Flying bird with branches and flowers

The bird came aboard three days out from Valparaíso, when the wind had gone soft and the sails hung like wet washing. It landed on the fore yard with its wings still open, as if it had been caught halfway through a decision, and nobody on watch could say where it had come from, for there was no land within a thousand miles. Mr Pryce wanted it shot for luck's sake, the wrong sort of luck, but Cook Abernethy only shook his head and set out a dish of biscuit crumbs.

It stayed. By the second week it had taken to roosting on the coil of the main brace, and the men began to say that the branches in its feathers were growing. I laughed at that until I went to the rail one morning and found a sprig of something green tangled in the rope where the bird had slept, its leaves fine and sharp, a small coral bloom at the tip. Nobody on this ship had planted anything.

Last night the moon was full and sat on the water like a coin, and the bird rose off the rail with a sound like a sheet being shaken out. I watched it climb against that white disc until I could no longer tell where the wings ended and the twigs began. Then the lookout called down that the sea had gone quiet and the stars were out over Cape Horn, and I went below.

I have kept one of the blossoms pressed inside my logbook. It has not dried the way flowers should. I am writing this so that somebody on land knows what I saw, should the rest of us come home thinner than we left.

Your loving sister, Hannah