Excerpt
The Philosopher's Dog
Friends
and Companions
The white patch in a dark blue sky changed shape as he turned or rose or descended. Often in winter the grass was also white, thick with frost until ten and even eleven in the morning. In summer it grew high and yellow and was especially beautiful in the late afternoon if the wind joined with the sun to transform entire paddocks into waves of moving grass, golden and tipped with silver. The thrill of seeing him in that landscape, against that sky, imprinted an image on my mind that is as vivid now as the sight of him was more than forty years ago. He was Jack, our cockatoo, and he was following me to school, flying a bit, then sitting on the handlebars of my bike before flying some more.
Jack was much more my father's pet than mine. In fact, I'm not sure that I should say he was mine at all. We lived together on terms he dictated, indifferent to my need to possess him, giving or withholding affection as he pleased. Nonetheless, he was a great joy to me and never more so than when he followed me to school. When he sat on my handlebars I felt we were friends. I even dared hope that we were comrades. But back at home, in the evening of the same day that he followed me to school, if I moved to stroke his crest he was as likely as not to bite me just because he felt like it.
He was fiercely loyal to one person at a time and that person was my father, except once when my father was in the hospital and his friend Pantelimon Hora looked after me at Frogmore, our chicken farm, near Baringhup in central Victoria. During those months Jack transferred his loyalty to Hora rather than to me even though I had lived with him for years. “Hey liew liew,” Hora used to say to Jack, sometimes to greet him and sometimes as though to ask, “And how are things now?” The affection both men felt for Jack—the interest they took in him and his ways and the intimate knowledge of him that they shared—deepened, and was in turn deepened by, their friendship. More than thirty years after they had last seen Jack they greeted one another in the same way. “Hey liew liew,” one would say. “Hey liew liew,” the other would respond.
Hora delighted in Jack and often observed him with affectionate attention, sometimes chuckling at Jack's comical ways, at other times marveling at his ingenuity. Jack soon made himself at home in the part of the house Hora occupied when he was with us, though he was never physically as intimate with Hora as he was with my father, never so ready to surrender himself to his petting. Nor, I suspect, did he ever entirely trust Hora to give him food of the quality that he fancied he deserved. Whenever Hora cooked spaghetti (which was almost every other evening), Jack waited patiently until it was ready and then made it known that he would like some. Always Hora gave him some on a separate plate. Always Jack tried what had been given him and then asked for some from Hora's plate. Only when he was satisfied that Hora's spaghetti was no better than his did he return to his plate.
As well as spaghetti, Jack was especially fond of bread dipped in tea or coffee. Whenever we had a cup of either Jack would come down the side of his door to the level of the table to ask for his soaked bread. He ate many things that we did. Whenever it was something he had not eaten before he would nibble it ever so delicately, cock his head to see what to make of it, try it again, and after doing this a few times, he would usually eat it. Convinced that it would not harm him he relaxed, enjoying the excitement of something new, and yielding to the pleasure of it. In this and many other small ways Jack came to share our world.
My father was in the hospital for almost three months. When he came home Jack could not contain himself. He screeched, raised his crest, and allowed my father to stroke him on every part of his body, turning first on this side then on the other and then upside down, and all this for hours. For a day or two afterward, when Hora tried to pet him, he raised his crest aggressively and even bit him once or twice. Jack simplified his emotions, overcoming without difficulty whatever conflicts he may have felt when confronted by two claimants for his loyalty. I, who loved both men dearly, fell prey for a short time to the pains of ambivalent attachment.
We are seldom physically as tender with birds as we are with cats and dogs, even when we have complex moral relations with birds—as we do with birds of prey, for example, whom we have trained, if not tamed. Accustomed to seeing birds in cages, our physical contact with them is often limited. We sometimes stroke them when they perch on our arms or shoulders, but we don't cuddle them. They stand stiffly on their legs, their bodies are not flexible, their contours don't fit ours. So it can seem, but it's not quite true.
Jack flew free and had the run of the house. He slept on the kitchen door on which he made himself at home by eating away parts of it and the adjacent wall. Almost every morning he would climb down from his door and come into the bedroom in which my father and I were sleeping. The sound of his beak and claws alternately scraping on the kitchen door as he climbed down, and of him trying to open the bedroom door by pushing it with his head and retreating as it closed on him, usually woke us. But if my father remained asleep, or if he pretended to be asleep, Jack would perch on the bedstead until he opened his eyes. He would then jump under the blankets, poking his head out occasionally to kiss my father.
How does a cockatoo kiss? Like this. He puts the upper part of his beak onto your lips and, nibbling gently, runs it down to your lower lip, all the while saying “tsk tsk tsk.” That, at any rate, is how Jack did it to my father, with unmistakable tenderness. My father would stroke him, under his wings, under his beak, and on his chest and stomach. Sometimes he would cup his hands around Jack's head and return his kisses. The same sound—tsk, tsk, tsk—came from under the blankets, together with an occasional squawk, sometimes of pleasure and sometimes of sudden but slight pain as my father inadvertently hurt him. Never, however, did I hear a squawk of fear or even anxiety, never anything that suggested Jack's trust of my father was qualified in the slightest degree.
My father worked in a blacksmith shop on a neighboring farm some half a kilometer from our house. Jack often went with him. Sometimes he would keep him company in the workshop, digging his beak into small heaps of screws or scraps of iron, placing some to one side, some to the other, as though he were sorting them. When he tired of this, he flew around the area looking to see what mischief he could do. He never had trouble finding it, but when he bit off all the bright plastic baubles on our neigh-bor's television antenna, my father was forced to cut his wing, compelled by the threat that Jack would otherwise be shot. Undeterred, Jack walked from our house to the blacksmith shop. Even with his wing cut he could fly a little, only in circles, but with practice he gained sufficient height to reach the antenna. So, for a time, to keep him out of trouble, my father tied a chain to his leg and weighted it down with an old sandal. If Jack tried hard enough he could drag the chain with its weight along the ground, but he must have reckoned that what he gained by doing this wasn't worth the trouble. Mostly he moved only within the five-or six-meter radius the chain allowed him without effort.
My father and I talked quite a bit to Jack. Generally, we asked him questions. “So you're back, are you?” “Would you like to come with us to fetch the cow?” “Why don't you leave the dog in peace?” “Why must you chew holes in the doors?” As a consequence, he often had a quizzical air, but perhaps I imagined it. There was no doubt, however, that Jack was a highly intelligent bird. Occasionally we would catch him trying to whistle a tune he had heard on the radio. He would whistle a little of it, forget how to go on, and would then screech, raise his crest, and dance around on the chicken-wire fence in frustration. When he calmed down, he would usually get a little further until he would again forget how to go on. He did this often, but would stop if he noticed us observing him. Only when he believed no one could see him did he practice whistling tunes he had heard. We seldom talked cocky talk to him, and he seldom talked it to us. He talked a lot, but mostly to himself.
Close though Jack was to us, it seemed the conditional closeness of a creature that spends only part of its time earthbound. The thrill of seeing him high in that dark blue sky above a vast and empty landscape was partly an expression of the mysterious place that birds have in our lives. On the one hand, high there in the sky, completely free in his flight, he seemed alien to us, a being of a quite different and enviable kind, one who graced our lives with the gratuitous gift of his friendship. On the other hand, he was my pet cockatoo, who slept on the kitchen door, climbed into my father's bed, and was now following me to school, soon to sit again on my handlebars for a few minutes, inviting me yet again to yield to the illusion that he might become as close to me as he was to my father.
