– Felix
Felix gripped the branch with both feet, watching the sweet, sticky sap oozing between his claws. A breeze rocked the branch and his feet tingled with a rush of fear. He refused to look up. To even think about looking up. Up meant open air, risking his life, taunting death.
Bend-stretch – leap-swoop – pump-lift.
He barely registered the words he was muttering. Instead he found himself suddenly fascinated by ants. In their own dance with death they flocked to the sap, the unlucky ones never making it back out. What species would wear them as amber jewellery in a million years? Would it still be the apes? Or would another species have taken their place by then? The rats were due another turn, surely. He started to feel bad for the ants.
The cry of a currawong forced his mind back to the Launch. It was the Thing He Hated Most about flying. Even now his gut clenched, his claws turned white.
He muttered his mantra again: bend-stretch – leap-swoop – pump-lift.
Of course, there was another way to do this; in fact he’d only just tried it again on Monday. But it turned out the ground was still hard, and limping all the way to school afterwards was still embarrassing. Not for the first time he wondered why mudlark nests had to be so high up. Come to that — why couldn’t he just have been born a brush-turkey, building a nice safe mound on nice safe solid earth?
He held his breath. Bend-stretch. The fear-tingle rose up through his legs as he bent them. He stretched his wings – leap-swoop – and, resisting the urge to close his eyes—maybe he wasn’t gritting his beak right?—he tilted forwards, unsqueezed his claws and dropped.
Pump-lift. Pump-lift! Air rushed past his face, parting his feathers, tickling his skin. The horizon did sickening back flips over his head, his stomach emptied into his beak. He flapped, hard and fast, promising never to do this again if he could only be allowed to live, plummeting with all the control of a misshapen rock. His heart pounded, forcing blood into his straining muscles. His world turned red at the edges and spots strobed in his vision, but nothing blocked his terrifying view of the ground rushing up to meet him. And then, just as the high-pitched screaming he associated with near-death experiences started, physics saved him. Pump finally overcame weight. Lift overcame drag.
He was airborne.
He dragged a deep breath in, sucking at the cool, clean air and startling himself with the gurgling, gasping noises he made. He almost lost control of flight again. Carefully he tucked his feet under his tail, climbed in a gentle, easy spiral to the clear blue above the trees, and circled once, twice, until the magnetite particles imbedded deep within his brain locked onto a heading. A soft hot wind blew on his beak and with it came the scents of fresh loamy earth and newly mown grass, the last of the sweet wattles, the menthol tang of eucalypts, the salt spray of the ocean. Koels called their eerie cry, seagulls squawked, crows wheeled. Finally he could relax. He set off in a steady, slow, straight line: it was the Thing He Loved Most about flying.
His mind turned to his migration plans. About soaring to new heights and exploring new sights. He loved the way that sounded in his head. Like the poetry the apes put so much energy into.
Today was definitely the day.
A squawking fuss at the end of the treeline caught his attention. Native miners were harassing a crow, chasing it, herding it towards the heat shimmers rising above the ribbon of tar ahead. Felix sighed. His neat straight line was about to be ruined. He calculated a minor correction and triple-checked his maths before adjusting his flight path by exactly eight degrees west.
Keeping a side-eye on his new route, he watched the melee. The grey and yellow miners, a third the size of the jet black crow, flew at it fearlessly; beaking and clawing at its wings, its tail, the back of its head; swooping from above and below. The metallic tang of blood reached Felix’s nostrils. The crow changed direction but the miners continued the chase, screeching, until the crow finally arked its anger and snapped.
Hang on: that bird looks different. Felix upped the zoom on his vision for a better look. Black and white feathers. He zoomed again. Mudlark black and white.
“Orville?” He called. “Is that you?”
“Just a sec,” Orville, apparently, called back.
But Felix couldn’t wait. Not today. He passed the fight at his nice, safe distance, focusing on the maths to angle him back to his original track. His beak moved with the effort, but with a lucky-last check, he calculated that an eight degree shift east should do it. Eight again. Huh. He made a note to ask someone about the coincidence.
Orville caught up. “You should have helped,” he complained. “You know it’s our duty to ward off predators.”
