Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey Read online

  “Happily,” said our mum, taking up the thread, “some birds they came to see more as cohorts than as livestock.”

  At this, Miss America brightened. “We became pets!” she said.

  “Not pets,” Mum said, her tone gentle but firm. “Pets are animals that depend on humans. We are animals that humans depend on.”

  “Like hunting dogs,” Dad said. “Or mules. Or, even better, like Thoroughbreds.”

  “We’re the racehorses of the skies!” I said, recollecting the wind as it lofted my feathers.

  “Now, dear,” our mother said, “there’s no need to borrow dignity from other creatures. Besides, a racehorse can run at thirty-five miles per hour for a single mile, which I suppose is impressive for a big, flightless animal with a man on its back. But I, a homing pigeon—one pound of feathers and flesh—can fly five hundred miles in a day at over sixty miles per hour. I can do it without stopping to eat or drink. And I can find my way home from places I’ve never seen. Alone, by my wits, without anyone tugging my reins.”

  Our parents’ speech was meant to foster pride in our capabilities, and indeed it did, particularly since I was still luxuriating in the thrill of that first flight over the hills.

  But my newfound confidence also inclined me toward contrariness. “You do this because John wants you to, no?” I said. My parents were impressive, but John was intriguing.

  Our father—always one for pigeon pride, which he had in abundance, one could even say in excess—puffed out his breast at this question. “John provides an occasion for our feats,” he said. “But we perform them out of our inherent fiber. And while it’s true that over thousands of years our human keepers have helped us become the extraordinary creatures that we are, so, too, have we shaped their history. Our line is descended from the pigeons who constituted the private post of the Rothschilds in London. Our forebears delivered them news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo a full day before the rest of the city heard it!”

  This meant nothing to Miss America and me. “Darling, you digress,” our mother said, rubbing her iridescent head against his shoulder. “What you must always remember, children, is that in the air no creature is our equal. Our wings, as the two of you found today, are shaped ideally for ease in lengthy flight. Our necks are muscular and flexible, allowing us vision in all directions. Our heads are large because our brains are large. Our vital parts are well protected against attacks.”

  “Rather more so than those of the mammals, including John and his ilk,” our father said, an aside directed more toward me than Miss America. I wouldn’t understand what he meant until the trenches of France.

  “Most astonishing of all,” my mother said, “is the quality after which these humans have named us: our ability to home.”

  “This is our home,” said Miss America, craning her exquisite neck at the wire screen above us, which let in fresh breezes and the smell of clover. “Provided by the Wrights and maintained by John.”

  “We live in a home,” said our mum. “That’s correct. But for us home is a verb, too—a thing to do as well as a place to be.”

  “It would do many humans well to think in those terms,” my father said. “The world would be a better place. Not so many people marching in conquest. Or stepping out for cigarettes, never to be seen by their families again.”

  “Even we pigeons don’t know what enables us to do this,” our mother continued, accustomed to his puzzling interruptions. “To return, if necessary, from a point we’ve never been, a thousand miles away. To humans it’s evidently rather unusual and mysterious, a riddle that remains unsolved.” She laughed, a bit ruefully. “What fun it would be to explain it to them! But we can’t, of course. It comes so naturally to us, as you’ve just seen, and fundamental things are always the hardest to explain. Imagine describing the color red to one of the farm dogs! It simply can’t be done.”

  “Practice is important,” our father said. “As John continues your training, you’ll encounter interference, danger, disorientation, and you’ll learn to overcome it all. But experience isn’t enough. You’ll also develop strength of wing and steadiness of mind, keenness of eye and a sharp sense of direction, but these, too, are incidental to your innate and irreducible ability to home, to whatever site you regard as your home, from any location.”

  Pigeons have no belief in God nor any need for such belief, but like most creatures we have our rituals. That day our parents taught us about the voice—a voice that speaks from both within and outside each of us, that urges us homeward and reassures us that we’ll get there. Every pigeon knows this voice. I still hear it in the Smithsonian every morning, though it’s been a hundred years since I last took flight.

