Soon after my husband and I met, he brought me a feisty calico kitten, who grew up to be a feisty calico cat. One summer, we worked at a tree nursery\/landscaping business, and we stayed on site in a small pickup bed camper. More than once I found birds in various stages of disassembly. One memorable night, I awoke in the wee hours to find my cat crouching on my chest, eyes glowing greenly, with a recently deceased robin clamped in her jaws. A not-so-unusual occurrence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What is more noteworthy is when one receives such a gift from a human child. Here\u2019s how it went down. I was in my classroom of borrowed fifth graders, in Aniak, Alaska, right after lunch. I was in the process of lowering the small foam ball from the ceiling so that the kids could take turns jumping up to tap it, when a kindergartener appeared at my door. She held up a plastic bag of what appeared to be small bloody objects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy teachers said you might want this!\u201d she said happily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I peered at the bag in confusion. Luckily, an aide was in the room with me, and he explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a grouse,\u201d he said. \u201cIt hit the window of the kindergarten classroom and the teacher cleaned it.\u201d Now, I had seen this young woman wrangle a snow machine, so I had no doubt that such would be her response to a grouse hitting her classroom window. (I, of course, would be much more likely to give it a state funeral.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, I recovered my wits and graciously accepted the gift. Later I fixed it with stir-fry vegetables, and it was tender and sweet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some nights after that, I, along with many other people, went out on the dike to watch the river ice go out. As I stood there, a small girl approached me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s your name?\u201d she asked me. I told her, and her eyes grew wide with delight. \u201cI gave you the grouse!\u201d she cried. Why yes, dear little girl, you did indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Soon after my husband and I met, he brought me a feisty calico kitten, who grew up to be a feisty calico cat. One summer, we worked at a tree nursery\/landscaping business, and we stayed on site in a small pickup bed camper. More than once I found birds in various stages of disassembly. One […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[48,168,194,193],"class_list":["post-312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-as-an-alaskan-educator-and-citizen","tag-alaska","tag-aniak","tag-gift","tag-grouse"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions\/313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightasrainonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}