Song of the Crow

by Layne Maheu

  We’re told that his understanding of nature was so exact that he could select the tree, specifically a cedar tree, or a kind of cedar tree, that in the course of one-hundred and twenty years, once planted, could grow to the height of fifty meters, which is the measure he needed for the construction of the Ark.

  —AARON TENDLER, Noah and the Ark, Voyage to a New Beginning

  3. Mother of Many

  Another tree gone, and the sky hung lower.

  The Giant lay dead, dumb, and naked, and Keeyaw kept smacking it, ripping the limbs free until the trunk lay wasted in the clearing. He went after the branches with the same grim intensity he went at the trunks, lost in mossy arboreal sadness, and he kept hacking away until he was further hidden from sight. Only then did our mother find it safe enough to fly to the nest. Her eyes, leaking the ancient ooze of her years, took us in lovingly as she lowered strips of half-chewed frog gut into our gapes. Then she cleaned the nest of our dung sacks, flew away with them in her beak, and then came back.

  Every once in a while the winds threatened to argue all over again, but the sky let out a long sigh and the wind went on its troubled way, leaving us to the devices of Keeyaw.

  My hungry brother and I strained above the nest to see what Keeyaw was up to.

  He heaped all of the severed branches into a loose, snaggy pile.

  “Is he building a nest here?” I asked.

  I waited for an answer, staring at Our Many’s claws, scaled and gnarly and clutched to the nest at my face. Above her hooks, her squat old body blocked out the sun. But then she was the sun, dark with love, ragged with comfort. As if she were well-being itself, we longed for the blue-black, worn-feather protection to come shining down over us. But she bristled now from wounded authority, and her beak kept working away at the unrest in her coat.

  Then “Eeiiwaaack! Eeiiwaaack!” off in the distance, soaring.

  Whereas most creatures flee the sound of Keeyaw, my father flew in, desperate for a look. “Fly Home!” Whenever our father heard the beastman’s attack fall over the woods, he cried out in alarm, but also in eerie exultation. “Fly Home!” Was it a welcome? A threat? He flew in wild and large and threw his hooks out to land—even though the tree was no longer there—as if in denial of what Keeyaw had done. He must have thought his own absence had allowed the tree to fall. He lit far from our nest and let Keeyaw have it. He bobbed with each caw and his feathers flared as if Keeyaw were directly below, and the strange, terrible beast answered with the gnawing of his ax.

  “Me! Me!” cried My Other. “I Am!”

  But not even the begging of his favorite could bring my father to the nest.

  Instead, Fly Home stayed where he was, leaning and lunging and spreading with each call, and our mother flew to the outlying woods to meet him. But their greeting was clipped and afraid. Our father had a huge, swimming brow of crown feathers where all his distant thoughts could live, and our thick old mother stretched herself up as best she could to rearrange his scattered brow.

  “Can’t you see?” she said. “What’s happening to the woods?”

  “Has he touched Our Giant?”

  “No,” she said. “I won’t let him.”

  And they quieted even further as if suddenly realizing the good luck that our own tree had been spared, and silently they watched Keeyaw, turning their heads, pecking at their perch, while the beastman walked in and out of the Giant’s arms, carrying cracked sticks and heavy fans of cedar leaf.

  “So. What did you bring us?” Our Many finally asked with a quiet sweetness. “From far off, from far off.”

  “Open your beak, and I will show you.”

  My father gave a gentle tilt to his horn and shook the offering down into the sweet food pouch of her throat.

  Then he flared up and leaned into the wind.

  “Meet me in the sky,” he said, which was a common enough farewell among lovers but was especially gallant in the falling woods.

  Instead of flying away, though, he perched just above the downed Giant and began yelling again at the beastman.

