Spring: courting, mating. Mates seeking out mates in the dispersing flocks, thinking of building. All Crows are capable of things in that season that they are not in other times, heroic things, surprising things. Dar Oakley knew that well enough. He also knew that the changes he felt occurring in himself were happening now for the first time to the daughter of Digs Moss for Snails—or would happen if a male was there. And knowing that, and feeling as he felt, he perceived what he could or would do next. It was unlikely, hardly possible, but it was as though he could see himself doing it, see out of his eyes today what he would see tomorrow; as though what might be done had been done already.
She was still shut up in the house in this season. Crow bodies were warming now within, but cold rain still fell and froze. Springs had been warmer in the land of his birth.
He could see her, when he dared to come close enough, behind the large window on the darkwise side of the house; when he perched on the ledge of the window and rapped on the glass, her head turned his way, and she lifted her wings as though to go to him, but then remembered she couldn’t: the leather shackle that tied her to the perch was on her leg. Still he performed for her, his body moving in what for Crows is the equivalent of making faces. On each day thereafter he brought a gift and laid it on the window ledge. She studied the gifts, though she couldn’t have them, pointing her face toward this one or that one: a brass bullet casing, a fragment of glass, a bent nail, a tarnished silver thimble. He’d lift one or another of them, change their arrangement. Yours, his stance would say.
But he’d have to do more. The time would soon come when she was no longer able to be wooed, when for all his gifts and charms he could no longer win her and carry her off: not in the mood. He’d have to get into the house, and soon.
How Crows can do things that astonish People—appear where they shouldn’t be, come into possession of things they can’t have got—isn’t really different from how Rats or Raccoons or even Cats do similar things: by persistence, constant investigation, endless trial and error. When People find that an animal has done something apparently impossible, they are seeing just the end of a long, secret process. Dar Oakley had come to know that house in ways even its inhabitants didn’t, every loose board and minute hole and fallen brick, every door that was opened to admit this person or that and when and how often, and they never caught him at it. He gave up on each possibility that he couldn’t use and then returned to it again and then again just to be certain, while keeping all the others in memory. So when at dawn one of the females went out of the kitchen with a pail in each hand for the Pigs, Dar Oakley knew she would leave the door open behind her; he was there and could slip in behind her back.
He was inside. He knew houses: how the ways within them twist and turn, how the ceiling hangs over the head oppressively. And he knew just where Moss’s daughter was: past this darkwise place, through this door ajar.
She was delighted to see him; she wasn’t a Crow who knew what was likely and what was unlikely for Crows to do. “What did you bring?” she asked.
“I brought myself,” Dar Oakley said. “All yours.” And he becked deeply. And Moss’s daughter, aflood with what it is that makes these things unrefusable, returned that beck as well as she could from the perch, and Dar Oakley becked again, and she again, and cooed a certain familiar coo. She may not have known what she did, but she knew how to do it.
The perch she sat on in this room was wider than the one outdoors. It was a ring perch, meant (I’d suppose) for a parrot now gone. With a quick hop Dar Oakley was beside her on it. The sky beyond the window was brightening dangerously. Dar Oakley studied the thing wrapped around her darkwise ankle with first one eye and then the other. He paused to respond to her sounds, to nuzzle and groom her, and then he bent again to the leather strap and the thongs that held it tight. Studied it with his bill, tugging and poking. Meanwhile Moss’s daughter began grooming the feathers of his head, and he paused to make sounds of appreciation. She spoke, and he grasped her bill in his, and shook it in play. The course eternal, except that at the same time he was busy undoing the strap that held her. No, it was too hard. He hung upside down from the ring and tried the thongs instead where they wrapped around the perch. Better. He drew one through the knot like a Robin pulling up a worm.
Footsteps suddenly loud in the house.
“Not One,” Moss’s daughter said.
Dar Oakley pulled out the other thong as quick as he could and dropped from the ring into a mass of plants and furnishings in a corner just as the female who’d taken slops to the Pigs came in. She stood for a moment in the dim room, listening, turning her head slowly as People do to see the thing they think they heard. Then—maybe a bit of sun struck the window ledge—she could see something that surprised or puzzled her; she went to the window, lifted the sash, and looked down at Dar Oakley’s love offerings. Mine, said Moss’s daughter softly. The woman shot a glance at her—Dar Oakley concealed behind the aspidistra thought she’d understood the Crow’s word, but of course she hadn’t. She turned again to the things on the ledge, leaned out to touch one of them, another one, with a sort of distaste or revulsion. Then she swept them all up, thrust them into the pocket of her apron, and bustled purposefully from the room without shutting the window.
Now, Dar Oakley whispered. Now, fly with me.
I’ll be caught and fall.
No. You won’t fall. I won’t let you fall.
One will come, One will put me back.
No. We’ll fly, out the window, there, out into the air.
I can’t. I won’t.
More footsteps now in the house, different ones, falling harder, louder, faster. Dar Oakley swept up behind Moss’s daughter, wings beating, driving her from the perch. With a cry she fell, but her wings supported her; she rose. A sudden flurry of Crow in the air of the papered and carpeted parlor, at once love and struggle, and he turned her the way she had to go. In something like a Crow version of holding hands they flew, almost touching wingtips, to the window, and there he had to lead her out—she was trying to turn back, saying, One, One—but then it was done, they were flying daywise into the bright air and the morning. Behind them they heard a cry, an animal bellow, a cry of rage. Dar Oakley didn’t turn to look back, and Moss’s daughter, crying too, followed him. And Dar Oakley had a sudden thought: I found a way into the house of a great black Crow and stole the Most Precious Thing therein, and I will be pursued. He seemed to have lived so long that he had come to the end of things possible to happen, and from now on what would happen was only what already had.
Hello, hello, cried Moss’s daughter, joyfully; hello, hello, flying high and free with her mate toward the last of the once-great Beech-wood.
This I hadn’t expected a Crow, or Dar Oakley, to be capable of: bending a natural urge to other uses, fooling innocence. Machiavellian. Had he learned too well from People? Had his urge for revenge purged him of decencies that even a Crow might be expected to feel? I had to wonder. Did he think, as he and she courted and nested, of Digs Moss for Snails, whose Servitor he had been, the beloved mother of this Crow that he had ruthlessly made his, and did the thought cause him regret, or shame for what he’d embarked on?