oloriel | Man proposes... II (Reply)

Mr. Darcy killed the tit.

Somehow it had managed to get into the attic, which is one of the cats' favourite places; and there, apparently, it appeared while Darcy was sleeping or playing with rock wool or whatever.

It protested very loudly, which I heard, and I ran up and tore Darcy away and it escaped to a corner where I could pick it up and bring it to safety. It had lost several tail feathers but didn't have any visible injuries, and I didn't want to stress it more by taking it to the vet immediately, so I just put it in its cage and offered it food. It was of course breathing heavily after the hunt, but it could perch and even fly (though not straight, what with the missing tail feathers), so I left it to calm down a bit and put a board over the bit of rock wool-stuffed ceiling that it had apparently squeezed through for no good reason. I thought I'd closed up all the cracks, but now there's a new one. (Perhaps Darcy pulled the rock-wool out or pressed it down and the stupid tit had nothing better to do than go and meet the ceiling cat.)

And now, half an hour later, I went to check, and it's stopped breathing. The body is still warm. Whether the exertion killed it in the end or whether there were internal injuries I can't tell.

As with any of my pets that died, I keep believing, somewhere deep down, that this is all a terrible misunderstanding and when I go and look in 10, 20, 30 minutes it'll be perching on a wall timber again, chirping loudly and asking where the hell its plant lice are. As with any animal that died, I know, somewhere else deep down, that this will not be the case, and that in the end I will have to accept that love and tears and denial won't bring it back from the dead.

Damn, it hurts. It physically hurts. It was only a tiny bird that but for a coincidence wouldn't have been alive at this point anyway, and I feel like something is squeezing my heart or my lungs together so I can hardly breathe, and I am sobbing pathetically. It would have been dead a month ago, but we managed to feed it, and it learned to fly and to hunt and not to trust humans too far, and had now reached the age at which it should be able to fend for itself, in the big world outside. And I am blaming myself, because if we'd put more effort into trying to catch it and put it outside it wouldn't have flown in the attic today and might still be alive. And I am telling myself that these efforts would have stressed it out, too, and because it was a young and inexperienced bird it would probably have come too close to the cats, and have been caught and killed all the same. A dead tit would have shown up on our terrace, then a bit later there would have been a tit's head and a lot of feathers, and a bit later again only the feathers would have been left. Perhaps it would have been a consolation that we would always have been able to tell ourselves that this was some other bird, there are dozens of tits around the place, nobody can tell whether this one was Helmut. And deep down we would always have been convinced that it was him.

I don't cry for every mouse or bird the cats hunt, but I am crying for this one, because a month is a long enough time to establish a relationship, and I felt responsible for that little bird and now it's dead.
I don't know how much of the hurt is loss and heartbreak and how much is self-reproach. I suppose in the end the ratio doesn't really matter. I saw this bird grow from nestling to fledgling, and just when it had reached the birdish equivalent of puberty and grown ready for freedom, the cat got it after all.

It's a natural process, yet it feels like a personal tragedy; and it feels like my fault.
And it hurts.