Taka And Koma

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Title:     Taka And Koma
Author: Katharine Lee Bates [More Titles by Bates]

"What madness is it to take upon us to know a thing by that it is not? Shall we perswade our selves that wee know what thing a Camell is, because wee know it is not a Frogge?"

--Barckley's Felicitie of Man. 1603.

To console me for the loss of the chicks, Joy-of-Life went into a Boston bird-store one day and, in defiance of all her principles and mine, bought me a Japanese robin. When she presented him, the daintiest little fellow, mouse-color, with touches of red and gold on wings and throat and the prettiest pink bill, I met her guilty look with one of sheer astonishment.

"A Robin Redbreast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage,"

I quoted.

"But he was in a cage already," she weakly apologized, "and we'll be very good to him."

"Good jailers!"

"But liberty here would be his undoing, and I can't take him over to Japan. Come! It's time that you said thank-you."

But Taka, named after a Japanese boy of Joy-of-Life's earlier acquaintance, proved a dubious blessing. He was in angry temper from the first, and a brilliant new cage, fitted up with all the modern conveniences and latest luxuries, failed to appease him in the least. He would thrust his head between the gilded bars so violently that he could not draw it back, and while we were doing our clumsy best to extricate him he would peck our fingers with furious ingratitude. He upset his porcelain dishes, declined to use his swing and, as a rule, rejected all the attractions of his criss-cross perches, fluttering back and forth and madly beating against the bars or huddling in an unhappy little bundle on the floor. It was a matter of weeks before we could coax him into conversation, and then his abrupt, metallic chirps were so sharp that Mary, who scorned and disliked him as a foreigner, was scandalized.

"Don't ye talk with him. It's all sauce that Jap is giving yez."

Even Robin Hood, social little fellow that he was, tried in vain, later on, to make friends with this ungracious stranger. The East and the West could not meet. In response to Robin's cheery chatter, Taka would bristle, turn away and maintain a stubborn silence.

I used to carry his cage out of doors with me and set it up on the bank, where crocuses followed snowdrops, and tulips followed crocuses, beside the steamer-chair, hoping that he would feel more at home amid the blossoms and bird music of the spring. But there little Lord Sulks would sit, bunched into a corner of his palace, deigning no response whatever to the soft greetings of the bluebirds, those "violets of song," nor to the ecstatic trills of the fox sparrows, nor even to the ringing challenge of Lieutenant Redwing, as he flashed by overhead on his way to Tupelo swamp.

A calling ornithologist examined Taka carefully and concluded that he was an old bird, although the dealer had glibly represented him as being in the very pink of youth. So our poor prisoner was perhaps not born in captivity and may have had more than ancestral memories of spreading rice fields, tea plantations and holy bamboo groves. Our brave blue squills, our sunny forsythias, our coral-tinted laurels could not break his dream of flushing lotus and flaming azalea. What was our far-off glimpse of silvery Wachusett to the radiant glories of sea-girt Fujiyama? I hinted that a pet monkey might solace his nostalgia, but to such suggestion Joy-of-Life remained persistently deaf.

The children of the neighborhood found him, sullen though he was, a center of fascination, and would crowd about his cage, pointing out to one another the jewel tints in his plumage.

"Cutest bird I ever seed 'cept the flicker," pronounced Snippet, whose straw-colored hair stood out like a halo.

"Chickadees are nicer'n flickers," protested wise little Goody Four-Eyes. "A chickadee eats three hundred cankerworms in a day and over five thousand eggs--when he can get 'em."

The boys gave a choral snort.

"Who does the countin'?" demanded Punch.

"Wish I'd been born with all the learnin' in me," scoffed Snippet.

But Goody, who had gathered many a pinecone for our feeding-boxes and, her snub nose pressed snubbier yet against the window pane, had watched the black-capped rolypolies twitch out the winged seeds, stood her ground.

"Does, too," she averred stoutly. "Boys don't know about birds. They stone 'em."

"And girls wear feathers in their hats."

"I don't, but Snippet's mamma does."

"Doesn't neither. She jes' wears regrets on Sunday."

"You don't say it right, but you're nothin' but a small boy."

"I'm seven," blustered Snippet, "and I think I'd be eight by now, if I hadn't had the measles."

"Where's Taka?" I exclaimed.

In the jostling of the children about the cage, the door, accidentally or not, had been slipped ajar, and Taka, taking advantage of the heat of the discussion, had escaped.

The youngsters raised a whoop that might well have scared him to the Pacific, but not the stir of a bird-wing could be perceived anywhere about.

Cats!

"Run to the house, Punch, please, and call out everybody to help us find Taka."

I had selected Punch as the boy of longest legs, forgetting his partiality for Mary's doughnut jar. He chose the route through the pantry with the result that when, after a suspiciously long interval, the rescue party arrived, Mary was dancing with wrath.

"Shure," she panted, "that gossoon would be a good missenger to sind for Death, for he wouldn't be after gitting him here in a hurry at all at all."

