The Complete Collection. William Wharton

back and I can’t even talk. I don’t have enough breath. My ears feel like they’re filled with snow.

      Al picks me up and throws me over his back in a fireman’s carry. I have no energy to resist. Al goes jogging along down the center of the creek. He can’t go fast because it’s slippery. He puts me down once and throws the ice skates under a tree growing over the ice. That’s the last I remember.

      It’s a good three miles we’d skated up that creek. While I’m running along, I’m keeping my eyes open for somebody up in the old factory or on the golf course who can help us. Birdy’s passed out. I decide against trying to get up the side of the hill to Sixty-third Street. I could never make it. I’m to the point where I’m going on automatically. If I stop for anything, I’m finished.

      When we get to the fire, it’s almost burned out. I put Birdy down beside it and throw on some more wood. Birdy’s gone all right. I slap him a few times to bring him around. It’s like he’s in a deep sleep. He’s breathing shallow, noisy gulps of air. I’m not cold at all myself; I’m sweating, but I’m dead tired. I lift Birdy up and walk him around to force some circulation into his legs. The fire starts burning fine but it’s not giving off enough heat. I know I have to get Birdy home. I can’t squeeze our shoes on either of us, so I string them around my neck and pick up Birdy again. This time I carry him piggy back. I hate to face his bitchin’ old lady.

      I trot up out of the woods and across the fields along the railroad tracks. I take the back way up to Birdy’s house past the Cosgrove place. The last part is uphill and I’m about pooped. I get him to his gate and put him down on his feet so it won’t look so bad. He can walk a bit now.

      Lucky nobody’s home. Birdy has a key. I get him upstairs and run some water in the bathtub. Birdy can’t get his buttons undone, so I undress him and get him into the tub. I sit on the john and watch to see if he’s OK. I’m starting to get cold myself; my clothes are starting to thaw in the warm house and I’m sopping wet. The sweat is turning cold, too. The bath brings Birdy around fine. In fifteen minutes he’s almost good as new. I take off for my place.

      When I get home, I jump into the tub. I throw my wet clothes into the hamper. I lie in that hot water for at least half an hour. My feet are bruised and cut. As the hot water starts to defrost them they begin to hurt. When I was running I couldn’t feel a thing.

      Next day, school is still closed. Birdy and I go up the creek to get the skates. We find them OK. In this weather, nobody’s sneaking around stealing ice skates. We go on up to the place where we went in. It’s frozen over again. We check the ice and it’s more than three inches thick already. If Birdy’d been alone he’d never been able to break his way through.

      We pace it off on the way back and it’s over three miles from the falls to the fire. Then, another mile to his house.

      Birdy comes out without even a cold but I practically get pneumonia. I have to stay home from school for three weeks; lose ten pounds. Birdy doesn’t tell anybody about it till I get there and we have the fun of telling it together.

      It’s amazing how fast they grow. By the end of one week their eyes are open and they begin laying their heads on the edge of the nest. Birdie doesn’t sit on them nearly as much and spends most of her time hauling food.

      At the end of two weeks they’ve developed pin feathers and feathers over their backs. Their eyes are bright, wide open, and they cower down in the nest when I come in to look at them. Little tail feathers have started and stick out about half an inch. They’re beginning to look like birds. I even think I can tell the males from the females. I decide there are three males and one female. The dark one is definitely a male and one of the yellow ones. The spotted one is probably a male too. I judge this partly from the shape of their heads and the look in their eyes but more from the way they act in the nest. All the males keep away from the door and the wire of the cage and the little yellow one I figure for a female is less afraid. It’s this bravery which almost does her in.

      By now, the nest is beginning to get messy. At the beginning, Birdie took their droppings in her mouth; then, by the time they’re a week old she has them trained to shove their butts up over the edge of the nest. Still, it doesn’t always clear the edge and the outside of the nest is covered with bird droppings. There’s so much crap I change the paper under the nest every day.

      About half way into the third week, this little yellow female starts climbing up on the rampart of the nest to get a breath of fresh air and look around. I can see she’s going to be the same sort of curious type as Birdie. She’s just a little over two weeks old when she falls out the first time. This means she falls about eight times her own height to the bottom of the cage. There are practically no feathers on her wings, so it’s a free fall. It’s like me falling off the top of our house. Weight or density has a lot to do with falling. Baby birds even fall out of trees and survive.

      I don’t see her fall but I look in and there she is, trying to stand on the flat surface at the bottom of the cage. Alfonso is hopping around in total confusion. He feeds her and there’s nothing else he can do. Birdie peers down over the edge of the nest. That baby bird’ll freeze if she has to stay out there all night. She doesn’t have enough feathers.

      I reach in, pick her up and put her back in the nest. She has virtually no feathers along her breast or along her thighs. Also her head is very thinly feathered. She snuggles back into the nest with the others and I think that’s the end of it.

      The next day I come home from school and she’s on the floor again. Alfonso and Birdie are frantic. I have the feeling she’s been out quite a while. When I pick her up she feels cool. I hold her in my hand to warm her, then put her back in the nest and hope for the best. Birdie feeds all of them and when I go down to dinner, everything seems in order.

      After dinner, she’s out of the nest again. I put her back in and wonder what I can do. I watch to see what’s happening. Birdie might’ve taken a dislike to her and is throwing her out, or maybe feels that since she left the nest voluntarily, she shouldn’t be allowed back in. Who knows what goes through a canary’s mind? In about an hour, the yellow one’s climbed up on the rampart. She looks over the edge and out into the aviary where Alfonso is flying. She stands up on her thin, bare-thighed legs and flaps her slightly feathered stubs of wings. She tumbles forward and almost off the nest. In about two minutes she does the same thing again and falls. The only solution is to make sure she’s in the nest before I turn out the lights.

      During the next week, all of them start standing on the edge of the nest. It becomes the thing to do. You can see they’re preparing themselves for flight. There’s much stretching of wings; they stand up high, stretch straight out and flap their wing stumps at faster than flight speeds. I wonder if they’re getting any lift from this flapping. I try it myself with my own arms as fast as I can but I can’t feel anything. You have to have feathers. I feel if I could only flap down without having to flap up again, I’d definitely get some lift. When I went off the gas tank, it was mostly falling.

      By the end of three weeks they’re all standing on the edge of the nest, even at night, and Birdie isn’t sitting them anymore. She’s beginning to carry around pieces of burlap so I put in a new nest on the other side of the cage. Between feedings now, she begins to build again. Alfonso is more and more the main feeder of the babies. They’ve started mating again, too, and I figure it won’t be long before Birdie lays another batch of eggs.

      Twice, Birdie comes over and snitches soft feathers from one or another of the babies. I’ve read how sometimes a female will pluck a whole nest of young naked to feather her new nest. This can cause all the babies to die from pain and cold. This is another one of those things that happens because canaries have been in cages so long. I wonder if it ever happens with wild birds.

      The third time Birdie comes over to take a pass at one of the young for some soft down to line the new nest, Alfonso pounces on her and chases her out into the aviary. She comes back twice more and each time it’s Alfonso to the rescue. For the next few days he sits beside the nest on guard. There are so many things that can go wrong.

      Finally, Birdie is finished with her new nest. In the meantime,