  Our mother ended their talk to us with a truth that still astonishes me. “Now, Miss America and Cher Ami, the two of you must always listen to that voice, the voice humans intuit but cannot experience. Heed it at the start of every journey and you’ll never be unable to home to your home.”

  “I’ll want to home because home is where you are!” said Miss America, always sweeter than I.

  “Me, too,” I said, though truthfully I was more eager for the crossing of strange distances than for the many happy returns.

  “You’re good birds,” our father said, and took us inside to show us how best to eat to restore our energy postflight.

  My wait to practice listening for the voice was not a long one. John came the next day—and the next, and the next, always at the same time—carrying us off in a basket and liberating us from various points a mile from Wright Farm. Then he began strapping our basket onto a bicycle to take us farther—five miles, he said. Then he borrowed the Wrights’ motorcar, and we flew for ten.

  With each toss from John’s hand, I could hear a voice behind my beak resonate with increasing clarity: Cher Ami! it said—it knew my name!—Home to Wright Farm! And home I went.

  The day that John first liberated us at twenty miles, he came in early, the morning sun shining through the door of the dovecote, illuminating the feathers and dust motes, making the air sparkle.

  “Cher Ami and Miss America,” he said, crooked teeth smiling beneath his bushy mustache, “I’ve brought you some jewelry.”

  He scooped me up and set me in his lap, then put a narrow band on my left leg above my pink claw.

  “Aluminum,” he said as I balanced on my right foot atop his corduroy-clad thigh, his thick fingers delicate as they fastened the anklet. “Your first race is coming up, and we’ve got to have you registered. ‘National Union Racing Pigeon, Number 615,’ it says. But don’t worry—you’ll always be Cher Ami to me.”

  I flapped uneasily when he released me, testing the new weight on my leg. The band felt strange and cumbersome at first, but then soon like nothing at all, like a part of me, which it might as well have been. Although I didn’t yet fully understand what it meant, I knew that I had crossed another threshold, had become more completely myself.

  John did the same for Miss America, who held her foot out and admired the accessory before John popped us into our wicker basket and put us in the motorcar, on the seat, while he cranked the engine and drove us out.

  Tossed, I spiraled, the band encircling my left ankle a badge rather than a burden, an indication of the seriousness of my purpose. I caught the breeze and made it back to our roost at a mile a minute, faster than John could have traveled in the car.

  Miss America struggled, showing up late, taking three times as long. “The bracelet puts too much pressure on,” she said, cleaning herself in the bathing water.

  It wasn’t long before John gave up on racing her and committed her to being a show bird, which suited her fine; she won many prizes. If my parents were disappointed, they didn’t say so, but I could feel the pleasure that they took in my speed.

  Early the next spring—the start of my second year, 1917—John sent me along with nine other birds, includ
ing Fast Time, to what would be my first race: five hundred miles, with a five-hundred-pound prize. John put almost every penny he won back into us, his hobby. I wanted to win for him, for the loft, and for myself.

  We all fit into a single large shipping basket—a bit crowded, but John gave us ample food and water and drove us to the rail station at Chipping Norton. When John bade us farewell with final encouraging words and left us in the care of a porter, I flapped in alarm, but Fast Time calmed me with faint exasperation. “Easy, Cher Ami,” she said. “We’ll see John again soon enough, won’t we?”

  “But who’ll toss us from the basket?” I asked.

  “What a silly question,” she said. “Does it matter? Out is out.”

  As we sat on the platform waiting to be loaded onto the train, we took note of garish images lining the walls. They were propaganda posters, many depicting the Germans as savage beasts: raping and pillaging, shelling and killing. DESTROY THIS MAD BRUTE, one read across its top, and below that a German soldier in the form of a gorilla clutching Europe—personified as a lady, limp and partially clothed—in his hairy left arm, civilization in ruins on the horizon behind him.

