When autumn came that year, the flock broke in two without ever agreeing on it, which they couldn’t have done. Many made a new roost, away from the old place by the river, amid the Alders and the Oaks of the foothills above the People’s settlement. From there they watched the People, which some at least visited every day, sometimes profiting, sometimes not. By the time the days were cold, their new roost was the larger one. It was where Dar Oakley roosted, though his parents, no.
The Crows then knew only two seasons. In one, the days grew ever shorter and colder until they ceased to, and began to lengthen again. That season had one name. When the Crows began to feel the lengthening of the days and saw the sun rising each morning a little farther billwise, they called that season by another name. I’ve written spring and summer, autumn and winter, because we People have thought for so long in fours, but that wasn’t how Crows thought, or how they think now. Neither did People: not in that land then. The difference was that the People marked a single day, or night, when the season of the long sun changed to the season of the short sun. One day that led to winter, and one that led back into summer. Dar Oakley thought that perhaps Summer was a realm, and Winter another.
Not long after the day in this year when (by the People’s reckoning) summer turned to winter, a day of silver mist and leaves golden and falling, Dar Oakley came down from the mountainside roost to find Fox Cap. He knew no more than before about what a realm might be, but when he talked to her—when he listened to her talk—the world around would alter, as when a mist lifts and things that seem vague and close are seen to be far-off and distinct. When he was alone with Crows, the world was simply wide and near and known. It was seen. With her he sometimes felt, deliciously, almost afraid to fly: What would he encounter?
She wasn’t by the lake, nor on the tall rocks. She was not on the margins of the forest, cracking nuts and looking into the darkness of the trees. Not in her cap in her usual places, nor in his.
She was gone.
Now and then he had seen People pack things in a carriage, and with their beasts in tow go off billwise, the direction where the Raven said many, many more of them lived. They’d return, eventually, their carriage full of different things. Dar Oakley hadn’t ever seen one as young as she go with these travelers. But up on the palisade, by the skulls of enemy fighters—more were honored there now—he kept watch.
So he saw the Singer carried out from his house one morning, two strong men bearing him, who seated him gently on the beaten and grassless earth. He looked up to where Dar Oakley perched, and gazed with his large, unblinking pale eyes at him. It made Dar Oakley quite uncomfortable. He looked away, preened beneath his wings, raised his head to study the sky, changed his place. The Singer went on regarding him. Dar Oakley expected him at any moment to begin to sing, and what would that song compel him to do? Instead a female came from the largest of the houses, the one from which the smoke never ceased rising, bringing a pot that she put beside the Singer. Still watching Dar Oakley, he put his hands into the pot and drew out gobbets of fat, broken bones with the flesh still clinging to them, other matter that Dar Oakley didn’t recognize. He laid it all on the ground before him. The other People, the Dogs, indeed everyone but a spying child half-hidden, went away. The Singer raised his hand to Dar Oakley, then with it showed him the feast.
Of course the Crow wasn’t going to be taken in by that. Settle on the earth amid these People, whether they were in hiding or not, crippled or not? He laughed.
It did look good. Fox Cap loved the Singer. How much did that count for? Dar Oakley was hungry, too: never not.
Crows are hardheads, not easy to fool. That’s what they think about themselves, and they like to prove it by telling stories about a Crow who does get fooled—they laugh and laugh, to show they never would be. But there are stories too about a Crow so skeptical and wary that she misses something good.
A story was beginning now, Dar Oakley knew that. He knew that he was in it, the example. He just didn’t know what kind it was. He shat, he felt his heart run fast, he let himself down into the compound.
For what seemed like a long space the Singer hardly moved, only watched Dar Oakley eat and eat. With every bite the Crow looked up at the Singer and around the compound, then bent to eat, then looked up. Amid meats cooked in the way the People liked them there were uncooked meats. The Singer took one of these raw bits and chewed it slowly, but nothing more. Only when the bird ceased, crop full, did he speak.
“I don’t know your speech,” he said in the People’s tongue. “But I think you may know mine.”
Dar Oakley understood the words, different though the sound of them was from Fox Cap’s. He becked with all the courtesy he could. Except for Fox Cap—and those defeated fighters he had eaten—this was as close as he had come to one of the People. He wished he could ask this one where Fox Cap was.
“She is gone,” the Singer said, startling Dar Oakley. “They came and took her cap of a Fox pelt. She went to take it back from them.”
Dar Oakley wanted to question him, but he had only Crow speech. The Singer said no more. He put his hands flat on the ground on either side of him, lifted his body a little, and pushed himself backward a small distance. Then he did it again. He moved in this way back toward the dark doorway of his house, his thin legs trailing. Dar Oakley watched with one eye and then the other as the Singer bit by bit withdrew inside, a Fox into its den. Dar Oakley stepped to the door, but he thought nothing could induce him to go in. He could see the Singer in there, and the glitter of a small fire, and things hanging that he couldn’t name. The Singer had lifted himself to a low seat, and busied himself with a small pot for his fire. Dar Oakley gave a hushed, inquiring call, but if the Singer couldn’t understand him, it was no use asking him anything. What could he do? He went inside, first his inquiring head, then a foot.
The Singer, as though not noticing that a Crow was in his house, put the pot on the fire. With such pots and fires Dar Oakley had seen the People prepare their foods. This pot was empty, but as it heated, the Singer, speaking words meaningless to Dar Oakley, took up from somewhere a handful of dry leaves, which he threw into the pot, and then another handful of something else. Smoke arose.
Crows are not excellent smellers. They hunt and forage by sight and find their cached food by memory. Not that they have no sense of smell, but for the most part they don’t go by it. Smoke, though, is another matter: they have a strange affinity for it. The smell that arose from the pot the white-hair set on the fire, that arose in the smoke and into Dar Oakley’s nostrils, would in a sense never go away from him; in later times, in places far from here, any whiff of it, or any air that bore anything resembling it, would carry him away, for a moment or for longer, to when he first went into the realm of the two-legs, where they spoke and said ymr ymr.
Now, said the Singer to him, and Dar Oakley heard that word, and understood it, though at the same time he knew the Singer hadn’t spoken. Now tell me your name.
Crow, Dar Oakley said.
Crow, said the Singer, and smiled and laughed, pleased.
He and the Crow not only understood each other now, but somehow they spoke the same tongue—not as Dar Oakley and Fox Cap had spoken together, each in a different one, but in the same—whether his, or the Singer’s, or another that was neither, he couldn’t know.
They came and took her cap, the Singer said. She has gone to take it back from them, and I am afraid for her.
He picked up from near him another pot, or a thing like a pot, but covered over with something that might be the hairless skin of an animal.