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Show 63 birds loved it. She called it her "pudding." And it would not scatter, she knew. It would not blow about in 'the now gusting wind. It would not whip to the ground, bury itself under snow, mix with mud, ask the birds to foul themselves in its pursuit. Leah would form it in balls, "sweet ephemerals:" she remembered her bit of Emerson. And then she would wrap the balls in the cloth mesh cut from onion bags, lash the mesh shut with twine, then hang the sacks in the pines, oak and birches. Leah talked to the birds through the window: "It's coming." She watched the white pine especially begin to shudder in the still-irregular but severe wind. What she supposed was down, a kind of fluff thickening the birds feathers, seemed to visibly thicken and the birds marked their time, waiting for her. But it gave Leah a reason. It allowed her, for a while, to forget Hunt and the helplessness he had seeded in her; the shapeless, sinister guilt, her sense of failure. The birds were real. The weather was real. Their hunger was real. Her rich, fat balls of feed were real. Leah knew about birds. She knew, yes, a considerable deal about their courage. And how they could endure. And she knew, when she fed them . . . she knew their gratitude. It was not a thing burried in their mind. It was there, outside: in sound, in flight, in motion. Leah tied the last mesh bag tight shut with twine, cut the twine at a two foot length, placed the five seedballs that she'd made into, again, her blue dish tub, and headed to the door. "They're here. They're here," she said. And she swore, from the sounds of the birds' pleased agitation, that they heard her. Outside, the wind had become dark and cruel. There was no longer sun, anywhere, and the wind came like hatred, in bursts and explosions. The still |