by Layne Maheu
Song of the Crow
Song of the Crow
LAYNE MAHEU
UNBRIDLED BOOKS
Denver, Colorado
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The epigraphs to Book I, Chapter 1 and Book II, Chapter 11, reprinted with permission from Lawrence Kilham, The American Crow and the Common Raven (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989).
The epigraph to Book I, Chapter 4 is taken from Tommy McGinty’s Northern Tutchone story of crow: a First Nation elder recounts the creation of the world, by Dominique Legros, Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1999, p. 59. © Canadian Museum of Civilization.
The epigraph to Book III, reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster from Adult Publishing Group, Noah’s Flood, by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. Copyright © 1998 by Walter C. Pitman III and William B. F. Ryan.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maheu, Layne.
Song of the crow / Layne Maheu.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-932961-18-6 (alk. paper)
1. Noah (Biblical figure)—Fiction. 2. Bible. O.T.
Genesis—History of Biblical events—Fiction. 3. Noah’s
ark—Fiction. 4. Deluge—Fiction. 5. Crows—Fiction.
6. Religious Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.A34933S66 2006
813’.6—dc22 2005035594
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book Design by CV•SH
First Printing
To Frank and Allie, young Spenny, and young Sam
Song of the Crow
A big black bird is making the most gawdawful racket, for no apparent reason, CAW CAW CAW !!! his entire body bouncing upward with each caw. Perhaps he is singing.
—BEN JACKLET, “CROW MYSTERIES”
Prologue
Happy Noah, singing Noah, eager to do God’s bidding without a single drop from the sky. There’s the story of his miraculous birth, that he came into the world already circumcised, with a full head of hair all long and silver and already combed, and at the age of three could stand and deliver speeches on the virtues of his all-powerful moral authority in the sky. But if it were true, that he was born with the pale signs of Misfortune already sprouting from his head, he wouldn’t boast, not even at the age of three, because it is a wellspring of sadness that grows there, and to carry it around with you always is a burden no one would wish for.
How would I know? And why was I summoned to keep an eye on this peculiar example of his species? It was in my stars, in my sky, and in my bones, and is the story I’m about to tell.
I. Nestling
Suddenly the ocean waters began to break through over the westward hills and to pour in upon these primitive peoples—the lake that had been their home and friend, became their enemy; its waters rose and never abated; their settlements were submerged; the waters pursued them in their flight. Day by day and year by year the waters spread up the valleys and drove mankind before them. Many must have been surrounded and caught by that continually rising salt flood. It knew no check; it came faster and faster; it rose over the tree-tops, over the hills, until it had filled the whole basin of the present Mediterranean and until it lapped the mountain cliffs of Arabia and Africa. Far away, long before the dawn of written history, this catastrophe occurred.
—H. G. WELLS, OUTLINE OF HISTORY, 1920
Crows, and with them I include ravens, seem as though by convergent evolution to have something in their psyches corresponding to something in our own.
—LAWRENCE KILHAM, The American Crow and the Common Raven
1. Keeyaw the Terrible
I remember the nest that hatched me. My mother lined it carefully with the fleece of human and sheep, mane of horse, down of dogwood, but mostly the fray of twigs and grasses. At first that was the world to me, until I was strong enough to look out over the tangled latticework of twigs on the outside of our nest.
Then I discovered the sky, spread out above our cedar roof branches.
And from the sky came our mother’s call, low and urgent and gurgled through the broth of freshly dead things in her beak.
“Grow! Grow!”
She lit, a black ball of rattling feathers, scanned all around her, then lowered the quick clippers of her beak, smeared with blood and slime and victuals.
And my brother and I, we opened our beaks to the sky.
“Me! Me!”
We cried, naked and fierce.
“I Am!”
Until we were just blood-red little holes crying out for the minced guts of life.
Her beak worked in fits, shaking the foodstuff into us, then pushing it further with her tongue. That became all of the world to me. That and sleep. Sleep, and feeding, and our mother’s low mewing call.
Then I began to wake to other sounds, other crow calls, and our mother flew off to meet them. When the calls were near enough, I saw how the rest of my family would feed her, and how she’d dive back down to the nest and give us their offering. Before long I began to realize when it wasn’t Our Mother of Many coming down to us. The others were longer and more luxurious in the air. Our Many flew as if perpetually landing—the air and everything in it between her and wherever she wanted to be. And if she found our father or one of the other siblings feeding us, she’d look us over afterward to see if we were still plump and juicy, as if their inept feeding had sucked the vital juices from us. Her eyes told us she was the only one with enough patience and wisdom and past to love us, as if she were nourishment itself. Through the ragged fall of her feathers, her eyes peered down at us, cloudy sky-yellow orbs of concern, the only thing about her that was calm.
But when the others left and Our Many leaned low to nudge us, or cooed down at us with her horn barely parted and trembling like two reeds, a wondrous warmth filled the nest. A blue-black cast spread out and covered us like our mother’s worn patch of brood feathers, and sitting over us, she hummed out slow winding histories, or ballads of the afternoon, or long ancestral songs of nothing but names that repeated and trailed off and left me dreaming my baby bird dreams in a tree.
