Two birds came and settled on the snaggled branch of a ruined tree. Ravens. It had been a long time since Dar Oakley had seen a pair of Ravens; he didn’t know what had become of them all. You could almost believe there were no more of them in the world, as though it didn’t suit them any longer and they were gone somewhere they liked better. But here were two, croaking in Ravenish.
He went closer, but not close. “Masters,” he said, and becked deeply.
The two turned to look at him, not particularly interested, but not moving away. Dar Oakley took that as sufficient permission and went to perch near them, though on a different shattered branch (what had, what could have, torn it in this way?). “Masters,” he said. “What can you tell me of the Crows hereabouts?”
The two Ravens turned to one another with a look that seemed to say, Has a question been put to us? Then one bent forward a little toward Dar Oakley. “Of Crows,” it said, “there are gnone.”
“Where have they gone? There are Crows everywhere.”
“As you say,” said the other Raven. “But gnot here.”
“It was a storm,” said the first.
“A storm?” Dar Oakley said. “Did a storm break these trees?”
“Oh, more,” said one Raven.
“It was a storm like no other storm,” said the other.
“How short it blew.”
“How loud.”
“But,” said Dar Oakley, “a storm will lay trees down, not take their tops. Was it ice? Ice will break treetops.”
“It was gnot Ice, it blew gnot Over but Up. Up.”
Dar Oakley tried to imagine this. “And the Crows? Was this a roost of theirs?”
Once more the two Ravens regarded one another knowingly, and turned to Dar Oakley.
“This was.”
“The storm carried them off.”
“Carried them Up.”
“Then all Down!”
They laughed their strangled Raven laugh, and ascended ponderously away.
Dar Oakley, alone, surveyed the distance. There were Crows elsewhere, surely, farther on; Crows and hunters of Crows, multiplying through the world as far as he could travel. Suddenly hopeless, he too rose and turned homewise.
He had seen, there in the shattered wood, the depths of People’s Crow hatred. But he hadn’t understood what he’d seen.
It had turned summer again when he returned to his home place: he’d been gone a long time. The Cattle had been let out into the pastures and the Crows and the Cowbirds followed their soft swishing tails, studying the dried plats of their dung for insects and worms, catching Grasshoppers and Mice stirred up by their big feet. Dar Oakley came to earth beside Ke Rainshower. “Say,” he said.
She gave him a curt nod. She hadn’t forgotten the gun that had not been a toy.
“Has that call been heard?” Dar Oakley asked.
“Call?”
“You know the one,” Dar Oakley said. “All us Crows talked about it, how it couldn’t be refused.”
“Oh that,” Ke Rainshower said.
“That.”
“Hasn’t been heard.”
“Crows haven’t been shot?”
“Oh they have been. Plenty. You knew Muleskin? Him. And Gra Brokenfoot. Ord One Egg. Others.”
“But . . .”
“There’s something new,” Ke Rainshower said, eyeing him. It was certainly something bad, and she seemed to blame him for it. Between jabs for bits of food, she told him what it was, the new thing.
It’ll be morning, she told him. On a branch protruding from a pile of brush or on a fallen shed roof, a Crow calls. It’s just an inquiry: Anybody there? Come here, come here. It’s a young Crow, a new Crow, and that’s interesting, so they come—hard not to. And when a few head that way, others follow. By the time they come close there are guns, and Crows go down, one, three, five. And when the unhit ones have fled, that cheerful little Crow begins again. Hello, hello! Jumping from perch to perch and stretching her wings. And the Crows return, cautious maybe, but how could there be danger? A Crow is perched there, not warning, not afraid.
And the hunters fire again.
“A Crow?” Dar Oakley said. “I’ve seen dead ones propped up to look alive, as if anybody’d be fooled. . . .”
“No,” Ke Rainshower said. “Alive. Calling, Come, come. Nobody knows how it can be, but it is.”
It was. It didn’t take a lot of walking and thinking and poking in cowpats till Dar Oakley knew who that Crow must be. He’d seen it crack its shell and come out into the world, had brought it food, had seen its first flight. “All right,” he said, and bent to lift off from the pasture. He could hear Ke Rainshower call, All right what? But he was away.
There were changes at Anna Kuhn’s farm since he’d last seen it: the corn grew almost to the edge of the yard, but Anna’s kitchen garden hadn’t been planted; the house was gray, its whitewash fading. And in the little grave-plot where Dar Oakley had first seen Anna Kuhn was something that hadn’t been there before: a tall smooth stone thing, pink or gray—it was hard to tell—that narrowed as it rose to where a wide-lipped pot with handles rested, a kind of pot he’d seen People use, and beneath it a cloth, its folds draped down the stone’s side. A ring made of flowers lay at its base, the flowers she’d always stop to breathe in, all withered. When Dar Oakley mounted to the top of the stone, he found the pot was solid stone too, and so was the folded cloth.
People.
He perched on the lip of the pot to look in, but it had no inside.
From the far side of the house he heard laughter, male laughter, which he connected to a wagon new to him and Horses tied up at the fence. He went over the housetop and into the big Cottonwood that grew there, whose branches shaded the yard that the porch faced. He moved carefully from branch to branch until he could see the porch and the People there. Dr. Hergesheimer occupied the long seat that hung by chains, his arms and legs spread wide. Others unknown to Dar Oakley stood or sat. And on Dr. Hergesheimer’s knee was a Crow. Dr. Hergesheimer put something in his mouth and held it with his teeth; the Crow leapt to his shoulder and plucked the morsel from between his teeth and swallowed it. The others laughed. The young Crow bent to Dr. Hergesheimer’s shaggy eyebrows, and one by one she drew the hairs through her beak, cleaning them as she would the feathers of a mate. Dr. Hergesheimer talked to her softly as she did this; then, laughing himself, he brushed her away. She mounted with a small cry to a perch of sticks that had clearly been built for her on the porch, and from there she becked and called to her beloved.
Yes, it was the one: the one who on that day had followed her mother out over the field, calling the begging call, more afraid to be left behind alone than to be under open sky. She seemed unhurt, healed.
One of those on the porch rolled tobacco into a white paper and put it in his mouth. Dar Oakley saw Moss’s daughter take notice of that; she stuck her head in that man’s direction, alert and waiting. When he took a match from a shirt pocket, her attention grew intense. So did Dar Oakley’s attention on her. The match—that little secret fire that People now kept about them—was struck on the porch pillar, sizzled and flamed orange, then yellow, and he touched it to the tobacco and shook it out. Dr. Hergesheimer’s eyes were on the Crow, a smile of deviltry in his black beard, and a couple of others also seemed to think that something amusing was up—and the little Crow, unable to bear it longer, dove to the man and with a neat, swift gesture that reminded Dar Oakley of her mother, snatched the burning, smoking thing from his mouth and flew to her perch with it. Everyone except the stunned one who’d lost his smoke exploded in glee.