When the box arrived, it was covered in white ribbons. Thrrrrp! A chirrup sounded from within, insistent and indignant.

When the girl opened the box (or rather, when the box nearly tore off its own wrapping), a feathered head thrust its way out.

“Oh!” her mother exclaimed. “Your ptarmigan looks a bit, uh-

“Pink,” her father finished.

The girl didn’t know what her parents meant. Her ptarmigan was clearly red, not pink at all. Its dark eyes gleamed. She scooped it up and went outside, smitten.

They played in the snowy garden for hours. The ptarmigan liked to do hesitant flaps as the girl ran around it in circles. When she wasn’t running, she sang to him while he twittered to her. When he chirruped for food, she brought him inside to the kitchen and pulled out small, seed biscuits. But her ptarmigan arched its face away, disgruntled.

“What do you want?”

The ptarmigan wiggled its head at a row of sausage hanging in the cellar. The girl had never heard of a ptarmigan who liked meat. But her ptarmigan did look very hungry. She broke off several links. The bird chomped and swallowed, then bobbed for more.

“You are going to be the biggest and most beautiful ptarmigan,” the girl said. “A giant ptarmigan.” The ptarmigan cooed and settled in her arms, asleep.

The next day was their first ptarmigan class. The girl arrived a bit late. Her ptarmigan had resisted the straps of the leash. It didn’t matter. It was worth it to strut past her classmates to the end of the line, their mouths agape while their own ptarmigans looked about as impressive as dirty snow.

Ptarmigan school proved to be difficult. The other ptarmigans walked neatly through the snow, hardly leaving footprints. Her ptarmigan jumped and danced, leaving a thick track of strangely shaped prints. The other ptarmigans stood stock still during camouflage practice. Her ptarmigan ducked itself into a snow bank, dusty red tail feathers shaking in the air.

The girl giggled. Her teacher frowned.

“Your pink ptarmigan must learn to behave. It needs to eat its daily allotment of seeds, respect the leash, and stop trying to run off.”

The girl wanted to object. Her ptarmigan did not like seeds. They made him sick. If he left the line, it was only because he was investigating his surroundings. He always came back. And he wasn’t pink. He was red.

But her teacher’s stern look silenced her.

For the next two weeks, she did as ordered. Her ptarmigan choked down seed biscuits, and then choked most of them back up in a wet blackish pile. He twittered too loudly, so he was muzzled each morning before being dragged to class on the leash. If he tried to move out of the ptarmigan line in class, the girl gave him a swift swat. She even dusted his feathers with flour so that he was not so noticeable amongst his cloud white classmates.

Her teacher nodded in approval.

The girl, however, cried every night.

At the end of two weeks, her parents found her in the kitchen next to the biggest oven with her ptarmigan in her arms. The bird lay limp, barely breathing. His eyes were dim and half closed. Swaths of red feathers had fallen out, leaving behind scabs on his skin.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to do,” the girl sobbed. “I did everything they told me.”

Her mother laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I think he knows what he needs. So do you.”

“But he isn’t like the other ptarmigans.”

“Who cares about them?” Her father said. “He is your ptarmigan. You get to decide what he eats and what he does.”

“Yes,” her mother agreed. “What can we give him?”

The girl wiped her eyes and cradled her ptarmigan. “He needs meat. A lot of it.”

The girl stayed home from ptarmigan class the next day. She nursed her red ptarmigan with squares of raw meat, blood dripping from her fingers, and slept with him nestled in her arms by the kitchen ovens. She sang happy and sad songs to him, depending on her mood. He cooed and chirruped more and more as the days passed.

Finally, one day, his feathers began to come back in, a soft rusty down. The snow melted outside their strong, stone house. The girl strapped him to her chest and took him for long walks in the sunshine.

One day, they came to a bright, sunny field. He twittered to be let down and scurried all over the muddy ground. He flapped his wings, no longer the soft rust, but now red-gold, a ruby caught in a bonfire. A wind gusted towards them and suddenly he was aloft. He chirruped in triumph.

“You are no ptarmigan,” the girl said as he hovered over her, testing his wide wings. The bright spring sun behind him cast a fluttering shadow on the girl’s smiling face. “You are a phoenix.”

They never went back to ptarmigan school.