you to New York, is that it? And what do you suppose we’ll live on then—your coins from busking in subway stations? Or did I miss it when they called from the Metropolitan Opera to offer you a role?”
What was to stop him? he thought as he stared at the brazen girl next to Cora. Then he glanced at the one sitting on the brazen girl’s other side. Long blond hair falling into her eyes and boiled-wool sweater slipping from her shoulder: bohemian clothes, but they didn’t seem to fit her somehow. She was decidedly not looking at him but at an open notebook in front of her. From time to time she raised her eyes, carelessly brushing strands of her hair out of her way, and looked pointedly at the stuffed and mounted great horned owl he had placed on the desk in front of him. She was drawing it, and even from this distance he could see that the likeness was strong.
She saw him watching her then, and momentarily returned his gaze. Her own look was inscrutable. She was pretty, but there was something pained in her expression that might have prevented most people from noticing. She blinked once and returned to her drawing.
Not since his days as a teaching assistant had he felt flustered and distracted at the front of a classroom. For years now he’d felt completely at home standing before a room full of students—as confident in the work he did there as when he was in the field. But for just that moment, when she blinked as if he were distracting her from something much more urgent, she had unnerved him somehow. He looked down at his notes and gathered his thoughts; then he turned and wrote two things on the chalkboard:
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. (Ernst Haeckel)
and
Sluggards! Spread the wings of your mind to the sky, and rise from the earth.
Strive not to catch but to become birds! (Petrarch)
“Here,” he said when he had returned the chalk to the tray and turned to face the class, carefully avoiding the occasional gaze of the girl in the front and to his left, “are the two poles between which this class will string its tenuous wire. I am an ornithologist, and also a musician, and a lover of poetry. No study of these illustrious creatures called ‘the birds,’” and here, as always, he began pacing the room, warming up, gathering momentum, “these marvelous creatures with their hollow bones . . . did you know their bones are hollow?” He had deliberately walked to the right side of the room, pausing there in front of the desk of a nonmajor, who stopped scribbling notes long enough to shake her head.
“It’s true! Hollow bones. Imagine what this means. Strength and lightness. Flight and surety. They hover too magnificently between the practical and the whimsical, the rational and the exquisitely nonsensical, for any student of their physiology and habitat and history to dare to linger too long at either pole, the strictly ‘scientific’ or the purely ‘poetic.’
“And further,” he went on, walking back to the chalkboard and pointing, “though Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation is largely discredited now, evolutionary theory, my friends, decidedly is not, as our objects of study, of close observation, even, yes, of our desire,” and he risked a fleeting glance at the two girls next to Cora Davis, sensing somehow that this last claim would reach both of them, “as these fascinating creatures make abundantly clear.” Here he paused, as he always did at this point in introducing the course, suddenly standing still and lowering his voice. Pens and pencils stopped, as they always did, and waiting eyes all turned to him.
“Understand this,” he said then, in a near-whisper; he would not disappoint them in their eagerness for the drama of this moment. “If you harbor any childish and ill-founded notions, which, one would hope, you surely will not, after even one year of a college education, about the ‘evils’ of the study of evolution, you do not belong in this class. Such an attitude will be a terrible detriment to you here. Every bit as problematic as an inability to rise at dawn to join the birds in their morning rousing and singing.”
He paused then, trembling, as he always was by now. Even now, even ten years after leaving Ireland in 1955, in love with the music and the countryside but sore with the strain of suppressing his excitement over all he had learned—about the natural world, about the lives of the creatures he had watched, listened to, and cherished since his lonely childhood—even now he felt it. A tremendous rush of excitement, and maybe a trace of fear, when he laid it before his students so boldly: “The world is more ancient than a strict reading of the book of Genesis will allow; there is undeniable proof of this. Birds are, in all likelihood, evolved from prehistoric creatures, some of which did not even fly. They are soaring, melodic evidence, undeniable, all around us, impossible to ignore, of natural selection. Please take note: I embrace the music and poetry they inspire, but I will quell the slightest effort to twist their near-mystical beauty into religious dogma.”
The power to proclaim this, to insist upon it, after his silent youth, after years of quietly absorbing the church’s denial of all that his senses made clear to him, always, always, left him nearly giddy.
Having made his point, he returned to the podium and his lecture notes, to tease out the subtler points of the theory of recapitulation. All eyes were on him, he knew, all pens and pencils poised. All except those of the blond girl, who had continued with her drawing all this time. He plunged ahead with his notes as the pencils began their frantic scribbling.
He resisted the urge to laugh at this desperate note-taking, as if there were some way in which he might test them on the kind of knowledge he was trying to impart. As if he planned to give them any sort of exam. As if their performance in this course would ever be evaluated on any grounds other than the quality of their attention in the field, and the seriousness and probity of their field notebooks.
Then, to shift from the drier, if crucial, background from Haeckel and Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace and to give them more to copy maniacally (and absurdly), he read them one of his favorite quotations, from the poet John Clare:
For my part I love to look on nature with a poetic feeling, which magnifies the pleasure. I love to see the Nightingale in its hazel retreat, and the Cuckoo hiding in its solitude of oaken foliage, and not to examine their carcasses in glass cases. Yet naturalists and botanists seem to have no taste for this poetic feeling.
“Now. Take a good long look at this ‘carcass,’” he went on, turning to the desk to lift the stuffed owl aloft, then setting it back down with a dramatic thud, “removed, for the moment, from its ‘glass case.’ This is a great horned owl, male, killed and stuffed right here in the valley of the Delaware River forty years ago, by none other than my predecessor at Burnham College.
“Take careful note, now. Record everything you see that might help you recognize this bird in the future.” As always, the majors began writing immediately, while the nonmajors stared helplessly for a full minute or more before beginning to write some tentative notes.
All except the blond girl, “the artist,” as he thought of her now, who sat quietly, her hands in her lap, staring at the stuffed owl, occasionally glancing at her drawing and making some small adjustment. Her bold friend, sitting next to her, pointed to her drawing and whispered something, to which the artist responded with a nod, then made some adjustment. The look on her face when she glanced up at the owl was completely unreadable to him. It was not, as far as he could tell, the absorption of someone who was studying a specimen carefully; it was something else, and though he couldn’t quite place it, he began to believe it might be something like contempt. Not for him, not for the poor bird, but more for this exercise he had assigned the class.
It astonished him that he recognized that look on her face. Contempt for the practice of closely observing something that had been killed and stuffed was precisely what he felt. But in all his years of teaching, no student had ever failed to register surprise at what he did next. To audible groans from those who had only begun to notice some feature of the great horned owl that they might record in their notes, he grasped the owl at its base and returned it to the black case in which he’d carried it into the room.
“And that,” he announced, “is the last time you will look at a stuffed carcass, in or out of a glass case, in my class.” He glanced at the artist again, searching for even the smallest smile of