Smoke came from holes in their tops.
Now and then there was a Deer, or an Elk, even a Boar they had caught, and some number of them would be going at it with their things; they’d hack at it, with amazing ease getting a leg or a rib cage detached and then taking the flesh from it in long strips, which they didn’t always eat right away but hung up on a thing of branches they fixed together (wonderful to watch them, their hands and the things they held, how quick and clever) that they set before a pit or hole where they kept a fire going, never large but never fading to smoky nothing, now and then throwing in sticks or dung so that sparks and flame shot up and Crows fled away.
Crows, at least Crows then, were wary birds, easily alarmed by novelty. They could not have imagined such things as they now, undeniably, witnessed; but Crows are also hardheaded and practical, and would prove (in the long relationship that this flock was just now setting out on) very adaptable. It wouldn’t be long before the new creatures and their ways became familiar, and though other smart animals never lost their fear of fire and of the smell and sound of People, Crows soon didn’t mind. They’d never seen fire managed before, even those few who knew what it was at all, but here it was, and before winter’s end it had ceased to frighten them; it became part of the way things were. And yes, the beings did leave a lot: rotting carcasses at the settlement’s edge, offal they didn’t want. Crows might not know swords and spears, but they knew offal. If you dared to get it, that disdainful female had said.
“But why do they let their four-legged ones at that meat and not take it themselves?” the Vagrant said to Dar Oakley in a hungry week of ice, as they overlooked the midden. “Those ones are an annoyance, that’s for sure.”
“I wonder,” said Dar Oakley.
They watched the beings tussle and square off, small ones and large ones, differently colored and framed. Was feeding beside them like feeding among the Wolves, who paid you no attention? Or would they argue with you? Hard to know. Keep far from them and nibble at the margins.
They saw newcomers arrive, following new beasts unknown to the Crows, heavy and tall like Elks but short-necked and dull; the two-legs pushed and harried them and drove them in a herd from place to place but never slew or ate them, and the Crows wondered: Who of these served whom? Then a new thing came in, impossible to describe to those who hadn’t seen it—even some of those looking down on the settlement from the winter-bare trees seemed unable to see it at all. One would say, It’s like a fallen tree rolling down a hill, and others would say, No, it’s like a Deer caught in a deadfall and trying to pull free, and those who refused to see it at all would shrug and depart. Dar Oakley had no description to give, but he saw clearly what it was for: a big mild animal in the lead tugging at the wooden arrangement following on after, the two-legs tugging at the animal’s head or striking it gently now and then with one of their eternal sticks. They were all doing one thing: moving something along too heavy to carry. With it they brought in thick boughs, stones, and other matter they for some reason wanted.
They also brought in others of their kind. One day as Dar Oakley watched from above, many came out from their shelters in seeming excitement and went to walk alongside the mover, pushing it as the animal pulled, into the settlement, up to a house. And from it was lifted one who could not stand on his own legs. Thin as though starving. With great care and under the eyes of all the others, this one was carried by two strong ones to the shelter—Dar Oakley thought of the Deer he had seen carried over the river and beyond. His hair (Dar Oakley felt it was a male) was the strange long plumage-like hair they all had, but his wasn’t dark and glistening; it was as white as Hawthorns in spring. He looked around himself at the place and the sky and the trees—his gaze pausing at the lone Crow on a bare branch—and then he was borne within. Dar Oakley on his perch and his kin on the earth beneath watched that shelter as though something striking might come out of it, but nothing did.
“Better get back,” the Vagrant said, looking darkwise.
Through those nights, as the Crows in their winter trees flitted and slept and woke and the Owls on muffled wings hunted the forest’s black edge for whatever showed itself, the little settlement between the long lake and the winter mountain lay silent. The doors of those for whom the Crows had as yet no name (nor a name for doors or houses, either) were barred and the small windows blocked up; their animals kept them warm, and at night when they slept in heaps together they smoored their fires so that they might be built up again in the morning with sticks and straw and dung. The smoke rose out the roof-holes and caught stars. Stories were murmured and children engendered; the stripped meat of the Deer and other beasts, smoked and dried, was chewed; mothers chewed it for their babes. On the coldest nights the long red Wolves could be heard on the mountain calling to one another, and when spring was near and hunger was sharpest they came down to walk at night amid the alien smoke and the houses, sniffing at the doors, and the ones inside in the dim dark could smell them too.
In time nights grew shorter. The People came out of their houses in the dawns into the mist and the holy sun, and got ready to work and to build.
Thus the cold moons were passed, though the Crows hadn’t marked them, Crows having no theories about how moons come and go or how many of them there are. They know very well how the days grow longer and the sun higher, and they know when winter is at last truly gone and won’t return; they know it not only in the weather and the forests but in themselves, a sort of madness beginning in their breasts and worsening by the day until it seems to them they have always been this way and no other, as though it’s they who cause the mad Hares to come out and battle in plain sight, the green Woodpeckers to rattle the dead trees, Toads to belch in the swollen ponds.
We People think we feel overweening desires, joys, furies, in spring, but those are mere vestiges of what the greater part of the living world feels. I suppose it’s like having a whole year’s lusts and longings packed into a few weeks. Dar Oakley says he’s seen enough springs, old as he is now, and says he’d prefer not to see another come: not in the world or in himself. It’s just too hard.
By now the great winter roost was shredding, as though a disaster had befallen it. All the flighty Rooks had gone in a cloud to where Rooks go. Families sorted themselves from the restless crowd, couples separated from families, and young ones talked about going—going anywhere, going just to go. Two of Dar Oakley’s siblings were drawn away one wet, mild morning with a swarm of young Crows related to them and not, without a thought and without farewell, going out to Who-Knows-Where, somewhere far from here, to spread, to reduce the land of no Crows by a little more. As they were subtracted from around him on that morning, Dar Oakley felt his own shoulders tense as though asked to take wing too.
Why didn’t he follow? he wondered, and still wonders. He was the same age as his fleeing, chattering siblings—Older Sister older by only a few days, and wasn’t he the first to leave the nest? His mother had told him so. Wasn’t he a Traveler, even then? So he’d told the Vagrant, who’d scoffed at him for it. Maybe what kept him from the exodus was that desire or bent in him, hard to recognize much less acknowledge, even if there had been words for it: that bent to be alone.