had to leave, but how stupid and useless I was, having no ability to even carry this body away to safety. The redness I will never forget.
Using my beak to pluck off the longest feather she had stemming from her tail, I scampered away, and with memories in my eyes, I took off to fly the most confident flight I’d ever have had.
~tc©
