What a roar they made, settling in those branches, calling to friends and foes, shouting out their opinions to one and all, moving from branch to branch and saying, You! Oh, you! There you are, here I am! and a hundred other meaningless but not useless remarks—older and bigger Crows, louder and better-friended ones, made their way by such greetings into the middle of the crowd, where in the freezing nights they’d be warmed by the mass of Crow bodies around them, while younger and smaller ones went to the outside. Toughen them up, their elders thought, keep with their friends. The young ones hopped from branch to branch, getting as far in as they dared, males around females, females beckoning males—young Crows who wanted mates in the spring had better look now. Hello there, hello! Better to be high up than down low, if you could find a place: those down low were often shat upon by those above, awaking in the morning to find white streaks on their black coats, lots of laughs for others.
It had grown nearly dark on a certain evening, with a big moon rising, and the Biggers were calling, Settle down now, settle down, when a thrashing or commotion began in the woods on the far bank of the river, a noise that for a moment stilled the Crows who heard it. Something large was coming through the underwood over there, and something else coming after in pursuit. The Crows started up yelling at whatever it might be—always best to cry out on any predator, though you might benefit later from its leavings—but what was it? Too early in the dark of the year for Wolves . . .
A Deer, a small female, burst out into the moon’s light, taking staggering leaps toward the river. After her came—were they Wolves? No, not Wolves, like Wolves but not, and making sounds that Wolves would never make hunting. And after them came two others, taking long steps, upright on two legs.
“It’s them!” Dar Oakley cried, and cried again over the noise in the trees.
“Them? Them?”
Dar Oakley could see, as the Deer plunged into the river, that fixed in her flank was a stick, one of the kind that the two-legs had carried—that’s what they were for. The Wolf-like ones leapt in after her, trying to bite and swim at once; she could hardly hold her head above the water. The Crows were shouting alarms or encouragement or just marveling. Dar Oakley leapt from branch to branch, crying, “Them! Them!” as the youths around him nearly lost their perches laughing.
The two-legs were at the water now too, wading in like Bears up to their waists before striking out with their forearms. The Deer reached the island and the shadows and it was hard to see, the Crows pressing in and shoving for vantage. She’d never have found the strength to mount the rocky bank if it wasn’t for the animals harrying her from behind—it was impossible to tell how many of them there were as they flopped and skidded over the rocks and the mossy logs. But the Deer was failing, her legs were buckling, they were leaping for her throat. The two-legs then made the island and came up the bank, and that was too much for the Crows—many of them rose up and into the treetops to get as far as possible from this thing happening, as they would have for anything they couldn’t account for, and who could account for these hunters?
The two-legs reached the tangle of animals, and with harsh cries they pulled the snarling ones from the now placid and surrendered Deer. Then the larger of the two-legs straddled her body, took her neck in his two pale hands, and ripped it open. Blood spurted richly, black in the moonlight.
No, it was not with his hands he had done it but with another sort of thing he had somehow all along been carrying, but it was only Dar Oakley who understood that; the others were baffled by the impossible behavior in the dark and the struggle.
They rested, briefly, their Servitors (as it was clear the four-legs were) stirring around them but not daring more. Then together the two of them lifted the Deer, flung her on her side, and with the tool (now it was clear to all it was a thing they wielded, it caught a flash of moonlight), they tore it open down its breast to its vent. It took only a moment. The Deer’s guts slid glistening out, and other parts; with the tool one hunter took the liver just as though he had reached in and tugged it out. They pushed away the rest, like Wolves showing little interest in it, and the four-legs fought over what was good in it.
Above in the trees the news went from bird to bird: the two-legs were dragging the emptied Deer, her head knocking the rocks, into the river. Swimming strongly each with one arm, bearing her up with the other, they brought her over the shallow river to the shore. For a while their animal helpers, left behind, called furiously after them, or went on messing with the mass of offal, but one by one they went into the water to swim across.
What were the Crows to do or think now? It was dark, fully night, the moon high and small. Crows don’t see well in moonlight and almost never chance a flight. But those riches lay down there on the ground, and they each thought how they could reach them in the morning before others did—or should they at first light go over the river and see what those hunters had left? Surely they couldn’t have eaten it all. It kept them from sleep, thinking and talking, changing place to look out over the river to where a dim glow could be seen that none of them understood.
At morning there was no sign of them across the river. There was smoke and the smell of burning (the oldest among them knew the smell; fires in that land in a dry summer were rare but memorable). And the Deer was gone entirely: no skin, no skull, no bones, nothing. Where had they gone? Some of the young ones followed Dar Oakley up and up into the morning to see, going out following the way he had gone that first day—and there! Out on the moorland between the river and the rise of the land they saw them, the two-legs, and the Deer as welclass="underline" her four feet affixed somehow to a sapling stripped of its branches, carried swaying between the two-legs, the four-legs sniffing at its lolling head. And there on the high ground were others of their kind.
Yes, they were here: they were as Dar Oakley had described them, though the flock soon grew tired of his telling the story. Nor for all his bragging was he the first or only Crow who knew of such ones. They were strange to the Crows of his own demesne, but word was that Crows roosting with the flock had tales of the beings, things they’d heard from some other Crows somewhere. One young female claimed to have seen them herself. She seemed not to find them that interesting. Dar Oakley schemed to perch beside her.
“What are they called?” he wanted to know. “How do you name them?”
“Called?” she asked, in a sort of disdain. “Why would we call them something?”
“Things are called by a name.”
“There was no reason to talk about them,” she said. “They were just there.” Her attention was drawn away from Dar Oakley to other youths, but then she seemed to remember something, and offered it to him. “The thing I heard about them,” she said, “is how much they leave.”
“Leave?”
“Don’t use, I mean. And if you dared to go get it . . .” But then, done with him, she gave him a quick beck—a polite dip of her head—and was gone.
Over that winter Crows in twos or threes, sometimes in dozens, went the way Dar Oakley had gone, to the place on the high ground beyond the lake. Soon there were more of the beings settled there than those Dar Oakley had seen, if the two who had caught the Deer were even the same two as had marked this spot with their spears. They all looked alike to the Crows at first, and it was hard to tell how many there were—a few were small, young ones perhaps. They had begun piling up on the plain some things, things that were like great nests, or (some said) burrows above the ground, shelters like the heaps of boughs and leaves a Bear will sleep under all winter, or perhaps like the stones a Caddis Fly sticks together to hide within—for they were indeed made of stones and sticks and wattles, whitened somehow the way a Heron’s nest is whitened with ordure; and the beings, for whom the Crows had still no name, went in and out of them, so that the Crows couldn’t tell if the same few were appearing over and over or if many were hidden within. More of these dwellings or nests were being made, too, whenever the Crows came to look.