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By the end of three months Jonathan had six other students, Outcasts all, yet curious
about this strange new idea of flight for the joy of flying.
Still, it was easier for them to practice high performance than it was to understand
the reason behind it. "Each of us is in truth an idea of the Great
Gull, and unlimited idea of freedom," Jonathan would stay in the evenings on the beach, "and
precision flying is a step toward expressing our real nature. Everything that limits us
where we have to put aside. That's why all this high-speed practice, and low-speed and
aerobatics...".and his students would be asleep, exhausted from the day's flying. They liked
the practice, because it was fast and exciting and it fed a hunger for learning that grew
with every lesson. But not one of them, not even Fletcher Lynd Gull, had come to believe
that the flight of ideas could possibly be as real as this flight of wind and feather."Your
whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, other times, "is nothing more than
your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you
break the chains of your body, too . . ." But no matter how he said it, it sounded like
pleasant fiction, and they needed more to sleep.
It was only a month later that Jonathan said the time had come to return to the Flock.
"We're not ready!" said Henry Calvin Gull. "We're not welcome! We're Outcast! We can't
force ourselves to go where we're not welcome, can we?"
"We're free to go where we wish and to be what we are," Jonathan answered, and he lifted
from the sand and turned east, toward the home grounds of the Flock.There was a brief
anguish among his students, for it is the Law of the Flock that an Outcast never returns,
and the Law had not been broken once in ten thousand years. The Law said stay; Jonathan
said go; and by now he was a mile across the water. If they waited much longer, he would
reach a hostile Flock alone.
"Well, we don't have to obey the law if we're not a part of the Flock, do we?" Fletcher
said, rather self-conscious. "Besides, if there's a fight, we'll be a lot more help
there than here." And so they flew in from the west that morning,
eight of them in a double-diamond formation, wingtips almost overlapping. They came across
the Flock's Council Beach at a hundred thirty-five miles per hour, Jonathan in the lead, Fletcher
smoothly at hi right wing, Henry Calvin struggling gamely at his left. Then the whole formation
rolled slowly to the right, as one bird ... level ... to ... inverted ... to ... level, the
wind whipping over them all. The squawks and grackle of everyday life in
the Flock were cut off as though the formation were a giant knife, and eight thousand gull-eyes
watched, without a single blink. One by one, each of the eight birds pulled sharply upward
into a landing on the sand. Then as though this sort of thing happened every day, Jonathan
Seagull began his critique of the flight. "To begin with," he said with a wry smile,
"you were all a bit late on the join-up . . ." It went like lightning through the Flock.
Those birds are Outcast! And they have returned! And that . . . that can't happen! Fletcher's
predictions of battle melted in the Flock's confusion.
"Well, O.K., they may be Outcast," said some of the younger gulls, "but where on earth
did they learn to fly like that?" It took almost an hour for the Word of the
Elder to pass through the Flock: Ignore them. The gull who speaks to an Outcast is himself
Outcast. The gull who looks upon an Outcast breaks the Law of the Flock.
Grey-feathered backs were turned upon Jonathan from that moment onward, but he didn't appear
to notice. He held his practice sessions directly over the Council Beach and for the first time
began pressing his students to the limit of their ability.
"Martin Gull!" he shouted across the sky. "You say you know low-speed flying. You know
nothing till you prove it! FLY!" So quiet little Martin William Seagull, startled
to be caught under his instructor's fire, surprised himself and became a wizard of low
speeds. In the lightest breeze he could curve his feathers to lift himself without a single
flap of wing from sand to cloud and down again. Likewise Charles-Roland Gull flew the Great
Mountain Wind to twenty-four thousand feet, came down blue from the cold thin air, amazed
and happy, determined to go still higher tomorrow. Fletcher Seagull, who loved aerobatics like
no one else, conquered his sixteen-point vertical slow roll and the next day topped it off with
a triple cartwheel, his feathers flashing white sunlight to a beach from which more
than one furtive eye watched.
Every hour Jonathan was there at the side of each of his students, demonstrating, suggesting,
pressuring, guiding. He flew with them through night and cloud and storm, for the sport of
it, while the Flock huddled miserably on the ground.
When the flying was done, the students relaxed on the sand, and in time they listened more
closely to Jonathan. He had some crazy ideas that they couldn’t understand, but then
he had some good ones that they could. Gradually, in the night, another circle formed
around the circle of students - a circle of curious gulls listening in the darkness for
hours on end, not wishing to see or be seen of one another, fading away before daybreak.
It was a month after the Return that the first gull of the Flock crossed the line and asked
to learn how to fly. In his asking, Terrence Lowell Gull became a condemned bird, labeled
Outcast; and the eighth of Jonathan's students.