Only when the plane started to taxi again, to move itself to the starting point for the next takeoff, did Cobb fully awaken, rub his eyes, and yawn loudly enough to cause the few remaining passengers to look at him curiously. When the plane accelerated down the runway again, Cobb was ready this time, leaning forward as far as the required seat belt would allow him. With fewer people on the plane, it felt even faster! The wind lifting up under the wings, buffeting the metal shell lovingly with every gust and tumult, all of it made Cobb feel as if he was at home again in the sky.
Outside the window, he could soon see the toy landscape and tiny coastline stretching beneath him, clouds butting up against a wall of craggy mountains that faced out toward the endless sea. In the distance, he could see more stone mountains, each with snow capping the highest peaks. The scope and size of everything was majestic. But the fact that each of the tiny green patches represented a thousand trees was just unbelievable to him. An impossibility, even from a plane that was daring to fly higher than the moon and the stars.
The descent to Cordova, by comparison, was just as exciting. The plane did a couple of quick drops and wing-catches in turbulent air that badly frightened a lady across the aisle. But for Cobb it was old hat. It was flying, full of the invisible unpredictability that the wind playfully gave to its creatures. As the runway rose up to meet them, Cobb kept expecting to see the plane’s rigid fixed wings flutter up, to catch and buffet the air just in time to slow them and bring them safely down to the ground. But that didn’t happen, and the roar of the engines stopped them by pure force and fury alone.
Once they’d landed, at the uniformed lady’s request he stayed in his seat until the plane came to rest and the overhead lights turned on. Then he grabbed his backpack and shuffled down the aisle with the rest of the passengers. A man at the front of the plane wearing a black jacket and a jaunty hat nodded and waved as Cobb went by. Cobb smiled and waved back, because it seemed like the right thing to do.
Outside, after walking down a set of steep metal stairs, Cobb hung back at the end of the line of passengers walking toward the small building on the other side of the tarmac. When he’d first gotten out of the plane, he imagined he would be in another place, another city, with the hustle of traffic and a new maze of buildings and winding roads to discover. But when he looked up at the vista above and around him, he just stopped and stared while trying to take it all in.
The mountains around him were as big as the world, towering in the clear air. They were heavy, rugged, ridged. Painted with snow up high and draped with an impossibly green blanket of trees down below. They were real trees, not the tiny ones that Cobb had seen when he was overlooking the world from on high, but huge trees beyond count, marching up the sides of the crags and cliffs with root-fingers and tendril grip.
But the sky above, with a deep hue like spilled paint, the color of an imaginary sea, it oppressed him, shoved him physically down to his knees with its vastness. No buildings, no wires, no skyscrapers, no telephone poles—nothing stood between the threatening rockfall of the trackless brilliance and tiny Cobb down below. Just blue, from horizon to horizon. Cordova was a land of giants, where Cobb was impossibly small among things that were impossibly large.
By the time he got up from where he knelt on the pavement, the other passengers were gone. One of the crew members looked like he was about to come over and give him a hand, but Cobb weakly waved him off. He got up and staggered toward the little building, trying to fight off the urge to run for cover before he was dive-bombed by the sky.
Inside, blissfully inside, there was just one little room where a bunch of people waited. He took a few minutes in the corner to catch his breath, to come to his senses. When he felt he was ready, no longer as overwhelmed, he got up and made his way out the front door of the terminal, backpack over his shoulder. There, he was caught by another scenic vista, but a different one than before. This side of the world was all about towering mountains and trees older than the sun. But there was a parking lot filled with cars and trucks, with enough familiar smells and sights that he could focus on the city stuff and not let the sky frighten him so.
Walking down the short road to the main two-lane highway, he looked left and right at where the airport let out. To the left was just a river of concrete leading into the trees. The road to the right led down a well-traveled dirt-and-gravel track heading out into the wilderness, just like one of the walking paths back at the University. From his human memories, Cobb had the sense that someone should have been waiting for him, that he should have met his friends or loved ones back in the funny building. But out here Cobb was alone. His leather coat felt thin against the cold.
