Bird head and feathers ink drawing

The bird landed on the tin awning of Sadie Penhallow's stall, where she sold pencils and cheap ledger paper to the schoolchildren. It was soaked through, its crest flattened to its skull, and its hooked beak kept nearly touching the rain-gutter as if it were reading the water running off it. Nobody thought it had come to buy anything, but it kept turning its head toward the pile of blank sheets she had pinned under a brick.

Sadie was a draughtsman's widow with a drawer full of her husband's nibs, and she had never once been frightened of a bird. So she went out with her umbrella held over nothing and offered the eagle a sheet. It took the paper in its beak, let it fall into the mud, and looked at her as if she had been slow. She tried a pen, then a bottle of black ink, then a stub of charcoal, and each time the eagle dropped a feather from its wing onto her counter instead. Eleven feathers by the time the market bell rang for closing.

She kept them fanned in a jam jar on the windowsill. When the flood came through in March the stall was washed clean, but the jar stayed upright, and the feathers inside had gone the colour of ink-washed paper, every one of them with a fine line of hatching up its spine. So when the rain comes in sideways like this, I say that eagle is still out there, wanting its paper back. Off you go now, and mind the puddle.