Trail Bird by Yitzchak Francus

The first one resembled a morsel of dirt. She spotted it on a dead leaf beneath a dense canopy. Upon closer inspection, she thought it might be something human animals ate.

She’d pecked too low, and the morsel catapulted off the leaf, landing beneath the cap of a white-spotted red toadstool. She pecked again, this time harder than she’d planned and it disappeared through the fissures in a jumble of twigs. She spotted the second morsel on a tree root about an ostrich-neck away.

Usually, she ate flying insects, which she caught on the wing, and, occasionally, ants or snails that hid among the stems and fallen leaves. But the insectivore population had grown and she’d had to resort to worms and the occasional cricket. The other day, she’d been so hungry that she consumed a tadpole—yuck! —so how bad could the human morsel be?

Actually, it was surprisingly tasty, so she went on to the next one and the one after that, but she wondered how they got there. Only two human dens called the forest home. She knew this because the humans made her curious. A trait that was reportedly lethal in cats. And anything that killed cats had to be a good thing.

The first den was near the edge of the lake where she plucked the tadpole. She liked to perch on an oak branch and watch the two cublets, a brother and sister, play outside. They’d run to the shore and coo at the crazy swan who’d been ferrying this or that on her back ever since the day a grey heron snatched the cygnet that used to ride there.

A mature male left the den each morning as soon as the sun came up. One of the two limbs extending from either shoulder—forelegs, she thought, but they never touched the ground—stretched beyond the patchwork of loose, shifting fur that covered his body. The limb ended in what looked like a spoonbill beak. The mature male would trudge to the place of broken trees, look for one that was still standing, and swing the beak at the trunk, like a giant slow-motion version of those benighted woodpeckers, until the whole tree fell down.

On her first few visits to the den, a mature human female quietly watched the cublets from beneath the oak. But that female was replaced by another one who only left the den long enough to snarl at the cublets like one of those angry lionesses she saw when the swallows migrated.

Morsels kept appearing, now spaced a little further, maybe an osprey-span, apart. She hopped along quickly; the forest floor was treacherous. A hawk or kestrel might swoop down, or a squirrel or rat might pounce. Yes, she was hungry. Yes, the morsels were tasty. Yes, they had a lovely beak-feel, gathering up as easily as those delectable predaceous beetles. But there was no need to take unnecessary risks. She wondered if the humans were predators. That spoonbill tree-assaulter sure looked predatory.

At a minimum, the humans were odd, and the tree-assaulter wasn’t the half of it. Their dens were way too big and they made crazy sounds. Swallows used three sounds—a chirp, a whine, and a gurgle—to communicate whatever they needed. Humans couldn’t figure out the sounds they actually needed, so they just kept making up new ones. She had no trouble making out the sounds. She just didn’t understand them. She wondered if the humans did.

The morsels were getting crunchier. Come to think of it, she’d been near the cublets’ den when she first spotted them. Maybe the morsels came from there. Then again, she couldn’t rule anything out, considering how bizarre the other human den was.

She always flew high above that den. To a bird’s eye, it was tempting. The top looked like a beaver dam built with high-end nesting materials you might see in a swallow-nest architectural tour. It seemed to be festooned with creamy giant caterpillars and shiny bugs. She could have sworn the walls were decorated with colorful worms, their fronts curled into spirals, and their rears sticking straight out.

A few times, she spotted human cubs nosing around the den, but she’d never seen one return. Of course, she didn’t get a close look. The air above the den sometimes burned like the sun. Once, her feathers got singed. The swallow girls thought they were frosted. They didn’t stop pestering her about her secret until she molted.

The trees surrounding the den were bare; toasted leaves scattered the ground. A lone female lived in the den. What a life that must be. None of the endless flapping and whining she got from her significant bother, the damned egg-fertilizer. Never helped out around the nest. Just kept stalking her to stop her from getting with other guys, as if that would work.

The female had one of those extra-long forelegs, but without the spoonbill beak, that poked at the leaves. A faint crunching sound was audible even from seventy vulture-spans up.

She had just plucked a new morsel from the forest floor when the cublet brother and sister emerged from a stand of conifers. The brother was about to say something to his sister but suddenly froze. Both of them did. Their patchy fur seemed dull and faded, hanging from their bodies as if they were nothing but fur and bone. As they watched her gulp down the morsel, they looked like fledglings who’d just spotted a kestrel. A choked rattle escaped from the sister’s throat, like the chatter of those woodpeckers that always woke her when she was trying to nap. Little drops of water ran down the sister’s face. She’d never seen an animal that could make its own water.

The sister turned to her brother and blubbered. She didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded like, “Hansel, oh, Hansel, how will we ever get back home now?”

Yitzchak Francus's work has appeared in The Atlantic online, The Saturday Evening Post, and Meetinghouse Magazine, among other places. His story "Principal for a Day," won the 2023 Get Lit! Writing Contest. His novel-in-progress, God Laughs, was longlisted for the 2023 McKitterick Prize for a first novel by an author over forty.