Going back toward the shelter of the structure, where he decided he would sit and make his plan, he was about to head inside when he saw the largest bird he’d ever seen. It was a huge black monster with shiny feathers and a wicked-looking beak, part giant and part crow, all rolled into one. It perched on a metal handrailing down by the end of the building, its head held high, tufted feathers at the base of its neck aggressively fluffed. It tawed to the air, once, twice, three times, each cry making Cobb quiver with fear. When it was done making noise, it glared at Cobb with hate in its gaze.
Cobb wasn’t sure what to do except to swallow down his terror. In his old body, the bird would have been easily twice his size. In a fight, it would have been strong enough not just to pluck out one of his eyes, but to tear off his whole head with just a few seconds of effort.
But now he was big. Cobb steadily approached the raven, moving slowly in the hope of not spooking it. Coming around the dented, rusted bumper of an old camper truck parked at the side of the lot, he approached the bright-eyed thing, noting its long talons and spectacular tucked wings. If Cobb had been created to glide, this feathered wonder was built for flying, to flap and lift and circle gracefully instead of fighting the wind for every inch and foot.
“Hello,” he said, but the thing didn’t answer. He pondered the beast for a moment, trying to figure out what to do now, now that he’d hopefully found a friend.
Hopping a bit on its perch, the raven turned to look at him, then sidestepped away in case it had to fly. Loudly, it screamed at him, a series of a throat-rattling cries that sent Cobb back a few steps with its noise and vigor. It was not friendly. It was not happy to see him.
Being rebuked was nothing new, especially for a crow that grew up in a city of mean-spirited seagulls. But Cobb’s eyes slowly grew wider as he realized that he couldn’t understand what the raven was saying. It was like he could hear the words, but nothing was getting through.
“Hello?” he asked again in the human tongue, having nothing else to offer. But all he got in return was a series of brisk taws. Like trying to have a conversation in a noisy room, it felt like the raven’s speech was getting lost in the disquiet of his borrowed human mind. His own dictionary, his lexicon of crow-speech, was submerged under ice, and Cobb was left with nothing but his own misguided emotions to wonder at, even as the raven worked itself into a huff, screaming at him for all it was worth.
“Wait—” Cobb said, but it was off and done with him, flapping hard, gaining speed and altitude as it crossed over the parking lot. It did a quick roll just to spite him as it flew into the trees. Cobb tried to visually track it, to see where it was going, to follow the lifeline to see where he needed to go next. But he lost the raven within the maze of hanging branches, and could only listen to its noisy cries fade, bit by bit, within the silence of the trackless forest.
[Tree.]
An hour later, Cobb still paced and waited outside the terminal, trying to figure out what to do. The thin sunlight was suddenly eaten by clouds. The world became dark and chill, enough so that he had to zip up his jacket.
But he was here in Cordova, where he was supposed to be, where Old Thom had told him to go. But now it was like his mind wasn’t working. Away from so many familiar things, from the patterns and places and rote activities that his h
uman knew so well, it seemed like all the advantages he’d had this morning were draining away like rainwater through a sewer grate. Here there were no cars to ride in or bags of bread to masterfully release. Just silence, the mountains, the chill air and an odd sense of waiting.
For a while, Cobb watched people come and go in the parking lot. Some cars brought people, and other people hustled into cars out of the cold. Some picked up packages from the terminal or did interesting things with boxes and crates in the backs of trucks. As he tried to figure out what to do, more than once Cobb thought about going into the building, about marching up to the man behind the counter and asking him for advice. But how would he know what Cobb needed? He was just a man, maybe lost just as much as Cobb was.
