by Betsy Byars
He brought himself to the present with a start. Then slowly he began to take off his jacket. The railroad jacket was old, the lining was worn out, and the back of the jacket was so thin Sammy could see the sun shining through.
His grandfather shook out the jacket and held it up in front of him like an apron. His arms were thin and frail-looking compared to the rest of his body. They were as white as if they had never been exposed to the sun.
“What are you going to do?” Sammy asked.
“Well, I’m going to try to ease up on him and get this jacket over his head. There’s something about not being able to see what’s happening that calms a bird. A bird don’t fight as much that way.”
“Plus he won’t be able to stab us with his beak.”
“You just keep back while I’m doing this, only be ready to head him off if he starts running.”
“I will.”
His grandfather stepped forward. His foot rustled some dry leaves, and the crane’s head snapped to attention. The crane stepped back against the bushes, pressing into the leaves in a quick startled movement. His head jerked around. His right eye, turned toward them, was a frosty yellow.
“He’s making it easy for us so far,” the grandfather said. “He’s getting farther and farther back in the bushes. When I first seen him he was out there at the edge of the cornfield and he ran right in here like he didn’t know where he was going. He trapped himself.”
“He could still stab us though. His beak’s longer than my knife.”
“He can use it too. I’ve seen a crane stab that beak five inches into the ground and come up with a root.”
His grandfather stepped closer. The crane moved with quick stiff steps against the brush without going anywhere.
“He’s been in more trouble than we thought. Look, boy. His wingbones are rubbed raw, like he’s been throwing himself up against something.”
The crane did not move, but he was poised as if ready for the sound of a starting gun, ready for the race. He snapped his head up, listening.
The air in the forest was now charged with excitement. It was like the moment before a storm. Sammy forgot that he was hungry and tired, and he pressed closer to his grandfather. There was something about the bearing of the crane, the proud carriage despite his pitiful condition, that made Sammy want his grandfather to succeed.
“I’ll take it from here,” the grandfather said.
Sammy stepped back. He knew that the capture of the crane had begun, the stalk. Slowly his grandfather lifted his jacket, holding it against his side. Then he stepped forward in a slow careful way. The heavy miner’s boots were soundless in the weeds.
Sammy waited. He swallowed and his throat was dust-dry. He blinked and his eyes seemed dry too, burned with the heat of the day and his excitement. Every muscle in his body was tight as a knot.
He kept his eyes on his grandfather as he moved toward the crane. His grandfather took three more steps without making a sound. The wind had died and silence hung over them like a tent.
“Be careful,” Sammy said silently through his dry lips.
His grandfather took another step. Again Sammy heard nothing, but the crane jerked his head around uneasily. He took a step forward with his long straight legs, moving around the bushes now, away from them. The crane took another step and paused.
Sammy and his grandfather waited. Sammy could see the air going out of his grandfather in a long silent sigh of relief when the crane did not run. If the crane stayed right where he was, Sammy thought, then the thick bushes would serve as a net, but if he moved …
His grandfather took a deep breath and stepped forward. The jacket was held loosely by his right side. With his left hand he pointed, directing Sammy, and slowly, carefully Sammy began to walk in the direction his grandfather had indicated, ready to head off the crane if he started to run.
Sammy picked his way noiselessly through the weeds. He looked down to see where he was stepping because the underbrush was thick here. Then he glanced up quickly to see if the crane had moved. He had not. The crane was still standing against the bushes, head high, turned away from them. Sammy’s grandfather had not moved either. He was waiting, his body bent forward, the jacket half-raised.
Sammy took another step. He was watching the crane and this time his bare foot stepped directly on a long thorny vine. The thorns scraped his skin and he said “Ow” beneath his breath. As he raised his foot the vine wrapped around his ankle and the briers raked his skin. “Ow,” he said, still talking only to himself. “Where are all these briers coming from?”
He took another step, avoiding the briers by stepping wide to the right. It was awkward and he paused to regain his balance before he proceeded.
He could see from the set of his grandfather’s back that he was waiting impatiently for Sammy to get into position. Sammy took two quick steps forward. “I’m ready to head him off now,” he said quietly. As he said this his foot landed on another thorn, and he jerked it up. In that instant he lost his balance. He took a heavy step to the right, landed on another brier, and pitched forward to the ground.
What happened next was so fast Sammy would have missed it if he had not snapped his head up as he fell. Startled by Sammy’s fall, the crane wheeled around, headed directly into the bushes, then finding himself trapped, bounded out and threw himself forward. The crane started to run, moving in a frenzy, but Sammy’s grandfather had come forward in one light fluid movement. It was such a quick reaction that he seemed for the moment to be a young man in an old disguise. He ran up and drew the jacket over the crane’s head. It was as easy as covering a sleeping child. Then he pulled the jacket together at the crane’s neck with his left hand and circled the crane around with his right.
He cried, “Got him!” holding the quivering crane and glancing at Sammy.
There was a flurry of movement from the crane, a series of hair-trigger reactions. The crane’s good wing, which was pinned to his side, came free and beat at the air. Sammy’s grandfather repinned the wing. The head and long neck twisted beneath the jacket. The grandfather loosened the cloth.