  And the wild-haired Keeyaw stopped what he was doing long enough to poke his head out from underneath the heavy weeping of the tree as my father grew even more menacing with pride. But Keeyaw showed no fear and only blinked and squinted with a look of vague curiosity, as if he had bad eyes, or my father’s attack was baffling him. My father continued harassing him with his hackles extended and his brow fierce. Keeyaw was about to creep back into the injured Giant when he stood back away from it. He walked up and down the entire sprawling length of the trunk and moaned, flummoxed by what he’d done, as if the whole thing would not release him from its enormous burden. And he took his frustration out on his beard, pulling at the bits of bark and leaf stuck there. When Keeyaw looked up again at my father’s territorial bickering, the white-haired creature had a sinking expression, even in his beard. Was it understanding? Had Keeyaw had a change of mind, or whatever it was that drove him at the woods, bent on destruction?

  With defeated shoulders, he took the reins of his mule and walked off, dragging the animal away with him into the woods.

  My father swooped over him, assured of his prowess. Over and over again, he mobbed the man, and Our Many’s eyes followed them, piercing into the unknown beyond the limbs of our spiny tree, where my father called from even farther off, from beyond the beyond, until his echo could no longer be heard.

  In Keeyaw’s absence, the woods remembered their silence.

  It was the hot, brooding silence of insects, and the silence of small songbirds high in the branches of the sweltering heat. They remained hidden from sight as if the treetops themselves chirped vacuously back and forth. And a strange inner weather began to affect Our Many’s eyes, the spell of an old mother crow, which was what she was. Later in life, I would find the large winter roosts filled with elder siblings of mine, crows from all ends of the wind, all of them singing out variations of her song. Our mother had lived long enough and had enough nests to be known as a mother of many, a great-grandmother over and over again, and though I have yet to meet another mother of many, I’ve heard of others. Every crow’s song includes at least one. Our stout, imperious mother had outlived two mates. Our father was her third. And like gurgling water from a waterfall, Our Many came down to us, and my brother and I—we opened our beaks to the sky, and waited.

  When all the food was gone, she sang.

  The bristles around her beak were thin with age and her eyes milky with cataracts. But when she opened her ancient horn, out came the call of fledges from innumerable nest times, from the seasons beyond counting, with a random whirl to the call, or the way she got stuck on one. Over and over again she cried out, “Sable . . .”

  In a muted, dreamy voice, since she was just over the nest.

  “Where are you?”

  She answered her own call.

  “Plucked away by owls.”

  She fanned her wings open and flew down onto the abandoned tree, stretched out across a bed of scrub and fern. She bobbed there and sang into one of the few weeping branches that remained. She cawed inwardly, lunging with muscles of grieving gut, as if regurgitating her song, as if feeding and singing were one and the same.

  “Nestor!” She called to some fledge of her memory, now lost inside the tree.

  “Where?

  “Where!

  “Bloated by rain.

  “Kettle, flung by the wind, eaten by mice, by flies, by maggots.

  “Fledges snagged by hawks, by angry gods without names.”

  Since crows can count up to seven, any bird beyond that in age is from the seasons beyond counting, and though it wasn’t always true for my mother, the seasons beyond her counting were advancing. She could remember the many who had flown from her nest. She just couldn’t tell how long ago they had come, or gone, or if they had gone, or where to.

  Then Our Many flew back up to the nest.

  Through her distant, cloudy blinking, I could swear she ha
rdly saw us, but looked far into her song and whatever unfortunate simp her memory had conjured up just then.

  Then somebody talked from the air. Maybe it was Moses. He said:

  “You build a big boat.”

  Crow did that and put the moose, the bear, the caribou, the lion, and everything in it.

  —TOMMY MCGINTY’S NORTHERN TUTCHONE STORY OF CROW:

  A FIRST NATION ELDER RECOUNTS THE CREATION OF THE WORLD

  4. Treasure

  “Who? Who dares attack the Giants of our song?”

  Fly Home called his threats to the sky.

  Then he called softly to Our Many, “Why the sad song?”

  Soon he and Our Many were both above the nest, leaning over with a foodstuff so wondrous that Fly Home must have flown far to find it. Often our father returned with strange delectables from the human roost: meats made dark and rough by fire, sweetmeats wrapped in leaves, nuts and figs soaked in juice, and a thing called bread that my father liked to dip in fresh rainwater. He had a keen eye for all things human, and such offerings were his specialty.

