June 8
When I woke four days ago, the angel was having breakfast, and little Camilla was dead. The angel watched me rub sleep out of my eyes, watched me discover Camilla, and then flew to me.
I received this: "Does it make you unhappy?"
"I don't know exactly." You can get fond of a hen, especially a cantankerous and homely old one whose personality has a lot in common with your own.
"She was old. She wanted a flock of chicks, and I couldn't stay with her. So I—" something obscure here; probably my mind was trying too hard to grasp it—"so I saved her life." I could make nothing else out of it. She said "saved."
Camilla's death looked natural, except that I should have expected the death contractions to muss the straw and that hadn't happened. Maybe the angel had arranged the old lady's body for decorum, though I don't see how her muscular strength would have been equal to it, Camilla weighed at least seven pounds.
As I was burying her at the edge of the garden and the angel was humming over my head, I recalled a thing which, when it happened, I had dismissed as a dream. Merely a moonlight image of the angel standing in the nest box with her hands on Camilla's head, then pressing her mouth gently on Camilla's throat, just before the hen's head sank down out of my line of vision. Probably I actually awoke and saw it happen. I am somehow unconcerned—even, as I think more about it, pleased.
After the burial the angel's hands said: "Sit on the grass and we'll talk. Question me; I'll tell you what I can. My father asks you to write it down."
So that is what we have been doing for the last four days. I have been going to school, a slow but willing pupil. Rather than enter anything in this journal, for in the evenings I was exhausted, I made notes as best I could. The angel has gone now to see her father and will not return until morning. I shall try to make a readable version of my notes.