Then gently he lifted the bird against his side. The tips of his white elbows were as sharp as knives, and the crane’s stick legs ran, scissors-like, in the air for a moment. It was a picture of sharp and impossible angles.
“Easy,” his grandfather said. “Easy.” There was another short struggle and then the crane was quiet. Sammy’s grandfather looked at the crane and then at Sammy. “He’s giving up now.”
Sammy had risen to his feet during the struggle and now began mindlessly dusting off his pants. “Well, we got him,” he said.
His grandfather’s face was bright with success. His eyes were burning in his face. He held the crane against him like an enormous trophy. When he spoke his voice was still trembling with his excitement. “Yeah, we got him, boy,” he said, generously including Sammy in the capture. “We got him.”
RAGGED WINGS
STILL DUSTING OFF THE back of his pants, Sammy came forward quickly and joined his grandfather. He looked at the crane’s long stiff legs, now motionless. “Is he all right?”
His grandfather nodded.
“He looks dead.”
“You feel his heart and you’ll know he’s not dead,” he said. His hand was curled around the crane’s chest and lay over the crane’s heart. “A bird’s got a big heart for his size. That’s why he has to eat so much. Feel that.” His grandfather was holding the crane awkwardly on his hip and he shifted a little.
Sammy reached out one dusty hand and touched the crane. The feathers of his breast were stained with blood. Sammy let his fingers rest there for only a second. He had not felt the heart at all but he said, “Yeah, he sure has got a big heart all right.”
His grandfather said, “Now pull the bandanna out of my pocket and get it over his eyes instead of this jacket.”
“Me?”
“Come on, boy.”
Sammy hesitated. “Have any of th
ese cranes ever attacked a person—anything like that?”
“I reckon so. One time my brother teased one of them cranes I was telling you about. He held out a piece of bread to the crane and then when the crane tried to take it my brother jerked it back. I tell you I never saw such a mad crane. His feathers rose and he spread his wings and he jumped on my brother and started beating him with his wings and stabbing him with his beak. Finally we had to just pull that crane off. It was something to see. My brother always claimed we took longer about it than we had to, but I tell you, a crane can get mad. There’s no question about that.”
“Oh.”
“Now come on, boy. Get going.”
“Well, where is the bandanna?” Sammy could see the bandanna in his grandfather’s back pocket, but he didn’t want to take it out. “I don’t see any bandanna.”
“In my pocket. Now get on with it.”
Gingerly Sammy pulled the bandanna out of his grandfather’s pocket. It was limp with grease and sweat, and Sammy stood holding it for a moment. “Now, what do I do? I’ve got the bandanna.”
“Get it over his eyes.”
“How?”
His grandfather sighed with disgust. “Just do it.” Sammy lifted the side of the jacket. His grandfather shifted and said, “I’ve got his wings so you don’t have to worry about them.”
The wings weren’t what Sammy was worrying about. Beneath the jacket the crane’s head jerked. Sammy’s heart was pounding in his throat. “I’m not going to do anything to you,” he muttered. He got the bandanna ready. In the dusky warmth beneath the jacket the crane turned to Sammy. For a moment they were eye to eye. Sammy’s hands started trembling. Then quickly, afraid to waste a moment, he covered the crane’s head with the blindfold.
“Not too tight,” his grandfather said.
“No.” Sammy was weak with relief. With fingers that were still shaking he secured the bandanna and lifted off the jacket.
His grandfather checked it. “All right, let’s go.”
Sammy followed, holding his grandfather’s jacket. It was a strange procession as Sammy and his grandfather walked slowly out of the forest and across the old cornfield. “Here’s the way I did it,” Sammy said. Suddenly he wanted to tell about his success. “As soon as I saw the crane looking at me under the jacket, I knew I had to move fast. So I just very quickly and quietly slipped up with the bandanna, so—”
“I reckon that’s what he’s been eating,” his grandfather interrupted as they crossed the cornfield. “Look close and you can see his bill marks in the ground around the stalks.” Sammy glanced down. “This cornfield’s been keeping him here.”
“That and his wing,” Sammy said. Sammy had been looking down to see the marks of the crane’s bill in the ground and he bumped into his grandfather. He looked up.
Suddenly he was confused. It was not just the strangeness of the land. It was everything. It seemed to him a hundred years ago when he had been on the way to Detroit with his parents. A hundred years ago he had sat in the back of the truck and laughed and yelled, “We’re going to Detroit.”
“We’re going to make this crane well,” his grandfather was saying happily. “We’ll get that wing bound up, get him fed.”
“Won’t he just go off when he gets well though?”
“Oh, sooner or later he’ll go off.” His grandfather was beginning to breathe heavily, but he kept talking. “I had me a blackbird once with a broken leg—a man brought it to me in an ice-cream carton. And I took care of that blackbird. I put a cast on its leg and I—”
“How could you make a cast for a bird?”
