An Unexpected Guest

Hopping out into the path, he halted me in midstride and looked up, his fierce, tiny eyes beaming a clear message: Help me!

With three large dogs on my heels, I had no choice. As I scooped him up in cupped hands, he closed his eyes. Oh, no, I thought, dismayed. He’s dying. I breathed on him, ruffling the gleaming emerald and sea blue feathers. His dime-sized chest was fluttering in out, in out. He was … asleep.

When my friend arrived, I hurried her into the house. 

“I have a surprise for you,” I said. 

On the table, in my largest crockery bowl, the hummer perched on a twig next to the feeder’s plastic rosettes and looked boldly around the room. 

“I’m calling him Buzz,” I said. 

I had no idea that this scrap of personality, barely one ounce of heart and fluff, was about to possess my entire household.

He was too weak to fly at first, but by morning, when I lifted the straw hat that covered his bowl, he was perched in the highest spot inside the hat’s crown. He would need care. Along his left side, feathers were missing; one wing appeared a half-inch shorter than the other. A flurry of Internet research ensued. A bird cage would not work: he’d batter himself against the bars. We would have to create a safer space for him when he outgrew the bowl.

 It’s illegal to keep a hummingbird, yet there was no local bird rehab facility. The kind ornithologist at Lees-McRae College’s wild bird center gave me an over-the-phone lesson in hummingbird therapy and shipped me the food Buzz needed — higher in protein than the kind you buy in the garden store. While I waited for it, I bred fruit flies on a slice of melon and smashed them into his nectar. Buzz grew stronger by the hour, graduating from bowl and hat to a five-foot-tall aviary we created from tree branches and ball gown netting. 

Still, he had trouble perching; I feared nerve damage. But because he was utterly fearless — he even enjoyed sitting on my finger — I could observe him from inches away and noticed a thread dangling from his side. I pulled, the thread stretched, and suddenly I understood everything. I knew what had happened to him and what was hindering him now. And he seemed to understand too, because when I gripped the filament of spiderweb in my fingertips, he hummed up from his perch and rotated round and round, unwrapping his leg and claw from its sticky trap.

Now the only thing that stood between Buzz and Brazil was a half-inch of pinion feathers, which grew out like time-lapse photography. After 20 days my little companion had had enough of me. From barest daylight until dusk, if he wasn’t hovering at the feeder, he was scouting the netting round and up and down for a way out. The low hum of his mending days became a high-pitched zoomzoom- zoomzoom that went on for hours. 

The bird doctor advised by phone: “He’s ready to go.”

I gave him one last bath — a spritz through the netting, which he loved — just so I could see him delicately sip at the droplets caught in the net with the pink thread of his tongue. Then, my husband carried the aviary outside. 

“Ready?” he asked. 

But Buzz was away before I could lift the camera. He scribed a huge arc out over the bowl of the lawn to the topmost twig on the maple, where he paused to look back at us.Then he was gone, flying down to Rio. 

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin lives and writes at the forks of Blackbird Branch in Cullowhee, N.C. Her collection of poems, Patriate, won the Longleaf Press Open Chapbook Competition in 2007.