A phoenix chooses its own burning, and it chooses a windless day. The one that nests on the shoulder of Cragkettle sat out three gales last autumn on a dead juniper, feathers clamped flat, and went up on the first still morning, in the middle of a goat auction in the valley below. Nobody bid after that. The flame stood straight as a fence post for most of an hour. The ash came down by afternoon, fine and gray as flour.
The oldest account is a salt carter's, scratched into a roof slate that now hangs in the granary at Ledgewren. He saw a red bird settle on the ridge and took it for a signal fire. His slate says the fire made no smoke and no sound. The next account belongs to the glaziers. Several generations later a Ledgewren glassmaker, whose furnace had failed, carried down a bucket of the gray ash from the burn field and found it made glass that never clouded. Ash-sifters have worked the ridge ever since. They climb with horsehair sieves and wooden shovels, because an iron blade strikes sparks in warm ash, and they sell by the sack to anyone who wants windows. The trade has no other reason to exist.
The households below the ridge let their hearths go cold on a burning morning. Chimney smoke is said to draw the bird down. Nahum Berrow, who has sifted the burn field for forty years, says the bird now on Cragkettle is the same one his grandfather sifted after. I have no way to check that and record it as his claim only. What I can record is plain. The body is a heron's size, the tail twice as long, gold at the breast and vermilion toward the wingtips. Around the left ankle sits a cuff of green glass as thick as a thumb, fused to the scale. The sifters say it came from a burn on a glassworks roof. The bird eats juniper berries and cedar resin, and it leaves pale rings in the lichen wherever it perches, which is how the sifters find a fresh roost.
I left Cragkettle by the sheep track at the end of the month. Halfway down I looked back. The bird had come off its juniper to sit on the sifters' lean-to, on the warm slates, and when it turned its head the glass on its leg threw a green spot across the roof.
- Classification
- Fire bird that burns and rises
- Habitat
- Dry ridges with juniper and cedar
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- Heron-sized body, tail twice as long
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Highland ridges above the cedar line
- Binomial
- Pyrornis redivivus
- Diet
- Juniper berries and cedar resin
- Temperament
- Aloof, patient, tolerant of watchers