We hunted and we hunted and we hunted. We hunted high in the trees, which the boys and Goody, too, climbed with an activity that surprised the woodpeckers; we hunted low in the grass, interrupting a circle of squirrels gathered around a toadstool, as around a birthday cake; but no sign of Taka. We searched hedges and shrubbery, but no Taka. We chirped and we whistled, though well aware that even if Taka heard us he would not answer.

The western sky was a brighter red than Goody's hair-ribbon before we sat ourselves down, discouraged, on the piazza steps to wait for Joy-of-Life.

One by one the children had been summoned home, all but Wallace. He had by telephone directed his parents, who used to be older than he but whom he now watched over with solicitude, to eat their supper without him and go to bed as usual in case he should be detained.

"I don't like to think of that little goldy head out in the big dark all night," I said.

"Maybe a star will suppose it's another star and come down and stay with it," suggested Wallace, trying to buttress my sagging courage.

"His winglets are so wild and so weak."

"I believe the other birds know where he is. Please tell us," entreated Wallace, addressing a solemn crow that had just flapped over from the wood to a neighboring fence-post.

"Now it's no use to be asking of His Riverence," put in Mary. "All the crows were prastes once and they talk only the Latin."

It was one of Joy-of-Life's miracles. It was almost dark when, tired and hungry, she came home from Boston,--from a committee meeting of philanthropists who had been quarreling as only philanthropists can. She looked into Taka's empty cage, stayed but for a glass of milk and a few inquiries as to our field of search, and then, taking an electric torch, slipped softly into Giant Bluff's cherished tangle of luxuriant rosebushes, where the rest of us had not dared to venture. In a few minutes she emerged, scores of irate briars catching at her clothes and hair. She was crooning as she came out and in her safe clasp nestled a sleepy little bird.

Soon after this episode, Joy-of-Life went west for her summer sojourn among the birds at a Wisconsin lake, leaving to Mary, Robin Hood and myself the guardianship of that forlorn mite. He was as obstinate as ever in his lonesomeness, always pettishly rebuffing the friendly advances of Robin and, though I would take his cage to the vicinity of bird after bird, hoping that in some one of these he might recognize a kindred spirit, he found nothing of his feather. The white-breasted nuthatch, after nearly two months of absence, presumably for the rearing of a brood in leafy seclusion, returned for a call at the feeding-box, looking as genteel as ever in his tailor-made gray suit, but so preoccupied with domestic memories that at first he would say nothing but "Spank! spank! spank!" I brought Taka to the window and he looked on disdainfully while I tried to win Nuthatch back to his winter phrase of "Thank! thank! thank!" Only once did he revert to bachelor freedom of expression. That was when he fluttered up to the nutmeat bag and found it dangling empty:

"What a prank, prank, prank, to rob my bank, bank, bank! oh, the offense is rank, rank, rank!"

At this explosion of resentment Taka gave an involuntary chirp, and Nuthatch, the most inquisitive and alert of all our bird visitors, looked the stranger over keenly before he retorted with shocking rudeness, "You're a crank, crank, crank," and flew off to see what the brown creeper, zigzagging wrong side up about the rough-barked trunk of an old oak, was finding good to eat.

Once I carried Taka well out into the wildwood, but he was not interested in any of its busy tenants,--not in little Chippy, who all but pushed his russet crown between the bars of the cage, nor in Yellow-Hammer, stabbing the ground for ants, nor in

"yonder thrush,
Schooling its half-fledged little ones to brush
About the dewy forest."

At last, one afternoon, after Taka had been moping for hours in deeper gloom than usual, I impulsively held up a hand-glass before him. As soon as the solitary caught sight of that other Japanese robin he broke out into excited chirps and twitters, and suddenly, to my astonishment, caroled forth a ravishing song. I hastily put the glass away, but he began calling, calling, calling with a wistful eagerness that could not be endured. He kept it up till dark and began it again at dawn, so hopefully, so yearningly, that, principles or no principles, there was only one thing to do.

I went into Boston that morning and, stopping at a Japanese store, asked their word for robin.

"Koma-dori, or Little Bird, usually called Koma, the Little One."

So on I fared to the bird-dealer's and bought Koma for Joy-of-Life. He was the only Japanese robin they had left, and the dealer swore that he was Taka's brother, but I suspected that the relationship was nearer that of great-great-grandson, for Koma, smaller than Taka, of brighter gold and more vivid ruby, was the quintessence of vital energy, a very spark of fire. He fought like a mimic Hector while the dealer was catching and boxing him, and all the gay-hued parrots jumped up and down on their perches and screamed with the fun of having something going on.

The dealer declared that the two birds would thrive best in the same cage; so I introduced Koma into Taka's commodious abode that afternoon and listened in high content to their jubilant bursts of song. They went to sleep on the highest perch with their tiny bodies cuddled close together, but during the following week their love lyric was punctuated by several fights. Taka, hitherto so contemptuous of the comforts of his cage, now wanted to swing whenever he saw Koma swinging and insisted on shoving his guest away and eating from the very seed-cup that Koma had selected, whereupon Koma, a glistening ruffle of wrath, would fling himself in furious attack upon his honorable ancestor.

