The Bitching Tree

by Scott Hungerford

  “Really?” Cobb asked.

  “Really. And if you had come into the back room where I was having my quiet time, we would have been done. I would have called Hawna and she would have taken you to the airport tomorrow without another word. But you passed this test, and I’m proud of you for that. Stronger crows have failed me.”

  “So, there’s no winter camp?”

  “There is a winter camp,” Torvo said plainly. “I’ll be going there tomorrow to see what needs to be done. You’ll have the day to yourself again, but this time I’ll be really gone for the whole day. This time I’ll be trusting you with everything and I expect that you’ll keep to the same behavior. Am I clear?”

  “Yes,” Cobb said. “I’ll follow your rules.” Relief, honest pride and recognition filled the hollow spot in his soul. The fact that he could still keep going, the fact that he hadn’t abandoned his cause for petty reasons—these made him feel good inside.

  “Now, let’s look at those hands,” Torvo told him. “I suspect that you’re not going to be doing any firewood tomorrow. But I’m sure I can find some other things that need doing.”

  “Ow,” Cobb said as Torvo poked at one of his fingers, then both of them laughed, banishing the darkness.

  [Say-vin.]

  When the two of them got up the next morning, Cobb tidied up the tent while Torvo made a fire to drive out the chill and the damp. They didn’t speak more than a few words of a time, comfortable now with each other’s patterns, all the way through breakfast and the re-inspection of Cobb’s fingers and palms.

  “What do you want me to do today?” Cobb asked, breaking the silence, flinching a bit as Torvo dabbed goo on a sensitive spot. “While you’re gone?”

  “I want you to take a look around,” Torvo replied, wrapping a new strip of plastic and gauze around Cobb’s finger, covering up a red spot that had come up in the night. “I don’t want you to go too far. Not over the ridge or down past the bucket tree. But anywhere on the flats, anywhere upriver, that should be fine.”

  “All day?” Cobb worried. He knew that Torvo would let him have crunchy bars. But what it if rained?

  “All day. I’ll be taking the boat and will be back well before nightfall. Just take some of the usual food—and some water—and that should get you through.”

  “What is it that you want me to do?”

  “Think. You’re adapting to human life well enough, but I want you to spend the day looking at the human world from both sides. As a human and as a crow.” Cobb nodded, mostly understanding. This was another test. “But you have to do one thing,” his teacher said, a quirk of a smile on his face.

  “What’s that?”

  “Sing!” Torvo said, throwing his hands open wide. “Shout! Yell. Talk to yourself frequently and often. There are bears and wolves out there. Make enough noise and they will leave you alone. They’ll head the other way from your foolish self. If you don’t scare them off, they’ll come see what you’re about, and then you’ll be in real trouble.”

  Five minutes later, after Torvo got him bundled up in cold-weather gear and stuffed his pockets with bottles and bars, he told him not to eat any berries, not to go digging around in caves, and to not go anywhere near the river bank. After Cobb acknowledged his commands, the old man shooed Cobb out of the tent and zipped up the front panels good and tight behind them.

  “Have a good day, Cobb.” He tapped the side of his head. “Think crow.”

  “Think crow,” Cobb replied, echoing the gesture. With that said, the old man clomped his way down the steps to his boat, climbed in and cast off before starting the engine. As he watched him go, as he watched Torvo fuss with the motor, getting ready to yank it to life, Cobb just wanted to shout for him to come back, to take him with him, to not leave him alone—

  With himself.

  The motor caught, and Torvo gave Cobb a final wave before angling the boat downstream and taking off with a roar. By the time Torvo’s little boat vanished around the bend, Cobb was already aware of nature’s little noises creeping in around him. The quiet lapping of water around Torvo’s rock … the breeze that kissed his face, like cold lips on warm skin … a shiver of pine needles falling, loosened from a branch, sprinkling into the water just downstream. His own beating heart and his breath as well, every exhale fogging slightly in the chill morning air.

  Shaking it off, Cobb wandered around the island looking for a rock to skip, even though he personally had no idea how to skip a rock.

