“Dar Oakley,” she said. “I want to tell you. I’m sorry I went away that time you were gone into Ymr, looking to find a thing good for Crows.”
“No,” he said. She had begun to alter; her primaries loosened as if in molt. The edges of her bill cracked. “Kits!”
“I’ll tell you the reason,” she said. “I was afraid that you’d come back changed; that you’d be like me, and learn to hate your condition. I didn’t want to see it.”
“Hate my condition?”
“There is such a thing as too much life,” she said. Her legs sank; her eyes were becoming dull and glaucous. “Thank you, Dar Oakley.”
“No!” Dar Oakley cried. “Kits, you lied!”
“I never did,” she said. “I said I wanted help. That I needed this thing; that the first hadn’t been enough. I have it now. It’s enough.” She altered further, more terribly; he could hardly hear her. “I hope you have all the life you want or need, Dar Oakley. And when you want no more—when at last you don’t want anything more at all—I hope there’s one nearby who loves you enough to bring this for you, as you brought it for me.”
She lost her hold on the branch; Dar Oakley put out a foot to catch her, but she fell away—all but the foot that his foot held—and in a disordered mass fell to the base of the Beech. She was no longer she. She was a skull and a gray mass of under-plumage and a breast fallen in. She might have been lying there for years.
He couldn’t bring himself to fly down to it. Around him as he stood he heard cries and wings—the Servitors, shocked, crowding the branch he sat on, keening loudly. Dar Oakley couldn’t keep his voice from joining with theirs. The louder the clamor grew, the more Crows of the flock were drawn in.
Only when the ululation began to die away—and it went on long—did the Servitors fall silent and turn to Dar Oakley. He let out the last, smallest of grieving cries, one eye on them. That was their Queen down there, and he was the last to have been near her. They began to call a different call to one another—Who is this among us? What has he done, what should be done to him? This has been seen among Crows, a kind of drumhead court-martial with much yelling and dispute and then suddenly a sentence passed, and carried out: a dead Crow on the ground.
Dar Oakley let himself tumble from the branch as though shot and fall limply toward the ground. At the last moment he unfolded, landed feetfirst, and leapt aloft. He was gone amid the dense firs before the puzzled Servitors caught on; but through that day till the sun went down they sought him, calling from tree to tree, trying to catch him in a net of sightings.
He thought they had good reason to hate him. He hated himself. He thought, even as he evaded them every which way, that he should dive into the dreadful Beautiful Lake and drown if he could. Or he’d starve: just never eat again, until he lay desiccated and bony like her.
But he couldn’t. He was already hungry! So hungry. And that was the Thing inside him too, wanting and wanting forever and ever.
He flew. He could see in his mind’s eye—for though he couldn’t dream, he could foresee—the Small Ugly People, trooping all together, coming to the place where the remnants of Kits lay. Enjoying their revenge; picking through her bones and feathers to find the new Precious Thing and the old Precious Thing within her, and carrying them both away for good.
Rivers and streams run down from the lands of the Crow and Turtle and Wolf and Bear clans of the Longhouse People, rising in the great lakes and going down to the Dawn Land. It was the Good Son who made the rivers run so conveniently for traveling, and in the beginning they used to run both ways, toward home as well as away; the Bad Son changed that, and now canoes must toil upstream against the current to reach home. But at least the downstream journey was when the canoes were heaviest with furs and other things to trade for the pierced shells of the Dawn Land, beautiful and rare and valuable but above all sacred, the currency of peace.
The Dawn Land was so called because from there the great salt sea extended to where the sun rose every morning. The People couldn’t conceive of a big land beyond the sea, and more land beyond that, and then another sea and more land, until it all came back to this shore where they sat. Dar Oakley could: though even then, when years had passed since Kits had explained it, he still didn’t know if he believed it.
“So the Crow had failed in all his attempts to get nothing,” One Ear told the others, “and at last he gave up and turned alone for home.”
Killed, burned, fooled, robbing, robbed, humiliated—by then Dar Oakley’d heard the story many times in all the ways One Ear told it, and always complained that it hadn’t happened that way at all; but One Ear always said he liked it better so. It’s funnier my way, he said.
In this telling of One Ear’s, the Crow was sitting by the riverside and feeling sorry for himself for his bad luck when he heard a voice coming from beneath a pile of rocks beneath a pile of yellow Beech leaves—a voice of distress, or anyway an unhappy voice. He went to see what it was, and when he had scattered the leaves and pulled away the stones he found a skeleton there, all jumbled up, his chest and skull filled with bugs and mice nibbling away. The Skeleton rattled pitifully until the Crow saw that he must put the jaw back with the skull bone, and when that was done, the Skeleton could talk more easily, and asked the Crow if he had any tobacco.
Well, I do, said the Crow.
I’d be grateful if you’d fill a pipe of it for me, the Skeleton said. So the Crow took his pipe and his pouch and his flint, and filled the pipe and lit it. He stuck it in the Skeleton’s jaw, and the Skeleton gripped it tight with his remaining teeth and took a long draw. The Crow was amazed to see the smoke fill up the Skeleton’s empty chest and float out between his ribs, while the Skeleton grinned with pleasure. Meanwhile all the annoying bugs and vermin fled away from the smoke, and the Skeleton pulled himself together and sat up.
That’s better, he said. Thank you. It can get pretty uncomfortable lying here, year after year.
Hm, said the Crow. I’d have thought you’d have long since gone over to the Other Lands, where everything’s fine, and left all this behind.
Well, perhaps I have, said the Skeleton, but I don’t know anything of it. As far as I know, these bones are all of me there is.
The Crow said that indeed it was all he could see; and the Skeleton replied that, really, bones ought to be treated better than his had been, and put properly under the earth in a pot or a wrapping, and wept over. They’re all that the living possess and can honor when the spirit’s gone.
The Crow had never thought of it that way, but he saw that it was surely true. The Skeleton finished his tobacco and returned the pipe to the Crow, and said that if there was anything an old pile of bones like himself could do for the Crow in return, he should ask for it. Where had he been wandering?
The Crow told him how he had had a dream of a thing, a sort of thing that if he possessed it would keep him from death forever. And if you dream of a thing you want, you are meant to have it, and so he had gone in search of it, with no luck.
Well, the Skeleton said, I’m not the one to ask for help with that.
It’s all right, the Crow said. I don’t think it can be found.
Maybe not, said the Skeleton. But look at it this way. When you return home, you’ll tell the story of how you sought it and failed, and that story will be told and told again. And when you’re dead yourself, the story will go on being told, and in that telling you’ll speak and act and be alive again.
And so will you, the Crow replied.
I guess, the Skeleton said. And—well, here it is, being told, and we’re here to speak in it. And not for the last time, I don’t suppose!