A VERY TRICKY BOOK ABOUT BIRDIES AND KITTENS
By the Little Lost Boy
I was asked what age you ought be to enjoy this book. But that is a silly question. You are only ever as old as you are. But if you’re lucky, the age you are will also always be the age you ought be.
- INTRODUCING MYSELF
There is nothing so cunning and self minded as a cat. And there is nothing so swift and sharp as a great bird of prey. So if ever you see a greAt winged cat, you had better watch out. You’d better not be in the way between it and what it wants for dinner. For that matter, I advise you to try to look a bit untasty at all times. Ways to do this include not brushing your hair and wearing your shirt untucked.
I’ve seen greAt winged cats all my life. The handsomest one I know once gazed admiringly back at me in the water’s reflection in a tidal pool, on a sparkling summer’s evening, just before sunset, on a small island in Panama. It was on the Pacific side of Panama, as that is where the sun sets. If I like, and I do, I can admire myself in the rising Atlantic sun in the morning, fly across the narrow isthmus of Panama, and do the same again in the setting sun of the Pacific. Isthmus: a human-invented word for a narrow land with the sea on either side that you can easily fly across in less than a day.
Humans, who cannot fly and require many weighty possessions to get on, built a great sloshing canal to get across the isthmus of Panama, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. They call it an accomplishment, but it took a long time to build, and many humans sacrificed their lives just so others might move their weighty possessions around in it, which strikes me as bad self management by a species. We greAt winged cats require no possessions, other than the self. We are, you see, perfectly self-possessed.
I could with great satisfaction tell you more about us, and so I will. I’ll do it by way of a story from my past. So when you start the next chapter you will begin reading a story nested within this story. Just like a bird’s nest is a little world for babies, inside the bigger world all around. One can curl up very comfortably in a bird’s nest, as it is infinitely round. So you see, nests appeal to both the cat and the bird sides of me. You, reader, may curl up too – I really won’t nibble on you right now – and listen to the story inside the story.
- SCARY SCARY FLIGHT
It’s finally an election year, and the first time you can vote, so pay attention,” my mother said sternly.
Being a self-possessed species sometimes makes it hard to get on together. Does this surprise you? Likely. You may already be thinking that we are both aloof and unneedy, like cats, and also quite a bit unfeeling, like hawk-eyed hunting birds. So not much getting along, but perhaps not much need for getting along. But of course we are needy. And we do feel. I will secretly admit to feeling all kinds of ways including small and large, cowardly and brave, harsh and kind, self-possessed and self not-possessed.
I tell you this, but don’t you go telling any other greAts what I just told you please, even if under threat of being eaten by one. Being caught out needy and feeling when you come from a species that is proudly self-possessed makes you feel instantly twice as much self not-possessed. And then when you think about this, that makes you twice more self not-possessed right there, which is a total of four times. And then twice more as you continue to stew about it, which is eight. And then sixteen, thirty two, sixty four, and so on. It’s infinitely humiliating. So you see that while we do of course feel things, we take pains to hide this from one other. And that makes getting along all the more challenging.
But difficulty getting along is not unique to greAts. In fact, getting on with your own kind is the hardest thing for any species. You may have been told that the biggest threat to ants is the ant eater. Or that the biggest threat to elephants is elephant eaters. But actually the biggest threat to ants is other ants, and to elephants, other elephants. Other species may nibble you, I should know we do it all the time. But only your own can test you and try you and twist and tie you. And even, as my example of humans building the Panama Canal serves to illustrate, even do you in.
So every species needs to invent some form of organized get-along-together system to smooth over the challenges of getting along. Thus it is that every 156 years, greAt winged cats elect a leader to shape and guide the collected affairs of the greAts. She or he is called the GreAt GreAt Winged Cat, or the GreAt Squared for short. Squared being a perfectly sensible hippopotamus invented word for timesing something by itself.
