Sings-to-Trees loved all living creatures with a broad, impartial love, the sort of love that rescues baby bats and stays up nights feeding them, one drop of milk and mealworm mix at a time. He splinted the legs of injured deer and treated mites in the ears of foxes and gave charcoal to colicky wyverns. No beast was too ugly, too monstrous, too troublesome. He had once donned smoked glass goggles and shoulder-length cowhide gloves to sit up with an eggbound cockatrice for three days, giving it calcium tablets and oiling its cloacal vents every four hours. Since he’d been nursing a pocketful of baby hummingbirds at the time, which had to be fed sugar water every fifteen minutes sixteen hours out of the day, it had been quite an extraordinary three days. He still had nightmares about it.