Mary, whose partiality for Koma, little beauty that he was, attempted no disguise, maintained that Taka always began the combats and was always worsted; but I was not so sure. Koma, a restless gleam of chirp and song, was such a violent character that twice he rammed his head between the upper wires of his cage and nearly hanged himself. Some heathen deity had given him, for his protection, a tremendous voice, and his shrieks soon brought me running to his rescue. Both times, as soon as I had parted the wire and released the lustrous little head, Taka, wildly agitated through the minutes of Koma's peril, turned fiercely upon me and accused me of the trap.

"You did it! Ugly thing! You did it! You nearly killed my Koma."

And poor little Koma, gasping in the gravel, would chime in faintly but with no less resentment, "She did it."

Yet within an hour they might be fighting again, and I would find them spent and panting, glaring at one another from opposite sides of their limited arena, with deep cuts about the little warrior faces.

"Taka," I would remonstrate, "aren't you ashamed to treat your own clansman like this, when you wanted him so much?"

But Taka and penitence were far asunder. "It's my last tail-feather--chir-r-r! Koma, he hasn't any tail at all--chir-r-r! No more have I now. Don't care a grub. I pulled his out. Catch me that fly, can't you? Who-oo-oo-oop!"

Koma, whose song had an entrancing gypsy note, was so much the wilder of the two that Taka seemed comparatively tame. Koma's terror of human monsters was unconquerable, and his panics, whenever one of us neared the cage, soon destroyed the frail confidence that our long patience had been building up in Taka. Presently we had two out-and-out rebels on our hands, and even Dame Gentle, who "had a way" with birds, could not cajole them into a League of Lovers.

When the cage door was opened for putting in or taking out the small glass bathtub, it was a ticklish matter to prevent their escape, for they could dart like mice through the least crack and, sly atoms of conspiracy, were always on the lookout for a chance. Warned by bitter experience, we saw to it that the windows were closed before that perilous task was undertaken, but too often a victorious squeal from Koma would announce his exit, and Taka, hopping in sympathetic exultation from perch to perch, would urge him on with ancient Japanese war-cries while he soared from mantel to chandelier, vanished in the folds of a portiere or flashed from fern to rubber-plant. If he succeeded in reaching the entry, he would prolong the game by hiding in overshoes and umbrellas, while Taka, now that Koma was away, would at once set up his pleading, poignant call and never cease until the truant, snapping his pink bill and kicking fiercely with scratchy little claws, was thrust back into the cage. Much as Taka might play the tyrant, he could not bear having Koma out of his sight and reach. Once, after an especially savage duel in which Koma had been badly trampled and pecked, we put the wounded hero into a cage of his own and hung it in the adjoining room. Forthwith both those scamplings raised such a prodigious outcry and lament, taking on as if their naughty specks of hearts were broken, that we brought back Koma's cage and hung it in the window beside Taka's. But even so they scolded and protested and, as the shadows fell, established themselves each on the extreme end of a perch, as near one another as they could get, but with the cruel wires and a few inches of space between them. Still they fumed and fretted until we returned Koma, mauled as he was, to Taka's cage, when instantly they nestled their plumy sides close together and blissfully went to sleep.

Yet we kept both cages in use, separating our tiny incorrigibles when their battles waxed dangerous. They loved to talk them all over afterwards, gabbling like schoolboys, but if one of us chanced to approach the window--"Sshh! Don't tell the ogre," and in an instant they were dumb as toy idols. When we had time, we would occasionally, after taking all due precautions, throw wide their cage doors and invite them to enjoy the freedom of the room; but liberty so given they despised. Only stolen fruit is sweet. After much deliberation and consultation, they would stealthily steal out and skurry about the floor like rats for a while, hunting for bugs and worms. When it became evident that our rugs did not furnish such refreshment, they would cuddle up together in Taka's cage and spoon. Koma would tuck his shining wee head down on Taka's shoulder, and Taka would gently peck him all over from the tip of his bill to his claws. Then, more often than not, they would bristle and square for the fun of a fight. At this point we would try to catch Koma and put him back into his own safe cage, but even when his little coxcomb was so bloody that I had to wash it off under the faucet, he was the top of ingratitude, gasping and clattering with fury. All the while Taka, who had cut that poor pate open, would be trilling abuse. A pugnacious pair of fairy Japanese pirates they were!

We kept those midgets, a daily trouble and amusement, through the winter. They sang like angels when it pleased them and in the intervals conversed exclusively with each other in a harsh, metallic chatter that filled the house. But one sad June morning we found Taka in the bottom of the cage, on his back, the uplifted claws pathetically curled, the wee body stiff and cold.

"The bird is dead
That we have made so much on."

Koma knew what had happened and bewailed his loss in such a shrill, incessant keening that when, a few days later, an east wind gave him a swiftly fatal chill, we could only be glad to have that pitiful piping hushed.

Little aliens! We had never known them.

[The end]
Katharine Lee Bates's short story: Taka And Koma

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