“You know I don’t get involved in politics,” Felix replied.
Orville darted upwards, snatched something from the air, darted back to his friend’s side. He tossed his head back to swallow a beakful of insect. “It’s not politics, Bumpy,” he complained. “It’s natural selection.”
“You know, you really need to stop calling me that.”
“Bumpy?! Why?”
But Felix needed to focus on his flight again. Away from the trees the air became thick, hot, and oppressive and he sank under its weight, falling ever closer to the tile, tin, and tar of the apes. He battled against heat shimmers in the liquid air, see-sawing and rocking and weaving, with just the rush of his wings breaking his concentrated silence.
“The flies are good today,” Orville said as he swooped again. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“No,” Felix managed. His belly rumbled treacherously and, spying their school up ahead, he spoke to cover the noise.
“Finally,” he managed to gasp, his muscles weak and his belly apparently having eaten itself from the inside out. Stormfeather’s Cockling Academy. Almost everyone he knew in the world went to school here but today, Felix hoped, was his last day. Today was the day he’d find the curlews. He muttered the maths under his breath as they circled to join their classmates.
“Uh-oh,” Orville interrupted his concentration. “There’s too many mudlarks here.”
Felix, already lining up for landing, could only spare a glance. “Thirty seven.” Counting was much easier than calculating. “Another class visiting, maybe? Maybe the northerners?” His legs were now outstretched, his wings twisted up into the wind, the ground just inches away.
“OMH,” Orville squawked in alarm. “Don’t look now, but the henlings are here!” Felix responded to his friend’s panic by looking up. But it left his feet unwatched: he crashed into a ground not nearly as soft as its covering of grass lulled him into believing. The shock drove through his ankles, buckled his knees, propelled his head forward, and he somersaulted and bounced his painful way down the short landing strip.
“Are you ok?” A voice that must have been Orville’s asked.
Felix groaned. “I think I’m dead.”
“But,” Orville lowered his voice, “the henlings are here!”
“So?” Felix rubbed his eyes.
“So?!” Orville gaped. “They’re judging us! When will you get it through your thick head?”
“Is that why you made me crash? Because you’re scared of a few henlings?”
“Hey, Bumpy!” One of the cocklings called: it sounded like Bert. “Nice landing.”
Felix jumped up. A haze of fog overtook his vision. “I meant to do that,” he said. A ringing in his ears screamed louder than cicadas on a summer evening. “Uggh,” he thought he continued. “I’m gonna be sick.”
“Dibs on your breakfast!” Orville said with a belly-rumble.
But the moment passed. What was left of breakfast stayed where it belonged and the imaginary cicadas stopped their racket. Felix beaked himself clean of bits of grass as though nothing had happened.
“Hey, Bumpy,” Bert continued with a smirk. “Is today the day?”
“I thought yesterday was the day,” Douglas Douglas said.
“Tomorrow’s the day, too,” Carlos said through a giggling fit.
“Tease me all you like.” Felix sighed. “But you’ll all be jealous when I’m gone.”
Douglas Douglas broke out into laughter. “Do the curlews know you’re joining them yet?”
“And do they know you’ve got tiny feet?” Bert said.
“More to the point,” Carlos said. “Does Bumpy know they’re ten times his size?”
Felix’s wings rose in blush. He pretended to check them for mites.
“So anyway,”—Orville fortunately had a short attention span—“my mum was at me again about moving out. She reckons I’ve got to the end of autumn.”
“Mine too.” A suddenly dejected Douglas Douglas flopped to the ground.
“You’re lucky,” Bert sighed. “My mum’s building me a nest on the other side of the park. Dad’s helping me move into it next full moon.”
“I guess the summer of Douglas Douglas’s nearly over. Before I know it, it’ll be eggs, eggs, and more eggs.”
Felix kept his beak shut. He’d be gone before things ever came to any of that. Tiny feet or not he’d be wading in the curlew wetlands on the other side of the world, eating all kinds of foreign insects, meeting new species and making new friends—he glanced at his old friends: Carlos was chucking beakfuls of grass at Douglas Douglas while the others watched and giggled like fledglings—make that proper new friends.
