What Are Angels To Birds? - Paperback

by Daniel Dillon (Author)

What Are Angels to Birds? is a fable in the old manner, told the way the first collected folk tales were told: plainly, and without apology.

On a high plateau at the cold end of the world, where the wind never rests, the hooded grebes dance to find each other. They are among the rarest birds on earth. One mother grebe lays two eggs in a floating nest of reeds. A storm takes one in the night. She leaves the other on the water and swims away, and she does not look back.

The current carries the last egg over the edge of the plateau and down into a warm green country, where a capybara keeps it until it hatches. The grey chick is raised by her and by three others, a stork, an otter, and a marsh deer, who teach him what a bird is, how to dive, and how to look at a thing until he has truly seen it. When he is grown, they let him go.

Something turns him north, back to the cold lake he came from. His mother has taken a new mate there, a nest has filled with eggs that were never hers, and high on the wind a gull turns and comes no closer. He sees what the whole lake has agreed not to see.

This edition is set as an illuminated book, with three historiated initials opening its movements and a wind-drawn border running the margin of every page.