Sukey did not dare to beat him, although the dog always treated her with the greatest consideration. She never hesitates to beat birds smaller than herself if she gets angry with them or with me. Sometimes when I am reading or sewing she caresses me until she gets tired, then puts her head down for me to rub it. If I am too much absorbed to do so, she beats me. Then I push her from me. Her eyes sparkle, she goes round and round on the floor, saying angrily, “rookety cahoo!” then darts at the nearest bird, usually an unoffending white dove that loves to be near her. The little dove’s feathers fly until I spring up, rescue her, pick the white down from Sukey’s bill, and apologize for my inattention. In these fits of rage she reminds me of children who do not dare to strike their parents, and who attack some one smaller than themselves.
A curious trait in this pet pigeon of mine is her sensitiveness to any change in my dress. At first I could not believe that she distinguished colors, and knew an old gown from a new one, but at last I became fully convinced of it.
Pigeons wear the same gown all the time. They do not moult into different colors, and Sukey does not like me to do so. When I moult into a new hat or a new gown she is either in a fright or a rage. If the former, she holds herself erect, packs her feathers and becomes slim, and grunts like an Indian several times—“Ugh, ugh, ugh!”
One can never mistake the pigeon sound of fright. If she is merely angry she flies on the hat, bites it, scolds incessantly, and shows her displeasure with me by talking rapidly. In the case of a dress she trots round and round me on the floor, biting the hem in displeasure. I have been amused with the curious way in which she dissociates my hands from my head. Some time ago I found out that she considers my hands aliens and enemies. She loves my head, but when she is caressing it the unkind hands often lift her away. So she spends hours in fighting them, and sometimes as I sit reading with her on my lap, I have to hide my hands or she bites them till they are sore.
CHAPTER XVII
MINNIE POST-OFFICE
During the six years that I have had Sukey she has spent all her winters, except the one on the farm, in her warm, furnace-heated room upstairs. Last winter I became worried about her throat, and had our family doctor examine it and prescribe for her. He gave her tincture of iron, and for a long time she had her little bottle of medicine and her tiny spoon and dropper.
I had been in the habit of keeping a few other delicate birds upstairs with her, but finding that the inhabitants of the lower aviary did not get sore throats, nor very dried-up claws, I decided that Sukey had been kept too warm, and resolved to put her and all my other birds downstairs.
If I had been at home it would have been a very difficult matter to keep her there. However, I was coming away, and I could not bring her with me, so a week before I left I carried my pet bird down to the inhospitable room in which she had been thrown from her nest as a baby, and told her she must stay there.
She ran after me to the wire door and begged to come out. I told her that the imprisonment was for her good. Her health would probably improve, and she would become less abnormal. I had been educating her out of her sphere.