  “What?” I asked. “What is it?”

  Our Many hushed me in discouraging whispers, as if Keeyaw were still near. But our father said, “From the beastman. By the sea.”

  “Keeyaw?” I asked.

  “No,” said our father. “I don’t like his nest.”

  Our Mother of Many gave him a look as if to say—what? “You spend all of your time watching him, and you forget to raid his food stores.”

  There was something about Our Father’s long, perching silences that made me and My Other strain our necks and blink out over the twigs of the nest with expectant wonder. Our father sat like a bird who had been long by the sea, who could swoop down and pluck things up from its briny depths. Not just clams and bright, juicy fish with wounded gills gasping on the sunlight. But utterly useless things. Shining metallic things. Like treasure. And nothing less.

  “Me, Me, I Am,” cried My Other. “I Am.”

  My hungry brother ate the most, yelled the most. He cried the most. He turned his baby’s blood-red beak to the sky. My father loved that beak and dangled food just above it. “Of course, my brave little flier, of course.” Fly Home laughed the deep, reedy laugh that was part of his song, and down came the food to My Other. Of course our father would prefer that beak; as it was the nourishing vessel to the promise of Pure Flight.

  History speaks of the noteworthy flier, the Old Bone of Misfortune, who could fly in his sleep. He chased hawks and molested owls all through the deep of night, as if his flight were a manifestation of some strange, powerful dreaming. We’re also told of the remarkable abilities of the great flier Hookbill the Haunted, who flew not only in her sleep but while clutching tightly to the tree below her. Her soul took leave of her body. Thus unsheathed, she bore witness to amazing landscapes and events that far transcended the boundaries of the horizon and returned with news of these. She became a living oracle of sorts, dazzling crows and inspiring them with hope and awe. There were times when I felt My Other had inklings of this. He could see things just before they happened, like the great ones, said our father. In the promise of My Other’s wings was also the promise of the future, somehow, in my father’s eyes.

  · · ·

  Just then the woods sounded.

  It was Keeyaw.

  But he made none of his mournful hammering noises and so appeared with the impact of insects or grazing deer. Above us, Fly Home and Our Many pretended to look elsewhere, though all of their attention fell on the strange underworld animal. They watched as if taking in breaths without exhaling. Neither spoke.

  We saw the hapless beastman scuttle out from under the bushes, peering from behind his desperate mane of hairy brambles. He seemed anxious, as if he’d forgotten where he’d left the fallen tree. Once he was in the clearing, though, he settled down and pulled his mule out into the open. He called sharply back into the woods, and a small group of Keeyaw-like creatures came to join him, a few of them with the same wild growth around their faces, but dark, like a crow’s. Others had smooth, serene, hairless faces, and with them came a mixed team of hoofed animals. Before long they had an encampment set up with tents and campfires and cooking pots and their animals tethered to the trees. One of the beastmen was slight and half grown, with no trace of a beard on his face, and he dawdled behind the others, lost in childish dreams, humming to himself and cradling a jawbone ax with the teeth of a dragon, or an ox, or some other monster, over his shoulders.

  That was when I climbed out beyond the nest.

  I picked my way up over the barbed scratchgrass and forbidding sticks and my toes hung up. In the open air, I felt acutely my impish nakedness and the whole world swam into being. Cloud, hill, nausea, carcass, bloody grin, gravity, constellations, illimitable depth. Out farther, I hung on to the spongy green cedar fronds and bobbed above the heights. Everything was much clearer, but that was fear. Then my mother’s beak hurled me back into the nest, and I hadn’t traveled nearly as far as I thought. Still, my new perch had a much better view than before.

  “Careful,” our father said to me. “Careful. Watch your perch. Watch yourself.”

  “Cursed,” cried my mother. “Just like his father. Left on his own, he’d do nothing but sit around and watch the ways of that thing human. Why? Why is our nest even here? So close to the road?”

