THE PRISON
Like a long-caged bird
Thou beat'st thy bars with broken wing
And flutterest, feebly echoing
The far-off music thou hast heard,
—Arthur Eaton.
This was my last day of liberty for many, many months. The very next evening I was stunned by a stone thrown by a small boy who accompanied a hunter. Picking me up he ran toward his father, who was coming back from the neighboring swamp with his loaded gamebag.
"This bird isn't dead," said the boy, holding me up to view, "and I'm going to put it in a cage and train it to talk."
"Crows are the kind that talk. That's no crow nor no starling neither," answered the man. "Better give it to me to kill. I'll pay you a penny for it."
"Naw, you don't," and the boy drew back, at the same time closing his hand over me so tightly that I feared I would be crushed. "I'm going to keep him, I tell ye. He's mine to do what I please with, and I ain't agoing to sell him for a penny, neither."
So saying he ran along in front of his father till we reached the mule cart. Into this clumsy vehicle they climbed and soon we were jogging over the sandy road to their home. As we drove along the man computed, partly to himself, partly aloud, how much money the contents of his game-bag would bring him. The result must have been satisfactory, for presently he observed:
"Purty fair day's wages, but I believe I could make more killing terns and gulls than these birds. Bill Jones and the hunters up on Cobb's Island last year got ten cents apiece for all the gulls they killed. Forty thousand were killed right there. Oh, it's bound to be a mighty good business for us fellows as long as the wimmen are in the notion, that is, if the birds ain't all killed off."
"Air they getting scarce?" questioned the boy. The man ejected a mouthful of dark, offensive juice from between his grizzled whiskers before replying.
"Yes, purty tol'ble scarce. So much demand for 'em is bound to clean the birds out. There used to be heaps of orioles an' robins an' larks an' blackbirds an' waxwings through the country, but they're getting played out too, since the wimmen tuk to wearin' 'em on their bunnets."
"Well, no woman sha'n't have my bird for her bunnet," and the boy gave me another friendly pinch that nearly broke my bones. "I'm a going to put it in that old cage that's out in the shed and give it to Betty, if she wants it."
"Humph! she won't keer for it. You'd better kill it. Betty won't be bothered with it."
"She may give it away, or let it loose, or do what she pleases with it, then," was the boy's reply.
I learned from their further conversation that the hunter sold his game to another man who cured the skins for shipment to the city. To this dealer the bag which held my dead companions was taken and I saw them no more. Arriving at the hunter's home I was put under a bucket that I might not escape, while my captor prepared my prison for me. It was an almost needless precaution for I had been so cramped between his fingers that I feared I could never again use my legs or wings. Just before putting me in my rude prison house he brought a pair of shears and bade Betty clip my wings.
"Oh, I'm afraid it will hurt it!" she exclaimed, pushing away the extended scissors.
"Nonsense, you ninny! What if it does hurt it?" and he roughly knocked my bill with his hand.
"Now that's real mean, Joe. You're a scaring it to pieces. Here, Dickey Downy, I'm going to give you a pretty name if you belong to me; let me hold you. Why, its little heart is a thumping as if 'twould burst through its body."
Joe was reluctant to loosen his grasp, and between being pulled first one way and then the other by the two children, I was badly bruised. Finally I was permitted by my young captor to enter the cage, where I sank, trembling and exhausted, to the floor, and remained there all night, being too sore to ascend the perch.
As may be imagined I was very sorrowful and unhappy. The separation from my mother and my dear companions, coupled with the fear that I might never again wing my blithesome flight through the bright blue sky, but spend the balance of my life in this miserable cell, filled me with despair. Frantic but useless were my efforts to escape. In vain I beat my head against the hard steel bars; in vain I endeavored to crowd my body between them. My prison was too secure.
At length I found that fluttering back and forth buffeting my wings against the sides of my cell only injured me and availed nothing. Then it was I wisely made the resolution to endure my imprisonment as cheerfully as possible. I soon began to regain my strength and spirits and, save that I was deprived of my liberty, I had no special fault to find for some days with my treatment from Betty, who was now regarded as my owner and keeper.
I was always glad when Joe was absent from home, for he was vicious as well as rough. One of his favorite tricks was to dash my cage hard against the wall, laughing boisterously as he did so to see how it frightened me. The concussion was frequently so great that my claws could not hold to the perch, and I would be tossed helplessly from side to side with my feathers ruffled and broken. There was but one thing Joe liked better than this cruel sport, and that was gingerbread; and my tortures were often stopped by Betty's producing a slice of this delicacy which she had saved from her own luncheon for this particular purpose. When I discovered that Joe could be bought off with gingerbread it can be imagined that I was always glad on the days when the pungent odors of cinnamon, ginger, and molasses issued from the cook-stove. It was a surety of peace, of a cessation of hostilities as long as the cake lasted.
All went fairly well for a little while, but as the novelty of possession gradually wore off, my little jailer grew negligent and left me much of the time without water or food. Frequently my throat was so parched from thirst that I could not utter a protesting chirp. I knew no other way to attract attention to my wants than to flutter to the bars and thrust out my head; unfortunately this action was attributed to wildness and a desire to escape, and I was allowed to suffer on.
"That bird is the most annoying, restless thing I ever saw," complained Betty's mother one evening when I was thus trying to tell them my cup was empty. "It spends all its time poking its head through the wires or thrashing around in the cage, instead of getting up on its perch and behaving itself quietly as a decent bird should."
"Do you reckon it's sick?" suggested Betty, and she came to my cage and looked at me attentively.
"Reckon it's hungry, you mean," growled her father, who was in one corner of the kitchen cleaning his gun.
"She never feeds it any more," commented the mother. "What's the use of keeping it? I'd wring its neck and be done with it. Betty don't keer a straw for it."
