Chaska returned carrying an empty cage and a very strong opinion.
“There are thrushes in the alder strip. Real gray thrushes. We could bring one up here.”
“Could you?” Suth asked.
“Gevren has a spring cage.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
Chaska set the cage on the kitchen table more firmly than the table required. The bird in the sieve flinched. At once she moved the cage outside again.
Ysabet disliked the quick satisfaction she felt at seeing someone else corrected. She had spent the morning wanting to lift Pip whenever it stopped. Chaska had pointed out the smooth path beside the ruts, where the creature could walk perfectly well.
“Show us the strip,” she said.
They went without Pip. It had eaten, then folded around the mouse and gone to sleep beneath the kitchen bench. Gevren sat nearby with a basin of damp cloths and instructions to leave both sleepers alone. His frightened bird rested on the shelf above him. Ysabet checked the mouse had room to move before closing the door.
The alder strip lay beside a drainage ditch. Chaska led them downwind, stopping short of a fallen trunk. Beyond it gray birds moved among dark leaves. One lifted its head and sang three clear phrases.
“There,” Chaska whispered.
Suth nodded.
They listened through another phrase. It began low, rose, then ended in two close notes that Ysabet could barely distinguish. A second bird answered from farther away. The first flew after it. For a moment the leaves were full of movement.
“Migration,” Suth said.
“How do you know?”
“I have heard it in that situation before. Several times.”
Chaska flushed. “I know how to put two things together.”
“Yes. I meant that I might still be wrong.”
Ashaun crouched awkwardly, using her right hand against the trunk for balance. One bird had remained on a branch above them. Its tail moved with each breath.
“What would it sing in a cage?” she asked.
“Possibly nothing,” Suth said.
“And if it did?”
“Possibly a very detailed account of the cage.”
Chaska looked toward the orchard ridge. “I wasn’t going to keep it.”
“No,” Ysabet said. “But we need the sound it makes when it is going somewhere. That might be hard to persuade it to make while it isn’t.”
A cart rattled on the upper track. The bird’s head jerked. Its next call was short and sharp, unlike the earlier phrase. Other birds answered with the same harsh note. The leaves emptied.
Chaska shut her sketchbook. “All right.”
They stayed long enough for the birds to return. This time Chaska drew the trunk and the branches, marking the places where each call had come from. She tapped the rhythm against her knee. Ysabet found herself listening for the wrong part, the prettiest whistle instead of the final two notes. Suth corrected neither of them. She bent to look at tracks in the mud.
On the way back Chaska stopped at a broken irrigation gutter. Wind blew across its mouth, producing a low hoot. She turned a loose board and the note climbed.
Ashaun looked at her.
“A cage for the wind,” Chaska said. “Before anyone asks, it has an exit.”
At the house Gevren was asleep upright with a damp cloth in each hand. The bird had shifted onto its breast. Its bent wing rested lower than the other, but both feet were under it now.
Ysabet woke the keeper and sent him outside to eat. When she stooped for Pip, she found the creature awake. Its pouch lay open. The mouse was drinking from a shallow bottle lid near the bench, its bad hind leg extended behind it.
Pip clicked once. Ysabet touched the floor with her right fingertips. It approached, and the sensation that came across their bond was a narrowing, followed by a blunt pressure beneath her ribs.
She could not tell whether it was a question.
“We went to listen to birds,” she said.
Chaska whistled the beginning of the phrase. Pip turned both amber eyes toward her. She repeated it badly, laughed, and tried again. On the third attempt something in Pip’s loose folds fluttered.
Ysabet held up a hand. “Not yet. We haven’t even found out what you do with air.”
Chaska stopped. Pip continued staring.
That evening they carried the wind gutter up to the ridge. Gevren helped, partly because it was his gutter and partly because he could not endure another hour watching the sieve. They set it against two stones. The wind produced a wavering sound, louder and lower than the bird’s call.
Nothing happened in the orchard.
Chaska adjusted the board. The pitch changed. A moth rose from a branch and settled farther away. That was the whole result.
“Perhaps you need a priest after all,” Gevren said.
Ashaun, who had carried one end of the gutter against her stone forearm, set it down.
“Perhaps you need a longer gutter.”
Chaska grinned despite herself. They marked the angle before taking it apart. By the time they returned to the house, Ysabet knew which tools Gevren lacked, which hollow stakes remained in the quarry, and that the bird had eaten a softened grub without being persuaded.