“You carried them there,” I said. “So many of them. So you said.”
“So they said.”
“Just take us to the gate,” I said. “That’s all I ask. As you took the Singer.”
He tilted his head up, darkwise, downward, daywise—in difficulties, thinking what to say. “It’s very far away.”
“Well, yes, perhaps.”
“So far away it doesn’t matter how far. Too far to go. Especially for one who can’t fly.”
“It is very far away,” I said, “but it’s also easily reached. Isn’t it? They say not a day and a night passes between the moment I’m no longer here and the moment I’m there.”
“That’s a little hard to swallow,” he said. “Don’t you think?”
“It’ll be short enough if you’ll stay by me.”
He stood looking at me with first one eye and then the other, and it was easy to know what he thought: that he’d been there and I hadn’t. “All right,” he said, “I will go with you as far as I can. But then I’m for elsewhere.”
“It’s all I ask,” I said.
“It’s no place for Crows,” he said.
“No, you have your own place. You told me about reaching it, that it was hard but possible.”
He looked at me, one eye, the other eye.
“A story about cherries,” I said.
“Ah,” Dar Oakley said. “That story.”
It occurred to me at that moment for the first time that Dar Oakley may have lived lives he doesn’t now remember—lives that were too short, too dull, or simply lost in time and unavailable to him as story or as memory. I’ve been thinking about that. I wonder, too, if the stories he does tell me, of lives he remembers living and leaving, are actually chosen by him for me alone. The ones I need most to hear. To Crows he may tell others, full of interest to them. These are mine. And this one the last.
CHAPTER TWO
This was when Dar Oakley was one among the thousand who roosted in winter in the trees of the islands rising in the river. They had long since ceased to migrate south; the riches available here never ceased being produced, and now springs came sooner, summers were longer than they once had been, winters warmer. Young Crows came in from the farmlands and the surrounding country to get in on the endless provision, nesting in the parks and in abandoned factory complexes. They were fast, careless, assured, these young ones; they spoke in ways new to Dar Oakley, their language changing with each generation that came and went. As good as Corn, they’d say of something that was both common and necessary; in a snare, they’d say, meaning any unresolvable trouble, though none of them now had ever seen a Crow desperate and terrified in a Crow-catcher’s snare. Got a Gun? young males strutting and rousing would yell, a taunt meaning, You don’t have the stuff to drive me away.
They had over time withdrawn from the old city center where they used to feast, the alleys where the wealth was dumped nightly in overflowing containers. The great mountain was near, and held almost all they needed. The avenues and squares within the towers were too alarming, no place for Crows; full of crowds and sirens and flashing lights, smashed windows, guns fired, corrosive gas. At night, home from their forays over the garbage heaps, the Crows on the river islands might awaken to see the dull glitter of fires that way too, the city burning.
Dar Oakley’s city, where he lived. But looking down at daybreak on the river in spring flood, laced with yellow scum and speeding so fast that even the Gulls (who’d come from who knew where) couldn’t fish it, Dar Oakley could feel put out of space and time, liable to fall from the branch he clung to. The lights of cars streamed over the bridges as fast as the river fled under them, just as endlessly, too.
“Say,” a Crow beside him said. “Look there.”
“Ah,” Dar Oakley said. “They’re back.”
Down there by the river along the stretches of open ground between People buildings and barriers lived another crowd of birds that had ceased to migrate. Dar Oakley remembered them too from long ago, big gray Geese with long black necks and heads, white chin-straps, flying over and coming to rest on ponds and lakelets, then going their way again north or south. They weren’t the ones who were back. They lived here now all year, building slovenly nests along backwaters, laying their big eggs, taking young to the water at morning and back at night, their settlements fouled with green turds. The flock the two Crows could see were just now sitting spring eggs. What Dar Oakley saw returning were dim gray shapes in trees and bushes farther from the river. Crows had glimpsed them around here before, though they had no name for them. Lean four-legs, a large one and another, then two young ones. Sharp-faced, with great pointed ears and full brushes. The Crows could see a large one, then two young ones. Gone when you looked for them, then again appearing.
Dogs? No, not Dogs. You never saw Dogs that looked all the same exactly, as these did. Dogs came in packs, but not in families. Foxes? No, not Foxes, either, bigger than Foxes but not Wolf-size, and dull in color. They seemed at home; watchful, but at home. Like Crows, Dar Oakley thought: scavengers, improvisers, opportunists. Right now they were after those eggs, and maybe a gosling. As yet the Geese, readying for sleep, hadn’t perceived them. But now Dar Oakley could see them very welclass="underline" they seemed to confer, their twitching ears turning toward one another. The largest slipped away through the abandoned People furniture and trash and disappeared.
The city had swallowed up the country, and with it, black-masked Raccoons, eaters of eggs as well as People, Muskrats and Otters in the river; Fishers and Martens who preyed on Felis domesticus and broke their owners’ hearts. A Marten could sometimes climb a tree and take and eat Crow nestlings. Ghost animals, too, that People claimed to see, Bobcats and Cougars and Wolves, as though they expected the ancient wild to return and take back this realm, as this realm had taken it from them long before.
These gray ones were real enough. It was fun watching them work their plan. The three who remained on the landward side of the Geese crept on their bellies to get close, and then poked up their heads and yipped, then hid again. The big male Geese came toward them, opening their wings and hissing threats, and the gray ones retreated. The Geese and the Dog-Fox beings went back and forth, each staying short of the other, more Geese coming to threaten and protect. Meanwhile—Dar Oakley had guessed it—the big one who’d slipped away had swum up through the shallows and now came out and rushed the rearward, where the goslings were sheltering, and he got one almost before he was noticed. As soon as the Geese turned, shrieking, and ran toward him he was away, and—this was the neat part—his kin immediately rushed in and got an abandoned egg, and had slurped down much of the goodness and the half-formed gosling within before they, too, were cried out on and had to flee. One little one glanced back at all the eggs remaining.
The two black Crows up above laughed and laughed.
After that Dar Oakley began keeping a lookout for the beasts, though it was only at dawn or evening he saw them. Night-beasts. He followed them, but they’d slip away or vanish, only to materialize elsewhere and catch his eye.
On a heavy fall day with a red sun sinking through brown-tinged humidity they appeared in the open, climbing a ramp that cars no longer used up to a bridge over the river—not the one that ran over the Crow’s islands but one farther downstream. In bad repair, stone facings falling, guardrails broken. It sagged. High fences of heavy wire blocked the entrances at each end to keep People from entering onto it, and flaming oil-pots too for a warning. The four animals, the large one in the lead, all heads low, constantly looking side to side and to the rear to see pursuit, went up to the fence and on their stomachs squeezed under it and went out onto the bridge.