“Well, yes,” Gray Feather said to him. “I’ve heard there is an oldest Crow still living. A Crow that Crows began with.”
A chilly billwise breeze lifted Dar Oakley’s back feathers. He’d lingered, unable to make up his mind to go; he’d only pondered and put questions to himself and others. But it was autumn now, late to be staying.
“My mate, Rin Darkwood,” Gray Feather said. “He was born a Crow of another clan, a clan whose marches run up billwise to a great lake, he told me. He said that the oldest Crow lived somewhere in those lands. He said he knew a Crow who knew a Crow who knew.”
“Yes,” Dar Oakley said. “That’s what I’ll do. Find a Crow who knows a Crow who knows a Crow.”
Gray Feather laughed. The world was so rich now, so full. “Go now while it’s still warm in the sun,” she said.
“I could be gone long,” Dar Oakley said. “Never return.”
“I won’t forget you,” Gray Feather said.
“No? Because I, because of how you and I—”
“No,” she said, and lifted wings to go. “Because you have a name.”
He watched her out of sight. Then he dropped from the branch he’d shared with her, fell into the sweet air, stopped his fall with a wing beat, and pointed himself billwise.
Through the days he traveled, flying and resting in the slow Crow way, over lands not very different from those he knew. People towns and hamlets went by under him in his going over them; he looked down on the shaggy tops of their lodges, the black heads of women and the smaller black heads of their naked children, which sometimes turned upward and showed paler faces, hands pointing at his passage. Beyond their palisades, the long stretches of Maize-plants turning yellow—the Crows of this North hadn’t yet learned to live on it—and vines of squash and beans growing up and clinging around them. These passed. Then groves of tall nut trees, Beech and Hickory and Chestnut, the ground around littered with the mast that many beings lived on, People too; Dar Oakley flew too high above the spreading limbs to see any gatherers. The leaves were turning.
Farther North the People had begun the autumn burn, the low grasses and shrubbery set alight to keep the ways open, and to make the grass and berries come in sweeter in the spring, and so bring in Deer and Bison. And also just because People loved fire. Beneath him gray smoke like dense low clouds lay over stripes and sparkles of red like sunsets, as if the sky lay on the ground. Most beings feared fire and ran from it, and so People could use fire to force them to go where they could be caught. Many Crows, though, loved smoke, hopped and flew along the lines of the burn, wings cupped as though to clothe themselves in smoke, dizzy with it or stoned by it. Dar Oakley, a stranger, couldn’t stop to join them, might not be welcome. Aloft he smelled the sweet-acrid smoke, followed the silver rivers winding through the blackened woods. A line of canoes, there. He wondered if People had once thought of a thing that would do all that fire does, and then worked out how to create it, as they had made weapons and houses; or if they’d come upon fire in the world, tamed it over time and made it do what they wanted when they wanted it, as they had Maize, or Dogs.
Through all this he didn’t seek. He had no name to ask for or to call, no qualities to look for—what would the oldest Crow look like? He was among Crows who likely didn’t want him there, and so he kept to himself; there was food in plenty, and he had no reason to contest with any Crow.
He didn’t seek, but he was aware—and the farther billwise he went, the more he felt it—that he was sought. Single Crows and pairs would notice him, and go away without a call of inquiry. Or they’d follow far off, thinking that they weren’t seen.
And all the while a strange notion, an impossible idea, was forming inside him, forming as a spring nest is formed of many things from here and there, growing stronger.
It was turning cold when he reached what was surely the great lake that the People called Beautiful. The day was dark and a sharp wind raised whitecaps on the stone-gray surface; white-winged birds sailed over it, and Dar Oakley did think of the sea he’d crossed, whether this could be some part of it.
Then Crows began to come around him in numbers, smooth slim birds blacker than the obsidian chips Crows love and hide. Word must have passed from Crow to Crow that the one they awaited had come: himself. Hard to believe that was what the calls and black eyes turned to him meant, but it seemed to be so. Follow, they said. That was clear enough. The Crows around him passed by and over him, settled, waited for him to catch up, then took up the guiding as other Crows went on ahead. Their calls were neither welcoming nor hostile, and Dar Oakley kept still.
How was it he knew that a great smooth Beech, at whose foot masses of nuts had fallen, was where he was being taken? Like Bees streaming all together toward the entrance to their hive, the Crows flew unerringly to it. On a high branch alone a Crow sat, and the incoming Crows alighted on lower branches; but Dar Oakley, as though he knew for sure he was meant to, took a seat there beside that Crow, a female big and glistening in many iridescent shades.
“Hello, Kits,” he said.
She raised her head to him without a beck. “Long time since I’ve been called by that name,” she said. “Hello, Dar Oakley.”
“The same,” he said. “The same for me, Kits. A long time.”
Once, in the time when they were mated, in that other world elsewhere, Kits had told him that if a Crow flew far enough daywise—or darkwise, it was the same either way, she said—then after a long time, many years, that Crow would come back to the very place it had started from. The world, which seems to go on in plains and mountains forever without any end, is really all curved: like the trunk of a great tree, maybe, she’d said. And like a Tit or any small bird searching a trunk’s bark for food, you could go right around the trunk of the tree of the world and return to where you started.
She’d said, You know it to be so. The way the earth rolls up over the horizon as you fly toward it and look from high, high up? It’s so, it does.
Dar Oakley, who’d tried to believe this though he could barely understand it, had said that even if it were so, and the world was like the trunk of a tree and so on, no Crow could ever live so long. And how could she know such a thing unless she had circled that world-tree herself, and come back to where she started from? Which she could not have done in a Crow’s lifetime.
She’d given him a mocking look and didn’t answer. And yet without any good reason he’d come to believe that she had had life enough.
“Then tell me,” he said to her now. “By what way did you come around to this place, this lake, this Beech? Darkwise, or daywise? Did you cross the sea? I did, Kits, and died.”
“I never died,” she said. “I came from darkwise, going into daywise, all over land. And here we are, you from one way, I from the other, side by side. Again.”
That was true: it was she, and he was here beside her. Like two little pecking birds circling a tree trunk in opposite directions, they’d come together as far from where each had started as they could go, and something he’d lost forever was returned to him, which was stranger by far than the losing of it. Which had been strange enough.
“Kits,” he said. “When we parted that last time. When I set out with the red-haired People woman on that journey that I shouldn’t have taken.” She nodded, the cooler and more skeptical of her two eyes turned on him. “You said you might not be there still when I came back; that lots could happen, we might not meet again. And I said to you, ‘You and I, Kits. For life.’ And you said, ‘Life is short.’ ”