  Pigeons are capable of neither hatred nor patriotism. But there on the platform I began to see that humans had difficulty understanding the war without animal metaphors. “The fighting is raging like a tiger,” someone on the platform said.

  None seemed to understand that the war had come from them.

  Another poster showed a picture of a pup in a Red Cross uniform beneath the headline EVEN A DOG ENLISTS, and across the bottom, WHY NOT YOU? It was meant to recruit men, but I thought about the question for hours and hours on the swaying train, dark in a freight car, silent and stoic. Half a dozen pigs squeaked and complained in the same car, but not we pigeons.

  We arrived in Inverness the following morning, and after a confusion of strange hands and all-but-unintelligible voices and a bumpy ride into the countryside, when the men in charge of the race set us free, I thrilled to the familiar happiness of being high up and homing. The voice said, as it did every time, Cher Ami! Home to your loft by the airway! Home to Wright Farm! For a moment I was flummoxed by the alien topography of the Scottish Highlands, utterly different from the gentle hills of Chipping Norton. And then I knew where I was.

  I flew as low as I could, for it was windy, and left the rest behind. The air was choked with grit blown up from the ground below, and my nictitating membranes skimmed my eyes constantly to keep them clear and bright. Like other birds, pigeons have a transparent third eyelid, a thin, glassy film that sweeps the eyeball like a windscreen wiper, rewetting it and swabbing away dust without interrupting our vision. It’s always struck me as remarkable that humans must go blind for an instant each time they blink, but then again humans aren’t routinely obliged to hurl their hollow-boned bodies between tree limbs at breakneck speed.

  I needed sharp eyes for my journey. In the late afternoon, I was chased for two miles by a bird of prey, a falcon, broad-winged eater of ducks and chickens and pigeons. But not racing pigeons, at least not this one; I got away.

  Then I ran into a thick pewter fog, as dangerous to homing as was any predator. I had to wait on the roof of a house for an hour, drinking from the wet shingles and thinking of how I longed to be home with John and corn, John and peas. When the fog lifted at dusk, I flew on at almost a hundred miles per hour to make up time, but soon night fell, and pigeons can’t fly at night, or rather can’t home. The world pours clues at us, as it always does, but when the sun’s gone, they stop adding up.

  I found shelter in a barn among fowl, a turkey and some hens, none too friendly, jealous maybe of my relative freedom. I stayed in the hayloft, pecked at stray seeds, and resolved to be off again at dawn.

  I awoke to the prismatic blue eyes of a Siamese cat eyeing me hungrily and made my escape through a hole in the roof, probably cut for some other homer.

  By the time I rang the bell later that morning on the landing board of my own loft, I’d lost a full three ounces of my total sixteen. I was welcomed home by Big Tom and Lady Jane, Miss America and my fellow birds. I was the first of the ten from Wright Farm to return, faster even than Fast Time, but I hadn’t won the race, John told me gently. A hen from another loft had completed all five hundred miles the day before. But he said to never mind that, that one day I’d make a name for myself.

  He was right. In every race after that, I finished in the top three. All through 1917 I raked in prize money with my clawed feet.

  Only two apprehensions, gray nimbuses, floated low and indistinct on our otherwise sunny horizon.

  The first was the war. Sometimes on the darkest nights, we could hear a German bomber fly over the countryside in search of targets. The warplanes sought ports and factories, not modest farms, but their navigation was bad and their aim was worse. The sound of their engines frightened John and the other farmworkers and therefore frightened us, too. John spoke to us often about his soldier son and also told us that pigeons—Belgian, Italian, French, and English birds on one side, German birds on the other—had been dying alongside men in the war. They flew like I flew, not for prize money but as messengers. I thought of them often.

