off. So he clung there, trying to move as little as possible and praying that the branch didn’t snap off altogether. The wind picked up and shook the whole plant. Jasper wanted to cry.
Mama was cawing something at him from the nest (easy for her to caw from all the way up there where it was warm and safe and there wasn’t a cliff and rocks and ocean below her). Pop flew down from an adjoining palm and hovered a few feet above him. He cawed, Jasper, Jasper, Jasper! (Crows tend to repeat themselves when they’re excited.) What are you doing, boy? Spread your wings! Trust your instincts! Come on, son, let’s go! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!
It wasn’t exactly a heartfelt pep caw. Jasper could hear the frustration, maybe even disappointment, in his father’s voice. It made him feel worse. If even Pop, the crow who believed anything was possible, didn’t have faith in him, what did that say about his chances of getting out of this fix alive?
He cawed back, humiliated at how terrified he knew he sounded, I can’t! Look at this branch! It’ll snap off if I even take a deep breath! Help, help, help!
His father didn’t answer but circled twice and then flew back up to his observation post. Great, thought Jasper, his heart sinking further, they’re gonna sit up there and watch me die. Or worse, watch me make a fool of myself and then die. Instincts, my tail feathers. I don’t need instincts, I need the nest and a good meal. I need a nap.
At the thought of sleep and the nest he relaxed, kind of. He realized he was more exhausted than he’d ever been in his entire life. His terror ebbed into the fatigue and he saw a warm yellow light in his mind’s eye. That was it, he would just take a little nap here on the branch. He would take a nap and when he woke up maybe Pop would have carried him up to the nest and put a little lint over him like he liked. He knew some parents gave their kids a few chances to learn to fly. As Jasper drifted toward the yellow light he was certain of it. Pop would rescue him.
Pop was cawing at him again, more urgently, but Jasper didn’t hear what his father was saying. Mama joined in and she sounded even more upset. But Jasper was slipping closer to that warm yellow light, which he realized looked like the nest. Oh, the nest! Maybe his sisters and brothers would come back. He’d rest a day or two, tucked in the warm down of his siblings. When he was ready they’d help teach him to fly. There’d be no shove out of the nest, no hurtling earthward, no clinging to a yucca branch in gusty wind over a cliff of death. He loved his brothers and sisters, and they loved him and would care for him. Jasper felt warmer and warmer even as his parents cawed like mad and the wind blew harder.
For the rest of their moons, Maynard and Martha Wolfskill swore they didn’t see the cat until the last second. It was black and it had spent the minutes Jasper clung to the branch slinking through the undergrowth. Slowly, with feline patience, she moved within striking distance at the precise moment when Jasper succumbed to his trance.
Mama saw the cat an instant too late. She dove out of the tree as the beast leaped from the bush and took a vicious swipe at her son. She cawed louder than she’d ever cawed, and dove straight for the black back caring nothing for her own safety. Her instinct to protect her son took over her mind and her body. She wanted blood. An instant later Maynard was right behind her.
Jasper never saw the cat. He didn’t hear Mama and Pop screaming at it like screech owls. The cat’s razor-sharp claws sliced the air and missed his tail feathers by a quill’s width. They sliced his branch and sent him plummeting down the cliff to the rocks and the surf.
He never saw the cat, but he would remember every nanosecond of the fall the rest of his life. At first it felt unreal, and he didn’t actually believe that he was watching the yucca tree and the ledge streaking away from him or that the branch to which he’d clung was suddenly level with his head. He felt like he was tumbling very, very slowly, until he was falling beak first. He was perplexed for another endless moment. The ocean was racing toward him at mortal speed. That wasn’t right, was it? He caught a whiff of sage in his nostril, and it tickled his eyes. He thought, I didn’t know death smelled like sage.
As the rocks rushed toward him, he felt something. At first it was just the sense of a sensation. Between him and the cliffs and rocks was a sort of cushion of air. It felt almost like the bottom of the nest, and at the thought of the nest he flashed to a memory of wrestling with his brothers and sisters, falling over and over in the downy bed. Then he felt it under his belly for sure, a slight difference in pressure caused by him moving through it and by the proximity of the rocks that threatened to crush his fragile body. Mama would later explain something called ground effect.
He saw the warm yellow light again. Only now the color was deeper, nearly gold, and it wasn’t in his mind but all around him in the air. It enveloped him and hugged him and he felt safe. Safer than in his egg, safer than in the nest, safer even than in Mama’s wings. As the rocks rushed toward him he reached for the golden light to see what it felt like and what it was made of. He stretched out his wings as far as he could as if he was reaching for a great and perhaps final secret in the instant before his demise.
And he was flying. The sea rocks and sea foam and water rushed at him but the light was above it and around it. He reached for the light again and executed a perfect snap roll around the closest rock, missing it by a barb. Now the golden light lay above the surface of the water like mist and he reached for it there. His snap roll resolved into straight-and-level flight a few feet above the whitecaps.
From somewhere behind him he heard Pop cawing like a bird possessed. Jasper realized he was losing altitude. Pop cawed again and Jasper forced himself to take his eyes off the transfixing light and look over his shoulder. Above him the light was bands of gold and pale purple, and his father was racing toward him flapping almost as fast as a hummingbird.
Jasper looked back at the ocean surface. The light above it had changed into the same sort of gold and purple, the colors woven like a palm frond. He tried to touch a purple band but missed it. He tried and missed again. He kept trying and kept missing, and a funny thing happened. He was flapping his wings. He was no longer losing altitude and heading for the water. He was climbing.
When he’d flapped a few more times, the purple faded and then almost vanished and he was once more bathed in gold. He stopped flapping as an updraft from the cliff caught his wings and his belly. He was maybe 200 feet above the water now, gliding in a slow figure eight as the current ebbed and flowed.
Pop and Mama caught up with him. Pop was as pale as a mourning dove and Mama’s eyes were as wide as a puffin’s.
Mama reached him first. Jasper, Jasper, Jasper, Jasper! Son, we thought we’d lost you! Lost you, lost you, lost you!
Jasper had already forgotten the terror of clinging to the yucca branch. He’d forgotten the nauseating fall from the nest and Mama nudging him out. In fact, he was forgetting more with each flap. He reached for a pale purple band and looped over Mama. Aw, Mama. Don’t make a big deal. It was just a dive. You guys do it all the time.
Pop leveled off next to them. His color had returned and there was a huge grin in his blue eyes. He didn’t say anything at first, but just looked at his son. Then he started laughing. As he laughed the gold and purple around him gave way to a deep orange light and Pop was hovering. Caaaaw, caw, caw, caw, caw! Didja see that, Martha! First time Jasp flies and he rides the ’cane! A danged snap roll against a cliff! Takes most crows moons to learn that kind of maneuver! Caw, caw, caw, caw, caw! Jasper, boy, you’re a natural! Our boy’s a real Old Bill!
Mama started laughing too as Pop flipped onto his back in midair and grabbed his belly with his wings, cackling uncontrollably. He dropped down and away from them, then caught himself and climbed back up, still choking back giggles.
Jasper saw tears of laughter in his
