The Seventh Crane
Would you do things differently if you could see your life from 36,000 feet?
At touch of first light, blades of sea grass whistled in the early breeze. They had waited all night for the sun, and so had the Crane. Too large to catch the small nimble fish frisking her legs, she preferred to nip dragonflies in mid-flight or crack a fresh mollusk. Dawn had just broken, and the Crane was alone. She was, after all, always the first one there. Breakfast would be abundant—and easy.
But there was someone else. A child, perhaps a little more than one year of age, sat by the water’s edge. She watched the Crane, little fingers sifting sand. A dragonfly alighted on the child’s knee, and she grabbed for it clumsily, missing. It sped off, straight into the bird’s beak. The Crane and the child watched each other quietly, waves lapping against their feet.
“Lovely of you,” said the mother to the father a little further away. “Baby’s first breakfast on the beach.” She leaned to kiss him over finger omelettes, slices of brie and warm bread, and a baby bottle laid out between them. The father smiled and stroked his wife’s hair away from her face.
“Look at that great big crane,” she said. “Have you ever seen one so big around here?”
“Mm-mm.” He reached for his camera. Perfect shot of his baby with a crane against the steel-cut blue of the bay. He’ll feature it in the exhibit next month.
The Crane picked up a tiny crab by its claw, the little creature wriggling in protest.
The child let out a peal of delight.
The Second Crane came just after breakfast. She had fed elsewhere, in those places further down the shore only she and her mate knew, and had a nest to build. Wading through the grasses at the water’s edge, she searched for those perfect strings of grass and twig that would make her eggs warm and safe. It would be a magnificent nest, larger and firmer and more secure than the nests of other cranes, a nest one of her two chicks could call home—the one who’d survive.
She knew the merciless instincts of Natural Law that made her young a senseless part of the food chains that interlinked species, she knew the inevitable and innate hatchling rivalry that would claim one, and she knew the ways of men who needed her kind neither for food nor shelter but hunted them for that strange pleasure they called sport.
But her determination was that of a mother of any other species: fierce. Herself one of a rare pair of hatchlings, the only pair to survive the summer she was born, she counted in part on the benevolent memory of her genetic code and in part on her close extended family to protect her young. Her younger twin sister, willful, independent, and not yet mated, had come here before her to feed; she would soon take on her duties as doting aunt.
With her mate the Second Crane had already selected the site of their nest, hidden among the tall marsh grasses far away from the decoy nest they’d built together weeks before, and protected by a strategy only long seasons of trial and error could evolve: from the ground a daunting labyrinth of watery channels and blind grassy paths, from the air an indistinguishable tapestry of color and shadow stretching across the wetlands. Now it was time to build.
The child, just a few days shy of her third birthday, played with her toys on the sand. She had seen the crane come in and watched her for a while. She watched her tug at the tall dry grasses that had turned brown during the drought, snapping them free. She watched her with the kind of whole and single-minded attention only innocent unmolded minds still hold, before the insistent habits of society threaten to lash them into submissive shells of themselves. Decided she wanted to build a nest too. She gathered pieces of driftwood and dry seaweed, a few leaves that had blown in, put it all into a pile on the sand, and sat in it. Curious, the Second Crane tilted her head at the child. The little one has a few seasons of learning still ahead, she thought. But, good initiative. One day she’ll make a good strong nest of her own.
The rest of this short story is in eBook format… right here