“Look, Bumpy,” Orville said. “We’ve only got one moon to go. Why don’t you debut first, migrate later?”
“What do I care about debut?” Felix huffed. “When am I ever going to need to know half the stuff Ms teaches us? I’m not even interested in mating.”
“Has Amelia really put you off?”
Felix missed a step. Fledging day. His nostrils filled with the remembered smell of blood and crushed roses. His breath quickened, his feet turned cold, and his wings gave an involuntary flap as though trying to save himself all over again. It wasn’t just his most embarrassing plummet to earth, but the most dangerous too. The back of his neck prickled in response and he rubbed a wingtip over the old scars left there by a vicious, hooked beak. Felt the feathers that still wouldn’t grow right. He hadn’t even seen the currawong swoop in, hadn’t even started to feel the pain as blood gushed from his neck. But he did see Amelia. Amelia, her still-yellow pin feathers puckering out from her ugly grey skin, screaming, pecking at the predator’s eyes, kicking and clawing like an angry mother hen. She’d gouged its soft underbelly until it dropped him.
“You know,” he said to his classmates, wings rising again, heat flushing his beak, “I actually haven’t thought of her in ages.”
“You miss her, don’t you?” Douglas Douglas teased again. “The way she used to follow you everywhere? And didn’t she give you worms?”
“I’m sure she’s forgotten.”
“I doubt it.”
“Anyway, even if I was going to mate, I’d pick that nice one, Bobbi, before I picked Amelia. Or even Pancho. I think she really likes me.”
“We don’t get to pick, Bumpy.” Orville sighed.
“Alright, class.” The harsh voice of Stormfeather cut through all conversation. “As you can see, the henlings have graced us with their presence today. But try not to think of them. Just pretend they’re not here.”
Douglas Douglas engrossed himself in a staring contest with his own feet, Bert groaned, Carlos tried to make himself invisible, and Wilbur’s face turned so pale his black chin was almost a henly white. Felix gave a self-satisfied smirk.
“So,” Stormfeather continued. “Before we get today’s lecture under way, let’s have a snap test. I’m going to call you up in your competition pairs, and you’re going to compete for me.”
The cocklings sniggered.
“Young Bert.” She singled him out. “I’ll have you know that Stormfeather’s Cockling Academy for Eastern Mudlarks did not earn its epithet of Number Two, for nine consecutive years I might add, through the mirth of its cocklings.”
The sniggering grew louder.
“But Ms,” the unfortunate Bert complained, “I don’t want to compete for you.”
The rest of the cocklings let their laughter out, but Felix stifled his when he saw the muscles of Ms’s head and neck stiffen.
“Well,” she raised her voice and dripped sarcasm. “Because Bert and Wilbur have so graciously volunteered to be first, I’ll mark them lightly. But the rest of you,” she snapped, “can line up in random algorithm.”
Felix tried to remember what algorithm meant while the rest of the cocklings moved to do her bidding.
“Bumpy!” Orville whispered harshly. “Don’t just stand there, line up.”
“Errr…random what?”
Orville would have rolled his eyes but for the limits of his avian physiology. He rolled his head instead.
“Line up. You know, in Xn+1 = (aXn + b) mod m sequence.”
Felix, priding himself on his ability to pretend to understand things he knew nothing about, took a confident step towards the line.
“Not here!” Douglas Douglas whispered, spreading his wings to fill the space Felix was heading for.
“I wasn’t,” he protested.
“Over here!” Orville whispered. “What’s wrong with you?”
Felix’s wings were rising again. He took his place next to Orville and settled in to preen. Not that he was embarrassed, of course; it was sheer coincidence his wings happened to rise. Nor was he just vain, and worrying about looking good for the henlings. It was hunger, pure and simple. He just felt like eating a few mites that’s all. If he was vain then he’d be at—of course! He resisted the urge to wing-slap his own face. It was Friday, wasn’t it?! And where else was any vainglorious bird on a Friday going to be than at the last feather-dressing opportunity before the East Asian-Australasian Flyway! They’d be at one of the bigger ones—a flock of curlews didn’t fit just anywhere—so Termite Park would be the best place to look. He visualized a flight path and had just finished calculating it would take 17 minutes to fly when his belly rumbled; he added another 12 minutes for stinkbug-guzzling. Stinkbugs. Did they have them in the northern hemisphere? Or did they have something even better? The flies there were supposed to be even better than blowfl—
“Bumpy!” Orville yelled at him.
