“You really never mated?” she asked him, when first they were friends.
“Oh, sure,” Dar Oakley said. “But—well, you know how it is.”
The old polite formulation was sufficient, even though she really couldn’t know how it was, not for him. But he left it at that. Ever since his time as a herder of the dead, a night bird, he’d decided that in the day, in Ka, he’d be as ordinary a Crow as he could be.
Moss was among those (they can be Crows or People) who are devoted to the diurnal, to the this and that of a well-ordered life (to the extent that any Crow life can be well-ordered) and yet whose poise and grace transform those things to worth above all others. Moss never kept a cache of valuables, as so many Crows do—Dar Oakley had by then lost a dozen such, full of beauties he would always regret, but for Moss what she did each in its season, the eggs she laid, the young she hatched, the food she found, the flights she took (she was a flier of wondrous offhand skill, never a show-off) were all the cache she required. Oddly, Moss reminded him of blind Anna Kuhn: her unwasteful motions, her open heart, the simplicities of her daily round. Dar Oakley thought or hoped that he could learn from her to return wholly into Ka. It was all he wanted.
In spring it was his duty as Servitor to watch over her and her mate in their nest-building and mating, and he remembered his mother’s Servitor, and how he had cooed like a Dove over their coupling. He thought of the Vagrant, too, and a certain day with his mother in spring—but he was old now and ought to be wise, and he kept his place on a nearby bough and only called soft encouragements and admirations. When the eggs were laid, he helped Moss’s mate (Dar Oakley can’t remember his name, or if he had one) feed Moss where she sat day after day. He thought his own offerings were richer, but her stolid spouse took no notice of that, merely put what he’d brought into her open mouth and went to get more.
Stronger than any People calendar, than any succession of People fasts and feasts (which were already in those years detaching from life-labors, planting, sowing, gathering): eggs laid each spring and brooded. Four eggs of Moss’s five opened at once at the common time, and the new year began; the tiny beings (they weighed less than an ounce just out of the egg but doubled in size every week) had to be fed, their great pink yawning mouths as large as all the rest of them. Dar Oakley conceived daring plans to get good food in quantity from People farms, using elaborate deceptions and cooperations, and he fell behind in the necessary ceaseless provisioning, of no matter what kind or quality.
“You,” Moss said at the nest’s edge, without reproach, “were to watch, while we hunted. Where did you go?” She didn’t wait for whatever answer he’d give; was off again. All the pink mouths clapped shut and the dingy little nestlings effectually disappeared in the sticks and leaves of the nest. Dar Oakley looked down on them gloomily. He wasn’t a good Servitor; he’d got bad at being a Crow.
The one duty of a Servitor that he could do well, and better than any other Crow, was to watch over his mistress and keep her from harm. Harm was everywhere, and always had been; but Dar Oakley knew something about harms new to Crows.
There’s an ancient Crow strategy—not unique among flocking birds—of all for one and one for alclass="underline" a Crow under attack by a Hawk in the air can call for help, and quickly there will be other Crows in the air, a tight mass of them, dodging in and threatening and shrieking; the commotion brings in others. The Hawk can ignore threats, but the mass of Crows going every which way, Crows nipping at her tail, confuses and distracts her; she can’t make a choice of one Crow to go for, and so (if the Crows are lucky and steadfast) she doesn’t get any. She might, of course, and sometimes does; but every Crow has an equal chance of living another day.
The trouble now was that the old ploy was getting Crows killed every day, and not by Hawks.
Crows anywhere within earshot can’t ignore the cry of a Crow in trouble, which was what made Crow shooting as a sport or enterprise possible. The perfected Crow-call—like a big wooden whistle—mimicked the common distress call with sufficient exactness to draw Crows, whose calls drew other Crows. Hunters hid in blinds, two or three of them, and with shotguns the numbers bagged grew rapidly (it’s likely that Dr. Hergesheimer, like other Crow hunters, favored the pump-action shotgun that John Browning brought out in 1893: more shots before reloading). The Crows could see People building their blinds at the edge of the cornfields or in open country, piling brush on wooden stakes or on chicken wire, but they thought nothing of it; just more human labor, meaningless to them. If the hunters entered the blind with their lunch pails and whiskey and boxes of shells before sunrise, the Crows wouldn’t know about it.
On a still, damp morning an urgent call, well-blown, could travel far. Crows would be overhead quickly, in crowds, all shrieking at whatever unseen enemy had got hold of a Crow. The shooters then had many targets, sometimes too many. And here’s the surprising—the dismaying—thing: so long as the shooters kept hidden, so long as the blued guns couldn’t be seen, the noise of their firing and the dropping of shot Crows wouldn’t send the others instantly away. They’d discount the noise; they’d interpret the falling Crows as Crows falling on an enemy, Fox or Owl, and join in. Even when they’d scattered, the Crow-call could bring them back.
“It’s not a Crow!” Dar Oakley would cry, buffeted by the mass of hurrying wings.
“But what if it is?” they’d yell.
“It’s not!”
“But what if it is?”
If the Crows could have listened to him, Dar Oakley could have explained to them about hunting and hunters—though not why Crows should have become hunters’ prey. But he couldn’t explain it to all of them: the flocks now were too huge, they covered too wide a range; they filled not one tree or two in winter but tens and dozens, branches breaking beneath their weight. So there were always naive Crows, Crows Dar Oakley didn’t know, for hunters to call.
But it was more than that. Any bunch of Crows will come eventually to recognize a Crow-call, and know it’s not really one of their own. Old wise ones will tell young eager ones; parents will tell children. Expert Crow-callers can vary the calls to some extent, but in time every Crow-call loses much of its power over a flock.
Every Crow-call but one.
Dr. Hergesheimer prized his Crow-call even above his Browning shotguns. The reed was metal, the stopper of golden cherry. The barrel was of two woods: walnut over ebony (I believe this is what Dar Oakley has described to me); the walnut was cut away so that the ebony below showed through, and the black wood was carved with great skill and delicacy into a Crow. A dead Crow, wrapped around the barrel, wings awry, eyes closed, beak open. This call of his could draw any Crow, at least as Dr. Hergesheimer used it, and not once or twice only but many times, until the last time. It was unrefusable. Crows heard in it the cry of a lost young one. They heard the desperate voice of a mate in trouble—not any mate, my mate. They heard a Crow mourning for a killed friend, could believe they knew which friend, even if that friend was alive and nearby. They heard the whicker of nestlings, far from any nest.
The Crow-call of Dr. Hergesheimer was hung around his neck on a lanyard woven of snakeskin; he called it a new Eastern model, scientific, but other hunters thought it possessed a dark magic they would never have. Its call could draw Dar Oakley even though Dar Oakley knew its secret. It was Death’s own siren, for as long as Dr. Hergesheimer possessed it. He hunted with it in the summer, when unwise young Crows in their first adult plumage could be drawn even if oldsters called caution; he hunted when Crows were in molt, stayed apart from others, and were harder to draw into the air, ashamed of their scruffy and clumsy old coats. He hunted in the fall, when flocks were dense, and Crows came in masses from the roost at morning, then passed over again at evening. And he hunted in the spring: that was when he could catch one of a mating pair with his Crow-call, and likely her mate would be near and rush to help her. Get them both. And be pretty sure their young would starve in the nest.