Birdy

young one he’s been trying to reach has backed up the branch toward the nest where the other baby is looking over the side.
    I’m just scrambling onto the roof when the cat knocks down the mother bird with a swing of one paw. I jump to get there ahead of the cat but he gets her first. He drops the young bird and grabs her with his teeth before I can do anything. I catch hold of the cat by the front leg. He scratches at me while I shift my hold and get him around the neck. I pry open his mouth to get out the mother bird. It’s too late. She’s dead. I pick up the little dead baby bird. I’ve let go of the cat and it slinks back across the roof, then drops to the porch roof. My father is standing with a stick by the rain barrel. The cat leaps off the roof and past him. He swings at it with the stick but doesn’t hit it.
    I climb down and inspect the two birds. Both their spines are broken at the neck. A cat knows what it’s doing when it comes to killing a bird.
    Before we take down the ladder, I go up and get the two baby birds out of the nest. It isn’t hard to catch them, they can’t fly. I take them into the fliers’ cage with the other young ones. Maybe one of the males will adopt them. I stuff them with food before I go to school and hope for the best.
    When I come home, they seem all right and I give them another feeding. I’m sure somebody is feeding them. The fathers can’t remember all the birds, and one of them is father to these birds anyway.
     
    That night in the dream, I’m afraid for what will happen, but everything goes all right. Perta’s nest is fine and there’s no sign of a cat. The nest we have is too high up in the tree for a cat to see. I talk to Perta and try to tell her about the danger of cats, but she’s never seen one and can’t know what I mean. I almost want to move our nest back into the cage. I wonder what would happen if I climbed up into the tree in the daytime as boy and moved the nest. Would Perta abandon it in the dream? Would it stay in the same place? It’s too big a risk. I feel confident that if I’m careful nothing will happen. The dream doesn’t have everything happen that happens in the day. The nest of the little yellow bird isn’t even in my dream.
    It’s a week later and I’m feeling it’s all going to pass over, when, in the dream, I see the same cat climbing our tree. I’m perched just above and behind our nest where Perta is sitting. That day our babies have started standing on the edge of the nest. It’s what had to come about. The babies were too young before; now they’re old enough. It can happen.
    Perta still hasn’t seen the cat. Our first nest of babies for this year, all four of them, are off flying with their older brothers down where we used to have the pigeon coop in the tree. There’s nothing I can think to do. I wait and watch the cat. I see him very clearly. He has one ear partly torn off, a ragged dogear of a cat’s ear. I can see all the details of this cat. I didn’t know I’d seen him so well. I was so busy thinking and doing things I didn’t notice myself seeing the cat.
    What I must do is break the dream. I have to wake up. I need to become Birdy the boy and somehow work it out with this cat in daytime life. I can’t. I can’t make myself move out of the dream. I’m on the wrong side of the door; the key is in the other side. It’s like when you wake up and you’re not sure you can move your body and you’re afraid to try. I can’t make myself try. The bird in me is too strong. The bird doesn’t know it can make it all stop by going away. The bird is too afraid of the cat to get any distance. The bird has to stay and protect Perta and the babies. It won’t believe the other thing, the other existence. Yet the boy knows a canary cannot fight a cat.
    I give in. I wait and watch as the cat scratches his way up the tree. Everything of my body wants to fly away. My bird-boy brain has to stay. I try to think out how the dream will happen. Must Perta be killed? If she sees the cat, will she fly at him or fly away?
    I hop down to the nest.
    ‘Look, Perta, why don’t you take a little fly for yourself. I’ll sit the nest.’
    Perta looks at me. She’s tired but she doesn’t want to leave. She senses my fear; it’s impossible to lie to her. I’m thinking maybe if she’s out of the dream I can wake up. I say again that I want her to take a rest; I want a chance to be with the young ones alone.
    Perta knows