He’d always believed he couldn’t fly at night, and he didn’t know even now that he could, didn’t know if this dark was night itself or some other place that came after day. He’d slip away from the flock as it headed for the evening roosts, fly to a high Pine he knew of that had a long view; there he watched the sun set and the further world arise. He learned about moonrise and moonset; saw the white stars and found that they turned through the night, some going down darkwise below the black land and others arising daywise, as though they flocked. He thought of Kits: the world is round, and if you go far enough, you return to where you started; did these lights do that, all in a night? Sometimes he’d fly, exalted and afraid. From a height he’d see the People, concentrated in some places, scattered thinly in others; roads and inhabited places were marked by the greater numbers of them there, a dull sparkle of drifting souls, like the lines of fires set across the land by One Ear’s People that he’d once looked down on.
There were so many. Not all were soldiers: no, he knew they weren’t, he could in time separate the blue-clad foot-dragging limb-shattered ones from all the others he perceived, whose sorrows glowed around them too: the ones murdered at home, the diseased, the ones frozen alone in their cabins or burned in fires, killed at birth by mothers who then killed themselves or were hanged. Men killed in knife fights or caught in iron machinery or shot by their friends, some of them once soldiers. However close he came to them, however long he sat by them, he wouldn’t learn the stories or fates themselves; he heard the vague murmur the souls made, felt their rage or regret, but he was only a conduit or collector of them. Don’t kill me, Sam, don’t kill me now and send me down to Hell with the sin of what we’ve done all on me. Anna Kuhn then drew the stories out of him, her blind eyes weeping, her fingers like the dipper that draws up clear water from the black rain barrel. He couldn’t tell the stories, but still they were his; in the day as he fed and flew with the others and as he sat the Pine in the night, they were with him.
Pity. He felt it in his breast and in his hooded eyes when at dawn he roosted to sleep in hiding. He had no name for it in the language of Ka; there was no name for it because he was the first Crow ever to feel it within him. Pity for them in the awful complications of the lives they built for themselves, laboring as helplessly and ceaselessly as bees building their combs, but their combs held no honey, he thought now. Useless, useless, and worse than useless, needless: the labor of their lives, the battles and deaths, and all their own doing. He lifted his wings to fly, to fly from this pity, but he could not; folded them in disorder; bowed with open mouth in pity.
If only he had not gone into Ymr. For out of Ymr he had brought pity into Ka, and now could never get it out. He saw the earth and the night as People did, and it wasn’t a different place from their day-world. It was all one now, Ymr was, and he was in it.
The Crows had taken notice of Dar Oakley’s visits to the white farmhouse, that he seemed unafraid of the People or animals there. It was something to gossip about, as anything out of the ordinary was.
“So what do you get from that?” the Crow called Ke Rainshower asked him. Late summer, and a dozen Crows were laid out on a sunward bank, wings spread out, eyes half-closed.
“Oh, nothing special.”
“Uh-huh. Well.” She was a lean and suspicious bird. She didn’t suggest that Dar Oakley was hiding something, but it wasn’t like a Crow to do something for nothing.
“Let us know if you need some help,” she said. “Distract the Dog. Get the Ducks away from their wee ducklings.”
“Sure.”
“All for one,” Ke Rainshower said, not as sleepy as she seemed. “Right?”
Watch out, watch out, the lookouts on high called. Gun, gun. Wearily, reluctantly, the sun-drugged Crows roused, looking the way that the cries pointed. The hunter was there, creeping to a clump of tall grass, likely thinking he couldn’t be seen; the Crows could certainly see him, see the color of his hat, the color of his eyes, for that matter. It was the boy from the farmhouse, who’d shot at Dar Oakley from the window, and then later from behind a shed.
“It’s not a gun,” he said.
“It sure is,” Ke Rainshower said.
“Well, it is a gun, but it can’t hurt you.”
“Oh yes?”
“Watch,” Dar Oakley said. He pulled his sun-softened parts together and got aloft. He flew low and slow over the place where the boy hid, and the boy swung wildly with the gun to keep him in his sights. Then the sorry little sound. Dar Oakley turned back to where the Crows had taken to the trees.
Too little caution is rarely better than too much. Sometime afterward the Crows spied the same boy making his way toward them, squirming on his belly, the gun cradled on his arms. They came closer, ready now to be amused, calling to the others, Come, come. The boy raised and aimed the gun, and it went off with a true bang. The ball shattered leaves and twigs passing amid the Crows.
“Not a gun, huh,” Ke Rainshower said to Dar Oakley, not without some harshness. “Can’t hurt you, huh.”
What could he do? He becked, shrugged, held his tongue.
They watched that boy closely from then on. He always came alone, toward evening; he never quit till the light failed. His first kill—a fledgling he got by luck and the little Crow’s inexperience—came the next spring. The fledgling’s parents cursed and shouted but didn’t dare come close; the other Crows joined in. They saw the boy kick the dead bird with a cool ferocity until it was hardly a Crow at all.
The young man’s name was Paul. He hated Crows; he’d later become famous for it. He hated his mother’s blindness; he hated his father for being dead. But more than anything he hated Mental Sympathy.
When he was old enough, it would become his duty to drive to the station in the trap, collect his mother’s Visitors (as they were always called), and bring them to the house. He also was the one who received from the visitors the coins and envelopes of dollars—differing amounts, whatever they chose, no one in the house spoke of it to them—which they didn’t care to press on Anna. Sometimes a father or a mother would take Paul’s hand or try to reach him through his eyes, but he’d just return to the trap and the waiting nag, and climb aboard. Along the road to town he’d see Crows sitting a branch above the road, or cruising not far off. He’d snap the reins, turning his head to look up and around, old enough now to know that if the Crow his mother favored—the Crow with the white cheek—wanted to track him from far away, he’d never see it. And of course Dar Oakley did track him, unseen himself; likely the boy Paul didn’t know that a Crow sees four times farther and three times sharper than one of us can. But he gave far less thought to the young man than the young man gave to him.
The great commonwealth of the dead, which had for a time grown so close to the living as to be identical to it, had begun to seem farther off now. Perhaps the elder spirits had by now finished the work of leading the lost war dead into felicity, work that Anna Kuhn had labored at too; perhaps to some extent they’d lost their interest in the living, had turned to face the other way, toward the nested spheres of the higher realms and the infinity beyond. I don’t know. Dar Oakley stayed at his work, kept his watches in the night, but like the great flights of Passenger Pigeons that he and the Crows had watched in awe and then over time had seen grow fewer and fewer, the flocks of the wandering dead grew less.
At the same time there began a great movement to account for, locate, disinter, and honorably rebury as many of the fallen as could be, and it continued for years. Families were able at last to lay wreaths over beloved bones; those who had long laid wreaths over the wrong bones were led to the different ones, made to learn a new story. Still, more than half the dead, North and South, were never accounted for; the ploughs turning battlefields back into fields would bring up their brown skulls and corroded brass buttons for decades after. Among the ones who remained unfound were Anna Kuhn’s two menfolk. She had seen them through the Great Change, as it came to be called, but never did learn from them or from the Crow where their bodies lay; surely—she tried to be glad of it—they themselves didn’t care at all.