Speaking of numbers and counting, I realise that most readers of this little book, regardless what species you may be, live much shorter lives than do greAts. A year is a year, once around the sun, for us all. But greAts live to be thousands of years old. Because of this, everything else in our lives simply stretches out longer than it does for the rest of you. We are children up to about 60 or 70. We are adolescents, wickedly in-between child and adult states, for another 50 or 60 years. Longer for some. In the midst of this period, at age 99, we become eligible to vote. I am 104, and so this is my first election. I am in no hurry to grow the rest of the way up, because once you are an adult you have to stay one for a long time.
Sometimes our elections take a while because in the first ballot every greAt winged cat nominates herself and votes for himself, and the result is a massive tie. “I won,” everyone yells and raises their forepaws in the air in celebration. But a government with everyone in it is no government at all, and no progress can be made. “Yet that,” my father always says, “is the only tolerable outcome.”
But father aside, this opening ritual is all a pleasing joke for us. Young greAts, under the voting age, laugh at it because it so reveals the folly of the grownups. We stop laughing temporarily when a grown up flies over. Just to avoid a whack across the side of our heads from a big leather padded forepaw at the extended end of a swift dive. And then we laugh even louder and longer. Those of voting age laugh because being self-possessed, they can afford to laugh at themselves. When you come of voting age, whatever that is for your species, that will make more sense to you.
But this is all for show, and after we have had two or as many as eight such ballots, we finally tire of it and are ready for the serious business of selecting real candidates.
My mother explained this to me when I was very young. “Candidates are self selected from amongst those that bring the greatest gifts back to the collective greAts,” she said. “The greatest gifts are great stories,” mother explained, “and so the selection of candidates is also the night of new stories.” She knows this all especially well, because she herself had been a candidate eight election cycles, 1,248 years, ago. She never tells me the story she told. She just says things have evolved since then. For humans, evolution means improvement and adaptation. But it’s better meaning, which we use, is simply randomized, meandering change through time, like hat fashions. Really, you can’t much improve on greAt winged cats.
Other species, father told me, choose candidates and even elect leaders on the basis of promises. But this approach, he said, never works. “Either they make promises they cannot keep,” he explained, “such as a hermit crab candidate promising to make low tide last longer so everyone has more time to feed. Or they keep promises they ought not have made, such as the time the leader of dogs first promised and then made a treaty to fetch things for humans in return for food scraps.” Whenever my father said dogs he made it sound like spit.
In contrast to other species with low voter turnouts, pretty well every greAt participates in our elections. The night of new stories is the biggest and funnest party every 156 years. My friends and I looked forward to it with relish. Feleene is my very best friend. Whisper is my other very best friend. My name is Lightpadd. We are greAt winged cats.
“This is the plan,” I told Feleene and Whisper a couple of months back on a day when I was feeling particularly clever and daring. “I don’t want to sit in the back row where new voters are supposed to sit. I want to be right up close to the candidates where I can watch every expression on their faces as they tell their stories. Let’s scamper up along the tree branches over the story pit as soon as it turns dark, while the rules are being read and the elder cats are settling in the front rows. We will slink like the night air flows. We’ll flatten against the dark of the bark. We’ll watch and listen from right over their twitching tails.” The story pit, where the candidates would do their telling, was surrounded on all sides by circular shelves of flat seating where we were expected to settle to listen, and it was all covered over by dense old trees which we proposed to use as our hiding place. Very clever.
Feleene said this plan was “genius” and Whisper said “let’s do this” with a cheery growl and a swish of tail, the way young greAts do when they are leery and scared but must not show it to one another.
We practiced our slinking skills every day thence forth. Just as cats are natural slinkers, so are greAt winged cats. In fact we look just like ordinary cats when we are on the ground with our wings folded away in tuck. Well, handsome, large ordinary cats. The only way you can tell the difference is by the feathery feel of our wings hidden against our underbellies. So if you have seen cats that are extra slinky and don’t even stop to let you scratch their bellies, they are probably greAts. You may have seen the three of us slinking around your neighbourhood in the early evening recently, just before dusk after suppertime. Or perhaps one of us even practiced slinking nonchalantly along the side of your socks, with you hardly noticing at all until we were already disappeared again.
