by Layne Maheu
Up here I actually liked to watch Keeyaw fell trees. So did other crows—strange, meandering onlookers from foreign woods, here to take note of the changing geography of the trees. A loose, shifting daytime roost had gathered just beyond Keeyaw’s attack on the Giants. Then, right beside me, a stealthy presence made the branch dip.
At first it pleased me because I thought one of my siblings had come with food. But the more I looked, the more worried I became. I knew it wasn’t a raven, being too small and nasty and full of ragged feathers. Its dull, matted coat lacked the luster of my family’s, and there was a sleepy, greedy, half-opened look to the eyes. When the strange crow who’d been swinging his head in all directions finally looked at me, I had the sinking feeling it wanted to eat me.
“Hungry, are you, I Am?” He cawed my name with mocking derision.
“How do you know my name?”
The strange bird gave no answer but bobbed and shrugged nervously.
I said, “Keep to yourself. Unless you’re the Old Bone. Then I have business with you, for I Am the Misfortune.”
“Oh. I see. I thought it took seasons beyond counting for the Misfortune to appear.” The bird laughed to himself, or coughed, or gurgled, I couldn’t tell. “Great dangers, feats of daring. A little egg like you?” The bird’s laugh was a strange, derelict wheeze that seemed idle and corrupt. If this bird couldn’t learn the sounds of a crow, then how could it ever imitate nature? “But, your worshipfulness, your eyes are still blue. You can’t even fly—” the bird leered wickedly, “—or so it seems. And that wispy bit of fuzz on your face—”
“How do you know all of this?” I asked. “Are you the Old Bone?”
“Me? Oh, no, not me.”
The strange bird bobbed and pecked at the bark for no reason. It cringed. It pecked its own claws. Its eyes spun, then crossed. It shivered, startled by nothing.
“Then watch how you treat me,” I said. “For I bring bad tidings.”
“You’re better off watching yourself. A Misfortune only brings bad tidings upon itself.”
“Why should I believe you? Do you know of the Old Bone?”
“Keeyaw! Keeyaw!” the strange bird called out, as if his wits had flown off. “Keeyaw is the one to watch out for. A bird’s curse is nothing next to his.”
I perched there silently, listening to the far-off chopping of Keeyaw, hoping the bird would leave me, or at least be silent, too.
“Of course. Every crow knows of the Old Bone,” he said. “But few know him.”
“Have you seen him?”
“All birds see the Old One, flapping around, flap, flap. But few see him.”
Just then Plum Black sounded distantly in the woods.
“Aawwwk.” The strange crow tried to sing like my family, but from him, it was disgusting and embarrassed me. I’d heard the mockery before while I was in the nest and always wondered where it came from. Maybe the bad part of a dream.
Then Fly Home’s rage warp sounded from the trees.
And the Lone Crow took off when my father shot past in a wheeling attack and followed him through the branches.
Directly afterward, my sister Plum Black lit beside me. “You didn’t eat anything from him, did you?”
“No.”
“He wanted to feed you. He watches where we hide food and steals it.”
“If he steals, why would he give it back?”
“He wants to be like your Plum Black and live in Our Mother of Many’s song.”
“Why?”
“He is lost, a Lone Crow, without family or song.”
“How could he ever join our family, born from another nest?”
“I am from another nest.”
“And from another song?”
“Yes. But I learned your mother’s song well enough that hers became my own. And in her old motherhood, she thought I was one of hers. First setting eyes on me, she called me Plum Black, and I’ve been Plum Black ever since. When it came time to feed you, your father did not chase me off either. But I grow too old to feed another’s. Soon I will be chased off. I will become the Lone Crow.”
“How will it end?”
“With the season of my own nest, I hope.”
“I will come to feed your nestlings,” I said.
“You say that now.”
And Plum Black, the Beauty of our aerie, lifted easily into the air.
“C’mon,” she said. “Hurry. The winds won’t wait.”
