There were differences, though only Dar Oakley noticed them, or cared to make the comparison. The log cabins they’d once built, as low and rude almost as the winter shelters of Bears, had come to be replaced by houses of painted wood, for which planks were cut at mills—it was Dar Oakley who learned what went on in those places by the waterfalls, who watched the raising of the houses and barns made from them, heard the ringing of hammers. The white churches too where People gathered, from which came the sound of their voices raised all together, while their Horses waited, some wearing in hot summers the hats of straw that their People wore too.
There was another difference.
Far away and long ago, Crows and other birds had followed the sowers in the spring, who cast seed from their bags over the plowed earth, step and cast, step and cast, and the birds took up as much as the earth did. Not here now. Like their secret burials, their hidden lives in houses, these People hid their grain from sight, pressed or packed it into the ground with an engine a farmer sat on—a thing resembling but different from the gun-carriages that threw the black killing balls—and was pulled along by big shaggy-ankled Horses. It seemed that no grain, no corn, was ever sown, and yet the crop came up, and not in heaps here and straggles there as the sower threw but in long, straight lines.
It didn’t matter that Dar Oakley didn’t understand the principle of Jethro Tull’s seed drill. Crows care about cause and effect where it profits them to do so; they don’t see it as general. Not many days after that engine went around, and given good rain and no frost, the long neat rows of green sprouts would appear, bursting the buried seed and pushing up through the soft bared earth. At the root of each corn plant, the kernel that produced it remained: one small mouthful of yellow goodness. And a step away another, and another, until the plowed and planted land ended.
It was the dawning of the Age of Gold.
Of course Dar Oakley says that it was he who first pulled up a green corn plant, shook off the leaves, and swallowed the sweet kernel. That it was his long study of People back to the time of the Crow clan of the Longhouse people that taught him that this wealth was hidden there.
Well, perhaps. What was certain was that People hated Crows for their depredations more than any People anywhere had ever hated them. With the coming of the great cornfields a war began between Crows and People that would last a century and more, and in some places still isn’t won or lost.
By early summer corn is high, and of less interest to the Crows: they can’t easily get at the ears within their tough jackets. Dar Oakley and his kin and neighbors still gathered in the cornfields, though, and voiced their calls, because ploughed ground yields grubs, and Snails, and Mice, and strong Crows at least could tear away enough silk from young ears to get a bite or a worm; every opened ear would then spoil in rain. Sometimes their calling would bring a farmer with his gun, children running and yelling, a wife shaking her apron. “There they come,” one Crow would call, and they’d lift away, move to a farther field.
The Crows don’t remember, and neither do People, when farmers first tried to scare them off by making those false People to stand and stare, bowing a little in the breeze but never changing place. Dar Oakley tells how he’d stand watch and call, Watch out, watch out when one appeared as though suddenly standing up, with big eyes like the bird-costumed specter of the Wolves gang. It was enough to make most Crows stand off a ways from one, the braver ones still snatching a corn sprout here and there behind its back, then taking off. But it wasn’t long—not more than a generation or two of Crows—before the difference between a man and a pair of crossed sticks, a pumpkin-head with an old hat on it, and a coat stuffed with straw, became clear. The young were taught, who taught their young in turn. Look him in the eye, shriek in his face, give him a poke in the eye. You see? You see?
The Crows finally came to delight in the figures; though Crows can’t recognize the many images of People that People make, the use of this one is so evident they can, and it has the effect on their sense of humor that a pun has on some People. They still like to pretend a little fear at first, then go settle on its outstretched arms, and crow in its face—for Crows do crow, in delight at wit and surprise: a sound you’ll come to know if you watch them. As the corn grew high the comical People were propped up higher, or they were left standing and hidden by the yellowing stalks; come late summer when the farmers and the hands, the women and children, came out to cut and shock the corn, the scarecrows fell amid the stalks and waste, lost their heads and hands. Dar Oakley was alone in seeing in them all the gaunt skeletons in his story, the bones of One Ear’s brother, the ragged men on the ground in Na Cherry’s old homeland. He could be startled coming unaware upon one, as though it might lift itself on its skinny arms and turn up its face to him.
However it was—the final cutting of the forests, the temperate warming of the earth (if it was indeed growing temperate throughout those dry regions, as hopeful opinion had it), or the widespread planting of corn, milo, and wheat—in those years Crows grew numerous beyond anyone’s understanding. Farmers watched tens of thousands of Crows come to winter roosts, “darkening the skies,” clouds of them rising from and falling again to the trees or the ground in elaborate aerial ballets that observers could discern no reason for (they were simply sorting themselves out in order of precedence, and the more Crows there were, the longer it took). It’s easy to imagine the awe People felt, the horror, too: the heart of the country had become infested, and the infestation was spreading like a ghastly necrosis. A rage to kill Crows swept over the wide middle lands that the Crows knew as their own; town after town posted a bounty for a dead Crow. For a long time the Crows were ignorant that a war against them was on, and for all their wits and their cautions, for all the well-remembered stories of fool Crows come to grief, they didn’t escape the People’s fury.
The strange thing—People and Crows both perceived it—was that no matter how many Crows the hunters bagged or the farmers poisoned, no matter how long the war went on, there never seemed to be any fewer of them. More, if anything. To People it seemed more than strange: it was supernatural, diabolic.
Likely Dr. Hergesheimer would not have participated in such speculation—he had no truck with the supernatural; he’d dissected bodies and found no trace of soul or spirit in them. A dead Crow was a dead Crow. In his duster and black-billed hat he was a Crow figure himself. He’d work steadily through a day’s hunting with his acolyte hunters around him, cigar between his teeth and the black rags of shot crows scattered over the ground. At the fading of the light he’d go over each corpse, turning it with his boot, looking among the dead for the one with the white cheek.
Dar Oakley had not mated again. He was much taken, though, with a brilliant and quick-minded female, whose mate was a strong old Crow of quiet disposition. Dar Oakley hung around her so much one spring and fall that her mate got used to him, and Dar Oakley became for the only time in his life (as far as he can remember) a Servitor. Her name was Digs Moss for Snails, or Moss for short. (The snails story is apparently a funny one, but I couldn’t understand it when Dar Oakley explained it to me.)