Song of the Crow

by Layne Maheu

  “I Am!” she cried and flew in a circle around the tree.

  She landed above the nest and cried, “I Am!” gaping down, looking through me and into the soiled part of our nest. She took up a stone of old excrement and threw it in a hard, heavy chunk down her throat. She circled our tree and landed above me. “I Am,” she cried and flew around the tree. She kept circling and landing like that, groping through the fog.

  The soul of Aristaeus, also, was seen at Proconnesus flying out of his mouth in the form of a raven; this subsequently gave rise to the invention of many stories.

  —PLINY THE ELDER

  8. Burnt Offerings

  “Surely you are my last lovely simp, for I will not live to have another.”

  And though Our Many flew far into the tree of her sorrow, she never neglected her feedings or duties to me. When it grew hot, she’d fly back from the cold stream, moving her feathers as little as possible so that the water might drip from her wings and cool me. When the nights grew cold, she would ruffle her belly feathers down over me as if I were a clutch of unborn eggs, even though I was far too old for it, but since I was alone, it was tolerable, smothered up against the walls of the nest. While my own coat of feathers spread out dark and thick, hers grew prickly and slate-gray underneath and lost their luster in the hot summer noon.

  “Oh my last, sweet last, hatched next to the Promise,” and from her horn came sounds that made me doubt the very world around me and believe only in the pale shroud of her song floating between me and the woods, while I sensed My Other come back and sit in the nest beside me and cry out. Her fading loves, drifting in and out of her last season, were sung for my ears and mine alone, one nestled beneath the stray, washed-out emanation growing beneath my eye.

  It rained without end.

  The water came down in such thick sheets that my mother sat there bathing in sorrow. After the loss of My Other, she had many strange, bewildering episodes and I thought that this overwhelming water from the sky was one of them. She watched distantly as my siblings shook and flapped over the nest, shrieking as if that might empty it of water.

  My father spoke. “Oh, hapless bit of birdlife.”

  I knew he wished I was My Other, so there still could be the promise of Pure Flight. Fly Home’s feathers were slick and no longer repelled the rain. He nudged Our Many to save me from the water pooling up in the nest, but she only shivered, staring into the onslaught. Their feathers were so waterlogged, their pale skin showed through, and it sickened me to see how much our skin was like the human’s. Soon I had to strain my neck, unable to call or else have the foamy water rush down my throat. The water weighed me down and kept me from climbing up on the nest top.

  That was when the terrible whack of Keeyaw’s implement shook the base of Our Giant and moved through the branches. The pool of water in the nest shivered with each blow.

  Our Many stuck her head beneath the fowl soup and dislodged some of the twigs and began throwing them over the edge. As the rainwater drained, she spoke. She put her beak right against mine and said these words: “Now. It’s time. I know it doesn’t seem like it. But you’ve been able to fly for a while now. You’re just shy of the wind. Don’t worry. I’ll stay over you until your feathers are dry. But be quiet when you’re down there. Nothing. Not a sound.”

  “After I jump?” I felt just like the worm, no feathers, no wings, no eyes, no feature anywhere except the twisting of my guts through the middle. “What? What do I do then?”

  My mother leaned back so she could take me in with both of her eyes, blinking with her alert, cloud-yellow love. She slid her beak through my feathers and gave me one last kiss.

  “Why—you’ll be able to fly,” she said. “You’ll follow us, through the sky. It’s what you were born for.”

  · · ·

  So I climbed my way out into the storm.

  The rain seemed thicker but somehow warmer out here. I edged my way out along the branch that shook from the grim attacks of Keeyaw, and soon my family called from their different trees.

  “Fly!” they called, and it caused a break in the rhythm of Keeyaw’s implement. When I reached the edge of the heavy, sagging leaves, where it would be easier to jump, Keeyaw stopped, and through the spongy fronds, I saw him. He stood there staring at me in silence. My family stopped making their racket, too.

  All that could be heard was the rain falling on itself.

  In the dull calm, I spread my wings and flapped but still held on to my perch. The branch dipped menacingly.