She flew off.
In the distance, my father continued his complaint, warning all Lone Crows and those of other songs to be wary.
crow’s nest: 1. A small lookout platform with a high protective railing and wind screen, located near the top of a ship’s mast. 2. Any similar lookout platform located ashore.
—THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
11. Tree
Our Giant was about to fall.
Keeyaw had that nervous excitement about him in the way he drove himself at Our Giant’s pulpy wound. It was there in the sound of his chopping. He’d spend all of his time there, until the end.
Night Time and Plum Black made giddy, savage dives at Keeyaw. They perched on the branch just above him, where they hacked away at the bark and sent tree dust and chips falling down on his mane. But Keeyaw kept swinging. His brainless attack on the tree weakened the spell of Our Many’s troubled song, so when she came to the part about My Other, the Promise of Pure Flight, who could see things just before they happened, he did not return. No bird dared light on our tree, and when Our Mother of Many sang out my name, I grew fierce and hissed at the strange beast below. But did he hear it?
It could have been his own head he sent against the trunk. He was far too lost in his manic need to fell things and haul them off to oblivion—lost, but still too great a force. I’ve seen the awe before in my father, how he can wait out a long storm and how his drenched feathers stick to their pins, showing the bluish-white color of his skin—skin under our own feathers just as ugly and strange to me as the face of that—no, there was nothing in that beast of the underworld anything like a bird. My father lit near and watched with his calm, fatalistic detachment.
Night Time wheeled above Keeyaw and let loose a long stream of excreta that landed across that man’s lifeless, colorless beard. But did Keeyaw see it? Or slow from his tireless pace? He cackled to himself and wheezed in anticipation. He took pulpy hardwood wedges and sent them deep into the incision he cut. He swung the frayed, pulverized head of his maul with all his clumsy might, and our tree quaked like bubbling doom.
Then Our Giant began to creak.
It whined like a wolf puppy.
The whole world began to tilt.
Keeyaw scampered off into the bushes. He had a clumsy gait, with his head hunkered down, as if Our Giant were headed right for him, and he hid behind other trees. All of us watched as my father watched, with rapt attention at Our Own Giant’s doom. Just then, when I thought it was going to fall, like water slipping through my ribs, like my worst dreams when my wings won’t work, it stopped.
I was waiting for the tremendous noises, the groundswell of thunder, the rumble, the aftershock, the echo from the hills.
But they never came.
Our tree leaned over now, slightly, hung up by the shoulders on another tree almost as large.
Everyone in my family, and crows I’d never seen before, looked on silently, expecting our tree to fall as if struck by a bolt from the sky. Instead the breeze rustled the needles and cones the same as always. The lone twine of a spider web shivered, suspended between the limbs of a tree half-severed from its roots. Only a small section of the trunk was cut up, like the mangled mane of a horse.
Keeyaw walked openmouthed back beneath our tree and studied it. He ran his hand over the shattered trunk as strange sounds came from beneath his beard, and he looked to the sky, dragging his tool, squinting upward. He began pounding the giant’s wound until the wedges fell out. He kept hammering
away, looking spooked as if the injured giant might take sudden revenge and fall on top of him. Instead our tree remained upright in the embrace of the neighboring tree, as if the leafy neighbor were a lover and the two supported each other in grief.
As if I’d been flying all my life, I raised my wings and lifted in an easy, thick flapping motion. I flew like heavy liquid through and around the branches of our aerie and landed on a low branch of Our Giant right above Keeyaw. I lifted my claws, one claw at a time, and made sure they had a good hold of the branch. Then I held out my wings as if ready to fly again.
“Now,” I said to Keeyaw, “be gone! How many times must Our Giant beat you?”
I kept guarding Our Giant with my wings outstretched.
Keeyaw stepped back and looked up at me. He walked backward, wide-eyed and suspicious. Then he joined his mule and petted it as he reached deep into his knapsack and began other preparations.
