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Steve Maslowski, Wikimedia
Background Music
She flew from perch to perch through a mile of forest. Every hundred trees or so, she paused, listened, and moved on. Even in the fallen-oak glade, close to her father's home, she couldn't find his voice. She suspected he wasn't making noise this morning.
Years ago, her mother had told her, "He was so quiet, I never noticed. But he watched. He knew about everything. He listened to the other males as they sang for me. One day I heard it. I heard the perfect song. It made me fly to him."
"What made it perfect?" she asked, knowing she had asked before. She never got the answer. Yet her mother was still talking about the song a generation later.
"When I swooped down, I noticed how his eyes shone. His feathers gave off a blue glow. And his voice. His voice was beyond compare."
Her mother always paused at that point. She had told her children the story many times and always hesitated, as if listening to the distant song again. The children knew their father was a quiet one. All the woodland thrush males calmed down after mating but their father didn't even announce his nest. He didn’t assert his territory, which meant he defended it more often.
He had clashed with other male thrushes in fierce fights, right in front of the nest. She had witnessed the blood and feathers as a fledgling. But he always won. In fact, he seemed one step ahead of his predators and competitors. Once, when she was older, she saw a young male swoop in on her father but stop when he opened his beak, as if paralyzed by his single note of warning. The young fellow had sized up her father from a safe spot on a branch. He flown away soon after.
Even so, that had happened many seasons ago. Now her mother was several seasons dead. Her father was the oldest male she knew. Most of the colony had moved eastward to avoid flocks of ravens that passed through. He had not bothered. The larger beasts, although they were known to sometimes be cruel to thrushes, seemed to leave him alone.
Finally, as she rested in the middle-height of one of the tallest trees in the forest, she heard a few notes. It was only a trill of greeting. She knew from the perfection of those notes, though, that it was him. She glanced above and found him perched on a branch in the border between sunlight and shadow. His chest was still blue, still vibrant. His eyes still shone. She felt amazed he was still alive.
He did not call to her again. Instead, he waited in silence as she approached.
"Why are you always so quiet?" she asked, as she often did. "It makes you hard to find."
"I am listening to music," he murmured. He turned his head and leaned downward as if to show her the direction. He seemed surprised she didn't hear what he did. She held still for a moment.
"No one is singing," she concluded. Insects buzzed, flapped, or hopped but she didn't hear even the caw of a raven.
"I am not listening to birds," he said. "I am listening to the plants."
She laughed with surprise. It made her wonder if he were going crazy, the way elderly folks did. She sat with him a while, mostly in silence. In her experience, this was how mornings went in his company. They listened to wind through the trees and buzzing from a few winged insects. Eventually, her father flew down to a lower branch to where a beetle had rustled a leaf. He ate the beetle.
His talons rested on the thickest base of the branch, where a vine grew. He tilted his head in her direction.
"Listen to the vine," he said. "It is tightening its grip."
"How can you hear that?" she laughed as she flew down next to him.
"Listen to the tree," he countered. "The sap is rising up strongly today."
That, she understood. When she was quiet, even when she was alone, she could hear life gurgling in the trees. She sensed the sap when it rose in the trunk. How could she not? It was practically under her feet. Then she remembered, most birds didn't seem to hear it. Her recent mate had not known. The blood of the trees climbed into the branches every morning in the spring, starting not long after sunrise. Most animals did not know, she guessed. They did not really listen to the trees.
When a raven landed on the tree opposite them, it took her by surprise. She bristled her feathers. She felt small and brown compared to the large predator, like a mouse. Her father ignored the danger.
The great bird regarded her with disdain, she saw. Most animals of such a size treated wood thrushes as annoyances or prey. A moment later, the raven gazed at her father and changed its stance. It stood straighter. It did not look at her father as a lesser being. Rather, it seemed to know her father and respect him.
This is why he had not moved when the other thrushes changed territories.
The raven turned away from her father to gaze down on the forest floor to the east. There, a treefall had created a glade where berries grew. Sometimes, they heard mice among the fallen leaves and brambles. The raven knew about them. Soon, it spotted one. The dark talons hopped once on the branch. Then the raven launched.
In a minute, the forest lay quiet again.
"Do you remember when my mother chose you?" she asked after a while.
"Oh, yes." His eyes twinkled. At the moment, he hardly seemed his age. The memory of her mother had taken him to an earlier time.
"I listened."
"But my mother was not singing."
"She was full of music. Always, I feel the songs of movement. From others, too, I feel them, but I liked the sounds of your mother very much. Liked her most of all. Every turn of her head, every twitch of her tail, struck in a rhythm. She moved with the world."
Without meaning to, she had persuaded her father to talk. She hadn't heard this much in a year.
"The others in the music, her suitors, the tree boughs, and the wind through the grass - they all led into this moment. The males had not taken the music of the world into account as they wooed. When I sang, I put my voice into the silences and pauses. When the world's music crested, I grew louder and harmonized with the forest, the small movements, the insects, the flowers, the trees. I sang to her with all those things alongside me."
"You feel music in the whole world?"
"Every living thing feels it." His body grew still. "But not everything listens. This morning I felt someone in the forest, coming this way. Soon, I knew from the change in the music, it was you."
They sat and waited for a while, as she listened to the distant forest. She was distracted by the movement of a leaf below her. She dropped down to its branch, found a leaf-cutter beetle gnawing on a stem, and she ate it.
Her father landed next to her. They listened to distant sounds.
"Someday you will not hear me sing anymore," he said. "But the rest of the music will still be here. The other animals, these trees, the beetles, the dragonflies beside the glade, they all know me. This place will echo with my presence, for a while, if you listen."
"Did they echo with my mother?" she wondered.
"There is still a place, high in the tallest fir, where a hive of bees knows her."
She remembered her mother's favorite perch. She strutted as she thought about it. A hive had started in a hollow branch there, years ago. Although it was high up, she could listen to it. She had no doubt that was how her father observed the hive. He wouldn't feel any need to disturb the place or dilute the echoes of her presence.
They sat into the heat of the day and listened to the hush of the breeze through the berry grove. In time, she heard bees far above. She listened some more. Finally, she felt a prickling in her right talons. It was a fleeting sense, a mere instant. She realized it had come from the vine nearby as it tightened into the bark.
She sighed, content. She knew someday she would no longer find her father by homing in on his perfect song. Someday he would no longer be a part of the forest. But she would still have this, the music of all things, and the echoes here of past souls.