"Yes, I do," cried the little girl. "I'll get it something to eat this very minute."
These spasms of attention only lasted a day or two, however, when my young keeper would lapse into carelessness, and again I would be allowed to go with an empty crop and a dry throat. My beautiful plumage grew rusty from this irregularity and continual neglect, and although I am not a vain bird, my dingy appearance was a source of daily grief and mortification to me. When Betty was not too busy playing she sometimes hung my cage outside the door of the cottage, but often for days together through the pleasant summer I was left hanging in the kitchen, sometimes half-choked with smoke or dampened with steam. No wonder I drooped and ceased my cheerful song.
The days when I was put out of doors were indeed gala days to me. Many families of young chickens lived in the back yard, and the pipings of the little ones and the scoldings of the mothers when their children ran too far away from them, were always amusing to listen to and gave me something to think about which kept my mind off my own troubles.
I liked to watch the hens with their fuzzy broods tumbling about them, or with the older chicks when they scratched the ground and ceaselessly clucked for them to come to get their share of what was turned up in the soil; meanwhile they kept a sharp lookout with their bright eyes to see that no outsider shared in the feast. And how angrily did they drive it away should a chick from another brood heedlessly rush in among them to get a taste.
One old hen in particular interested me very much. I noticed her first because of her pretty bluish color and the dark markings around her neck, but I soon came to pity her, for she made herself quite unhappy and seemed to take no comfort in anything. She was usually tied to a tree by the leg, and although her string was long it seemed always just a little too short to reach the thing she wanted. To make matters worse she had a bad fashion of rushing wildly around the tree and getting her string wound up shorter and shorter until at last she could not stir a step, but would hang by one foot foolishly pulling as hard as she could. It always seemed to me that her chickens were more disobedient than the rest, because they knew she could not get to them nor follow them.
Joe sometimes slyly threw pebbles at this blue hen to scare her and make her jump and pull at the string, when he thought his mother was not looking. As pay for his sport he often got his ears cuffed, for though his mother did not seem to notice how cruelly he teased me, she would not allow him to frighten her fowls.
"Don't you know that a hen that's all the time skeered won't lay?" was the lesson she tried to impress on him as she punished him.
But the thing I liked best of all was to see Betty's seven white ducks crowd up to the kitchen door every time any one appeared with a pan of scraps. Such gabbling and quacking, such pushing and such stepping on each other and on the chickens, in their eagerness to get there first, was almost laughable. In fact, the pink-toed pigeons that walked up and down the ridge of the barn roof, did make fun of them openly. Had I not known the ducks were well fed and so fat they could scarcely waddle, I might have thought they were really hungry, but I soon discovered that they were simply greedy.
Standing on tiptoe and stretching up their long necks they often seized the food before it had a chance to fall to the ground. By this good management they usually got more than the chickens. Joe accused Betty of being partial to the ducks.
"You allus give 'em the best of everything, and twice as much as you do the chickens," he complained.
"They get the most because they've got the most confidence in me," said Betty, putting on a very wise look. "They come close up to me, while a chicken shies off and misses the goodies coz she's silly enough to be afraid. Besides, the ducks are mine. I raised 'em. I paid twenty cents a setting for the eggs out of my own money, and when you raise a thing you generally like it the best. Ducks are a heap smarter'n chickens, anyway," she asserted. "I never can get one of the chickens to feed out of a spoon, and the ducks like it the best kind." To convince him she held toward them a large baking spoon of soured milk. This milk was thickened into a paste or ball by being put on the stove and separated from the whey, or watery part, by the action of the heat.
It was a favorite dish with the fowls, and they all smacked their lips when they saw it coming.
As fast as Betty could fill the spoon it was emptied by the ducks, who stuck their big yellow bills into it and devoured the contents, letting the chickens below scramble and push and pick each other for any stray bits that fell to the ground.
"Didn't I tell you?" said Betty triumphantly. "Them chickens had just as good a chance as the ducks, but they wouldn't take it."
"Huh!" answered Joe. "Their necks ain't long enough, is what's the matter."
There were several trees in the yard, and often when the fowls were fed, birds flew down from their leafy recesses to pick up the crumbs left lying about. How I used to wish they would come near enough to my cage that I might converse with them, but it always happened that just at the time when one of them would settle close to the house, either Joe's little dog, Colly, would run across the yard, or Betty or her mother would appear at the door and frighten my feathered friend away. Only once did I exchange a word with any of these birds, and that for but a few short minutes.
The bird did not belong to our family, nor had I ever met any of his relatives before, but that made but little difference. He was a bird, and that was enough. We did not wait for any formal introduction; but as he balanced himself on the edge of my cage he hurriedly told me news of the woods, and how he wished I might get free and come to live there. He told of the lovely dragon flies, with purple, burnished wings that floated in the forest, mingling their drowsy hum with the chirping of the birds. He told of the great mossy carpet spread under the trees; how at set of day the owls came out, and the moles rustled in the fallen leaves, and the frogs raised their evening hymn to the sinking sun.
I could have listened for hours to the sweet familiar tale my feathered brother told of life in the happy woodland, but Betty's mother suddenly hurrying out to the pump to fill her bucket, cut short the story, and away my bird friend skimmed out of sight without so much as saying "good-bye." Though I saw him several times after that, he never came so close again.
"Oh, what heaps and heaps of fireflies!" exclaimed Betty, as she unhooked my cage to move me into the house that evening. "It looks as if our door-yard was full of moving lanterns."
"Nothin' but lightnen bugs!" said Joe contemptuously. "Here, see me catch 'em," and in a few minutes he showed her a handful which he had killed by crushing between his hands.
"Hold on, I want to catch some too!" and hustling me into the kitchen, Betty ran along with him and was soon engaged in catching and killing the beautiful fireflies.