Bonny had a dream. His inventor's eyes gleamed with the light of it. His
days lived with the hope of it. His nights moved with its vision.
Because of his dream we called him Bonny Gull. He dreamed of building an
airplane with metal, wood and fabric to emulate the sinewed, feathered
grace of a soaring gull.
He studied gulls. He studied them dead and alive. He studied their
wonderful soaring flight alive. He killed them and studied their
lifeless wings. He wanted their secret. He wanted to recreate it for
man.
He might have asked God. He might have asked God and heard a still small
voice answer: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is
God's. Render unto man his own flight and leave to the gulls their own.
Man's flight is different because his destiny is different. He doesn't
need the gulls' flight."
But Bonny envied the gulls. He killed hundreds of them, yes, thousands,
and buried them in the field. He built an airplane from what he thought
he had learned from their dead bodies.
He built an airplane and took it out to fly. Engineers, who had never
studied gulls but who had studied man's flight, told him he shouldn't do
it. They pointed out to him how the center of pressure would shift on
his wings. But Bonny glared his glittering faith at them, snuggled his
dream in close, and flew.
He took off all right. He roared across the field, and if he didn't
sound quite like a gull, he looked the part. He rose into the air for
all the world like a giant gull. He pulled off in a steep climb, and the
wise men wondered if again they were proved wrong by an ignorant
fanatic.
Their wonder didn't last long. When Bonny tried to level out, he nosed
over and dove straight into the ground, like a gull diving into the
ocean for a fish. We rushed out to the wreck. Bonny was quite dead.
There was scattered around him not only the remains of his own gull
wings, but thousands of the feathered remains of other gull wings. He
had dived straight into the shallow grave of all the gulls he had
killed.