“Well, you get the leg straight and then you take a little plaster and dab it on and when it starts to harden you splint it with toothpick halves. Then you put on a little more plaster and wrap it with gauze. It makes a nice cast. When the leg’s healed, you soak off the cast with vinegar. Anyway, getting back to what I was saying, that blackbird stayed with me all that fall and all that winter. He got attached to me. That happens with birds more than you’d think. He went everywhere with me, rode around on my shoulder.”
“That doesn’t sound like any blackbird I ever heard of before, riding around on somebody’s shoulder.”
“Well, that’s what this one done. One time I walked into Gatsburg with that blackbird on my shoulder and a man took a picture of me and put it in the newspaper, in the Gatsburg Press.”
Sammy stumbled a little looking up at his grandfather. His grandfather said, “Watch where you’re going now, boy.”
“I am watching, only what’s this about the blackbird?”
“Well, that’s all. They just put my picture in the newspaper. It made me famous. Kids would stop me on the street and ask, ‘Where’s your crow?’ Kids called me the crow-man.”
“I wouldn’t mind having a blackbird like that,” Sammy said. “Alabama blackbirds are more trouble than anything. They steal corn and—”
“A blackbird makes a nice pet,” his grandfather interrupted. “I guess a blackbird makes about the nicest pet there is. If you’re eating, he comes over and helps himself right off your plate. If you’re reading a magazine, he turns the pages for you. He unties shoelaces and opens packages. There wasn’t nothing he couldn’t do.”
“This one blackbird did all that?”
“And if I put a toothpick in my mouth he’d come and have a game of tug of war.”
“Have you still got him?”
“No, the blackbird’s gone. He went off in the fall of last year. October 6.”
“He just flew away without any warning?”
“Oh, no. He’d been flying free all summer, but he’d be gone for a few days and then come home. Then the last time I seen him was in October, October 6. He came up to the house in the morning and flew to his favorite perch outside the kitchen window. I opened the window and he hopped on my hand and I brought him in. We sat down at the table and had breakfast—he ate a piece of banana and some Wheaties and drank at the sink. Then he flew back out the window and was gone, heading south. I figured later it was migrating day.”
“And you never saw him again?”
His grandfather shook his head. “I looked for him last spring but he never came.”
“He could still come though, couldn’t he?”
His grandfather didn’t answer. He said, “The blackbird’s gone. A canary a lady gave me is gone. My gray parrot’s gone. My wild ducks are gone. The redbird. The thrashers.” He began to tick off his losses in a slow sad voice.
“But you’ve still got the owl.”
“One day the owl will go too. I don’t keep the front door shut all the time, and one day he’ll fly out and be gone.”
“You could start shutting the door again, being real careful.”
“I’ll tell you something,” his grandfather continued. “Every one of them birds that stayed with me is more real to me than the people I’ve known.”
“Even your family?”
“I can’t even get some of my own children straight in my mind, if you want the truth. I never have been able to tell the girls one from the other, and I got a son living in Louisiana that I wouldn’t know if he jumped out from behind that bush yonder.” He shook his head. “But, boy, I’ll tell you something. I could pick my owl and my blackbird and my gray parrot and my canary and my wild ducks out of a thousand.” He paused, breathing heavily. “I don’t know why that is.”
Sammy said, “I’m that way about a dog I had one time. I didn’t have him but two weeks, but I’d know him anywhere. His name was Freckles.”
“If that blackbird come flying over our heads right now, I’d know him.”
“Same with my dog.”
Sammy watched the crane for a moment. He was not moving at all now. The long serpentine neck was arched downward. Only a faint quiver from time to time showed he was still alive. Then Sammy looked up and saw the highway ahead, the culvert they would have to climb through.
“Let’s hold on a minute,” his gra
ndfather said.
Sammy paused and glanced at his grandfather. Holding the crane against his side, the grandfather felt for his bandanna, realized it was over the crane’s eyes, and mopped the back of his neck with his hand. Then he started walking again.
Sammy said, “The crane sure is quiet. It don’t seem natural to me. If somebody was carrying me off with a blindfold over my eyes, I’d kick and holler and—”
“It’s a funny thing with birds, with animals too. When you capture a wild bird or animal, well, a certain number of them will just die. I reckon it’s the shock of the thing.”
“You don’t think the crane’s dying, do you?” Sammy asked quickly.
“No, but I am thinking we ought to get him home as fast as we can.”
“Yeah,” Sammy said, “that’s what I was thinking too.
THE LONG WALK
AS THEY WALKED TOWARD the superhighway, both of them kept their eyes on the round circle of the culvert. Finally as they got closer, his grandfather cleared his throat and said what they were both thinking. “The hard part is going to be getting him through that pipe.”
They paused at the foot of the bank. There was a concrete runoff leading down the bank and Sammy put one foot on it and rested. He said, “I don’t think we can do it.”
“We got to.”
“Can’t we go around some other way?”
“Not less you want to walk the five miles to Gatsburg and the five miles back.”
“Well, we could climb that fence, wait till the traffic dies down, and run across. I know I could.” He had been dodging Alabama traffic since he was four.
“The traffic don’t die down on a highway like this. When the cars thin out, the trucks get thicker. Anyway, I don’t want to take a chance with this crane.”