  The second apprehension was breeding. Most pigeons mature sexually at around seven months of age, and given my gifts as a homer, John had high hopes for my progeny. Miss America, always indifferent to racing but delighted at the prospect of becoming a mum, was already raising her first pair of squabs, and John didn’t understand why I hadn’t taken to producing babies with any of the lady birds in the cote. Despite his considerable expertise in avian physiology, he had mistaken me for male, and I could sense his quiet dismay as he confronted the growing likelihood that my talents were doomed to die with me.

  In John’s defense the sex of pigeons is not an entirely straightforward subject. Our external anatomy provides few hints in this department, so it’s mostly behavior that signals our gender, and I certainly acted like the males did, particularly in the affection I showed toward other females.

  “Breeding pigeons is an art, they say,” John told me somewhat apologetically as he put me in a private cage with Fast Time. “A careful balancing of beauty and form. You’re my two finest homers, and I can only imagine what your broods might do. Pigeon hearts have their own reasons, I’m sure, but I do hope you’ll give this arrangement some consideration.”

  While I don’t wish to be prurient, at this point a few words on the subject of pigeon coitus may be in order. To be blunt, we, like most birds, have no genitals but only a cloacal opening from which we dispense excrement and through which male pigeons secrete—and female birds admit—sperm. Copulation, though pleasurable, is fleeting and consists only of light cloaca-to-cloaca contact. No penetration.

  Because he had observed my sexual interactions with other female pigeons and had no fertilized eggs to show for it, John believed that I had failed in my efforts to impregnate, and he trimmed the feathers around my cloaca prior to arranging my dalliance with Fast Time, thinking it would improve my chances of making an effective deposit. But though she and I enjoyed our liaison, with respect to breeding it was to no avail.

  I once overheard a discussion between John and another experienced pigeon man from a neighboring farm on the phenomenon of “henny cocks” and “cocky hens”—birds whose characteristics and mannerisms don’t align neatly with their supposed sex—but John never recognized me as one of the latter. The men speculated that these “unnatural” conditions might be caused by abnormalities of our invisible interior gonads or of the hormones they secrete. In my case this was probably correct; unlike Miss America, exactly my age and an excellent layer, I never produced an egg.

  Their conversation bothered me for some time. Partly this was because I wanted to inform John, who in most ways was so sensitive and perceptive, of his mistake. Partly, too, it was because I never felt unnatural. I never had any idea of wha
t it might mean to feel unnatural.

  Now, drained of my innards, wood-stuffed and wire-skeletoned, perched one-legged on my base for eternity, I have a much clearer sense of what this means.

  By the spring of 1918, John had largely given up on breeding me, his mind busy with other concerns. One early morning he entered the dovecote with Farmer and Mrs. Wright. The farmer had a newspaper under his arm, and I could make out a headline announcing the long-awaited arrival in Liverpool of American troops, the first wave to pass through the UK on their way to France.

  “We have almost fifty,” the farmer said, surveying us in our nesting boxes. “I should think we could spare a dozen for the Allied cause.”

  John nodded, grim-faced. Mrs. Wright said she was sorry but encouraged him to think of how the birds might help his son in some way. “This war has upended the normal duties of men and women,” she said. Short and round and ruby-cheeked, in her orange apron she had the look of a chrysanthemum. “It’s no wonder, is it, that it’s finally come to upend the birds, too?”

  “I’ll pick out a dozen tonight and have ’em ready to go by noon,” John said, tipping his tweed flat cap.

  He waited until the farmer and his wife had gone back to the big house, then took up speaking to us as he always did. “Those Yanks coming to help are going to need things,” he said. “Their General Pershing asked for two thousand homers, to be used as messengers in the army. England has offered to send five hundred directly. And not just five hundred but the five hundred best. Many of you are among the best, true and tested. So there’s no way around it. You’re off to help our boys.”

  The dovecote bubbled in a cooing cacophony. John came to me straightaway, as I knew he would. Sad, I could tell, to give me up. But I wasn’t a breeder, I had already won the best purses in Britain, and my talents called out for a fresh challenge. I had no future on the farm.