Eventually, though, a strange calm came over him. He crouched on the branch, at the thin end of it, and looked upward, toward the sky, showing blue through the forest canopy. There were birds up there, circling casually on the wind. They had wings and they could fly. Saekrae had wings and she flew.
The black chick spread his own wings. They were big and wide, with long feathers. A few wisps of babyish down still clung to the vanes, but the strong feathers of adulthood had finished growing.
He beat them experimentally. They nearly unbalanced him, but he held on tightly and tried again. He could feel them catching the air and lifting him very slightly with each blow. Feeling a little more confident, he flapped them as hard as he could, faster and faster, trying to make them lift him off the branch and into the air. They didn’t, and the violent motion threatened to send him tumbling to his death.
He gave up—tired, hungry and frustrated—and ripped strips of bark off the branch, growling to himself.
He calmed down eventually and sat still, thinking. How does his mother do it? She didn’t just beat her wings to fly. She jumped. He remembered that now. He’d seen her do it dozens of times, but never really thought about it.
He looked upward again. If he could fly, he could get back to the nest and then Saekrae would come and bring him food. He turned to look toward the end of the branch. Suddenly, it didn’t look so daunting. Without another thought or a moment to prepare himself, he braced all four legs on his perch, spread his wings wide, and charged. He ran as fast as he could, claws scattering bits of bark, holding his wings and tail out rigidly as he had seen Saekrae do, and staring straight ahead. As the branch became thinner, it started to bend. He could feel it threatening to break, and for an instant he panicked. Then he jumped.
The branch acted as a springboard, and the black chick launched himself into space. His wings caught the air and held him up, and he went into a clumsy glide. When he realised he was flying, he panicked and began to beat his wings wildly, terrified that he was about to fall. He didn’t, but not knowing how to steer with his tail, he lurched crazily around in the sky, unable to go in any particular direction or at any particular height. His wings, still too weak and uncoordinated for true flight, started to falter. He managed to stay up for a while, but his wings finally gave out and he careened toward the ground. It wasn’t an outright fall—his wings stayed open and acted as a kind of crude parachute—but he didn’t have the strength to pull up again. He screeched, flailing at the air, and then he hit the branches of the tree below him.
Leaves and twigs smacked into him from all sides, lashing at him like whips. He had a confused vision of leaves and sky and brown bark before something hit him hard in the head and lights exploded in front of his eyes.
He did not remember hitting the ground.
The sun was high overhead and it was hot and wet among the trees when the black chick woke up. He lifted his head dazedly, thinking he was still in the nest, and stilled when he realised he was not.
He was lying in a crumpled heap on a patch of muddy ground softened with moss. One foreleg was twisted beneath him, and his head hurt. He struggled to get up; the world seemed to be spinning around him and he cheeped pathetically. But despite the pain in his head and sides and the deep scratch in his foreleg, he was all right. His legs and wings were sound, and he hadn’t broken any feathers.
He tottered off over the forest floor, caught up in a sudden need to explore this strange new world. The light was dim and greenish beneath the trees, and the air was full of the scent of leaf mould and damp earth. The trees and rocks were festooned with moss and lichen, and everywhere insects chirped. The black chick wandered here and there, discovering things he had never seen or imagined before, his fear forgotten.
He came across a stream, shallow and perfectly clear, flowing among heaps of moss-green boulders. He stopped to drink from it, throwing his head back to swallow, and