THE BOY was crouching by a shrub outside the Phillips Academy library in Andover, using a stick to jab at something. It was growing dark and I wanted to continue walking before sunset that July night, but his furtive glances made me curious.
“What are you doing?’’ I asked as I moved closer.
“There’s a baby bird here and I’m trying to get it to eat something,’’ he said, looking toward the bush instead of meeting my gaze.
I crouched, too, and peered between the branches at a trembling baby crow that was futilely dodging the poking stick. Its little legs were no match for the boy and his stick.
“The mother is really angry at me,’’ the boy said. “She keeps flying by and making a screeching noise.’’
I looked up but saw no birds flying overhead and I worried that it was already too late for this fledgling. The boy was about 13, caught in the buffer when childhood ends and manhood begins - a period in a boy’s life that is dominated by parents, teachers, and other adults who call the shots and leave him feeling endlessly frustrated and perhaps powerless. The baby crow and its desperate mother were the only thing of which he was the master that night.
“Mother birds abandon their babies if a human touches them,’’ I said, not knowing if it were really true, but using what I could to make him stop.
“I didn’t touch it,’’ he said. “I just want it to eat something, even if it’s just an ant.’’
I wondered how he would spear an ant in the dimming light and feed it to the terrified bird. I was becoming uneasy.
I asked the boy if the bird was hurt.
“No. I only saw a little blood. . .,’’ he said, before ending in mid-sentence. “If I could just get it to eat something, even this stick, I’d be happy.’’
“Birds don’t eat sticks,’’ I said.
With that the young teenager realized I wasn’t going away, so he dropped the branch, bid me a polite goodnight, and ran inside the library.
Later, on my return route, I saw the bird move slightly, but couldn’t tell whether its stillness was due to injury or sleepiness. In the dusk of evening, we met eye to eye, both completely helpless to fix what was wrong. I wondered if it were cruelty or compassion that led us there.
Did the boy mean well or had he found perverse pleasure in dominating the bird? Instinct told me they both needed saving.
Birds and boys are so delicate, that sometimes even those with good intentions end up damaging them. Once when I still lived in Andover, a bird flew into my garage and couldn’t find its way out. I waited a day before calling the town’s burly animal control officer, with whom I had developed an acquaintance that summer, having found a dead carcass on my lawn earlier that month and continuing to call him with sightings of wildlife in my yard. By then he’d pegged me for the crusty, sensitive type, so when he captured the bird in his large gloved hands, he said he would set it free away from my yard. I didn’t tell him that I’d noticed the fresh blood on his glove and, upon reflection, later realized he had accidentally ended the bird’s quest for the blue horizon.
On the Phillips campus that July night, I peered inside the library window like a stalker, and spied a number of summertime students studying inside. I thought I saw the boy sitting with his back to the window at the first row of elongated desks, reading a book.
I felt better knowing he was now preoccupied with some other endeavor and walked back to my car, believing that the bird’s future was black, and praying that the boy’s was not.
Joyce Pellino Crane is a Globe correspondent. 