My Other woke me up for no reason—or the only reason—hunger. I found him ripping at the frayed weave of our nest’s inner bowl. He gulped on the air. “I’m hungry.” He clicked against the waddle. “I’m hungry! I Am!”
“Me, too.”
I looked up.
Above us, no mother.
No crow with worm in the sky.
Only emptiness.
Only a peaceable sun-filled blue. As if that were the sky’s natural state.
Then the sky sent a panic of bushtits our way, along with a lost little kinglet whose crest flared up into a red eye of agitation. He seemed even more lost, hanging on to the mixed flock. Their fleeing only excited my hungry brother. His eyes blinked, and his veins pulsed, and he flapped his naked elbows, ready to fly off to wherever small birds go. He wanted to eat them and become them and cry out their wee bird calls. There was no way he could have scared them, not with his round, splotched head much too big for him, wobbling around on a skinny neck without much control. His stomach was already engorged, but he kept stuffing it so that his twiggy legs could hardly lift him, which they did only so that he could get to the food before me. The points of our new pinfeathers did nothing to cover our gray and brown, liver-spotted skin. I laughed at the sight of him, but in pained recognition. Was I really just like him, so naked and helpless? No, worse. I was afraid of everything. A leaf blew past our nest and I shrieked and hid myself down in my own dung. But My
Other saw it as an opportunity to fill his belly and raised his gaping beak to the sky, crying, “Me! Me! I Am!” as the leaf blew past, tumbling.
Then a disturbance took hold of the leaves.
The wind flew round in circles and gave no sign of going anywhere else. It grew in force until it shook the trees. They groaned. Their ancient arms whipped around in different directions, clacking against one another, making the sound of knocking antlers. Above us, the sky rolled up into a dark cloud mass and whispered along the limbs. Everywhere the wind said yes, first yes, then no, then yes and no in rankled argument with itself, pushing our tree as the sky and the leaves hissed.
A crow I’d never seen before hung onto the sky, blown sideways without making headway, calling, “Keeyaw! Keeyaw!”
“What? What do you see?” I asked.
Down in the familiar crags and burrows, I always asked my hungry brother what he saw. Because My Other was destined to be a crow of Pure Flight, at least in the eyes of our father. Already My Other could travel to the extremities of the nest and beyond, almost. He was an early hopper and climber and full of reckless curiosity as he teetered on the uppermost twigs of our nest. Above all things, our father valued this ability, as crows who possess it fly practically in legend. No other bird from our aerie had it. But My Other, he showed potential.
“What do you see now?”
The winds toppled him down beside me.
“Nothing,” he said, kicking his claws to stand back up. “I was looking for Our Many through the trees.”
“So was I.” I hoped it was our mother who’d frightened off the flock, bringing us more good gorge and spittle. “What’s taking her?”
But I already knew. Far back in the darkness of the egg, I’d felt the blows that landed in the forest and sent a tremor through our tree. I’d thought it was some dark force of the weather. But I knew now it was not only a beast but a beast human, Keeyaw the Terrible, doom of the trees, and I knew there must be others, all sorts of Keeyaw-looking creatures, chopping and mauling, driving a wedge into the pulp of the woods. But no. There was only one. One old, hairy curse on two legs, Keeyaw, the grim reaper of our trees, hunkered over the roots of the Giants, assailing them with his anger and dragging them away to the underworld. The thud of that beast working was like the struggle of my own beak, trying to muzzle my way out of the eggshell, or the clap of the flicker, drumming away at the bark, or the rhythm of the wind, my mother’s song, the pause of nightfall. The noise of him felling trees goes far back in my mind, to a time before sound and memory, where the boggy water never stirs.
I didn’t know if my hearing was getting better, or if Keeyaw was getting closer. But the crunch of his stone ax grew tremendous. With each blow, our tree quaked, and the wind scattered his hammering and brought it back again as if he were attacking all of the giants of the woods at once.
“Get up,” I said. “Get out there and look.”
“No one’s coming,” said My Other, kicking his claws to get back up. “He’s too close.”
“Close? He’s chopping us down.”
Crows and their cousins in the corvid family, ravens, jays, and magpies, have spent hundreds of thousands of years taking advantage of our inventions. . . . They’ve been known to perform pitch-perfect imitations of explosions, revving motorcycles and flushing urinals.
—MICHELLE NIJHUIS, “SHADOW CREATURES”
2. Fall of the Giant
“Fly off!
“Fly!”
It was our mother. But from where? Where? Who could tell with the wind chasing her calls?
I saw her, a few trees away. She appeared on one branch, then another, then in an altogether different tree. But it was just the yes and no of the wind heaving her perch and whipping her feathers into a confusion of leaves. Why didn’t she swoop onto the nest and stuff food into us?
“Fly!” she kept calling.
“Fly!”
