Yes, Crows were smart, they all agreed: but the hunters were smarter. There were plenty of Crows who’d dispute that; but just as many, even proud as they were, who wouldn’t.
One respect in which People could never be outdone, not by Crows or by any other living thing, was in the laying of plans. All through his multitude of encounters with People, this was what astonished Dar Oakley most: how People could see forward to the days after this day, and perceive as though they beheld them the consequences of doing the thing they were now doing, if after they had done it they then did another thing that depended on the first thing. Dar Oakley couldn’t do any of that. But up in the Cottonwood that summer evening he felt scenes or pictures come and go as if they were before his eyes, though they were not before his eyes. Not pictures of what would be, but of what the would be was going to be made from: the match that Moss’s daughter lit. The smoke of a long prairie fire. The innocent calling of Hello, hello. Theft and precious things. The cigar of Dr. Hergesheimer. Spring; and courting; and mating. The dense autumn flocks more vast than any ever before, their cries rising to the sky, so multitudinous that no single voice could be distinguished in the sound.
Each day produces in all its fullness the day that follows it. He didn’t know how, but he knew that much. And if the right things are done or the wrong things left undone, what comes to be won’t be what was to have been. It won’t be the future that this day now contains; it will be another thing. He didn’t yet know what the right things and the wrong things were to do and to avoid, but he knew that it was he, and Moss’s daughter, and Dr. Hergesheimer, who would do them, and bring that altered future forth; and after that, nothing.
The days went on, and among the things they produced was a new People engine for Dr. Hergesheimer, and after that a new dwelling.
The engine was a four-wheeled wagonlike device that moved without a Horse or an Ox or even a Goat like the little wagon that the boy Paul had had long ago. It moved itself, as though it were a beast; it made a continuous growl like a beast’s, and a steady rhythmic clatter like hooves on a road, and its hot breath came out the rear. But Dar Oakley knew it wasn’t a beast. The Crows had seen, in the last harvesttime, a huge yellow machine that also moved by itself, creeping over the land, smoke pouring from a chimney on it; with slow force it came into the cornfields as the People cheered, and in the course of a day it ate all the corn, chewing and chewing and roaring and roaring. Then it rested. Then it went away, and the People (who had watched the whole thing) went in to pick up what it had left, which was a lot, and there was some for Crows, too, when the People had gone. This wagon of Dr. Hergesheimer’s was the same: a thing that moved by itself because of fire.
The new dwelling wasn’t new; it was the Hergesheimer house, a three-story house on a bare rise painted a dark purplish color, with details picked out in another color, the fashion when it was made. A large gray barn beyond, and outbuildings and yards. From it and to it more People came than merely the Doctor’s hunting companions; two were women, one apparently a mate. (I suppose Dr. Hergesheimer had inherited it on his stepfather’s death and felt he could then marry.) Anna Kuhn’s small house was shuttered and unattended to. On the porch of the new dwelling Moss’s daughter sat a new perch, or in cold weather could be glimpsed behind the large bay window. Dar Oakley watched Dr. Hergesheimer pile his new machine with his guns and supplies and set Moss’s daughter in it, in a cage of wood and wire, and drive away; Dar Oakley followed, but the machine went far and fast and he didn’t dare go close enough to see where they went. He knew what they went to do.
Another new thing was that when the moved-by-itself car returned days later, it brought back not only Moss’s daughter but the Crows that Dr. Hergesheimer had bagged: Dar Oakley could guess that the grain sacks in the carrier at the car’s rear held them. Black feathers were blown back in the car’s wake as it went up over humps in the road, raising dust. Once returned, and after Moss’s daughter had been lifted out and secured, Dr. Hergesheimer brought his sacks of Crows into the back of the house and shut the door.
Before, the hunters had simply left Crow corpses to rot away, or be eaten by scavengers. If there was a bounty on them, they’d tie the dead ones together by the feet and sling them over their shoulders or toss them in their wagons. Not now. Now the hunters—some known by sight to Dar Oakley, some strange—brought their kills, one or two or more Crows, to the back door of the big house, and went away counting money.
Dr. Hergesheimer had gone from hating Crows to wanting them.
But if that was so, why were the corpses then brought out in tubs from the back of the house, not by the Doctor but by others, and dumped in a pit at a distance, where they were sprinkled with something from a red can and set afire? Black smoke of burning black birds. Dar Oakley thought of the land under the Abbey on the island that he had entered with the Brother, the burning pits where the unlucky souls of People were thrust, blackened and distorted, at once dead and not. That was in Ymr, where such things could be. These Crows were dead, dead as dead. Nevertheless he was appalled: the dead Crows, moved by the force of flames rising, seemed to try to escape. He wouldn’t watch—no Crow could—and went away.
Soon he came back again.
This is the patience of vengeance: when he wasn’t eating or sleeping, Dar Oakley was watching the Hergesheimer place and noting what went on there. It was boring but compelling. As winter deepened he saw Moss’s daughter set out on her perch less often; it was harder here than at Anna Kuhn’s house to get near to her without being seen, and it wasn’t the time yet or the place for the Doctor to see him. Snow fell thinly and the wind carried it over the flat farmlands and piled it in drifts and heaps; it blew from the peaked roofs of the purplish house like plumes of smoke. Crows ceased to be brought or burned at the house, but one warming day a wagon drew up to the back side of the house, and the driver and Dr. Hergesheimer in his shirtsleeves brought out wooden crates and loaded them into the wagon, crates filled with bottles packed in straw. One box cracked as it was being put on the wagon, and a few bottles fell out; Dr. Hergesheimer in a fury shouted at the wagoner. Money changed hands. The wagon departed, and Dr. Hergesheimer, breathing cold clouds, went inside.
When he thought it was safe, Dar Oakley let himself down and examined the remains of the bottles. The black stuff they had contained stained the snow; Dar Oakley tasted it. It was the bitterest thing he had ever touched to his tongue. Yet something in the taste was known to him, something that tasted of the burning of the Crow bodies. It was the same thing, whatever thing that was.
A noise in the house caused him to rise away.
Dr. Hergesheimer’s Genuine Pot-A-Wottamie Crow-Gall Digestive Bitters and Blood Strengthener. That was what must have been in the bottles. How do I know this? Because an advertisement for it appears in the pages of the Farmers’ Cyclopedia of 1915, which I acquired along with other books of no value when the local library gave up at last and cleaned its shelves and basements. There are ads for a lot of things in this fat, cheaply printed thing: Browning shotguns, chicken-wire fencing, dynamite for stump removal, seed, steam harvesters to hire. And medicines, which was what Dr. Hergesheimer’s tonic was advertised as being. Besides the stylized Crow on the label, there is the profile of an Indian with black feathers in his hair, facing a black-bearded man in a high collar and cravat. A tiny faucet has been let into the Crow’s middle, from which a black drop descends. The Crow’s face is distorted into a strange patient ecstasy, with blinkered eyes: a face the Doctor had certainly seen many times. A bottle cost a dollar; you could get a dozen for ten dollars. It differs—I think this can be said—from nearly all other patent medicines of its time in containing at least in part what it claimed to contain: bile from the gallbladders of Crows.