The Fastest Bird in the Meadow
Everybody in the meadow knew Pip, because Pip was the fastest thing in it that had feathers. He could beat a rabbit over open grass. He could out-corner a squirrel round the roots of the old oak. He ran with his wings half-open and his feet a brown blur, and when he won — which was almost always — he threw himself down in the clover and laughed.
He had an answer ready when the young rabbits asked why he never did.
“Flying? Flying is for show-offs. Up there it’s all wind and waiting. Down here is where the racing is.”
And he was so quick and so funny about it that nobody argued. His best friend was a young rabbit called Tansy, who was nearly as fast as Pip and twice as bold. All summer the two of them tore around the meadow from morning till the swifts came out, and if you had asked Tansy, she would have told you Pip was simply a bird who had chosen the ground, and good for him. If you had watched a little closer, though, you might have noticed some things.
The Things Pip Did Not Do
Pip never perched up high. When the others lined the fence rail or the low oak branches, Pip stayed on the gatepost, no higher than a rabbit’s ears, and called his jokes up to them from there.
When the meadow birds rose all together at dusk — that lovely sudden rush, wings everywhere, the whole flock pouring up into the pink sky — Pip went quiet. He would watch them climb and turn, and for a moment his funny face was not funny at all.
Then someone would land, and he would have a joke ready, and the moment would be gone. And when the wind came hard through the grass and bent the tops all one way, Pip flinched. Just a little. Just a flicker, low down where it lived.
Nobody put these things together, because Pip was always laughing, and a laughing bird is hard to worry about. So no one ever asked the one question Pip never asked himself either: not whether he liked the ground best, but why he never, ever left it.
The Rain
The clouds had been building all afternoon, dark and low, and at last the rain came — not soft rain, but the hard kind that drums the leaves flat and turns the little stream into something else entirely. By the time it eased, the stream was high and brown and fast, twice its summer size, roaring between its banks. And out in the middle of it, on the big flat stone where the children of the meadow liked to dare each other in dry weather, sat Tansy. She had gone for a windfall apple that had rolled there before the rain.
Now the water was up over the stepping stones, racing and cold, and the flat stone she crouched on was smaller than it had been an hour ago, and getting smaller. She called across the roar, trying to sound brave, “Pip! Pip, I can’t get back! The stones are gone!”
The meadow animals gathered on the bank. The rabbits could not swim that water. Nor could the squirrels reach across it. They ran up and down, helpless, and the water rose, and Tansy’s stone shrank under her.
There was only one creature in the whole meadow who could cross deep water without a bridge.
The Longest Moment
Pip stood at the very edge of the bank, and a memory he had kept down his whole life rose up all at once. He had been very small — his first morning off the edge of the nest, wings spread wide, the green world tilting bright below him.
Then the sky went black between one wingbeat and the next. The storm caught him like a leaf and flung him up and over and sideways, the wind everywhere, the ground nowhere, until it dropped him at last, soaked and shaking, into a bush far from home. He had walked home that day. He had not opened his wings since.
That was the secret under all the jokes. Pip could fly — he had always been able to fly. He had only been afraid of it, every single day, since the morning the sky threw him away. And here were the wind and the water again, waiting to drop him, and every part of him that had spent a whole life staying low said the same thing: stay down, stay safe, stay where nothing can throw you.
“Pip, please!”
Tansy’s voice was smaller now. He took a step back from the edge. He couldn’t. He wasn’t a flyer.
Everybody knew that. He had said it a hundred times himself. But the stone was nearly under, and there was no one else, and saying it a hundred times had never once been true. Pip looked at his friend, alone out there on the last of the stone.
And he found that being afraid and doing it anyway were, it turned out, allowed to happen at the very same time.
How Pip Flew
He opened his wings, and he jumped. The first try was terrible. He flapped too hard and all wrong, lurched up and sideways, and dropped — not into the water, but back onto the bank in a clumsy brown heap. The rabbits gasped. The fear shouted at him to stop now, while he still could, before the sky got him.
Pip got up. He was shaking all over, and he nearly turned around.
Then he opened his wings a second time, and this time he did not think about the storm. He thought about Tansy. He pushed off the wet grass, and beat his wings as they had always known how, even when he would not let them — and he was up, wobbling, low over the brown water, but UP, flying, out across the roaring stream. He half-landed, half-crashed onto the shrinking stone.
Tansy grabbed his feet. Pip puffed, “Hold on, and lean the way I lean.”
Then he opened his wings one more time, with his friend holding tight, and the two of them lifted off the stone just as the water swallowed it — wobbling, dipping, rising — and made it, all in a tumble, onto the safe green bank, where the whole meadow fell on them at once.
Both
Pip did not turn into a sky-bird after that. He did not spend his days up in the wind, looking down. He still raced the squirrels round the old oak, and still beat the rabbits over open grass, and still threw himself in the clover laughing when he won. The ground was his, and he loved it, the same as before.
But it was his now because he liked it — not because the sky frightened him. That was the whole difference, and it was the size of the whole sky. On clear evenings, when the meadow birds poured up into the pink in their lovely sudden rush, you could sometimes see one small brown bird go up with them. Not high.
Not far. Just for the joy of it, a few loops over the meadow, the wind in his feathers instead of his fear.
Then Pip would come down, and land light as anything on the gatepost, and have a joke ready for whoever had missed him. And Tansy, who never told a soul how the rescue had really gone, would say it for the both of them: that Pip was the fastest thing in the meadow that had feathers — on the ground, and now, when he felt like it, in the air.