“What?” He opened his eyes and the whole class laughed. Except Ms.
“Quite finished napping have we, Bumpy?” she asked.
Felix checked the sun and felt his wings rise again. Somehow, he’d daydreamed for an hour.
“And wipe the drool off your beak, if you please,” she added.
Or slept. Even the henlings were gone. He slurped and hung his head low as he followed Orville to the patch of bare earth they used for practice.
“Quiet, please,” Stormfeather called to the still-tittering cocklings.
Orville started the countdown. “Wrestlin’, tusslin’, grapplin’, go.”
“Look at me!” Felix raised his wings.
“No, look at me!” Orville’s wings went up as Felix’s went down.
“No, look at me!” Felix’s wings went back up.
“I said look at me!”
“My territory’s got worms!”
“My territory’s got mites!”
“His mites are tiny!”
“His worms are skinny!”
“I’ve also got crickets!”
“I build great nests!”
“Look at me!”
“No, look at me!”
“Well, cocklings,” Ms puffed up when they finished. “If it was up to me, I’d actually be giving you top marks. That was surprisingly good. It was simple, traditional, and to the point.” Felix and Orville looked at each other in satisfaction. “Now,” she continued as they returned to their classmates. “Are we ready for our final lecture on Celestial Mechanics? At the end I’ll transmit the newly updated model of the solar system, so listen up.”
Felix groaned. “Why do we have to cop a lecture if she’s just going to squawk us a file at the end?”
“You know why,” Orville hissed. “Now shut up or you’ll get us in trouble again.”
“But—”
“Shhhhh.”
Felix wished for once Ms would talk about something interesting, like hunting, or eating. Stuff that would really come in handy in the north. He’d have to record a lot of files when he was there, of course. Maybe he could publish a leaf on the topic. Even a recipe. A whole bark of recipes. He could match each bug with the perfect entree-aphid and dessert-grub. He’d call it Inspecting Insects. Perfecting Insects. No—Insectorama. Or Insectoganza. No wait: Stinkfest. No even better: Stink—
Orville’s angry whisper startled him. “I can’t believe you fell asleep again!”
Felix blinked. “I didn’t,” he protested, stifling a yawn and trying to stretch without making it obvious.
Orville shook his head and turned back to face Ms.
“This is the really important part,” she was saying. “Is everyone ready?”
“What about the lecture?” Felix whispered.
“She did it already!” Orville whispered back.
The cocklings stood still. Stormfeather eyed them all, then let forth a raucous squawk, partway between angry cat and choking crow. The wingshake tone. It grated Felix’s ears like claws on a wooden fencepost, but he squawked back with the other cocklings while he cringed. Of course Ms didn’t like their attempt. She never did, complaining even the subtlest differences were enough to corrupt the file transfer. She squawked again, and again, until Felix’s ears were raw. Only then was she pleased, and sang the rich and complex transmission song. Dogs across the neighbourhood joined in.
When it was over, Felix changed the colour scheme to his favourite bright pinks and purples.
“I said,” Orville was talking again. “Do you want to come to Surfest with me?”
“Wait…” Felix struggled to keep the image in his mind. “I haven’t tested the file yet.”
“Hawk, you’re slow.”
Felix gave the mental orrery a cursory turn, cycling Neptune through one of its years before shutting the file down. “Ok, now what’d you say?”
“I said, are you coming to the beach? Should be a tonne of seafood.”
“Nah. I’ll just find myself a couple of stinkbugs.”
Orville shook his head. “You mean curlews.”
“You don’t really eat stinkbugs, do you?!” Carlos screwed up his face in disgust.
“Leave him,” Douglas Douglas said. “Today’s the day, remember?”
Felix ignored them all, paced out a few steps, and took off smoothly. Departing from ground level wasn’t hard. Usually.
Evolution: it's for the birds 