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gaze. Gratitude welled up in my throat – I was being seen, seen by the only person in the world who I cared to be seen by . . .
    â€˜Hey, it’s OK, man.’
    Could I help it? I was touched.
    I gestured that we had to get going, for all I knew Sam might have fallen out of the tree while we were standing there. But when we got to the scour-hole he was nowhere in sight. I searched the ground beneath the trees in a panic, but he wasn’tlying there, groaning with his back broken or his leg bent double. Calm seemed to have returned to the jackdaw community. Maybe Sam had made it down on his own and walked home across the fields. And now I still didn’t have my jackdaw.
    Joe just stood there beside me, with no idea what was going on. I tugged on his sleeve and he bent over to me.
    â€˜What are we supposed to do now?’
    Using my good hand, I did my best to imitate the flapping of wings – it could just as easily have been taken for the clawing of an excavator or a hungry Pacman – and pointed to the trees. Joe looked at the birds flying back and forth, and at the sky drawing to a close behind them, then said, ‘Am I right in thinking that you want a little crow?’
    I grinned like a chimp.
    â€˜And you want me to get one out of a nest for you, is that what we’re doing here?’
    He shook his head in bemusement, but then slid down the side of the scour-hole with no further ado, climbed into a tree as nimbly as a ninja and was back in no time. In his hand was a huddled fledgling. The little bird had nervous, flashing eyes and a flat, broad beak. Pin-feathers stuck out here and there from its blue and reddish skin, between them there was a kind of greasy down. It was the ugliest thing I’d seen in a while.
    â€˜Is this what you’re after?’ Joe asked in disbelief.
    He laid the little creature on my lap and I carefully cupped my hand around it.
    â€˜Be careful with that bone cruncher of yours.’
    The jackdaw was warm and a little sticky; despite its tininess it felt like one huge pounding heart, throbbing away in the palm of my hand.
    â€˜I guess so,’ Joe said with a shrug. ‘I guess everyone needs something to pet.’

    Grabbing the handles of the cart, he wheeled me around in the direction of Lomark. I shielded the little jackdaw carefully with my hand. He was to become my Eyes in the Sky and would go by the name of Wednesday, for the day I found him. A gentle rain started falling. I was very happy.

When I turned fifteen I let my parents know that I wanted to move into the garden house at the back of our yard. I could already do some things for myself by then, and heating up a can of hot dogs wouldn’t present much of a problem. Ma was against it; Pa insulated the place and installed a gas fire, a little kitchen and a toilet. Above the door he nailed a horseshoe for good luck. After that my parents became my neighbours across the way, I showered at their place and sometimes watched TV there. Wednesday occupied a cage at the side of the house, and it was his custom during the day to ride around on my shoulder like a pirate’s parrot. He had already learned to fly, he would sometimes be gone for half an hour at a time, but he always came back when I whistled.
    It was there in that little house of mine that I started writing everything down. And I do mean everything. Some people find it hard to believe that I make an almost literal reproduction of this life on paper. To look at my diaries is to see time – here is what 365 days look like, this is ten times 365 days, or fifteen, or twenty. It’s almost too big to see over, it’s a mountain growing backwards into the past. And it’s all in there – at least, if it happened when I was around or if someone told me about it. If you came by today, for example, I’d write that down. Something along the lines of: So-and-so came by, around that time and onthis day. And if there was