Beyond the building, another noisy jet taxied to the runway and roared off to its next destination. Cobb walked around the parking lot a few more times, circling along the fence, trying to not look up too much. Looking up meant seeing the trees, and beyond that, the vast, unknowable sky that scared him more than a hawk diving for the kill. Compared to those mountains, Cobb felt like a speck, a single grain of sand amid a quarry of giant, impossible angles.
Then it started to get really dark. Out of nowhere, it started to rain. Cobb decided he was hungry, but there was nothing to be done about that, not since his dismal failure with the untearable snack pouches on the plane. With no small sense of dismay, he took refuge from the rain, ducking beneath a sheltering tree at the far corner of the parking lot.
After a little while the rain stopped, and the lot’s overhead streetlights turned on to drive away some of the darkness. Shortly after that, he saw the counterman lock up the terminal, get into the camper with the dented fender and drive away, leaving Cobb alone in the rising fog.
Getting up from his poor excuse for a roost, Cobb went over and tried the door handle a couple of times, even rattling it hard to see if it would open like magic. But he couldn’t get through. There were enough windows within reach that he could probably break one with a stone if he truly needed to. But the stickers on the windows told him that it wouldn’t be a good idea, though Cobb didn’t know why.
Sitting dejectedly on the damp wooden bench beside the door, Cobb finally gave into despair. He missed his flock, his tree, Old Thom, and hunting for morsels along the edges of the wide red square at the heart of the college. He hated being one instead of many. He hated this body, hated the Red Crow, hated the fact that so much was riding on him and he didn’t know what to do.
He missed his friends, his fellow feathered warriors with their bustling and dominance. He missed Old Thom’s stories about things no other crow had ever seen or felt. He missed wriggling worms and spilled popcorn, stinky perfume and car exhaust, hard seeds and soft candy, and gobbling down buns dropped by children on a hot summer’s day. All of these things he wanted more than anything else right now, rather than being here, lost and alone under the alien sky.
Seeing nothing more he could do here, knowing that he needed to be somewhere else, Cobb hoisted his backpack over his shoulder and headed down to the road, keeping a little warmer through movement than he would have by standing still. Cobb longed to fly, to glide along the length of this road in a fraction of the time it was going to take him to walk it. To fly up above the trees and see what there was to see, to find some beacon, some guidepost that would let him know where he had to be—
A wolf howled in the distance, stopping him in his tracks. He had never heard that chilling sound as a crow, and had never heard it in real life as a human. Cobb had come all this way to Alaska to find out what it meant to be human, but he’d never considered the possibility that he might be eaten instead. Humans don’t get eaten. They get fat and married and have lots of children that scream for food and toys, little pink mouths agape as they scramble for proffered treats. But eaten by wolves? That was nowhere in the stories that Old Thom told him. In the city, humans were at the top of the food chain with guns and sticks and knives.
But that was in Seattle, Cobb accepted, as he listened to the wolves call to one another in the distant hills. The rules he knew didn’t apply here. Not in Cordova, where there were no pacts between beast and man.
Walking briskly to fight the night’s chill, Cobb followed the wide paved road through the trees. There were no streetlights, and the road was pitted and rough beneath his feet, populated by running cracks and fissures that dodged and jinked through the concrete, always turning oddly when he didn’t expect it.
Within the rising fog, the spaces between the trees grew darker and darker, until he could hardly make out the trunks. There were some night sounds, distant noises—but nothing was familiar. They all sounded like they were very far away. Cobb was glad he had this concrete road, because within those looming trees, without the ability to fly, he would be lost before he knew it.
A while later, when the road finally led him out of the forest and the fog, he found himself facing something he’d never even imagined. It was a wide plain, miles across, rising up toward a band of high, snowcapped mountains. The road ran straight out across the expanse, vanishing into the darkness. The way to somewhere lay beyond this miles-wide, exposed killing ground.
A little way ahead, he saw a sign stuck up on two wooden legs. He walked up to it and saw a word painted on it that might be Cordova, along with a number of some kind. A number that meant more than one and less than a flock, untranslatable in his current state of mind.
