Free All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner Page B

unquenchable. “Listen to him!” Marian cries, and because I have been caught in a kind of emotional nakedness I generally take pains to avoid, I cannot forbear to say, shaping the words nearly silently, “He does it on a diet of worms.”
    Even so inert a witticism, reviving our argument but in a way to call it off, gets me what I hope for: a wrinkling of the nose, a widening of the flashing, white-toothed smile. Friends, then.
    The mockingbird swoops away with a flirt of half-hidden white feathers. A hermit thrush, winter resident for some reason hanging around well after he should have gone north, hops onto the terrace and examines us with a large round eye. A signal passes from Catlin to his wife. To keep them a little longer, because by now I am being willingly dragged in chains from the chariot wheels of this girl, I ask him what ethological circles say about the mockingbird. Does he really mock other birds, or do his old folks teach him his repertory, or is it built into the egg?
    Marian tips her head back with a gurgle, the hungry look dissolves in laughter. “Oh, tell him! Tell him about Hannes and then we have to go get Debby.”
    So Catlin tells me about an Austrian friend who got a clutch of mockingbird eggs and incubated them in the dark and raised the young birds in total purdah to determine how they learned to sing. The only sounds they heard came from a tape recording of a man’s voice reading Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, stepped up in speed until it was nothing but a high twittering. Hannes found that his mockingbirds did indeed learn by imitating: pretty soon he couldn’t tell which was tape recorder and which was bird. But then his old scientific devil began to whisper to him, he started to cast covetous glances at the Unknowable. Like an ethological Faust, he dared too high. He taped one of his mockingbirds and then stepped the speed down to see if their encoded sound could be brought back to words. I see him bending, tight with suspense, above his speaker in some midnight soundproofed lab. The helpers have all gone, the whir of the electric clock is cut off by his pulling of the plug. The unmarked seconds drip away, there is a silent countdown. Hannes reaches out, his bony fingers turn a switch.
    And does he hear the Great Emancipator’s solemn voice beginning, “Fourscore and seven years ago?” He does not. He hears something that sounds like seven Ukrainians plotting revolution behind a thick door. Failure. Enter Mephistopheles on a puff of sulphur smoke.
    “See?” Marian says. “Original sin. He tried to tamper with nature.”
    Just then the beagles across the gully, who have been unnaturally silent for an hour, erupt into a clamor. Still laughing, I stand up to see over the toyons, afraid I will see the owners in their padded corduroy-and-canvas shooting coats coming across the hill for their weekend sport with their shotguns over their arms. That would mean whisking the Catlins inside or around the house, because I doubt that Marian would enjoy watching this pair let pigeons loose and then gun them down for the dogs to retrieve. But there is no hunting couple in sight. Apparently, one of the dogs smelled something in his sleep and woke up yelling. That is the way the beagle mind works.
    “Is it a kennel?” Marian asks. “Do they have pups for sale?”
    “No,” I tell her. “Only Tom Weld’s latest way of making a dollar out of his pasture. His boy set it afire with a firecracker last Fourth of July, and burned off all the feed so he couldn’t rent it out to horses any more. Now he rents it to some dog-and-pigeon people. When the grass gets a little higher he’ll rent it for pasture again, without closing out the shooters, and before long one of them will shoot a horse, and I will sit over here watching and rubbing my hands.”
    Both Catlins are smiling at me, waiting. When I don’t go on, Catlin says, “Weld is the man in the white farmhouse down on the county road, isn’t