This was the first of the great dyings that Dar Oakley witnessed.
After many seasons passed, winter, summer, the Crows of Dar Oakley’s grand flock decided, Crow by Crow, that they had no interest in moving any farther, or in listening to Dar Oakley’s ideas and plans. They were satisfied with where they were. Successive generations spread daywise, billwise, and otherwise into flocks and demesnes, and claimed freeholds in the ancient way. That took I’d guess a century or two, and by the end of it they lived as Crows have always lived, and no trace and few memories of their long migration remained.
In those demesnes were People, People in clothes, with Oxen and wagons, who at winter’s end turned the soil in long brown rows where Crows could hunt for grubs. The Pigs and Sheep that the People kept for food and wool sometimes fed Crows, too. Crows ceased to be feared, mostly; on the lanes and byways that the People made from house to village the children walking together counted the Crows that they saw:
One for sorrow
Two for mirth
Three for a wedding
Four for a birth
Beyond the planted lands were still forests choked in underbrush, as they had been in the high lands and glens where the Wolves gang terrorized travelers; what Crows didn’t know was that these impassable forests weren’t ancient but new, the result of the settlers not understanding how the former People had burned the undergrowth yearly to keep it down. Untamed, the settlers called the forests, wild, primeval, not knowing they had themselves made them. And they set about cutting them, for lumber and potash and the land that they stood on. Dar Oakley watched trees being girdled, not one or two here and there as One Ear’s people had done it but in great numbers, and when they fell and the stumps rotted, they were burned where they sat or were pulled away by groaning Oxen. Farms were begun. They separated the land with long fences of stone or sticks, they gathered honey from skeps, they ground apples for drink. (It’s a strange thing, Dar Oakley says: though he’s sure he remembers raiding Beehives in his first land, eating sweet woolly Honeybees and getting stung, tasting honey on his tongue so sweet it burned, Crows in this land never did and never have.)
Content to be retired from his long generalship, Dar Oakley fell back, along with the descendants of his former followers, into immemorial Crow life: feuding, poking around, stealing, taunting Owls. Lolling in the hot sun. Gossip. Food. Nests.
Love.
Kits (Dar Oakley told me) thought this was the hardest thing about too much life: that you lose mates. Outlive them, one after another. If your mate’s not killed, he dies old, but you still remain to mourn, mourn for this lost one more than you ever did for any lost one before—or anyway, each time it seems so. You know it will happen so again, a grief piled upon you over and over, and you decide to have no more, just live single among Crow friends as the Saints did, and for seasons at a stretch that was what Dar Oakley did. But you can’t just stop. You can’t, not forever. Kits could only stop by deciding to cease living altogether.
“Those yours?” he asked a Crow who’d been watching the games of young Crows, this year’s and last.
“Some, I think,” said the other. “That one with the spriggy head feathers. I think one of mine just had that one, but maybe that was a different one a time ago.”
“Well, seasons pass, you forget,” Dar Oakley said.
“They’ll be mated soon,” the other Crow said. “Young of their own.”
How beautiful they were, the older ones teaching the younger, the younger cautious or bold, showing already the sort of Crows they would grow up to be. They played at dropping a stick from a height so that another could catch it, fly up, and drop it in turn, to be caught again: but they’d invented playing the game in a group, where players circled around the stick as it fell, competing to be the catcher—was it better to be above the stick and dive down, or below and shoot up? Graceful, quick, never touching. The game had been invented a thousand times over, generation after generation: Dar Oakley knew.
“Getting colder,” the Crow said. “You notice that?”
“Old Crows feel it,” Dar Oakley said.
“I smell snow in this air,” the other said. “Maybe good to move.” He pointed his bill in the direction without a name, opposite to billwise.
Perhaps because of their history of always moving on, the Crows of Dar Oakley’s nation—what remained of it now—had adopted a practice rare though not unknown among Crows: they migrated in winter. They didn’t go far—they weren’t Terns or Hummingbirds driven to cross oceans and hemispheres; they went south by degrees as the cold grew deep in their lands (and this was a time of deep winters) until they reached places they found sufficiently warmer than home, and there they stopped. They filled the Oaks and Elms for a time, and when they felt the first intimations of mating time, they wandered back.
Dar Oakley liked the idea, which he told younger Crows had been his own. He liked new scenes, new sorts of spaces with occupants strange to him. He’d leave whatever winter quarters the flock established and fly in a wide circle through the lands around, no reason, just pulled by that old un-Crowlike impulse toward solitude, the tug to go where no Crows are: to feel briefly that faint shiver of dissolution.
There were Crows native to those parts, of course, and Dar Oakley watched them. Even from a distance they knew him for a stranger, and he took care not to arouse hostility. He listened to the talk he could get close enough to hear—he understood most of it, despite the odd soft accents it was cast in. The season was a little advanced here from what it was at home, the cues of day-length and warmth coming sooner; pairing and nest-building had already begun. It was odd to watch it begin while not feeling it in his own body. One among the ones he watched was a female, unmated, just in her first season of maturity, he thought (he was wrong about that). A little small, perhaps—smaller than he was—but brightly black, with an air of self-possession, a cunning eye that reminded him of more than one Crow he’d known, and yet she seemed like no one he’d ever seen before. She was courted by many, the males dashing at one another where she could observe, dancing before her, and she seemed likely to choose one of them, maybe this gallant glossy one or that fat cunning one, but no, none of them pleased her enough. Dar Oakley wondered why. There are Crow confirmed bachelors and Crow spinsters—his Other Older Sister of long ago had been one. He didn’t think this Crow was among them.
When his flock turned for home that spring in ones and twos and then in crowds, Dar Oakley stayed behind.
He knew it would be little hard for her, a singleton surrounded by mated pairs. Those who were mated kept her away—a lone Crow isn’t something you want near a nest of just-hatched young—but she didn’t respond to challenges, didn’t seem to notice them, and walked anybody’s freehold as though she were welcome there.
Which made Dar Oakley pretty sure he could let himself down where she foraged among the dandelions, and not spook her. Still, he kept a certain distance. He knew she knew he was there, though she took no notice of him. Whenever he took a few steps closer to her, she went farther off, as though she’d maybe seen something good that way. When they’d played that game enough, he called sharply to her, Hey! Hey you! She didn’t fly; she lifted her head and made a civil response, as he’d known she would. In her own good time she lifted off, and so did he, and when they both touched ground they were side by side.