“The birds, the fish, the snakes, the wild things. They never plot and scheme. One day of life to them is as a thousand.”
—ROBERT GRAVES, King Jesus
12. Burning Creatures of the Sea
Everyone was there to watch me chase Keeyaw off again, including the rude, gawking foreigners from other lands. Except this time Keeyaw wasn’t packing up his mule and disappearing into the trees. Instead the sad creature had a strange, preoccupied walk as if freshly awake from bad dreams as he reached inside the knapsack and began searching its contents.
Perched above him in our fierce Giant, I was sure I’d scare him off again.
Silently my father lit near me and studied Keeyaw, first with sidelong glances, then counterbalancing himself with his wings, then facing the other way, then idly cleaning his beak against the bark. It was a manner of watching that I’d first learned from him, though I’d seen it in the gods and other crows. If you intentionally watch a creature, it is more likely to take note of you, for better or worse, and act differently either way.
Using twine, Keeyaw hung three strange, eelish creatures from the lowest branch of our tree. Below them, he gathered firewood and took out his special rocks and struck them together, summoning the specks of lightning. He blew into the smoldering, and his breath added to the fire. His whiskers rose and fell as he huffed. With the fire going, he lowered the three eels, dry and wrinkled with their fins stuck to their sides, just above the flames. I found the creatures, with their webbed fins and flecked scales and dried-open eyes, slippery and exotic, suggestive of flight.
At just that moment, the God Crow appeared again and perched far above us. There in our severed tree, I saw It, the Bird, Its head craned to the side, looking far into the mysteries of the mute green cedar palms, then turning Its back, flipping Its tail and wing feathers out in quick, random motions, like eye batting. Yes, It was watching me, I was sure, watching me and Keeyaw, yet turning the other way as the beastman spoke to It in Its supreme grace and indifference.
“Hey, You with all the names, You must remember this—my special tree! Your favored Ennouch, my grandfather, labored long and taught me to plant it. Just as he did with the tree You gave away to the Nephalem. Long have I labored, and now this tree is denied me, too. What have I done that is wrong?”
Keeyaw waited for an answer.
The God Crow was pecking away under one of Its wings.
When none came, Keeyaw continued.
“I offer You my favorite, eels.” Keeyaw gave a sidelong glance at his mule. “I know how You like the creature of hooves, hooves and horns. I ask only that I might be Your servant, and to do so, I turn to this tree.”
The eels spun idly on their strings. Their oils dripped into the flames and sputtered. Their lowermost fins turned black and crispy. Keeyaw threw more kindling and pine needles onto the fire, and they burst out in bright, metallic colors.
“Okay,” Keeyaw muttered to his mule, but mostly to himself. “He doesn’t want me to have it?” He scratched his head. “The whole thing’s off, then, I hope.”
Without a sound, the good God Crow flew away, while our severed tree held fast against its mate. Keeyaw cursed into his thick mane and kept cursing as he disappeared into the bushes, every once in a while poking his head back out through the vegetation, making a face at his eels and his fire, and then disappearing again.
But he couldn’t stand it. Looking around guiltily, Keeyaw clipped one of the eels down from its string and chewed sullenly on its belly, afterward restoring it half-eaten to its string. Then, with a grunt, he gathered up his defeated tools and led his mule away with him into the tangled secrets of the hollow.
II. Fledgling
600 years, less than 600 years, passed.
The country became too wide, the people too numerous.
He grew restless at their noise.
Sleep could not overtake him because of their racket.
Ellil organized his assembly,
Addressed the gods his sons,
‘The noise of mankind has become too much.
I have become restless at their noise.”
—ATRAHASIS, MESOPOTAMIAN FLOOD MYTH.
And God looked upon the earth,
and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh
had corrupted his way upon earth.
And God said unto Noah, The
end of all flesh is come before me; for the
earth is filled with violence through
them; and, behold, I will destroy them
with the earth.
