The Crow, transfixed by her prize, turned it this way and that. Her tail spread and bent daywise; her wings lifted and cupped; her eyes were nearly closed, the haws slid over them. She applied the burning thing she held to the insides of her wings, this side, that side, bending her head deeply within. She was trembling with excitement. When the cigarette fell apart and the ember dropped to the porch floor, she followed it, hovering over it as though protecting it, putting her bill into the smoke.
Only when it was all out and cold did she return to her perch.
Dar Oakley now knew a thing about this Crow, and it was a thing he thought might be useful to him. The daughter of Digs Moss for Snails was a lover of fire, an addict of smoke: one of that widespread Crow confraternity that can’t resist the summons of fire, and don’t try to. She sat unmoving now, as though after great exertion, her bill open slightly and her body settling toward the perch. Dar Oakley felt an eye turned to where he hid in the Cottonwood—Dr. Hergesheimer’s; he’d felt it probing for him before he knew whose it was—and he slipped away.
Dar Oakley can’t explain to me why Crows who love fire do so, or what the experience of it is for them, but he says some always have, that it’s a part of Crow life, at least for those who have the need. They seek it out, they step right up to it, handle embers in their hard bills, let the smoke into their feathers and up their nostrils. I didn’t believe it, had never seen or heard of such a thing, but since then I’ve had an old hunter and then a logger hereabouts tell me, Oh yes, Crows are drawn to fire; you can see a Crow hover over the chimney of a stove, or stand at a campfire that’s abandoned but not quite out—they’ll lift their wings, pick up burning stuff and dance around with it, spookiest thing you’ll ever see—but they do say Crows are devils, now don’t they?
When he was first in the world, Dar Oakley says, Crows didn’t encounter smoke that much. Fires set by lightning were rare; so were People. A Crow could live her whole life and never see fire. When the lives of Crows and People had become intertwined, and People owned fire and produced it in many forms, devotion to it had spread. Old Crows who loved smoke inducted young Crows in the practice, but the response to the smoke and sparks wasn’t taught or learned; it came from the soul. (He didn’t say exactly that, but I have no other way to state it.)
Is he, Dar Oakley, one of them? Any Crow might like the smoke, he says, but only some will do anything at all to get it. And playing with fire the way Moss’s daughter did is strange to him; all other beasts, he says, are afraid of fire. He doesn’t say that he is. Moths gather at flames, and burn; People stare into their fires, hypnotized. Are Crows ever burned, burned badly? That old hunter who says he knows all about Crows told me that once he saw a forest fire started in a nest, a big nest of sticks: had some loving Crow mother brought home a burning brand for her young ones? Dar Oakley in my house gazes at the orange airs that dance over the embers in the stove, and I see him tremble faintly, his feet move in shuddery steps, his wings tempted to rise.
Why do they do it? What is the fascination? It seems to me that fire is the only thing in Crow life that has a meaning for them beyond the thing that it is: but I can’t say, and they can’t say, what that meaning is.
In summer Dr. Hergesheimer chained Moss’s daughter to her perch. She learned that she couldn’t fly off when the leather cuff was on her ankle, after trying several times, being caught by the chain as she rose and then hanging helplessly, flapping upside down, until the laughing Doctor lifted and righted her. So there she’d spend the noonday hours while he slept away the heat in the curtained house.
That was when Dar Oakley came to talk to her from within the Cottonwood. Hello, hello, she said when he first spoke to her, but that was what she said all the time, and it wouldn’t rouse the Doctor. Sometimes he’d dare to bring a treat for her to eat—a strawberry, a Grasshopper, the fat leg of a Frog—though always careful to remove all traces of it from the porch before he flew away.
“Good?”
“Good, good!”
“Good.”
He tried to get her to remember who he was, but was never sure she did. He talked to her of her mother, how good and beautiful she’d been, and how her daughter reminded him of her. He told her of her brother and her sisters, one who had mated in the spring and was raising young of her own.
“You should see them,” he said. “They remember you.”
“Oh,” she said.
Except for the love of fire, the daughter of Digs Moss for Snails knew nothing about being a Crow: what Dar Oakley sometimes felt he had forgotten, she had never learned. She’d never been part of a flock, hadn’t courted or been courted; hadn’t mobbed an Owl with a gang of wild young ones, discussed a dead animal with hungry elders, learned to play Drop the Stick. She still spoke in the whiny voice of a fledgling, though she was grown now, and she never would learn grown-up speech. Dar Oakley supposed she was stupid.
What she did talk about was Dr. Hergesheimer, whom she called One—the Crow designation for a high-status Crow whose gender isn’t known. One gave me a squirrel to eat, which One had shot, she’d say. One took me into the field and let me fly and see Crows, and I came back to One.
“You know that he—One—kills the Crows that come when you call. Don’t you?”
“I just say hello,” she answered. “Hello, hello.”
“Your mother and your father were two that he killed.”
“Oh.”
There being nothing more to say about that, Dar Oakley spoke of the one thing that he thought would catch her attention. He told her about the great fires that One Ear’s people long ago had set, how far they reached, how the smoke rose up above the treetops to meet the clouds. He told her about the thick smoke of shrieking trains that rose up full of sparks, how the cinders they threw off started grass fires in dry seasons, how the Crows would gather at the long blackened edge in the still-warm white ashes, lifting their wings and possessing the smoke in great draughts.
She listened, one attentive eye on him, but he couldn’t tell if she could really imagine fires such as he told her of or could only respond to fire that she encountered.
Or fire that she started herself.
Concealed once in leaves and evening, he watched as Dr. Hergesheimer toyed with his Crow, taking her kisses and tickling her throat. After enough of this, she probed with her bill gently in his ear and in his collar as he smiled patiently, and then in a pocket high on his waistcoat. She pulled out a match, a wooden match that she seemed to know had been put there, and Dr. Hergesheimer did nothing to stop her flying with it to the broad rail of the porch; there she carefully laid the match and put her foot on it. She pecked at it, at the red head of it, striking with care and persistence until—Dar Oakley was taken by surprise, wouldn’t have thought it possible—it burst hissing into flame.
She’d certainly known it would. Cautiously but deliberately she picked it up by the stick’s end; her stance altered into the fire-lover’s, contorted tail and wings lifted, into which she pressed or shook the flickering match, her eyes half-closed but focused till it was out. Dr. Hergesheimer could be heard laughing, uh uh uh.
Hunters tend to admire the prey they favor: to hold the prey in esteem is to increase the hunters’ self-esteem. Crow hunters all knew that Crows were smart, “wily,” capable of feats of insight that those who didn’t know them as the hunters did would have dismissed as impossible. They could remember faces of People who’d threatened them, and keep the memory for years. They could imitate Dogs, Cats, People. They could start fires.