Now you may be sure that if the poor Great Bird of Paradise is killed because he is so beautiful, so is the poor Red Bird of Paradise because he is. It is dreadful to be sure of such a thing, and it is all because of the wicked little demon, and the Goddess of Pity being asleep. When the wicked little demon has been driven away, and the Goddess of Pity has been woken up—and it is you who are going to wake her—then you may be sure that no beautiful birds will be killed, and that the more beautiful they are the less people will ever think of killing them. But that time is not come yet. It will not come till you have read this book right through and finished it.
Now you remember that the Great Bird of Paradise is shot with arrows by a naked black man with frizzly hair like a mop—a man that we call a savage, though, really, he is not nearly so savage as some men who wear clothes all over them. You see, where he lives it is very warm, so that he does not want clothes, and he looks very much better without them, for his black, smooth skin is very handsome indeed, and so is his frizzly hair. If you saw him you would think him a very nice, amiable person, for he is always laughing and springing about, and his white teeth do flash so and his eyes beam, and he looks very pleasant indeed. I think you would quite like him, so you must not despise him because he is not civilised like us; never despise people because they have a different coloured skin to your own and wear no clothes and are called savages. Perhaps we may be better than people like that, but remember that the angels are much better compared to us, than we are, compared to such people. But do you think the angels despise us? Oh no, you could not think that, so you must not despise the savages. Never despise any one, that is the best thing. Instead of doing that, try to find out what is good about them—there is sure to be something, and, often, it is something which they have and we have not. Never despise.
Well, it is this same naked, frizzly-haired Papuan who kills the beautiful Red Bird of Paradise as well as the Great one, but he does not do it with bows and arrows, but in quite another way, which I will tell you about.
The Birds of Paradise are all fond of fruit; they like insects and things of that sort too, but fruit they are very fond of. They like a nice ripe fig, and there are so many fig-trees in that country, both growing wild and in the gardens too, that when the figs are ripe they do not trouble to finish one before they begin another, but fly about from tree to tree, making a bite here and another there, out of just the ripest and nicest. That is a nice, delicate way of eating figs, I think, just to take a little and leave the rest. We are so greedy that we always eat the whole fig, but then we are not Birds of Paradise.
But now there is one particular fruit which the Red Bird of Paradise likes better than any other, much better, even, than a ripe fig. It is a fruit which I do not know the name of, in fact I am not quite sure that it has a name, except in some language which we would neither of us understand. But you know what an arum lily is, and in those forests that I told you of there is a kind of arum lily which climbs up trees, for there are climbing lilies there as well as climbing palm-trees. This climbing arum lily has a red fruit, and it is this red fruit which the Red Bird of Paradise thinks so exceedingly nice. It will go anywhere to get that fruit, and the naked black man with frizzly hair knows that it will; so he makes a trap for it with the very fruit that it is so fond of.
But besides the fruit, two other things are necessary for making this trap; one of them is a forked stick like the handle of a catapult, and the other is some string. The Papuan soon cuts the stick, either with a knife that he has bought of a white man, or with a sharp piece of stone or flint, and the string he makes from some creeper, or by rolling the inner bark of a tree between his hands. When he has done this he takes the fruit and ties it to the forked stick, then he climbs up a tree that he knows the Red Birds of Paradise come to perch on, and ties the stick, with the fruit fastened to it, to one of the branches. To do this he takes a very long piece of string, one end of which hangs right down to the ground, and he ties it so cleverly that he has only to pull the string for the stick, with the fruit on it, to come away from the branch, just as a sash that is tied in a bow will come undone when you pull one of the ends. Then the black Papuan climbs down from the tree, again, and sits underneath it with the end of the long string in his hand, all ready to pull it when the right time comes.
Sometimes it will not be long before a Red Bird of Paradise comes to the tree, sometimes the Papuan will have to sit there the whole day or even for two or three days, for he is very patient and will not go away till he has done what he came to do. All savages are like that; they are ever so much more patient than civilised people who wear clothes. But whenever the poor Red Bird of Paradise does come, he is sure to see the fruit, and then he is sure to fly to it, to eat it, and then he is sure to get caught in the string. For the string has a noose in it which gets round his legs, and the frizzly-haired man underneath, who is watching the Bird of Paradise all the time, just pulls the cord, and down he comes as well as the stick. You see he cannot fly very well with the stick fastened to him, and, however much he tries to, it is no use, for the black man has only to keep pulling the string.
That is how the poor Red Bird of Paradise is caught, and as soon as he has caught him the black frizzly-haired man kills him and skins him—I need hardly tell you that he does that, for you know in whose service he is. Then the black man takes the skin to a yellow man, who buys it of him and cheats him a little, and the yellow man takes it to a white man who buys it of him and cheats him more, and it all happens just the same as it did with the Great Bird of Paradise, until the skin is lying on the floor of the warehouse, with all those other beautiful skins of poor beautiful birds—all killed to be put into the hats of women whose hearts the wicked little demon has frozen. Is it not shocking? But you know how to stop it. You have only to make your mother promise—yes, promise—never to wear a hat that has the skin or any of the feathers of a Red Bird of Paradise in it. Make her promise this before reading the next chapter.