Then he felt the oddest thing.
A Tern had come up beneath him, and bumped gently against his belly. Birds never touch in flight! Then another did the same. They were driving him—in fact they were bearing him—upward. These little birds—he weighed as much as four of them. When one tired, another came in, crying, Up! Up!
What did they want, what were they doing? Carrying him up: to stop the beating of his wings, to lay him on the wind. They wanted him to fly as they did, use the wind as they did; they thought it was easy. This high sea wind: he perceived it suddenly as a being, a being around him, the wind, and a friend of theirs. And if he just stopped beating, that being might support him for a time, yes, if he pushed out his wings, yes, like this, the tips curled upward like a soaring vulture’s, and let the wind sweep over them—make the wind sweep over them, or ask it to. He’d flown all his life and never thought he might change the way he did it. But he’d better, for now he was hopelessly far from the boat, a tiny thing bobbing on the water far away. He was exhausted: rations had been short, he was wasted to nothing, which was perhaps what helped him stay aloft, a weightless black scrap on the wind. Hold me, take me.
And out of the morning mists that the wind pulled away he saw land. A low blue-black island that might have been a cloud bank but wasn’t, was certainly not. The Terns were flitting and streaming toward it past him, and Dar Oakley could perceive other birds too homing in on the place.
Just lie on the wind: all he could do or tell himself to do. The Terns stayed with him, unconcerned, diving down now and then to fish, calling cheerful insults to one another. Beat once, no more; then once again. It was clear he’d have to fall down through the contrary airs stirred up by the sea and the lump of land before he could reach a landing, and his strength was nearly gone. But that bare point, there, reaching out toward him—the Terns and others didn’t care for it, it seemed, but it was as far as he could go, if he could go that far. The sea smashed against it, pointlessly furious as always, maybe about to have him for itself at last. But no: he made it, tumbling down onto stone, bleak stone, alive. For a long time he lay unmoving, bill open, wings splayed like a dead Crow’s, barely breathing, feeling his heart run. Run, heart, run, just stay within me.
After a time of not-being he felt movement around him, and sounds, and he thought that if there were predators here he was done for, and it wasn’t worth even opening his eyes to see something he couldn’t fight off. Then a sharp tap on his bill woke him fully. Terns around him; they laughed to see him startled. One hopped close on its weak little legs and thrust a piece of something into his mouth. Food. Fish. Something. He swallowed, and they laughed and nodded at each other, and one came with more food.
They were feeding him. They had brought him to this safety, and now they were feeding him.
It was against every instinct of self-preservation that the world obeyed, the instinct that ruled all beings, even People. It was the only time in all his existence that beings not of his own kind and close kin had given help to him with no advantage to themselves, anyway no advantage that he could imagine, and it would never happen again. He swallowed. He got more. They came and went from the rock they had borne him to; they seemed even to compete to be the ones who fed him. It was how the Brother said People should be and never were.
They wanted him to fly. Fly, Crow of your kind! Up, up! When he roused at last, they urged him to follow, follow them, follow from the little point to the long beaches and high cliffs farther darkwise, all crowded with birds, raucous with birds. Dar Oakley once aloft could see the long bitten coastline running on farther than his sight could reach, and glistening heights that went up into the day and the sun. This was no sea island but a great land, the one the Terns had told him of: the place of the warm sun in the land of ice. As he came close, he saw that all over the scrubby earth beyond the shingle, in the grass and sand, Terns were raising young: the gray fuzzy chicks were everywhere, just able to toddle out of the shallow nest-holes, waving stubby wings. So many. The adults coming in a steady stream to feed them—how could they tell which were their own? Did they know, or did they just push sustenance into any open mouth they saw? If they all did that, would all the young be equally fed? Or was he wrong and each mother and father recognized each little beaky face as one of their own? He didn’t know, and doesn’t know now.
They went on feeding him, though his strength had returned. He couldn’t fish for himself, which seemed evident to them, and they brought him fish and dropped them before him, even tried to stuff them in his mouth. They fed him like a chick of theirs. Certainly they hadn’t mistaken him for one; what caused them to do it? There was no word in the language of Crows to describe it; he thought there would be no need for such a word in the language of the Terns. And it wasn’t that he didn’t need or want their care: as far as he ventured back beyond the sun-warmed rocks and beaches, food was scarce—not much for Crows, and no Crows either that he saw, though he glimpsed a great Snowy Owl and wondered how it lived.
Each day when they went to sea he’d ask the Terns to look for the boat of the Saints, and they said, Yes, yes, look, look, see, but he wasn’t sure they understood him. He had enough seamanship to know that if the boat found its way to this shore, it would need an inlet where they could put in: a cove or the emptying of a river, a bay protected by outer banks from the thudding surf. There was only one such he’d found, where streams of meltwater fell from the heights and filled a wide pool, whose overflow went out a channel to the sea; at high tide the sea came in with enough draft for a boat. He visited there every day to learn if the Saints had found it, seeing in his mind as he went the boat tied up there and its sail furled—only to find it, once again, not there.
Meanwhile the long days were growing shorter. The Terns were stuffing themselves and their now-fledged young with quantities of food that Dar Oakley wouldn’t have thought would fit inside them. It was clear they were readying themselves for the long reach over open sea. If they went, he must go too. He couldn’t stay here; there was no here, not for him. And yet how could he go with the Terns? How, despite all their goodwill? Watching them dash and flit, training up their young in their trade, Dar Oakley thought a thought no Crow has likely ever thought before or since: that if only he could, he would become a being of another species; that there was a species better than his own to wish to be.
But they weren’t going to leave him there anyway. When that ever-returning need to go passed over all the red-billed birds, then the ones who knew him best (at least it might be those ones, he really couldn’t tell) flew around him, swooping in and dashing away as though they could draw him up after them, as People’s whipped Horses draw a cart into motion. His stomach was full and his plumage sleek with fish fat; his head was crammed with their instructions and urgings and scoldings about how he should hold himself and his wings, rise on the rising air until he reached a stream of wind that would carry him almost without his needing to make any effort. If he was let down again he must find another rising wind, and be lifted up to join it again. It was all so simple.
The air was filled with summonses. Fat white clouds striped with long thin ones walked the far sky, and surely the apprehension he felt was only the impossible journey ahead? But no, it was something else, something he went toward that at the same time, but faster, came toward him.