  He checked on the sturdiness of his woodpile and approved the fact that it seemed to have survived the night intact.

  He stared for a while at the rusted barrel on the shore that was once filled with bottles, but now had its bottom filled with heavy rocks.

  Cobb realized that he was alone. Not just away from his flock or on a bus or a plane with strangers or on a road just a little bit away from Hawna or Torvo. He was as alone as he could get in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, miles away from any city. His brain was running overfull with all of these human things and concepts, and all he wanted to do right now, at this very moment, was turn over a nice fat rock and eat some bugs.

  “Who am I?” Cobb whispered, just loud enough that nobody would hear. Pacing back and forth at the water’s edge, he kicked a couple of patches of exposed gravel back into the water. He considered chopping more wood or moving his wood stack a few more inches away from the creeping waterline. But the plain truth of his identity, of his existence was now before him like a mirror—and he couldn’t look away.

  It was an undeniable fact. It was something he didn’t want to admit. He was a thief. A thief who had stolen a body he could never return.

  No, Cobb decided as he stomped and stormed from one end of the rocky island to the other, hands in his cold pockets. He was borrowing this body and he would find some way to put it back. When it was all done and the adventure was over, he decided that the human Cobb would get his life back even if it meant the end of his own. Maybe Hawna was right that there was no way back. But maybe she was wrong, too.

  “What does she know?” Cobb muttered, feeling all loose in the head. “She’s just stupid.” It felt like all the progress he’d made toward integration, all the dreams, all the stabilization he’d found in being human was starting to come undone in just the space of a few minutes. Soon he felt he would be railing around the island trying to strangle himself with introspection. He needed distraction desperately, of the most immediate kind.

  Heeding Torvo’s instructions, he splashed his way across the invisible bridge and headed away from the bucket tree, away from the safety and dangerous madness of the island. As Cobb walked within view of the shore through the scattering of young, thin green trees populating the bank, he decided he liked the way the flowing water sparkled in the morning light. How the shadows from the clouds came and went so dramatically, like wings outstretched against the sun.

  The farther he went, the more relaxed he got, as he went around patches of undergrowth and slid his butt over a mossy downed log. Skirted around a slide of boulders and dirt that had come down the steep hillside to his left not all that long ago. After a little while he saw another great rock out in the water, a perfect place for fishing and drinking beer on a hot summer day.

  But how would the crow in him see all of it, he wondered? Away from all the keys and papers and responsibilities that drove human life? He stopped in his tracks and closed his eyes, trying to think past the human, trying to think past Cobb down to who he was deep inside.

  When he opened his eyes again he saw a mishmash of things, of concepts that a human couldn’t track. A sheltering hole beneath a fallen tree that could be a sanctum or another creature’s lair. A thin branch that would comfortably hold his weight and a thick one that wouldn’t. Grass tips, berries, and little bits of moss that might be food with just a nip of a delicate beak. Trees, sheltering him from view. Bushes that would hide him—or maybe hinder his escape.

  There were no other crows. N
o flock, no family, no arguing, no noisy cousins trying to make off with his scraps. Just a lone crow and the wind and the water and all the rest of the world. He breathed, feeling impossibly too large in his skin, in a northern country where everything made him feel too small.

  That’s when it struck him, the thought that finally came to light at a moment of perfect quiet. He suddenly knew that in the nightmare, when the crows had blanketed the body on the ground, it wasn’t Kory that had been picked apart.

  It was Cobb. It was his human self, drowned beneath feathers and pierced by hundreds of sharp, stabbing beaks. Clinging to the engagement ring that he’d never been able to give. Cobb looked down at his own empty hand, his bandaged fingers, shocked by the vividness of the memory, by the horror of the dream. For the human Cobb, for someone so young to have experienced such loss was beyond him. To be torn away prematurely from one’s mate before you could even become a breeding pair? To have eaten such loss, to have one’s heart torn apart by such violence? To have all of her laughter and hope and reassurance lost without even a word of goodbye?

