Things get worse when she starts to think about her life beyond the hedges, especially when she takes stock and finds that soon she’ll have been skipping school for a full month. Ultimately, she knows that every change—the appearance or destruction of an anthill, every new bug or the growth of moss up the tree—is a mile marker on the road to the end. Then her stomach flip-flops, her palms start to sweat, her legs grow weak, and a strange tingling overtakes her feet.

Only Old Man can pull her out of that state, by talking to her or just being there.

Old Man also has his ups and downs, though most of the time he talks tirelessly, stringing together his stories about the behavior of birds—intelligent, artful, cunning, even twisted behavior … we mustn’t idealize them! Shrikes, for example, are some great big liars. They fake calls of alarm so they can eat the food stores of other birds after they fly off in a fright. Another cheater is the cuckoo, which lays its eggs in another bird’s nest so its chicks are fed by adoptive parents who don’t notice the trick—even though the intruder can double them in size! If a fox approaches a whippoorwill’s nest, the bird will fake a broken wing to catch the predator’s attention and lure it away. And the hummingbird, so flashy, sweet, and colorful, is extremely promiscuous. They’re all so crazy! Soon listens attentively, tries to extract the lesson that every story supposedly hides, because she’s always been taught to interpret stories that way: casting the narrative aside to look for the moral it contains.

But Old Man doesn’t always feel like talking. Lately he looks at her with a great deal of interest, as if she were turning into a new bird for him to study. Sometimes he falls silent and merely observes her with sad eyes and a yearning smile, as if he were searching for the right words to express something, words that in the end he never finds. Soon is unsettled when he gets like that. She thinks it’s her fault for not interpreting his stories the right way. She feels awkward, uninteresting, boring. Still, he keeps visiting her every morning, and he stays longer every time—what started out as a few minutes, half an hour, is now an hour, or two, or three.