Frustrated, but seeing no other options, Cobb headed forward, head down, feet moving, heart beating time in his chest. He kept a wary ear out for wolves that could see him out on this open plain, as he was as helpless out here as Old Thom with his crippled wing.
Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot. Breathe cold air in, exhale warm fog out. When he finally had to, Cobb stopped and urinated by the side of the road as he looked across the dark waters of a sunken pond. It was a repository in the soil and rock surrounded by low, sturdy little trees and hardy plants capable of surviving the frost. Trying not to look at the unsettling sky above him, Cobb walked along the elevated road with his head down, cutting above a dry riverbed that seemed wider than all of Seattle’s streets put together.
A truck was coming, rattling and jiving on the rough concrete. Not wanting to get hit, Cobb got out of the way behind some bushes and let the vehicle go by. As it passed, he could hear the radio blaring through the windshield glass. Bathed in red taillight luminescence, Cobb stepped out and watched as the vehicle headed away. He wondered to himself what would bring someone out on a cold night like this.
He continued, mostly lost in his rhythm, occasionally walking a little faster when fear climbed up into his throat. But he knew that the road was safe, as anything that tried to attack him here might end up being roadkill. So he walked right down the center line, peering over his shoulder now and then to make sure some driver wasn’t going to run over him by accident and crush him down to guts and bones.
But when he passed a long stretch of water, its form trapped and bound by a long bowl-shaped depression alongside the highway, he realized that something had changed. That he could see just a little bit better. Grimacing, he craned his head to the heavens to dare a look.
Stars beyond count were cutting through the thin clouds above, millions of them in roiling, boiling patterns of light and milky expanse, exploding through the darkness. In Seattle, on nice summer nights, Cobb always enjoyed watching the sky turn above him while the others in his flock slept. The moon was always nice, gliding up and over and down in its predictable rhythm. But for him, the stars always seemed like a hidden language, like words and symbols and meaning broadcast across the sky, each point of fire playing its own role in telling the tale of the world.
But here, out here in the black, away from the glare of the city lights, Cobb felt like he was reading the whole universe, as if the mysteries of time and destiny were laid out for only him to see. All above him was the road map of the crow gods, each point a glint of gos
samer light. Every tale from the Old Time was there for him to see, written into the spiraling night sky with needles of fire.
He’d never felt more alive than standing beneath this cold sky. In time, he watched the moon start to appear with a warm yellow glow from behind the distant clouds, glimmering its milky brilliance off the pools and streams, shining off the distant glacier ice miles up the way. It even highlighted the snowy caps of the mountains that lorded over the west like angry herons on the stalk. His mouth agape with awe, Cobb trembled both with cold and reverence, consecrated by the raw beauty of the universe.
But he didn’t notice the twin bright lights coming up from behind him, and barely heard the horn blare as his shadow grew and grew out in front of him. Turning too slowly, he saw the gravel spitting out from beneath the truck tires as it skidded toward him, his doom in its path. He tried to fly, but instead tripped over his own feet and fell down hard onto the cold road, his wings gone, his safety stolen.
But the truck stopped just in time, grinding pavement until the unmoving bumper was close enough for him to reach up and touch. As he lay there on the concrete, trembling, feeling the killing shock not that far away, he could hear the rumble of the engine above him. He could hear the tick-tick of things inside the terrible machine and the sound of music playing from within the cab.
A door opened. A door slammed shut. A pair of booted feet marched up to him with red laces, with double knots tied as impossibly neat as the sky above.
“Are you an idiot?” a voice yelled at him. “Get up. Are you hurt?”
Cobb pushed to his feet, his legs rippling to jelly every time he breathed. “Sorry. No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
The shadow woman pointed back along the road toward the airport, back toward where he’d started, a silhouette against the blaze of the headlights. “Why didn’t you stay there? What the hell are you doing out here in the middle of the road? I could have killed us both if I’d hit you!”
The Bitching Tree Page 3