![]() There are others of her kind all over the icy rocks and circling the air, but they’re quick to avoid me. Wind screams, biting at my cheeks and nose. I approach slowly, reluctant to scare her. The world around her has changed just a little, or a lot. But she knows somehow that she is no longer free. Her wing clips the hair-thin wire and the basket closes gently over her. It’s only luck that I’m watching when it happens. Once, it was birds who gave birth to a fiercer me. Or maybe I was just hoping the bird’s final migration would show me a place to belong. Maybe I thought I’d discover whatever cruel thing drove me to leave people and places and everything, always. Maybe I was hoping it would lead me to where they’d all fled, all those of its kind, all the creatures we thought we’d killed. Once, when the animals were going, really and truly and not just in warnings of dark futures but now, right now, in mass extinctions we could see and feel, I decided to follow a bird over an ocean. ![]() We stayed a time with them, and for those few dark hours we were able to pretend we were the same, as wild and free. I knew only that they were fierce in their night caves and bold as they dove through moonlit waters. ![]() ![]() The night he took me there, I didn’t know they were some of the last of their kind. ![]() Once, my husband found a colony of storm petrels on the rocky coast of the untamed Atlantic. ![]()
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