The Complete Collection. William Wharton

says she could tell from the first that it wasn’t meant to live or fly, there was nothing of the sky in its eyes. In my dreams, birds have a kind of knowing humans don’t. I don’t know why this is. I’m only human, so I suffer very much at the loss of this young one. It is five weeks old when it dies. In bird time, it was in Scheen.

      Birds don’t have any kind of time except in relation to themselves. The movement of the sun or the earth doesn’t mean much to them. They have two kinds of time. First, they have the time which is one year or breeding period. It begins with Ohnme. This is the period after the molt and before breeding. Then, there is Sachen, the time of courtship, till the first egg is laid. Kharst is the fourteen days of sitting on the eggs. The next time is from when the young hatch till they leave the nest; this is Flangst. After this is Scheen, which is until the young can crack seed on their own and live without their parents. It is in Scheen when our son dies. Then, there is the first molt period of young birds; this is called Smoor. The molt time for older birds is called Smoorer. After Smoorer the adult birds go into Ohnme again. So, the bird year has six different periods. The longest is Ohnme and the shortest is Kharst. Kharst, Flangst, and Scheen are repeated three times in the typical bird year.

      The other kind of time birds have is related to the individual bird and not so much to the mating-molting season. The whole first year before breeding is called Tangen. The years of breeding are called Pleen and the last days before death are called Echen. Sometimes in old age or illness a bird goes into Echen. It is a time when a bird does not want to fly or eat. The birds have no word for death. As far as I can tell, Echen includes our idea of being dead. When Perta told me our son had gone into Echen, I went down to help him; he was not dead yet but there was nothing I could do. He was in Echen. When he finally died I told Perta and she only said:

      ‘Yes, he is in Echen.’

      The strange thing is that on the same day our son dies, one of the young birds in Perta’s nest in the cage also dies. It has the same markings as our son. I take it from the bottom of the cage and in the dream our son’s body disappears. I tell Perta this but she doesn’t want to listen. She never talks of him again. When I try to speak of him, of his death, of my sadness, she only gives the same response: ‘Yes. He is in Echen.’

      All these words are the closest I can come to what I’m hearing in canary. I have no way to know if they are bird ideas or Birdy ideas. In my dreams I’ve begun to hear the bird sounds as words like these, although to my ear, as a bird, they sound like bird sounds. I don’t know how this is happening. No bird word sounds in itself like any English word, but the birds sound to me as if they’re talking English. I’m converting the sounds as I’m hearing them and I’m only hearing my own conversions.

      At the end of the breeding season, Perta and I have eleven wonderful children. There are seven females and four males. The remarkable thing is that the young in Perta’s cage have the same markings as my children in the dream, and as far as I can tell, they are also the same sex. I can understand that I might have structured the birds in my dream to resemble the birds in Perta’s cage, but I knew the sex of Perta’s daytime young before I could know them in reality. Perta in the dream told me. This is something I can’t put together.

      I try talking to Perta, the bird in the cage, in sounds I remember from the dream but she doesn’t respond. However, if I peep or queep in the ways I used to do with Birdie, she’ll peep or queep back enthusiastically. She wants me to stay as a boy. My dream has nothing to do with her reality. Still, her babies are the same as mine in the dream. I’m getting so I can’t tell which reality is making the other. It must be that I’m tailoring the dream in some way to the things that happen, but sometimes it seems the other way around. It’s easy to fool yourself.

      The other flight cage is so full I have to do something. I’ve gotten three nests from almost every breeding couple. I need to separate the young males from the females and take the breeding birds apart. The season is over and the adult birds will be going into the molt soon. I need more space.

      To solve this, I divide off a part of the male cage for my project. I build in a new floor about one third down from the top of the aviary. Above this I put Perta and her young. The bottom part I use for the adult and young males. There are eighty-five young males and eighty-two young females. Now I’ll feed them and give them tonic to get through the molt and ready for the market. I hate to think about selling them, especially the children of Birdie and Alfonso. Still, making money is the excuse I have for keeping my birds. It’s the way I can hold onto the world which makes my dream possible.

      The reason I build off the special cage is so I can live privately with Perta and my children in the dream. The very night the partition is finished, it’s that way in the dream. We don’t have as much space to fly, but this will be all right after I get my plan going.

      My plan is to work out a way for free flying with my family. It is the idea I developed up in the tree.

      In the dream, I’m happy as husband and father. I spend wonderful hours teaching my children to fly, to crack seed, to eat. We bathe together and I teach the young males to sing. We start with simple songs about flying, without any difficult parts, and move on to harder songs. One of the children’s songs is:

      Down is up.

      Up is sky.

      Sing a song

      Don’t ask why.

      Another is:

      Touch the air

      Hold it tight.

      Stroke the wind

      Ride the light.

      When I sell the young birds, I sell off three of my breeding females and one of my breeding males. I replace them with some of the best of the new young birds. I replace the three females because they aren’t good breeders. One only laid two eggs each nest and raised a total of five birds. Another laid eggs but consistently pulled the nest apart scattering the eggs on the floor. The third abandoned each of her nests when the babies were less than a week old. I saved the babies by distributing them to other nests, but she has to go. The male I sell because he’s developed the habit of egg-eating.

      All of these young birds are even better fliers than their parents. It’s a pleasure to watch them. The rustling sound of their wings is musical. Because they fly so much and so well, they are all trim and longer-legged than ordinary canaries. I wish I could have Mr Lincoln come see my aviary and birds. I think about it of ten but I could never explain it to my parents. I wish people could be more like canaries.

      During the day, I spend hours watching the birds fly. The more I watch, the stronger, truer, my dreams are. I’m getting so much inside the bird world, my dream seems completely independent of the day. I don’t even know what I know anymore. I can’t know all the time why things are in the dreams or how they’re going to be. The dreams have gotten so complicated they’re at least as real as the day.

      I don’t do any flying experiments with the birds. I know all of them too well from my dreams. I’m not really that interested in flying anymore; at least not as a boy. It’s better to watch a bird fly naturally than to watch one with weights or with feathers missing. Flying is something practically impossible to take apart. You have to learn it all at once; it can’t be seen in pieces.

      The price of birds does go up and I sell my birds to a wholesaler from Philadelphia for even more than I thought I would. At the end of the year there’s over a thousand dollars profit. My mother can’t believe it and wants me to pay board. She says I live in the house and I’m making almost as much money as my father so I ought to pay. I don’t care. I’m not keeping canaries for the money. My father says no; he’s going to put the money in the bank for my college education. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not going to college anyway. I only want to raise my birds and fly with them at night. I can do that anywhere; I don’t have to go to college for that.

      The thing I’m more worried about is getting drafted when I’m eighteen. There’s nothing I can do about this. The army isn’t going to let me keep canaries, that’s for sure. I wonder if the dream would continue then if I didn’t have any birds to watch. The army will