Free The Bestiary by Nicholas Christopher Page A

iridescent wings and eyes blue as the seas it could cross, flying for nine days and nights without rest.
    The Bird of Incense. Spices. Music.
    With a song so beautiful it was the basis for the first musical scale.
    Its journey always ended in Egypt—in Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, atop a golden temple.
    The Egyptians deified it, with a grand title: the Lord of the Long Cycles of Time. They chose as guardians of the temple pilgrims that had followed the bird from India.
    Over the years I filled twenty-eight notebooks with descriptions and drawings of other such animals. Different sizes and colors, some of these notebooks were bleached by the sun, others warped by rainfall. Their pages were stained with tea and whisky. One was charred in a hotel fire in Corsica. Another barely survived a flooded basement in Siena. That very first notebook, which I bought at a general store in Maine, had a green marbled cover and unlined pages.
    Meanwhile, my everyday life at school continued. Few of my fellow students were from blue-collar families. I may as well have hailed from one of the outer planets. I divulged little about my family outside the fact my father lived abroad, which was intended to explain why I was one of the few students who never received a visitor on homecoming weekend. After that first train trip, my father hadn’t set foot on the school grounds again. (Even on my graduation day, years later, I would leave immediately after the ceremony; I couldn’t bear to sit alone, or attach myself to one of my classmates’ families, for a last celebratory luncheon.) My tuition checks arrived on time and my account in the school bank remained balanced. And every so often I received the usual three-line postcard from some far-flung port—but never a letter.
    I had to follow a rigid schedule: wake-up bell at six, chapel, breakfast, first class at eight, lunch, more classes, phys ed, dinner, study hall, and bed. We wore jackets and ties at all times; were required to address faculty members as “sir” were not allowed to speak to other students during class. And so on. I rebelled by isolating, much as I had in elementary school, where I had been lucky to find a real friend like Bruno. At boarding school I had many acquaintances, but no close friend. I gained the respect of my classmates by remaining silent and detached. Because of my childhood, this was not a difficult niche for me to carve out. Required to participate in a sport, I joined the archery team, which felt more like a collection of solitary competitors. I used to think solitude was my natural element, from the moment my mother simultaneously deposited me in the world and abandoned me to it.
    I only knew my mother’s image from that handful of snapshots which I now kept in my grandmother’s silver music box, along with the white whisker. Many times I had studied my mother’s face with a magnifying glass. I failed to identify the shadow of the bird on her shoulder. One day I took the snapshots to Jones Beach and tried in vain to determine their exact location using some blurred landmarks—shrubs, a bench, a lamppost—in the background of each. What did I expect to find? My grandmother had preached to me that the spirit of every creature to walk the earth was still among us. I felt my mother was nearby when I was most alone—lying awake at night, riding in a darkened train, descending an empty stairwell at school.
    In Mr. Hood’s ancient history class he had us memorize passages out of Livy and Herodotus. I was entranced with the latter: his incredible descriptions of animals such as the giant silver ants that fought elaborate wars in the Libyan desert; and in Book IV, the catalog of Scythian tribes like the Melanchlaeni, who all wore black cloaks, and the Budini, whose entire population had red hair and gray eyes. I also chose Mr. Hood as my adviser. I was a regular visitor—maybe the only visitor—during his office hours. His other advisees were assigned to