I Am Not Your Bird

I was running through the airport trying to catch a bird.

Sorry, a plane.

I was late. The screen already said FINAL CALL.

I caught the plane. A few minutes later, I was sitting beside the window, watching the airport move slowly past me: baggage carts, service vehicles, painted lines, lights, strips of grass between enormous pieces of concrete. The aircraft turned onto the runway and stopped.

Then the engines rose.

We began to move.

And there it was.

A bird. A real one this time. It was flying low beside the runway, almost parallel to us.

For a few seconds, we accelerated together.

The aircraft gathered speed. The bird did too.

Metal and feathers.

Engine and wings.

I watched it through the window and, without deciding to, turned those few seconds into a race. Could it keep up? The runway began to blur. The engines pushed harder. The bird beat its wings, still beside us. Then it banked away. We continued. The wheels left the ground.

And for one ridiculous instant I had the feeling that we had won.

Then something became obvious. There had never been a race. The bird had not lost. It had not even known that it was competing. It had been flying somewhere for reasons entirely its own. Perhaps toward food. Perhaps toward another bird. Perhaps back to a place it knew. Perhaps nowhere that would make sense on any map I carried.

I was the one who had made it a race.

The bird had simply been a bird.

And then the word I had used inside the airport came back to me.

Bird.

I had been trying to catch a bird. Perhaps my tongue had noticed something before I had.

And here is the detail I keep returning to. I could have told you the model of the aircraft I was sitting in. The airline. The engine maker, probably, if I thought about it for a moment. The bird — I could not even tell you what kind it was. I had names for almost everything about the machine, and no name for the living flier beside it.

That was when I began wondering about the others.

Not what we know about them. We know extraordinary things about animals. We film them, track them, classify them, protect them, breed them, study their brains and sequence their genes.

Something more basic.

Do we ever meet them before we decide what they are to us?

A cow becomes food.

A dog becomes companion.

A rat becomes pest.

A horse becomes transport.

A snake becomes evil.

A whale becomes spectacle, then symbol.

A wolf becomes the thing outside the fire.

And the bird?

Perhaps I had just done it myself. I had taken ten seconds of its life and made them a story about me.

So I decided that if I was going to write what came next, there was only one sensible thing to do.

Stop talking.

I looked once more through the window. We were climbing now. The runway had become a line below us, the buildings smaller, the roads beginning to resemble the map we had imposed upon the ground. The bird was gone.

Or perhaps I simply could no longer see it.

Either way, the microphone was no longer mine.

I Am Not Your Bird

I am not your bird. That may be the first thing you should know. I did not race you this morning. I did not know there was a race.

You were going somewhere. So was I.

The difference is that you needed a building, a gate, a ticket, a machine and a runway to leave the ground. I needed the air.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not mocking you. I do not spend much time thinking about you at all. You are the ones who have spent a very long time thinking about me.

You have painted me on walls, placed me beside your gods, attached my wings to creatures that never had them, carried my feathers on your heads, put me on flags, locked me in cages, listened to my voice and called it music. You even built machines in my shape.

And still, when you see me crossing the sky, you say that I am flying over your country. I have never understood that part. There is nothing up here. No line. I have looked.

You have many lines below. Roads. Walls. Fences. Fields. Borders. Some are visible. Some apparently exist even when nothing on the ground marks them at all. You seem to take those invisible ones particularly seriously.

I can leave one country in the morning and enter another before I become hungry. Nobody asks me my name. The wind does not change nationality. The sea does not stop halfway across and become somebody else’s.

From where I fly, your borders are among the strangest things you have invented. Not because they are unreal. I have seen what happens around some of them. Lights. Roads. Fences. Men watching other men. Machines in the sky that do not fly like birds. Your invisible lines can produce very visible things. But they are still yours.

My map is different. I know where I can rest. I know where there is water. I know places where food appears when the season turns. I know winds you cannot see. I know where I have returned before. Some of those places were known to my kind before the cities beneath them had names.

You know a great deal about my kind, and about the others. You have counted us, ringed us, filmed us, given us names in every one of your languages. But even when you study us, you are still standing where you stand. You have studied us carefully. I am not sure you have seen us.

I am leaving soon. It is the season. My route crosses seas and farmland, a village and its fires, cities, a narrow strait, the edge of a desert. I will pass over many of the others on the way — the ones you eat, the ones you love, the ones you fear, the ones you stopped seeing long ago.

Come with me. I will show you who else lives here.

— Karim

What you just read is an experiment — a preface, and a first voice. It begins a new series: The Other Inhabitants. Each chapter hands the microphone to one animal. It tells us who it is before us — how it lives, senses, remembers, returns — and then what happened when we entered its life: the names, the roles, the myths, the industries, the cages. No lessons. No pleading. These voices are not interested in being saved; they are interested in being accurate.

The bird will carry us. Ahead on its route: the whale, the horse, the cow, the dog and the wolf sharing one fire, the rat, the octopus — and others still auditioning for their chair. One flight. Many worlds. By the end, you may no longer be sure that sharing a planet is the same thing as sharing a world.

You may wonder why this isn’t called Dear Animals. Because Dear Water was a letter to something that never answers — and this time, they are speaking. And because “animals” is the kind of word this series distrusts: a category so large it erases every life inside it. There is no such being as Animals. There is a bird, a whale, a wolf, a cow — one at a time, each holding the microphone.

Tell me if the experiment works. The thinking, as always, is better with you in it.

— Karim