Firefly Hour

 

    My trek was a lonely one, weighed down by grief and a sort of hopelessness that can only come from losing everything... everyone... I had no place to call home. Even my memories of the place that had once been my home were tainted by the image of that charred half a face and those dead shells of houses. I had to restrain my mind from wandering to much, as it always seemed to wind its way to an image of my young nephew, my brilliant apprentice, laying as burnt and blackened as the corpse in the village square. I could see his violet eyes, cloudy with smoke, staring lifelessly out at me from a flame-eaten face in the eye of my mind, as clearly as if I had actually seen it. It sent shivers down my spine and convulsions to my stomach, and every time I shook it from my mind, it only seemed to creep back.

    The hopeless feeling seemed to eat away at me until I no longer cared about finding a new home, a place to stay. My life became a drone, and endless, hypnotic cycle of walking and sleeping that went on for weeks. I could barely find the energy to find myself food, and as the weeks progressed, I grew thinner and thinner until I was hardly more than a skeleton myself.

 

    Then, as if by some miracle from the heavens, I found Scout. I was barely dragging my feet along through the unwieldy savanna grasses when I caught the stench of death, heavy in the humid, midday air. My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach. A nauseating feeling washed over me, yet I somehow found myself scanning the area for the source of the scent, breathing hard through my mouth to keep my nerves calmed.

    It wasn't long before I spotted what I was looking for. There, on a bare patch of ground not to far ahead, lay the limp form of a bird. her feathers had the flat, dismantled, almost soggy look of death, and flies were already starting to gather around the poor creature. I felt a twitch in my abdomen, but somehow I couldn't pry my eyes away. I peered sidelong at the sorry scene, as if trying to hide my sickening fascination, though no one was watching.

    My fixation was not such a bad thing, though, because after a moment that seemed like it must have been an eternity, I began to detect something in the tiny, death-laden body. At first, I presumed all I had sensed were the flies that were working hard at ravaging the unfortunate creature, but as I listened closer, looked harder, I realized it was breathing I had noticed! My heart gave a flutter and I started forward in a blind dash, adrenaline forcing my disgust back into the shadows of my mind.

    I quickly batted away the flies. Their maggots were the last thing this poor bird needed. Crouching down, I began to dig through her feathers to locate a wound. There was no bleeding, which was a good sign I hoped. The issue seemed to be in her left wing, which was badly broken. I suspected she’d been in a fight with an egg-eating predator trying to raid her nest, by the looks of things. I dug some emergency herbs out of my cloak and began to mash them up to shove into the injured bird’s beak, coaxing her softly more to reassure myself than her. Later, I would run out and gather some additional herbs to speed healing and stop any internal bleeding or maggots in her that I wasn’t able to see, but for the time being, I needed to get that wing bandaged and get her out of the sun before she died of heat exhaustion, which seemed to be her real crisis right then.

    The bird was a female nightjar, almost the same size as me, but her hollow skeleton made her considerably lighter. After I had made a sloppy, makeshift bandage out of sturdy savanna grasses to keep her wing bound safely to her side, I began to drag her (for there was no chance I could possibly carry her) as gently as I could until we reached a miniature rock overhang, which I tucked my patient under to shield her from sun and predators while I went out to gather more herbs and a less makeshift bandage.

 

    When I returned, the bird was adamantly trying to remove the bindings from her own wing. She probably would have succeeded, had she not still been weak from her earlier condition. She still had a rather mangled appearance, but obviously the shade from the sun and the herbal boosts I had given her were doing their trick. She no longer bore any resemblance to the corpse I had earlier mistaken her to be. I couldn’t help but smile to myself as I gently restrained my recovering patient and reinforced her bandages with some strong reed leaves I had gathered from a nearby watering hole, creating a sling for her wing that couldn’t be removed so easily. She protested a bit at first, a healthy sign, but eventually calmed down upon realizing I was only attempting to help her (although the glare in her beady black eye indicated she wasn’t pleased with my methods). Finally, I finished properly binding her wing and offered her a second batch of herbs before slumping down against the wall of the overhang, tired but oddly exhilarated by the day’s events thus far.

    I was wondering to myself what I might name my avian friend, seeing as I suspected she would remain in my care for a while to come with an injury like that, when with a swift motion, her head swooped down and gulped a cricket off the ground, whole and unmaimed. It was the most graceful kill I had ever seen. There was no pain, no gore, no hassle at all, just a simple gulp with that massive beak. She must have been rather hungry, after lying out there in the sun for so long. Usually nightjars ate on the wing, but she wouldn’t be doing that for a while. I could tell just by looking at her that this fact annoyed her, as she snatched up another cricket from the ground before her, perhaps a bit more forcefully than was really needed, but still gracefully nonetheless. She had quite a way of sensing for little things, I noticed, even in the daylight, which her nocturnal eyes were hardly accustomed to. I smiled and murmured, mostly to myself, “I think I’ll name you Scout.”

    The bird turned her head in my direction, questioning me with her coal-colored eyes. I couldn’t help but chuckle, “I said, ‘I think I’ll name you Scout.’ How does that sound? Would you like me to call you Scout?”

    She made the slightest chirring noise, indicating that she didn’t mind that, and then went back to her game of scouting out any crickets that passed through, just as her name suggested. I sighed happily. I would miss this bird when she recovered and left. Something about her presence assuaged not only my loneliness, but also the worthless feeling that had weighed down upon me since I had lost my village. I no longer lacked a reason to be here, wandering about the savanna.

    For the first time in weeks, my stomach wrenched with the hunger that I had apathetically disregarded for days. It was time for me to get some food, too. I stood up and walked out into the sunlight, promising Scout I’d return quickly, and meandered my way back to the watering hole to get a drink and scrounge up some edible water plants. Unlike my new charge, I wasn’t blessed with such a graceful killing technique, so I had long since resolved to refrain from eating meat. Once I had gathered a nice sized root and filled my canteen with water, I returned to eat my meal under the overhang with Scout, watching her fondly as I ate. The little nightjar wasn’t the only one feeling more refreshed by the end of that day.