  My father only folded his wings into place. “The babes will be able to fly soon enough,” he said.

  “They’ll need more feathers than that.”

  My father only tugged at his own feathers. When he wasn’t off watching Keeyaw, he liked to watch the human go back and forth along a pathway made hard and barren by constant use, one man alone, or a small band riding other beasts, or whipping them, or traveling in great growing armies. If it weren’t for the traffic along the road, I don’t know if we’d ever have seen our father. For long vigils, he would sit in his tree above the road, his bulky brow stern and preoccupied. Just then he reached out for the air in the direction of Keeyaw’s tents, ready to fly.

  “What?” said our mother. “Again? If you keep watching, you’ll just lead him here.”

  “Lead him here? He doesn’t notice a bird. It’s as if the trees fall down on their own. If we could lead the Keeyaw here, then surely we could lead him away. No. He comes here following his own madness.”

  Then Fly Home leaned again as if to dive into the wind but turned back to the nest. He bent his head far down to feed me again. But this time no food came from his beak. His sharp one-eyed stare watched me and watched me from different angles, then stopped watching me altogether, all except for the pale patch of skin just below my eyes, the patch where the white pinfeather grew. His glare was so fierce, I felt ashamed and had to hide my head down in my usual crags and burrows. The white feather’s appearance was like grief stuck to my parents, but especially my father, because he’d seen it before, on the skin of a sibling from his very own nest time, the one known as Hookbill the Haunted, whose tree had been struck by lightning and who had lost her eyesight. Then, half-dead and half-living, she’d returned from the Tree of the Dead, where she had gained the powers of divination and prophecy, and began uttering cryptic speeches because she lived now close to the God Crow, Who sometimes spoke through her in Its heady God Crow speech. How did I know of all this? My mother and father had discussed it all before, that time when my father ripped out the white pinfeather at its first appearance and the blood trickled down and dried on my face.

  “Why?” my mother had cried. “Why?”

  “So it will never grow back.”

  But when the washed-out color reemerged, I overheard my father mumbling something under his beak, about how maybe I was a mockingbird, or some other foreign egg placed in the nest when no one was looking.

  This time he lunged at the feather in one swift bite and pulled back on my face until my bones made a snapping sound. Now he had three pale pinfeathers in his beak and spat the two smaller ones
out. I nearly lunged from the tree, hoping to catch a glimpse of one, having never before seen them or their color, stuck as they were just below my eye. I saw one, perhaps, a mere spindly blade of fluff. It dove as if injured, not quite a feather and not exactly white either, but a pale gray or absence of any color whatsoever and so an absence of Crowness and a portal to some strange otherness that would put the fear in my father and burden him.

  “These are far too early,” he said with his horn clenched, “for normal feathers. They’re definitely not baby’s down.”

  “I thought you were going off to watch the Keeyaws,” my mother said.

  “I was. But now I’m taking this confounded feather to the Old Bone.”

  “He is like you,” said Our Many, “or how you should be, maimed by the beastman, always off watching him. What will that prove?”

  “He is the only other bird around with the paleness. He’ll know. He’ll know what our wintry son is all about.”

  “I don’t care who knows. Surely you can see with your own eyes. Why don’t you help me find out what’s happening to the woods? Find out where Keeyaw has and has not been. For when the babes are strong enough, we’ll fly to safer woods.”

  “The Old Bone will know about that, too. Fear not.”

  The wind took his call and brought it back a second time, as Fly Home opened his broad, serrated wings until they covered all of our opening to the sky in black, and the sun shone through in iridescent greens and purples as they ripped through the air and were gone, throwing a sharp blast of air down over us.

  “Fear not.”

  Cooperative breeding behavior is rare in birds. . . . I have seen five adult crows at a single nest at once, all with their heads in the nest feeding young.

  —KEVIN J. MCGOWAN, “FAMILY LIVES OF THE UNCOMMON AMERICAN CROW”

  5. The Most Delectable