  Keeyaw was still looking up at me when he took his tool and slammed it once against the base of our tree, not in his usually pounding fashion but in anger, with just one arm. Then he threw his maul spinning through the woods. As if he’d suddenly proved something, he stood again in silence, staring at the woods all around him. Then he started to whack at the bushes in the vicinity of his tool. But the going was hard for such a lowly, groveling creature, and he stumbled. Falling made him angrier, and he complained, standing up against the rain. He stood stoop-shouldered and emaciated, with his clothes stuck to his bones and his beard plastered down to a thin rope hanging from his face. Waterlogged as he was, he reminded me of a tree with that likeness that always evoked such a strange pity, and I climbed even farther out onto the branch for a better view.

  Giving up on his tool, he thrashed his way back through the bushes. From his mule pack, he pulled out dry grasses, kindling, and wood and placed all of it beneath a thick overhang of branches. He arranged his kindling as best he could and struck two stones together to release the sparks and smoke that hid within the rocks. But he couldn’t summon his fire. Keeyaw blew over the strange source of smoke. Even his breath couldn’t summon the fire, and the air was thick with the dampened smoke. The smoldering hung in the air all around him, staying below the overhang of branches like the anger of his predicament.

  From his mule’s pouch, Keeyaw pulled out a bright orange sucker fish with one whisker on either side of its face, giving it the appearance of wisdom, even though rigor mortis had set in. He hung the fish by twine from a low branch above him. He pulled out a chicken with its orange feathers still dry, and the chicken tried to fly out of Keeyaw’s arms. Why did it even bother? Could I fly? If our tree fell? Keeyaw stuck its throat with a blunt knife, and feathers stuck to the blade as he pulled it out. Rather than cutting the bird, the knife bludgeoned it and the bird’s head hung, barely attached. Then, out of the mule’s pouch, Keeyaw pulled a large white goose with an orange beak, and he stabbed it, there in the crook of his arm. Even though his dull knife penetrated the breast feathers and wishbone and lodged in the heart, the goose managed to bite Keeyaw’s nose. It honked and flapped and walked about Keeyaw’s feet with the knife protruding from its bloody white breast before it collapsed, its webbed feet paddling the sodden forest floor.

  Keeyaw muttered to himself.

  Then he hung the creatures one by one—the fish, the bird, and the other bird—from a strand of twine attached to the branch above him. His smoking heap was already too soaked to catch flame. But he cupped his hands over his mouth and blew into the smoldering. He searched but could find nothing more in his mule’s pack to add to this strange arrangement.

  Then God appeared.

  At the time I didn’t know It was God. I lacked the experience or knowledge needed to understand my wonder. It flew in so silently, no one saw It or where It had come from except me. Like all crows, It could fly in between the branches and land just above the human without his knowing. While giving all of Its attention to Keeyaw, the mighty God Crow craned Its magnificent head to the side and studied the branch just above It. It scraped and sharpened Its bill, both sides, on the branch It clung to.

  Keeyaw looked wearily at the three creatures turning from the twine above the smoke. He moaned.

  “You can hardly call it a burnt offering if it won’t burn.”

  With the God Crow above him, Keeyaw’s words came to me as clearly as my own. Still, he se
emed unaware of God and complained to the trees, to the dampness, to the three sorry creatures that turned in the air above the hissing hovel of smoke all around.

  “I know these are not much, as far as offerings go,” he said. “I know you prefer the creature with hooves, the creature with hooves and horns. But I wasn’t planning on the flood starting so soon. This is the best I can do, on such short notice.”

  With his dull knife, Keeyaw sawed away at the string above the carp, and with a thud, the fish disappeared into the damp cushion of smoke. The God Crow turned Its back completely on Keeyaw, then stretched a wing to the side and scratched Itself with Its claws. But It was intently fixed on Keeyaw. This was the way not only of God but of all crows. You can watch creatures better if they think they’re not being watched. So God turned Its back.

  “There,” said Keeyaw. “Happy now?”