  Cobb knew that he had lost himself by giving himself to the power of the Bitching Tree. But the other Cobb, the human with funny eyelashes and a talent for drawing, he had lost his most important thing in the world. While he was going to fight the Red Crow and take up the challenge against evil, Cobb the man was already somehow lost when he’d let the crow enter him, when he let the crow bury him within his own grief. Cobb remembered how the apartment had been rank with rotting garbage and wrecked from one end to the other, even though the human had been living there for weeks on end. Perhaps for months. Ever since Kory was gone, taken by—

  He screamed, hands pressed tightly to his skull, not wanting to see or hear any more. No more thoughts. No more nightmares. Just crows with black feathers and food stories and sharp-taloned wit that made sense morning, noon and night. When he could finally open his eyes, his throat raw, his chest feeling like it was filled with fire, he was crying again, letting out little gasps, little sobs as the depth of the human’s loss stole away his breath.

  Then the thoughts let him go just as quickly as they had come, like a dark cloud eaten by the sun. Relieved, he could now breathe and swallow and mourn for not just his own selfish plight, but for what his friend had lost not so long ago. A friend he had never truly met, but who had given everything so that Old Thom’s flock might live.

  “Oh, Cobb,” the little crow said, apologized, confessed, “I’m so sorry.”

  But the other Cobb didn’t respond. The crow knew that the human couldn’t. He was too far down below, slumbering in the shadow beneath.

  “Your sacrifice is not in vain,” he said, he promised. “My people will live. I will fight and be victorious and smart and everything I’m supposed to be. But Cobb … I don’t know why you came to the tree that day. I don’t know why you came to me. I didn’t even have to lead you there after Old Thom told me to choose one, to pick one human that I would make my own for the journey ahead. You just came and sat down and waited, like you were ready for it to happen. Like you thought it was meant to be.”

  He took a deep breath before continuing, knowing that he had to speak from the heart. “But I promise you, Cobb, that your sacrifice will not be in vain. I will stop the Red Crow. We will, you and I, with everything we have. With everything we are. Together we’ll wring the Red Crow’s neck and I’ll get back my people. Then I’ll find some way to bring you home again. If need be I’ll nest alone in your window box for the rest of my life to keep you safe, so you’ll always have a friend …. I promise, Cobb. By Death herself, I promise.”

  A fish jumped in the water just a little ways away, startling him quite badly. He caught only a glimpse of the majestic, silvery body rising up into the air. But his eyes followed that sparkle of bright motion, the flick of a tail. Then he heard the ka-glunk of displaced water, the ripple of reflected sky that swam away in all directions from where the fish disappeared back beneath the skin of the world. Cobb laughed a little bit at this, at how much the human in him was startled, but how much the crow in him was attuned to it.

  But they could both appreciate beauty, Cobb decided, and decided they would be brothers forevermore.

  The rest of the day passed quickly, with his explorations cut off in the end by a great block of stony hillside that prevented further travel. Instead he wandered back to the camp, taking his time, watching for birds and squirrels to chatter at and sing nonsense songs to—then headed south to the bucket tree and just a little ways beyond, noting just how marshy it was down there compared to upstream.

  When he was bored with looking around he went back to Torvo’s rock, ate the last of his food, drank the last of his water, then sat and threw pebbles into the river. Finally, he heard the muffled roar of Torvo’s engine coming back. Excitedly meeting him at the bank, Cobb helped Torvo tie it up, then helped him get out of the tippy little boat, very glad to have his teacher back, his friend.

  After Torvo let them back into the cold interior, they made an early dinner together, a strange macaroni-and-stew concoction with vegetables poured out of a can. While Cobb didn’t much care for it he ate it anyway, glad to have warm food after a day of being out in the cold. He answered Torvo’s questions about the world and what he’d seen and found during his adventure, but mentioned nothing about the realization about the engagement ring, for that wasn’t his story to tell.