So what choice did we have? Though I’d never left the deep of the nest, I reluctantly climbed up to the fatal jump. There was no way we could survive it, but Our Many must have known there was no way we’d survive the falling of Our Giant either. And to die at least trying, even though you couldn’t fly yet, was a way to fly off to the Tree of the Dead. Any death before that was no death at all, but only a quick flight into whatever fate befell you—flies and maggots and stiff feathers and dust. The only way to become a true crow was to fly. Until then you were nothing, without a name; flying was all.
My Other was still in the deep of the nest, trying to stand back up, while I picked my way through the hurling twigs and stuck my beak into the headwinds. They howled yesss across my face. They howled yes and no in biting, utter cold. I’d never felt anything like it. But then, this was my first experience beyond the bowl of our nest. As our tree bent, the underworld was thrown into view, first one side of our nest, then the other. I was so scared and astonished, I would have kept going if it weren’t for my enormous bony feet holding me back. Below was a mad sea of branches thrashing every which way. What lay below all the layers of bushes and vines I could not see. But I was hungry to fly. Or fall. Or eat the air. I had to wrap it in my wings, if you could call them that, just bare bones and points. For this very reason, infant crows are discouraged from the edge of the nest. Some just cannot overcome the urge to lunge out and grab hold of the wind and plummet, or whatever the feeling is that takes hold of your wings, even though there are no feathers anywhere yet to fly.
It was worse than I could imagine. Our mother still urged us out.
But I found myself awed and calm in the stinging headwinds and wanted to take in as much as I could before casting myself down into the depths of a short life in the unknown.
The whole world swayed on its stem, complaining.
There was no bottom to the world, while our nest was filled with stuff from down there, or so I was told. I looked and saw only the green hurling movement below. Until I saw a sight yet stranger still.
Through the flying leaves and broken branches, I finally saw him, the monster, the mythic, the beastman, Keeyaw. He was much farther from our tree than I had thought. Not an army, or a gathering of many, as I’d learn was the case with his kind, but just one, one beastman like no other, separated from the rest of his kind, Keeyaw of the lank figure and mournful mustaches, low, groveling, hunkered over from the weight of his implements and the white, colorless beard that hung from his face in a way he had no control over. It just hung there and swung as he worked. And his eyes—those suspicious, unseeing orbs he occasionally turned to the sky as though he were about to be scolded and were constantly being watched—how could eyes sunk so far back in his skull ever see a thing? And his tools—they say he was the first to use tools, that he invented them. According to the lore of his kind, this was his gift to the world. And it was always upon us. All around us, the trees had been severed from the air and hurled to the underworld. And somehow I took a strange pity on this supposed Doom of the Trees. It seemed his grim hacking away at the Giants gave him no satisfaction whatsoever. Instead he seemed trapped in a landscape of irritable brooding, and taking his anger out on the mute Giants gave him no escape. Still, it was his only answer, which he repeatedly struck.
My Other finally plucked his way up to the nest top. He perched much closer to the edge than I did and spread his prickly wing points out to catch hold of the howling, but he failed to jump. He just crouched low and did what I did. We sat there and wondered about this Keeyaw creature from the heaving edge of the nest. Then My Other picked himself up and whipped his tiny bones in the direction of the powerful gusts.
“No! Stay there!” cried our mother, seeing his brave little twigs flapping. “Stay in the nest!”
I realized she’d wanted to join us at the nest but didn’t want to reveal our whereabouts to Keeyaw.
Though we thought Our Many had been calling us out to fly, she must have meant it for Keeyaw. Crows have no alarm call for walk off, or grovel your way back across the u
nderworld. Fly was the only call she had to drive Keeyaw away.
And she dove down to mob him, strafing his whiskery head. But the wind weakened her attack. When she dove after him a second time, a sudden gust nearly pushed her up against the trunk. So she hung on to the trees between us and the beast, looking at him, then at us, then back to him, full of hesitation, until it turned to weary patience.
“Get back inside,” she called, mute and panicked
So I dove back into the safety of our nest’s inner bowl and closed my eyes, until I felt more acutely the heaving and roiling of Our Giant through the air. My fearless Other, who was already practiced in the ancient art of imitation, stayed up in the headwinds and made the sound of Keeyaw’s ax just fine. But no crow could imitate the sound of a tree falling, like the rippling of violent thunders, darker than doom, worse than the end, broken limbs, loose leaves flying. Frightened birds and creatures took off. Then our mother fled. The branches of our own tree sank, and there was a silence, like a weight falling in my chest. We felt the whole world tilt. When the Giant hit, the woods exploded. Each bounce brought more thunder, until it stopped.
The forest was never so quiet as then.
Except the cooling of the wind. And the murmuring of the yes. And the murmuring of the no. And the sighing beneath the leaves, waiting for the final word.
Soon the rhythm of Keeyaw’s ax resumed.
And the wind picked up, arguing again through the grizzled mat of the beastman’s beard, and My Other could imitate, with the high, nasally pitch of parody, the sound Keeyaw made, hacking away at the underworld, rending the tree of its branches, and the beastman would hesitate and look up, full of woe and worry, swinging those awful implements over his head and then down again. Tunk, tunk, tunk, sang My Other. And Keeyaw’s mournful mustaches shook.