  Then Keeyaw stood, arms open, as skinny as a tool handle, his wet robes matted to his bones like his hair and his beard, and the blood of the birds still awash on his clothes. Keeyaw’s own blood shone brightly from the wound on his nose where the goose had bitten him. The wash of blood ran down him like the rain.

  “What else can I do?” said Keeyaw. “You’re flooding the world before the ark is finished. It can’t even float. I never asked to save anything in the first place.” And Keeyaw collapsed in a gray puddle on the forest floor and sat, rubbing the heel of his palms hard against his eyes. “After all, it was You who asked me. What did You expect? Am I more worthy? Is it too late to pick someone else? Or maybe a few others, nearly as worthy, to help out?”

  Keeyaw trod off again, hacking away at the bushes in search of his maul.

  “And those strange black birds,” he said. “Why do they mock me?”

  But before he could find his tool, the rain evaporated. The great God Crow arose in the humid mist and left without notice from anyone, man or bird, except me, to whom It cawed out in a loud, ornery voice, “You! You!”

  I shat my guts. Its dark wingspan grew ominous, and I thought this would be the end of me, that I’d be plucked away to the other realm along with My Other.

  “Yes, you!” said the God Crow.

  “Me?” I moved quickly along the branch to get back down into the filthy mulch of my own beginnings.

  And It flew over me and beyond, just as silently as when It had appeared.

  “Be ready when I call,” It said, and was gone.

  They may share the “cognitive capacities” of many primates. . . . To date, all the experimental results point in the same direction—in various trials, corvids [the crow family] have scored better than chickens, quail, pigeons, rabbits, cats, elephants, gibbons and rhesus monkeys.

  —CANDACE SAVAGE, Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays

  9. Wind of the Long Journeys

  God the Crow spoke to me, and no other bird seemed to know or care. Maybe Its Mightiness kept in constant contact with everyone in the same way that the wind washed over the woods and moved the trees. The morning’s wind came in pure and steady and made the trees want to fly. They flapped their branches as best they could, wishing they were crows. And I had to be ready, as the God Crow had decreed. Everyone has a patron wind that guides his wings. I needed one to fly and forget, to go to a land beyond Keeyaw, where I was no longer the Misfortune, where no one would know my face.

  But in the plentiful winds, everyone forgot about me anyway.

  Alone in the nest, I had too much room to hop around and scratch the tufts of sooty feathers that grew from my skin. I’d reach my claw toes over my head. I’d stand up straight and stretch my legs, pulling them to make them longer and working my wings, flapping and flapping so that the great beyond might take me to its promise. But just at the moment of release, I had the same anxiety I had when I looked out over the edge of the nest and saw nothing but the air and the leaves below, all turning and swaying above the endless underworld. It was a great fear in me. It was glandular, ancestral. It grew up from my skin like my new charcoal coat. All I could do was to grab hold of a branch, hold my wings out, and wag them slowly.

  Over and over again, between feedings, at night, awake or asleep, I had the same dream.

  I’d leap from our tree and keep rising until the world dropped out from beneath me. In the sky there was no forest and no valley and no human city burning on the horizon. I’d be lost in the clouds without perch and keep going. That, or I would fall and my legs would weigh me down like the bough of a tree and pull me under and smash my hollow bones across the face of the underworld.

  My nightmare was upon me one day when the wind blew in brilliant and clear and pushed the clouds from the sky. The sunlight swarmed all around me in and out of the nest. Trees rocked on their stems and creaked until they loosened. This wasn’t one wind but a treacherous force of many hidden currents and names. Under the conflicting furies, the world was coming apart. All except my family who rode the invisible waves as I’d never seen them before.

  My elder siblings dropped from the sky, and the wind tore them from view. Their feathers splayed like wild leaves. Seagulls soared in outrageous circles; starlings shot past in agitation as if the wind might scatter their flock. Farther off, my mother and father looped around each other, rising until they disappeared like ashes into the sun. Surely this was a favorable wind of pure sources.

  Keeyaw was able to negotiate these superior currents and make his way to Our Tree. But the dreadful blows against Our Giant had no force.