  That night, once the dishes were cleaned and put away, Cobb read out loud again for a while before the two of them went to sleep. Once Torvo said good night and clicked out the lights, Cobb lay awake in bed for a time staring up at the dapples of firelight caught on the tent’s roof. He was more than a little worried that the dreams would come again. But he eventually decided that whatever came his way he could handle—and drifted into a dreamless sleep that carried him all the way until morning.

  Over the next few weeks they settled into a routine, with woodcutting in the morning and then a variety of different activities in the afternoon, depending on the weather. One day it was learning to fish from the boat, to be still and silent on the water for hours at a time. Another day they went for a walk up along the cliff’s edge, back up through the notch where Hawna had dropped him off at the beginning of his time on the river. He learned how to punch and kick and to use a machete to chop through undergrowth. He learned how to fight with a stick, and how to use it to strike an opponent in vulnerable spots. Torvo’s rules still applied, more sternly now, that Cobb could only ask questions about the Red Crow or his coming mission when they were eating. But he found that he had fewer and fewer questions about the future, as he trusted that Torvo would reveal all in time.

  But early one morning, with the sun’s shallow glow still breaking through the clouds, Torvo handed him a different pair of gloves, indicating that today was going to be a very different kind of day.

  “What are these?” Cobb asked him as he examined the heavy, oil-stained gloves. “I already have my gloves?”

  Torvo said nothing, then handed him a pair of plastic safety goggles as well, with an adjustable rubber strap that smelled faintly of old fish. Together they walked down to where Cobb’s wall of sticks had steadily grown, now six sections long. But this time, instead of Torvo taking the chainsaw to his station at the upriver edge of the island, he stopped and put it down on Cobb’s stump with a heavy thump.

  “Oh, no …” Cobb said, understanding now, already backing away.

  “You’re telling me no?” Torvo snapped.

  “No,” Cobb said, getting a hold of himself and stepping back up to the dangerous instrument. “No, sir. I’m not. What is it that you want me to do?”

  “There’s a big word for what I’m about to teach you today. It’s something called ‘acclimatization.’”

  “Does that mean I’m not going to have to use the chainsaw?”

  “No. You’re going to have to do that today. But it does mean that if you can conquer this, if you can use your m
ind to will yourself to get through the task I’m giving you, you’ll be better off than any other crow you’ll likely meet.”

  “You mean like loud noises,” Cobb offered. “They’re terrifying and dangerous.”

  “The urge to take flight when something dangerous happens is hardwired into our brains, but less so in humans. On one level, they’re unconventionally stupid, especially the young ones, until they turn about twenty years old. But if you can get used to this, swallow your fear, I can give you weapons to drive off the enemy that will allow you to complete your quest.”

  Cobb nodded, terrified. “What do I do?”

  “Put on your gloves. They’re heavier and thicker to protect you from splinters. Then put on the goggles, as they will protect your eyes.”

  “You don’t wear goggles,” Cobb insisted.

  “That’s because I’m an idiot. Now put them on and make sure the strap is tight.” Cobb did so, then turned to face the tool head-on. He tried to tell himself that it was just a piece of metal, like a car or a plane, but his crow mind was firmly convinced otherwise. He kept trying to edge away sideways, this way and that, until Torvo slapped a heavy hand on his shoulder and pinned him in place.

  “Pick it up,” Torvo told him. “Feel its weight. This is a tool, not a weapon. Later on we’ll get to weapons, but for now, this is just a thing.” Cobb followed Torvo’s instructions, lifting the object with both hands—and was stunned at how much heavier the yellow chainsaw felt than it looked. He took a deep breath and let it back out again slowly. Without the chainsaw running, it was just like his ax. Useful for cutting wood, above all else. He remembered taking the thing apart, seeing every wire and gear inside and learning the basics of how it worked.

  “It’s very dangerous,” Torvo said. “Even a master woodcutter can lose an eye or a limb by a bit of bad luck, even when they are paying attention. You can’t afford that, and neither can Old Thom and your flock. So when you use this we’ll do it for short periods of time with all the concentration you can muster.”