The day of the night of new stories is an all-out party. Everyone comes, from greAts you do not know to greAts you know too well. There are delicacies from across the world: turtle tenderloin and salted bat bellies and rat raisin pie and butter rolled snake bites and mouse paste mousse. There are games and contests, of which my favourite, and also the most challenging, is deep sea diving. GreAts love to soar through the open skies and slink through the back allies of the city, but we hate getting wet. We can’t stand the cold matting of fur against our skin. It makes us feel small, sluggish, and uncharacteristically ungraceful. The very thought of getting soaked makes us want our mothers to cuddle us and warm us and fuss over us. That’s the challenge of deep sea diving.
To deep sea dive you start out in flight, circling high over the water, scanning for fish. When you see the one you want, you aim for it in a full on dive through the air and into the sea. You get marks for three things: how far under you dive, how big a fish you snare in your mouth, and how gracefully and seamlessly you launch your wet, heavy, fish-laden self back into a powerful climb into the sky. A self-possessed-looking powerful climb back into the sky. Of course, you get to eat the fish. I have watched humans, who fish with complicated sticks and strings, catch and release and catch and release fish. Very silly, and for the fish, terrifying.
I told you I was pretty good at this. In a quiet kind of way. But there was this girl, Moretton, age 127, who was the defending champion. She was loud and boastful and condescending. She regularly rattled me. It got worse over the years, because the better I got the more attention she paid me. She would say things like “you look kind of wet already, little pad. Are you sure you are old enough to swim?” She is only 23 years older than I. But when you are young, it seems even a little bit older is a whole big bit. Or: “Some dive like dragons and some paddle in puddles. And which are you, lightweight?” My mother said her family was all born with beaks. That’s what you say of greAt folk who are particularly sharp and nasty. I just thought she was formidable.
“You piddle like a poodle,” I hissed back at her the day of the night of new stories. We were licking our fur smooth and silky in the contestants’ paddock. But I said it under my breath, and she did not hear me. And so it badly backfired, as it just confirmed for me that I really had no true courage. One advantage of body fur is that it largely hides the blushes of shame and doubt. I was experiencing a very shaky start to the biggest public competition of deep sea diving in a 156 years.
But on with what happened. I was up there in the air, circling with the rest of the contestants, on the low side. What I lose in speed by starting my drop from a lower altitude, I make up in precise sighting. And I am accurate to a fault. See a fish, too small. See a fish, too shallow. Circle left on the wing and watch with hawk eyes. See a fish, perfect prey. Tuck, fall. Stretch into a dive, wings folded in tight. Eyes on the fish, not the water. I am aiming my body with the smallest twitches of my tail flowing behind. Time slows. The fish is the world, the world is the fish. I close my eyes for impact, see the fish now in my mind. It’s a hard hit, always, followed by sudden deceleration in the water, so thick after the clean drop through thin air. For many, this is very disorienting. The trick is to move only the muscles of my closing eyelids on entry, nothing else, stay the course.
But just as I am closing on the water and closing my eyes I sense a flurry of motion beside me. I feel myself rolling away from it, instinctively. I twitch my tail in the opposite direction to compensate. What was that?
I open my eyes again, now underwater. The fish will be right in front of me.
But it isn’t. It’s gone. Just empty wetness where it should have been. Movement below: another fish, to the left. I am losing speed and with it manoeuvrability, but I can twist in the water to set upon the new fish. Closing the gap. Opening my mouth to catch it. A sudden swirl, a sharp pain, and then time just stops and I am gone.
The Little Lost Boy has written a sweet Novella. If you’d like to read the rest, email me at martin@imageaday.ca and I will send you a PDF file and a personal use licence — enjoy.