  The wind took the grim keeeyaaack and sent it awash. He flailed as if he were underwater, swinging his implement through an unction heavier than air. And my family shot past. “Fly,” they cried, and were gone, behind the bending trees.

  “Fly!”

  I looked down from the heaving nest. The scrub and grasses all trembled, pointing in the same direction from fear. I stretched my legs out again, elongating the bones so I could see out over the edge, and the instant I lifted my wings, the wind ripped me away.

  Before I even knew it, I was gone.

  Was I flying?

  Falling?

  I rose and fell at the same time. I tumbled. My wings worked too fast for what little they did. I smacked up against other trees and branches and whacked into a tangle of twigs, where I tightened my talons and tore at the cones and needles, breaking the twigs free. But I managed to hang upside down, sideways, right-side up, until I edged my way to a thicker part of the branch and cried out. The wind engulfed my cries in the oblivion of its sad siren.

  The elder siblings, when I saw them, kept playing in the violent currents. They were joined by strangers and dove in groups, in pairs, in singles. Crows swarmed in ragged formation, more crows than I’d ever seen, diving, rolling, lifting into the caterwaul. Some of the strangers’ caws I’d heard before. Some were entirely strange to me.

  Seeing my brothers or sisters, I called back. But to no avail. Like shooting stars, the minute I saw them, they were gone.

  And though I heard him through the trees, Keeyaw seemed much smaller now, his threat like the trailing off of the wind.

  I called and called.

  But the wind ate my caws.

  “Where?” Our Many called back. “You are, aren’t you?”

  “I am!”

  “You are!”

  Like a black fireball, the welcome Mother of Many lit beside me, her feathers rattling. She clipped at my eyebrows and neck. “You are, of course. You flew, didn’t you?”

  “I did?”

  “Such a strong flier,” she said, covering me with crow kisses and the exaggerations of a mother. “In such a strong wind, the Wind of Long Journeys. So—” she took me in with a proud, wide-blinking love, “that must be your wind.”

  “I’m hungry,” I cried, and she bit me hard near my eye.

  “Not so loud. You’re not in the nest anymore. And you can’t fly—not well enough. So you must be silent. You must. Wait here. Not a sound.”

  But where could I go? I
could barely hang on. And she flew to a split in our tree, where she withdrew a long and drooping head with a spine attached. “Here. In celebration,” she said. “Your first meal as a crow.” I pecked at the catfish brains, all mealy-good with rot. She watched me with pure love, following every movement of my clippers. “I thought I was going to have to coax you up from the underworld, which would have been hard to do today in this wind, your wind. Look how far you flew. But listen,” she said. “There is the hawk. If you cry out, he’ll pluck your feathers and you’ll watch as he eats your throat.”

  “The hawk?”

  “And the owl.”

  “The owl?”

  “At night you must be absolutely still. And quiet.”

  She gave me the last bit of catfish. Even bone—hard nubs from the prickly spine.

  “Owl?” I said.

  “Listen. Do you remember the raven?”

  I nearly coughed up the sharp, scraping bone.

  “These are just as bad. No, worse. They’re waiting for the time you’re like this.”

  Just a few trees away, I could still see Keeyaw, but his anger looked foreign to me, foreign and mute, just as it had sounded when I’d first come from the egg.

  I was in the habit of wandering around in our garden every evening with a gun, on the lookout for crows—I’d long cherished a hatred for the wary, sly, rapacious birds . . . (the crows recognized me, and merely cawed spasmodically at a distance).

  —IVAN TURGENEV, First Love

  10. Lone Crow

  In clearer weather I was still stranded, but managed to make a safe and comfortable home out of the tree where the wind had taken me. For rest I found a cleft between two branches, despite the tree rodent’s disapproval. Up here I could hop up the ladder of perches and finally see the world. I saw the sky where the trees leaned and where the clouds wondered. I saw where the river slid to every day in a lazy way that said, Come follow. And up here branches always wavered, bristling with danger. Songbirds never stopped prattling in their sweet, mindless anxiety, and large birds saw too much.