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In Cage 15 There Was A Bald Eagle

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In Cage 15, there was a bald eagle. Regal and upright, imperial and intimidating, it stood on a log, paying me no heed as I scribbled adjectives. A sign beside on the wooden cage beside the barred window called her Spirit and informed the reader why she had been committed to the asylum. She’d dislocated her left wing in 1989. Beside her on a little table sat the corpse of white field mouse, she did not deign to acknowledge its existence either, at least not in my presence. The free birds noisily inhabiting the woods and circling the lake beyond her cage were not ignored. I had seen bald eagles before, but never in captivity or in their immediate vicinity. I had never heard one before. It was unnerving. Like a laugh, the eagle’s screech had …show more content…

With its pointed face red and beak bone white, it takes the appearance of some grotesque skinless atrocity ready to jump at a viewer in a horror film. The vulture, I never looked for its name, was busy when I arrived. Busy with its white field mouse, holding the carcass down with its claws, while snipping at its fur with dull scissor beak. I watched it find the tail of the mouse and apply a series of deliberate pecks at its base. Once the tail was separated from the body, the vulture slurped it up like a spaghetti noodle. This disgusted me, but I kept watching. Spirit the bald eagle was a scavenger too in the wild and that a near identical white mouse waited in her cage. Her sharp beak would surely not have allowed the slurping of the tail, but regardless of the method, the act was the same. As hard as I tried however I could not equate the two. My mind would simply not allow the white domed aristocrat and the red faced villain to share a common category. Actions and motives indistinguishable, the two creatures somehow generate incompatible emotions in humans. The bald eagle can fly on banners, mark song sheets, and lead men to battle. The vulture cannot. A soaring eagle evokes a sense of gallantry, greatness. A vulture circling is a symbol of foreboding and …show more content…

First to a hunchbacked Harris Hawk, who would once hunted in a large pack, and now in its solitary confinement stared forlornly at the dirt. Then on to three kestrels, each cursed with injured wings. The second of these, a female larger than the males, charged at me when I appeared in its window. Repulsed by the metal bars and disappointed at its failure to pluck out my eyes, it resigned itself to watch me through the gaps between the cage’s wooden boards. Before leaving I went back to the cage of the eagle, I admired her posture, her dignity, the way she wore the white cap like a crown. I heard again her reply to the birds chirping, singing, flying free outside her cage. This screech seemed even more hostile than the last. I did not want to hear

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