“The Mandarin’s Canaries” (Weird Tales, September 1938)

Bloch, Robert. “The Mandarin’s Canaries.” Weird Tales, September 1938, pp. 316-.
https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v32n03_1938-09_ATLPM-Urf/page/n61/mode/2up

Mandarin Quong is an artist, and his medium is pain. He rules absolutely over his domain, having taken power from his brothers and father, each of whom died violently. Quong is the head of state and also of the judiciary. He amasses wealth by convicting wealthy people of crimes and the confiscating their property. The sentence is always the same: they are to die in the most painful way possible: they are tied to a tree, and an expert archer shoots them with arrows starting in places such as the ankle and wrist and gradually moving closer and closer to vital organs. When the victim is finally dead, Quong summons his flock of thousands of canaries to clean the bones. These are merely birds, the Mandarin explains. All of the superstition about them devouring souls is nonsense. The expert archer in Quong’s employ is married to a beautiful woman. Quong becomes smitten and takes her for himself. He soon grows tired of her, kills her, and feeds her to his birds. The archer, enraged, attacks Quong, who, in a dying blow, manages to stab the archer with such force that he is pinned to the killing tree. Both men are dying when the canaries arrive. The Mandarin relishes the sight of the archer being devoured until he witnesses something strange. One single bird, a female, remains on the fleshless skeleton. From within the ribcage, a new bird—a male—emerges. Could it be the soul of the archer now in bird form? The two lead the ravenous canary flock from the trees and onto the terrified Quong. 

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I once wrote a short paper on a story by Mark Twain that mentioned a group of blue jays living on the Southern California coast. That dropped me into all kinds of research on the history of that name, what “blue jay” might have meant to Twain, and the actual bird, its habitat, and its habits. I concluded that Twain was talking about the kind of blue jay common to Missouri and the rest of the eastern United States but not at all where he said it was. The rabbit hole was a fun one. So here I am thinking about canaries and poking around the internet to see what I can find. There are many kinds of canaries. There is a species native to the Canary Islands, appropriately enough. The domesticated canary comes from that line. These are also the birds that have been used in coal mining as a “sentinel species” to detect poisons in the air. First of all, carnivorous? Not much. They will eat a small insect, but they prefer nuts, fruit, and seeds. Second, do they feed in packs? Yes! Apparently, they drop from the sky en masse and forage in low vegetation. Finally, I am now a fan of the sports teams from William Allen HS in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Let’s go canaries!!