Blackie & Co.: A Blackbird’s Lesson in Friendship

In the middle of my bleakest winter, my friend Andrea gave me a battered copy of a forgotten book from her elderly father’s used bookshop in rural Texas, by a man named Hockley Clarke. I inhaled it in a day. Born in England in the final year of the nineteenth century, Hockley Clarke grew up loving nature. When he was sent to France with the British infantry during WWI, still a teenager, he looked