Episode 1 — The Avian Megaphone

The bus reached Greenwood Municipal Zoo at nine, and Della was the first one off it, because a tour lead is first.

She had asked for this. Three days earlier, in the biology room, Mrs. Vance had held up the folder with the recommendation forms in it and said that someone would have to lead the Class 12 trip, someone who understood that a zoo was not an outing but a lesson, and the room had gone very quiet, because everyone could feel the want. Della had raised her hand. Siddharth had raised his a second later, which in that room was the same as never. She had said that she would be honoured to lead the class through the natural world, because the natural world, when approached with a calm and authoritative presence, tended to meet you halfway.

Mrs. Vance had looked at her for a long moment. Then she had smiled and written something down.

Mrs. Vance wrote one university recommendation a year, and she wrote it for the student who loved the living world. Everyone knew this. Everyone also knew about the owls. There was a barn owl on her coffee mug, a barn owl on her lanyard, and a framed barn owl above the board that she said good morning to. In September, Della had handed in a two-page project on the barn owl with a drawing on the cover. Mrs. Vance had pinned the drawing beside the frame. It was still there. Della had never seen a real owl. She hoped to keep it that way.

“Bring your admit cards on Friday,” Mrs. Vance had said, as the bell went. “The recommendation form needs your roll number exactly as the board prints it. I will fill it in at the zoo.”

So now Della stood at the gate of Greenwood in a uniform her mother had ironed to a shine, holding a sun-bleached map on which every arrow pointed at a wall, and thirty-one classmates stood behind her waiting to be led. Her admit card was folded in her breast pocket, over her heart, where nothing could get at it. Her shoes were white. The path was not.

“This way,” Della said, with authority, and set off toward the water birds, because the water birds were the first thing on the map and also, she reasoned, the calmest. Birds that lived on water would have a settled temperament. She had read this somewhere, or she had decided it just now. It did not matter. She said things and then they were true, and that had worked for months.

Siddharth walked at her shoulder, phone in his hand, held low, the screen dark. He had kept a bird list since he was nine. He could name every bird on the Greenwood map without reading the labels. For three months he had watched Della say things about animals that were not true and get Mrs. Vance’s smile for it, and he had not said anything since the bus. He was waiting, and Della knew what he was waiting for, and knowing it made her spine straighter and her sentences slower.

“The key with birds,” she said, to the class, to the phone, to the morning, “is not to approach them. It is to allow them to approach you. Fear is a noise. Be quiet, and they hear the quiet.”

“Where did you read that,” said Siddharth.

“I did not read it,” said Della. “I observed it.”

The water-bird enclosure was a low pond behind a knee-high fence, with a strip of muddy bank between the fence and the water, and on the bank stood one swan. It was large and very white, whiter than her uniform, and it was looking at the class the way a landlord looks at people standing on his step.

Mrs. Vance came up beside Della, and her face had the thing on it that Della lived for, the almost-belief, the hope looking for a reason. “Go on, then,” Mrs. Vance said softly. “Show them.”

Della stepped over the low fence onto the bank.

She had not planned to step over the fence. But Mrs. Vance had said show them, and a nature lover, the kind of girl Mrs. Vance would call truly at home in the natural world, would step over the fence, and the whole class was watching, and the phone had come up an inch. So she stepped over.

The bank was softer than it looked. Her white shoe sank to the lace.

“You approach a swan,” Della told the class, over her shoulder, keeping her voice low and even, “the way you approach any wild thing. Slowly. With respect. Without fear.”

The swan started walking toward her.

It did not hurry. It came across the bank the way she had said wild things came when you were quiet, except that she had not wanted this one to, and there was nowhere to go, because behind her was the fence and the class and the teacher and the phone, and in front of her was a large white bird closing the distance with the flat, patient hate of something defending a territory it had not agreed to share.

Della held still.

She held still because to step back over the fence now, fast, arms up, would be a girl running from a bird, and a girl who runs from a bird does not get the letter, and Mrs. Vance was standing right there with the almost-belief still on her face, and the whole thing she had built over three months would come off in one second in front of everyone. So she did the only thing the costume allowed. She stood her ground and lowered her voice further and spoke to the swan as an equal.

“There we are,” she said. “There. We are simply sharing the path.”

The swan reached her. It looked up at her, and she looked down at it, calm, authoritative, a noise-free presence, and the swan considered her for a moment and then took the hem of her sleeve in its beak and began, methodically, to work its way up her arm.

“You see,” Della said, not moving, “it is curious. Curiosity is a form of trust.”

The swan reached her cuff and moved to her forearm.

“It is reading me,” said Della.

Behind the fence, the phone had come all the way up. Siddharth was not smiling. He was filming, steadily. He had waited a long time for this.

The swan reached her collar.

There was a small sound, a wet dark tug at her throat, one bent point where the collar had stood crisp a minute before, and a line of pond water printing itself across the shoulder of a uniform her mother had ironed to a shine at six that morning. Della felt the cold of it go through the cotton. She did not look down at it. She kept her eyes on the middle distance, over the pond, over the class, where a person at peace with the living world would rest her gaze.

“And that,” Della said, in the calm, deep voice she had spent three months building, while a municipal swan finished with her collar and started, thoughtfully, on her hair ribbon, “is how a bird says hello.”

Somewhere behind the fence, Farhan said, “She’s amazing,” and meant it.

Mrs. Vance had her hand over her mouth. She was, Della saw in one flicked glance, moved. Actually moved. The almost-belief had tipped over into belief.

The swan let go of the ribbon, lost interest, and walked back to the water.

Della stepped over the fence. One shoe made a sound coming out of the bank that she chose not to acknowledge. She straightened her wet collar with two fingers, as though straightening it were a decision and not a repair, and she turned to face the class, thirty-one faces and one phone, all of them looking at her, some of them awed and one of them certain.

“Next,” she said, “the mammals.”