Very well, it said, when once again it sat beside Dar Oakley on his imaginary branch. She is indeed among them, and you will find her there. Now night has come. Go just the way I went and do the things I did.
All right, Dar Oakley said. There was nothing else he could conceive to do.
He lifted off from the ground, forgetting he was supposed to be dropping from a branch; he hoped that wouldn’t count against him. Now where was it exactly that the Owl had disappeared, before? There was no way to know. Dar Oakley picked a spot in the placeless air and tried to imitate how the Owl had angled itself with care into the Hemlock grove that wasn’t there. Bank this way, stall, fall that way.
The grove was there. He was in it, and it was filled with Crows.
Crows, gathered at a winter roost at twilight, yakking, calling to friends, leaping branch to branch, chatting and laughing. They seemed to go on forever, and the grove, too, forever. Late sunlight fell through the dark branches and dotted the Crows with glitter, so familiar. A great glee filled him: he was where he should be.
Well, well! he heard a Crow say. A voice he knew from somewhere, sometime; a harsh, rich voice, challenging and chummy.
Va Thornhill, he said, and turned to see that Crow. It’s you.
As ever, Va Thornhill said.
I’ve missed your black eye.
Can’t say the same, Va Thornhill said, and laughed. But what brings you here only now? What’s the story?
No story, Dar Oakley said, having no idea how he’d answer that question, from a Crow so long dead.
Oh, you always had a story, Va Thornhill said, and laughed again.
Dar Oakley laughed too. He becked as though in a hurry, and passed from branch to branch, seeing others he knew or thought he knew; some hailed him in welcome or amazement. Dar Oakley! Is that you? Was Death filled only with his friends and relations?
When outside he had felt night come on, but as the Owl had said, now in the grove it seemed to cease, and the happy hour of sociability at day’s end to go on and on. In Death there is no sleep.
She appeared then, not as though he spied her far off but as though a Crow in his view gradually became clearly her. She was amid others, some he knew, one he suspected of once fathering a brood of hers. She was regarding him without surprise, and the chatter of the others seemed to fall away.
It’s you? he called.
Dar Oakley! he heard her say. I’m sorry to see you.
Sorry?
If you’re here, she said, you must have died, there.
Well, he said. It seems pleasant enough here, where all of you are.
The tilt of her head said that he knew little about it, and the little he knew was wrong—which was surely true. But there was company, talk and jokes, as though this time came after a long day of good things to eat and fine flying weather, and it went on and on. He remembered Fox Cap in the Other Lands, when he’d said that People must find it better here, where everything they liked went on forever. It’s not better here, she’d said with cold certainty.
Then Dar Oakley and Na Cherry were side by side. The others had moved away without his seeing where. What was he now to say to her?
Na Cherry, he said, I’ve been granted a wish. At least I think I have.
Oh? she said. What’s a wish?
Well. It’s asking for something that you don’t have but want more than anything.
Oh, she said. And who do you ask? A friend, a child?
No, Dar Oakley said, but then couldn’t say more. Who had he asked? Death? Himself?
She waited.
I asked for this, Dar Oakley said. That I could come here, just as I went to those other places I told you of.
Oh yes, Na Cherry said, as though remembering for the first time something from long ago. And here you are, she said. Welcome, you. For good.
No, no, he said. Just for a time.
Even as he said it, he knew he couldn’t bear it to be so. He didn’t want to be dead to be here, and couldn’t stay anyway as long as he was alive; but he didn’t want to be out of her presence again, lose her again.
It seemed there were snares set within granted wishes: he hadn’t known.
Night’s passing, Na Cherry said. Soon it will be dark and still.
Tell me about this, Dar Oakley said. All this. Are there mates, are nests built, eggs laid?
Well, she said. There’s talk of all that. There are nests and young, and the young grow old, but then again not.
Memory, Dar Oakley said, and Na Cherry went on looking at him with the same placid interest. They talked long, not of death but life, of what she recalled from earth, though she seemed not to care to hear about her many young and how they’d fared. Meantime it had grown dark in the grove, though it wasn’t a nighttime sort of dark but a dull vanishing of things visible. He thought he saw Na Cherry speak, but heard nothing. The Crows were silent, then gone. He was on the bare white earth in a blank dawn.
The Owl on its great soundless wings came to alight beside him. I’ll guide you home, it said.
No, Dar Oakley said. No, not yet.
Did you see the mate you came to see?
Yes, but it wasn’t enough. There should be more. More time. More—he wanted to say more life, but that couldn’t be said. The Owl only closed and opened one eye.
I want, Dar Oakley said, to bring her back with me to the world. The whole world. If she’ll come.
You don’t, the Owl said. You don’t want that.
I do. I said that I want it and I do want it.
What was he doing? How could such a thing be demanded of Death? But he had demanded it, and would get it. He knew Death; he knew what it could take and give. His heart swelled.
The Owl looked around itself with its mobile head as though for a definite answer to give. Then it said, This is possible.
Yes, Dar Oakley cried. I knew it must be, and it is!
It is possible, the Owl went on. Because you have been a friend to Death, I will tell you how.
Yes, Dar Oakley said. (Had he been a friend to Death? Where, in what land, among whom?)
To do it, the Owl said, you must act exactly as I say.
I will.
No one ever does, the Owl said. Now listen. If she will come with you, you must return exactly the way I brought you. You must never look back toward this place, this grove where you found her, not once.
Yes.
She won’t speak, the Owl said. Stay close to her through all the journey.
Yes.
And, said the Owl. No mating. No matter what. You understand?
Well, Dar Oakley said. It’s winter.
I’ll say it once more, the Owl said. No mating, not till you reach the land where living things are, your own land from which you came. There she will become again what she once was. But if you do not do all this, she will return to where she came from, and you can never go that way again.
Dar Oakley said nothing.
Night’s coming, the Owl said. Be off.
Did she say yes when Dar Oakley asked her in the pale light of the following night, the night that was day? He says she did. What was it like, crossing back across that cold white waste as it turned back into snow? He talked, plied her with stories, and she seemed to listen, but she didn’t answer, not until the world began to become the world.
“Remember that old Pine?” he asked her. “The one with the Bee’s nest in its hollow?”
Yes, she seemed to say.
“It blew down,” Dar Oakley said. “Cracked right there at the hollow in a wind. Bon Hawthorn, you remember her?”
Yes, she said.
“She and her mate built a nest in that Pine that year. She said, ‘We’ll have Honeybee grubs to eat all the spring.’ Then comes the big wind. Ha-ha!”
Yes, she said.
The white land became a place, and she began to grow distinct, and warm. They slept in the real night—it seemed to Dar Oakley that it had been long since he’d done so. They foraged in the melting snow, and she ate what they found, shook her head and swallowed, and was the Crow he knew: but still she wouldn’t or couldn’t speak to him in their common tongue.