when i was free

The cage was cold and hard. I look down at the bare patches of skin on my chest, red, raw, rubbed. How I longed to break free from this prison, escape back to the sky-scraping trees, green, glowing in the sun. I used to be beautiful.

I had heard the stories and seen them happen. The big tall creatures, dull-skinned and featherless, with long legs that hung from their shoulders. They used their clawless wings to capture young ones. The innocent, naïve.

I should have listened to Mama. She flew back to the nest one day, alighted, and preened her feathers. “I heard that Ara’s chick got taken.” I cocked my head inquisitively. “It was the giants. Set a big shiny thing down and put food inside. Too curious, that young one.”

I preened my own feathers, crimson, canary yellow, electric blue. We took pride in our appearance. We were the top of the forest creatures. All the other birds looked dull in comparison.

“One day,” Mama said, “you will grow up to be just like your father.” He was majestic. He roamed the skies; they were his domain. He was known for his loud call, piercing – some may have described it as a screech – I, a symphony.

How I longed to grow up, big and strong. Find a mate to share my life with, to raise young ones. But how unyielding life is. How unwilling to listen. How wild and untamed. It will not bow to one’s wishes.

The times had changed. There was shift in the atmosphere, literally. The trees had been coming down for weeks. You could see the bare patches in the earth, like the sores in Old Pedro's plumage. Something had happened to the poor old one in his youth – he was never the same – plucked the same patch of skin raw and dry, over and over.

Each time Mama came back to the nest, there were less and less nuts and seeds. She couldn’t find my favourite fruits. Some whispered about a famine in the land. How were we to know that this was just the beginning of the apocalypse, slow at first, then gaining speed?

Suddenly it was right at our treestep. It first occurred with the felling of the great deciduous trees by the river. Then it was our neighbours. Where were we to go? This was the only place we had known.

By this time, we were starving. All our favourite food-places had gone. I had come to the age where I could go foraging for my own food. But when the time had come, there was none.

I had decided to go and look for some food – we hadn’t much in days. I swooped down to the lower layers of the canopy – perhaps I could find some fallen seeds. Before I knew it, I had been pinned down, my wings flapping helplessly against the scratchy, tight confines of some sort of dry vine net. It had closed in on me and I could not break free. I called out, loud, screeching, the sort of call reserved for the most important of times, looking for a mate. But there was no swooping saviour. Instead, I was swung over the shoulder of a giant.

How did I end up here? I wondered. I had been so careful, so free, all my life. I saw the future slip away as light faded to dark.

The journey is too harrowing to recount here. I ended up in a foreign land, exiled. No longer could I see and hear the beautiful trees of the land I had grown up in. The sounds around me were foreign, garbled. The young macaws I encountered here had adopted the new language of the land. But I could not understand a word. They repeated the same things over and over; I saw no forest-light in their eyes.

I look down at my skin, rubbed raw and red. Just like Old Pedro's – the fabled legend of old. I wondered about Mama, what had happened to her. I wondered where Papa was – he had disappeared when I was two.

Was his fate the same as mine? Consigned to live the rest of my days in a metal cell? For a crime I did not commit?

I cry myself to sleep each night.

Pretty bird.

Pretty bird.

Pretty bird.