Gizzard

My uncle showed me a casting from one of his hawks. I asked if it was the same as a pellet, and he said it was, but with hawks you call it a casting. I knew what a pellet was because earlier that year a lady in khakis had come to my classroom and handed out owl pellets for us to dissect with tweezers. She told us about the gizzard and the crop and I asked if I had one. She laughed and said no, because I was a girl, not a bird. I asked my uncle if I had a gizzard. Maybe, he said. Would be a good place to keep all those old bones before you’re through with them. Could get poke-y, though.

That was my first summer with my uncle and his boys at the Bird Ranch. It wasn’t really called the Bird Ranch, there’s no such thing as a Bird Ranch, but at the time that’s all I could think to call it. I said it aloud once and my uncle’s boys laughed. Their names were Joshua and Jonah. My aunt had named them, since she was a proper Christian lady, but Joshua’s middle name was Harley, since she wouldn’t let my uncle have one. She would tolerate the birds, not the bikes.

Back then Joshua had a kestrel. It was a tiny little thing that fluttered miserably on his gloved hand. He always held the jesses too tight. I knew that the kangaroo leather straps around each bird’s legs were called jesses since I had first referred to them as “bird bracelets”, which got me in a lot of trouble with the boys since bracelets were for girls and hawking was for boys. I knew that the jesses were made from kangaroo leather because the first time I heard it I was alarmed that kangaroos could be leathered. But kangaroo leather isn’t made from kangaroos, and now I call jesses bird bracelets on purpose. Mostly when I’m around the boys. They don’t bother me about it anymore.

That summer my uncle showed Joshua how to toss a lure on a string. It was a fickle art, to snap it midair, to whip the string in a widening gyre, to drag it across the ground after a hit in a clumsy imitation of a wounded animal, the lure’s leather wings embedded with the feathers of some unfortunate sparrow. I wasn’t allowed to hold the kestrel, so I sat beside its perch. Together we watched the lure go up and down, up and down.

I know it’s not real, the kestrel said, but I’ll go after it anyways.

My uncle had lots of birds. Some were his, some weren’t. There was always a Harris’ hawk, a kestrel, one or two red-tails. Nothing quite as noble as a peregrine or an eagle, but that summer, he had a moon-faced barn owl he’d taken in for rehabilitation. One day I asked her how she liked her mews and her Astroturf throne. I asked her if she missed the trees.

In a past life, she told me, I looked a lot like you. I was taller, though.

I asked my uncle if I could hold her. He was surprised. Joshua and Jonah hadn’t asked before. She wasn’t like the others, hatched from heat lamps and revolving incubators, soothed with imping needles and antiacids. My uncle called her wily. She had a scream like all of hell was after her, and she told me that it was.

You can hold her, my uncle said, but first you must prepare her food.  

My uncle led me into the shed. Earlier that day I’d watched him carefully mend a snapped feather on one of the red-tails. He was pointed and slow as he chose a primary from the box of last year’s moult, dipping the imping needle through its hollow spine. Someday I would stand there alone, imping eagle feathers. That day I watched my uncle remove a defrosted Tupperware container from a cupboard. He popped off the lid and a wet, musty smell filled the shed, like the odour of a formerly beloved stuffed animal left in the rain to mould. He removed two corpses. Chicks, no bigger than my palm, Easter-yellow and limp.

Jonah leaned against the door. Joshua stood a few paces back, the kestrel in his gloved hand.

You don’t have to do this, the kestrel said. It’s gross.

You don’t have to if you don’t want to, my uncle echoed. It’s not pleasant.

I want to, I replied.

My uncle demonstrated. First you remove the head, that’s the hardest, so do it first. Then the legs – they should come off easily. Then you squeeze out the insides. The bodies are small, so there’s not much inside. He handed me a chick. It was cool and damp and its head lolled gently against my thumb. Jonah mimed vomiting. Joshua took a step back.

They don’t think you’re gonna do it, the kestrel said.

The head popped off like a cork. I felt light-headed. Ooze trickled between my thumb and forefinger.

Oh god, the kestrel said. Jesus, that’s gross.

But I did it, I said. And I’ll do it again and again. And I did it again and again.

The barn owl didn’t flap or scream. She held the decapitated chick in her talons, but she didn’t reach for a taste. I supposed it couldn’t compare to anything she’d butchered herself. We watched my uncle demonstrate the lure for Joshua. He wasn’t getting it right, but the kestrel went after it nonetheless. Back and forth, back and forth. The owl’s head bobbed, liquid black eyes staring through the lure and onward towards something I couldn’t see.

What was it like, I asked her, when you looked like me?

She turned her head two hundred and four degrees to look me in the eye. 

Different, she said. My gizzard was harder to empty then.