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SY: So one day we decided, since we couldn't, looking at the Sears and J.C. Penney catalogue, we knew we couldn't ever buy a bow and arrow or buy a shotgun or a rifle, so we had to resort to slingshot. Well, we could hear the magpies in the distance, we didn't see any coyotes, we didn't see any animals, so we thought... one kid, one of the boys said, "I bet you can't shoot, hit that magpie nest." There was hundreds of nests. Why that one, we don't know. So we start shooting at it, and next thing you know, we could see it shaking, and next thing you know, it rolled down, hit the ground and it rolled and stopped. Well, we wanted to see what was inside of a bird nest, not knowing that it was a little baby magpie bird. The minute it saw us, it started making all kinds of noise, thinking that we had food to feed the bird. We start looking for little bugs, and we get some water from the Shoshone River to try to keep the bird from making noise. Well, as I had mentioned earlier, I was one that went from babysitter to babysitter to babysitter, and when somebody said, "That baby bird is gonna die because the mother is gonna reject it," I says, "I'm gonna adopt this bird." And I carried it in my T-shirt, brought it back, tried to keep it cool.

And the irony of this bird was it was like any other internee. We were forced into camp behind barbed wires, that magpie bird went between the barbed wire, went in just like an internee. And as it went in, each of us held the barbed wire apart so we won't get hurt, and my mother is waiting for us with folded arms, with a big smile, because we returned from a hike. But when she saw that bird, she saw microorganisms, she saw viruses, and she says, "Take that back where you found that bird." I says, "No," I says, "the mother's gonna reject it, it's gonna die." And my mother not only talked loud, but she screamed, because she didn't want us to get this disease. Well, fortunately my stepfather was a nature boy. He knew what to feed the bird, how to take care of it, he made a beautiful cage from the scrap lumber, and fortunately they had mesh, wire mesh, and so it resembled a -- and we had driftwood where the bird could stand. But I immediately, I didn't know whether it was a male or a female, I even put a mirror to see if it was attracted to, you know, to see if whether it was a male or not, the bird didn't tell us, so I even put twigs and strings to see if it would make a nest or not, it didn't respond, so I just automatically named it Maggie. It just sounded close to magpie. And we knew it was a scavenger bird, so the mess hall people and the dishwashing people saved all the best of the meat for Maggie, so the Maggie always had the best of food. But my mother didn't understand magpie bird, it's a scavenger bird, it will stuff its chest out where it gets so big it will regurgitate and bury the meat into the dirt, which we put on the bottom. My mother will take all the meat out, because it didn't want the bird to get sick, because she, you know, medical student and so forth, she was always conscious about good health.

Well, every day that bird will be the first to be up in the morning, and we had a canvas on, and when people walk to the restroom or whatever, it would bounce back and forth, jump up and down, make all kinds of noise, and responded to every person. And most of the people were just determined to just go to the bathroom, don't want to talk, don't want to do anything. But the bird liked people, and so every time I would leave the premise I would go down the stairs, I would say, "Hello, Maggie." Every time I come back from school, or playing with my friends or whatever, I would say, "Hello, Maggie." Or, when I spend time with the bird, give him quality time, trying to make him -- at first he would peck my hand, it would bleed and everything, but I wanted that bird to land on my... [indicates shoulder] like the parrot, to sit on my shoulder, and eventually it did. But the thing that I noticed about Maggie was it loved to be stroked on the head. The eyes would turn completely white because it loved it, it loved to be nurtured on the chest, and so it was a great, great opportunity for me to get to know the bird. But my mother, from the very beginning, would scold the bird, yell at the bird, and the bird will scream back, and they seemed like they were fighting at each other, looked like they were mad at each other, hated each other, but I didn't realize 'til years later that they were the best of friends, they enjoyed each other.

And so one day, when I said, "Hello, Maggie," the bird said "Hello, Maggie." I looked around to see if there was a ventriloquist or, or somebody's playing a trick on me. I went up to the bird, I said, "Hello, Maggie," and the eyes turned white and it said "Hello, Maggie." I told my friends. "You're a liar." Again, two for lying, if you tell a lie, you get to punch a guy, if you don't wipe, you get hit again, opposite person get hit. Well, they came, they heard, sure enough, it did say it. The word starts spreading all throughout camp, eleven thousand people, not that every eleven thousand people came, but the children came, because they said, well, it was like a zoo. The seniors came, because they wanted, they had nothing else to do. The teenagers came, and, of course, the teenagers used profanity, so the bird said profanity that we didn't teach, and I was embarrassed because I didn't know that the bird said profanity until, at a Heart Mountain reunion, a guy I never met before in Block, upper Block 14 said, "Hey, you know, you got a bad bird." I said, "What do you mean a bad bird? Everybody loved it." "Well, it cussed at me." I said, "Oh, I'm sorry." I said, "It was the teenagers heckled him." And so they used words such as, "Come on, Maggie, what you doing?" It could whistle, it could laugh, just like, if you laugh a certain way, it copied exactly how you laugh. And during the summer, my stepfather clipped the wing because we knew it couldn't survive in the wilderness. It was too domesticated. So we would let him out between the barracks. It would socialize, going from one stairway to the other. Well, there was two old ladies that used to sit each evening on the summer night, laughing, talking, laughing and talking, and Maggie would be in the middle, talking in Japanese and laughing, and it sounded like there was three old ladies talking, where there was really two. And every once in a while the bird would go to another section of a different barrack. It gets confused, because they all look alike. And so some man would say, "Come on, Maggie," and he'll walk, the bird will follow the bird -- the man. "Okay, here's your barrack," and she could identify our barrack. So it was a very intelligent, intelligent bird.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.