—GENESIS, 6:13
In the beginning, God was a perfectionist.
—BLU GREENBERG, GENESIS: A LIVING CONVERSATION.
crow: intr. v. To boast; exalt. To make a sound expressive of pleasure or well-being, characteristic of an infant.—n. The shrill cry of a cock. An inarticulate sound expressive of pleasure or delight.
—THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
1. Triumph of the Tree
Deep of night.
When the greatest fear was the fear of owls, the tree below us shuddered. It creaked with a massive lurch. The lovers’ grip failed, and our own Giant fell forward. The whole world tilted. I was thrown.
“Get!” Fly Home yelled.
I jumped into a confusion of wingbeats in the rolling dark. The thunder of falling was like the dark Apocrypha of Keeyaw, as if sound could rattle everything, everything, and turn it to dust and leave us flapping through a greater dark. I heard the caving in of other Giants. And the splitting of branches. And smaller trees. When Our Giant finally hit ground, I flew out as fast as I could—to where I couldn’t see—but I kept going, into the rumbling hills. The Giant bounced three times, each time raising tremendous clouds of smoke and dust, and I crouched under some growth in the dust-filled dark.
Then, nothing.
In the sudden hush was an eerie stirring. Wolves bellowed bewildered questions. A fleet-footed creature whished enormously through the brush above me, barely touching ground. I thought a shadowy creature was behind me in the bushes. But I kept quiet as I had been told to do at night. Among the calls here and there, I heard muffled squawks from my family, but they were too scattered to bring any comfort.
Down in the tangled growth of the underworld, I remembered how Fly Home had told Our Many that our tree was strong now. He said the augurs alive in the leaves were full of power and he no longer needed to consult the Old Bone, even if he could find him, because I was not the Misfortune and we would not have to take refuge elsewhere in the woods, all because our tree had beaten Keeyaw and sent him away.
Down in darkest depths, I waited for morning.
As the gray mist rose, so did our songs.
“Night Time,” called Night Time.
It turned out I hadn’t flown as far as I’d thought, because I was still in the rubble of our tree.
“I Am,” I called, and found Night Time perched on a branch sticking up from the felled Giant.
Plum Black lit, too, and called out.
But, “EEEeiiyaawhhh!
” Fly Home hollered, deep from the splitting stones of his gut. He was perched on the tangled ruin of branches directly above our nest, which was smashed along with the underside of the tree, all a mangle now of splinters, shards, and broken spears. Blood and bones and flattened feathers, trapped beneath the lopsided nest was Our Mother of Many, her wings twisted and pinned by the wreckage. She, too, was a mangle and didn’t move.
“Who did this?” yelled my father. “Who?”
Who would come by in the night and knock our tree down a second time while the world had its eyes shut? Perhaps the demons that lived in the wind. Or an owl. Or the raccoon.
We cried out in grief and disbelief and tried to fly over Our Many, disfigured by the tree of life and lost within the broken web of sticks.
But when we approached, our father chased us off.
“Fly Home!”
He guarded our sweet mother’s black feathers, crushed below the nest I came from.
Yet, until shown otherwise, we can assume that the same powerful mechanisms driving behavior in one species apply in another.
—BERND HEINRICH, Mind of the Raven
2. Lost Songs
“Fly Home!!”
Our father wailed as he swooped above the flattened bed of feather and bone that was Our Many. Landing, he cried out, then dove above her again, and if we ever wanted to get close to her we had to shriek and dive past her in the same way or else get chased off, our father broad-browed and open-beaked, diving over her and diving back. He landed on the ground near Our Many and approached as if afraid, sneaking up beside her, afraid of Our Giant. He acted as if the branches were going to reach out and pin him to the ground, too. He tried to feed her, opening his pouch up to her mangled beak and dropping food inside it. But his offering dropped to the ground.
