PART 2
“Ma’am, I don’t think—”
I was already running.
The deputy followed me. So did two search-and-rescue volunteers with flashlights.
Edgar flew from post to post ahead of us. Every time we got close, he flew to the next one. Every time, he looked back. Every time, he called.
He led us along the canal path, past the spot where the searchers had already looked. Down a steep embankment, into a gully thick with brush that nobody had searched, because it was outside the walking trails.
At the bottom of the gully, there was a big concrete drainage pipe. A culvert. Taller than a child, running under the road.
Edgar landed on top of it.
He cawed and cawed and wouldn’t stop.
I knelt down at the opening and shined my phone’s flashlight inside.
“Birdie? BIRDIE!”
From somewhere deep inside the pipe, a tiny voice.
“Mommy?”
Water was running along the bottom of the culvert. The rain was making it rise.
One of the rescue volunteers, a young man named Arlen, got down on his stomach and crawled into the pipe with a flashlight in his teeth.
Two minutes later, he backed out holding my daughter.
She was soaked and shivering, covered in mud, missing one shoe. Her lips were blue. But she was alive.
She’d followed a kitten through the back gate, she told us later. It ran into the gully and into the pipe. She crawled in after it to “rescue” it. Then she got scared and lost in the dark. She’d been sitting on a ledge of dry concrete inside, crying, for three hours.
“I heard everyone yelling,” she said. “But I was too scared to yell back. Edgar kept flying to the end of the pipe. He was talking to me.”
“He took your butterfly clip,” I said.
“It fell off when I was crawling,” she said. “He picked it up. I thought he was stealing it.”
He wasn’t stealing it.
He was bringing it home.
The paramedics treated Birdie for mild hypothermia. She spent one night in the hospital and came home with a stuffed crow from the gift shop.
The deputy who’d thought I was losing my mind came to our house the next day.
“Twenty-two years on the job,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like that. That bird found her when our dogs couldn’t.”
The local news ran the story. Then a national news channel. Then a wildlife scientist from the university called me. She said crows can recognize individual human faces and remember people who are kind to them for years.
“Your crow knew your daughter,” she said. “And he knew you.”
Mr. Dennison came to my front door that week.
He had his hat in his hands.
“I owe you an apology,” he said. “And I’m canceling the fine.”
Then he held out a small paper bag.
Unsalted peanuts.
“For the bird,” he said. “From me.”
At the next HOA meeting, the board voted to install a locked grate over the culvert. They also voted to change one rule. Feeding wild birds is now allowed.
Edgar still comes every morning.
Birdie leaves the peanuts herself now. She talks to him while he eats.
Last week, he left one more gift on the porch railing.
A tiny pink plastic butterfly wing. The piece that had broken off her hair clip in the pipe.
Birdie put it in her jar, next to the bottle cap and the button and the earring.
“Now it’s complete,” she said.
THE END.
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Kindness to the smallest creatures has a way of coming back to us. Sometimes on black wings.
Have you ever had an animal remember a kindness? Tell us in the replies.
