As soon as the mama grisset had disappeared, What-the-Dickens stood up and leaned over the side of the nest. “Look!” he said to his nestling friends. “A rescue committee of one!”
The baby grissets craned their scrawny little necks as far as they could. A patch of white fur slithered behind the green slats of fern.
The baby birds shrank back, trying to be invisible.
“Did you see that creature?” asked the skibberee. “She’s looking for me, I bet. Isn’t she a fine specimen of a friend, waddling along like that? McCavity! Up here!”
McCavity heard the voice. Perhaps she understood English and perhaps not. You can never be sure with cats. In any case, McCavity’s nose had picked up the trace amounts of rancid tuna, for a fading stink still clung to the webbing of the skibberee. Now her ears confirmed the suspicion: she had found him.
The white cat put her paws onto the trunk of the tree and stretched. Her eyes, from this angle, were like oxidizing bronze: emerald sparks in warm, loyal gold.
I’d better face facts, thought What-the-Dickens. I think I’m in love with a cat. Well, I’ll just keep it to myself.
He couldn’t wait a moment longer. “Coming!” he shouted, and he tore a broad leaf off at the stem. Gripping its rim as a child grips a toboggan, he launched himself into the air.
It was a foolhardy gesture. So young, he knew nothing about aerodynamics, except how the heart could lift and lift.
Did he plummet to his death? No, he surfed the breeze. He was light enough not to drop like a stone. The leaf circled without overturning, and the skibberee peered over the sides.
He was startled by what he saw. Remember, he was only one day old himself, and he’d seen little of the world so far, and all of it from close-up. This was his first sense of the larger landscape.
How marvelously the world seemed to unfold, improbably, in all directions — forest this way, field that! A grey ribbon looping over the hills to the north (in time What-the-Dickens would learn it was a highway). Off in the distance to the west, a lowland bog choked with purple loosestrife. It was as complete a world as What-the-Dickens had hoped for. And a river ran through it.
But before he could glide into McCavity’s waiting claws, he was plucked from his vessel by the mama grisset. She dumped him back in the nest with the other nestlings, scolding What-the-Dickens as if he were one of her own.
She sat on him to make him be quiet. He pounded his little fists against her feathery rear end, while McCavity began to make her way up the trunk of the tree.
No big surprise, then, that the mama grisset suffered an attack of nervous conniptions. Her melody lost track of itself and became a shriek. When McCavity was only six or eight feet away, the mama grisset began to thrash her wings, to screen her children and to blind the intruder. In the commotion, she knocked one of her own nestling babies out of the tree.
What-the-Dickens lunged to grab the baby grisset’s tail. He was too late, and grabbed only air.
But the smallest grisset did something wonderful. First she tumbled, and then she opened up her little wings. Clumsily she coasted a few feet and came to rest on a limb in an adjacent tree, looking surprised at herself, and a little smug.
“I didn’t know you little ones could fly, too,” whispered What-the-Dickens. “Wow.”
The white cat continued to climb, so the mama grisset took emergency measures. If her littlest nestling was ready, the rest would have to be ready, too. Without ado she launched the other three grisset siblings. One by one they wobbled to new perches, and, delighted with themselves, they all began to sing. (Given their family background, they stank at singing. But you can’t learn everything you need to on the same day, not even if you’re stuffed with talent.)
The mama grisset was as much a mama as she was a grisset, so she couldn’t abandon What-the-Dickens to his fate, about which she had a better idea than he did. She took him in her beak one final time. This at least had the advantage of silencing her concerto.
“No!” cried What-the-Dickens. He struggled and began to weep. “No, no! My ride is almost here. My friend looks for me. How dare you? Unbeak me, and I’ll bring you a present the next time… .”
The offer didn’t help. The rust-throated grisset had made up her mind. She left by wing, dragging What-the-Dickens beneath her.
He closed his eyes against the wind, but he felt also as if he were closing them against the world, which now seemed to be full of emptiness. What good was the future if he didn’t have a job as a pet to a minor deity in a white fur coat?
By now the night had fallen, with a quality of blackness rarely seen in a suburban setting. It made the house feel crushed into itself, as if it were floating in space, separated from anything. Well, given the backed-up sewage lines, the dead phones, the collapse of the power grid, the Ormsbys were separated from everything.
Everything except themselves. While Gage went to refill his glass of water — to keep his busy voice from drying out — Dinah looked inquiringly at Zeke. What-the-Dickens? said her expression.
He rolled his eyes, indicating, Stupid nonsense, but probably harmless.
Dinah stuck her tongue out at her brother, signifying, Don’t be so superior.
The usual conflict, and, in its way, consoling. They still had each other. That much was okay.