“Good day,” he said, and she becked in acknowledgment, unalarmed. “You’re looking black today, I must say.”
“Thank you,” she said in the soft voice of her flock. “I’ve seen you. You’re one of them, aren’t you, the ones who come in winter?”
“Yes.”
“They’re all gone,” she said. “You’re late. Your mate will miss you.”
“Haven’t one,” Dar Oakley said. “No more than you.” This embarrassed her not at all, and her eye held his, waiting. “All those suitors,” he said. “I saw. None of them pleased you?”
“Oh, they were fine,” she said. “Most. Not all.”
“No, I’d guess not. But you never made a choice.”
“The choice wasn’t mine to make,” she said, and when he took a stance of puzzlement, she laughed. “Well, I don’t know how you all make matches where you live. We here have a way.”
“A way, what way?”
“A way of being sure.” She lifted her head, looked this way and that, as though afraid to be caught telling secrets—but no, maybe just shy to say. “It’s fine to seem strong and healthy and all that. Most all are. But you want to be sure. Will they always do what you need done, no matter what it is? Can they? You don’t know. So you ask them—or tell them, really.”
Dar Oakley was visited with a memory, sharp as a thorn, of Kits demanding that he do impossible things to win her favor. “What things do you ask?”
She told him. If she’d had fingers, she would have counted the tasks out on them. She’d set them for all her suitors, she said, in this spring and the last, and not one had done them; most had refused outright, for all their becking and strutting.
“Well, they’re very hard, those things,” Dar Oakley said. “Maybe impossible. It makes me think that if you set such hard tasks, maybe you don’t want a mate at all.”
She took a stance of her own, and let him interpret it: that yes, he was right or was all wrong; that she didn’t know if what he’d said was so, or did know and wasn’t telling.
Then she turned her attention billwise. “You hear those Crows?” she said. “Let’s go see what they found.”
But he knew he’d better not. He was still a foreigner here, a Vagrant. He’d keep his distance. He watched her lift off and away.
It’s possible to think of Crows, or any being with an estrus, as neither male nor female for most of the year. As summer comes and young Crows fledge, that part of Crow life subsides and shrinks—literally for males, whose testes have grown to many times their normal size in mating time—and Crows can become pals with old rivals again, or at least indifferent to them, and new friends can be made.
It was more often she who sought Dar Oakley out that summer. They walked and ate together. (That sounds like they met for lunch, but what it means is that they spent the daylight hours foraging, since what birds mostly do all day is look for food and eat it. Flight costs a lot.) If others kin to her joined in on a good find, he’d retreat.
When it grew too hot in the long afternoons of that land of hers to hunt, they’d sit in silence in the deep foliage of a tree he had no name for, and watch the world; or, because she asked, he’d relate the story of his life to her. She didn’t believe the tales, really, and forgot them almost as soon as they were told, but it was a relief to him to tell them at last; she marveled at his journeys and murmured softly for his deaths. Like Desdemona she loved him for the dangers he had passed, and he loved her because she pitied them.
He told her how, long ago, he had invented names: how names made stories possible, and memories of who did what in times past. She listened with care, though she seemed to think that names were really a game that friends could play just for their own amusement.
“I’d like a name,” she said. “How is a name got?”
“You choose it,” Dar Oakley, “or better, it’s chosen for you. You’re named for something you did, or something special about you.”
“Special?”
“Something that makes you different from others.”
She pondered that, but seemed in no hurry to make a choice, or think up names to choose from. Dar Oakley thought, though, and waited for the right one to appear; there could be only one.
“Well,” she said, “there is one thing. One story of a thing that happened to me.”
“Yes?”
“When I was young,” she said, looking not at Dar Oakley but at the world around, “I got the idea that I wanted to go away to a place where no Crows were. A place where no Crows had ever gone.”
Dar Oakley wondered if he’d heard this aright: words crossing from his own life over into her mouth. “A Crow alone is no Crow at all,” he said.
“Well, so,” she said, as though she hadn’t heard him pass the old saw, “one day I did set out. I thought I might just go about and study other creatures, and find out how they lived, you see? And one day learn to be no Crow at all.” Now she turned a black eye on him, maybe to see if he listened. “And after I’d gone far enough, so far as to leave all the Crows in the world behind—as I thought—I came to a deep, black, still lake, where I saw a Kingfisher a-sitting on a branch above the water.”
“A Kingfisher?”
“Mm-hmm,” she said. “Bright blue, the way they are? With an orange breast? And she was fishing. I watched her fly out over the water, hover, point her big long bill down, and then drop into the water. Gone! Then, quick, she burst up out of the water, and in her bill was a little white fish. She settled back on that branch, and swallowed it.
“Well, I’d never seen a diving bird before—I said I was young—and I wanted to know just how it was she got that fish. So when she did it again, I watched real close, and what I saw was this: as she dropped to the water, another Kingfisher just like her came up from below the surface, and just when the falling Kingfisher reached the water, her bill touched the bill of the Kingfisher coming up. Right then there was a thrashing and a roiling of the water and the Kingfisher rose up just like before with a fish.”
“No,” Dar Oakley said.
“She’d taken it right from the other after a bit of a struggle.”
“No, no.”
“So that looked like an easy way to get a meal. I thought I’d try it. It took some courage to just fling myself into the water bill-first. But sure enough, I could see as I came close to the water that a bird was flying up to meet me—only it wasn’t a Kingfisher. . . .”
“It was a Crow.”
“It was a Crow like me, bill open like mine, with no fish in it for me.”
“Oh no.”
“Well, I couldn’t help it, I went down under the water’s surface, and kept going down and down underneath. It was all dim and sparkly there, like a day when raindrops fall on your eye-haws. I couldn’t see the Crow who lived down there. . . .”
“The Crow was you.”
“But the other Kingfisher—the one who brought up the fishes for the one who dove—she was there, and she was angry with me. I knew even though I couldn’t understand her words. I’d no business in her realm, she said; my plumage was the wrong kind, I was a stupid bird who didn’t understand a thing.”
Dar Oakley thought: Is a story a lie? As hers went on he’d begun to think of One Ear, and the adventures he’d say he had under the earth or in the sky or riding on an arrow: he wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling the truth. He’d never known a Crow who’d talk so. Except one. Likely she was paying him back for his own impossibilities.
“Why,” he asked her, “are you telling me this?”
“I was just coming to that,” she said, and her stance was teasing and shy at once. “The Kingfisher said that because I was ignorant, because I was young and foolish, she would help me to get out of the water if I promised never to come back again. I didn’t know what to say. I think the cold of the water was stopping my heart, or my breath. But the Kingfisher took ahold of me—don’t ask me how—and bore me up through the lake and out into the air and even as far as the shore, where I somehow scrabbled or scrambled up and out. And I sat in the sun and tried to get dry all that day long.