“Dennis is the purest soul I know,” said the crow, thick love spread all over him like cream cheese frosting.
“Hmm. He’d shank you for a French fry,” I told him, matter-of-factly. I just wasn’t that willing to share all of Dennis.
Even though I’ve always been pretty plucky and motivated by my various passions, I’d never done anything like the Freedom Flies. Nothing that kept me so excited that my heart trilled like the songbirds that bolstered us on lunch breaks. They serenaded us with stories about bravery and long-lost loves as we drilled into cans of finely aged SpaghettiOs and syrupy peaches with our beaks. The work was dangerous and made us so tired our bones hurt like old memories, but our hearts were overflowing as we dreamt about the dogs, goats, and all the other domestics we had offered life. I cannot recommend this to you enough: find something that you believe in, right down deep in the depths of your silvery plumage, and then throw your heart at it, blood and valves and veins and all. Because I did this, the world, though brambled and frothing at the mouth, looked more vibrant; blues were bluer, and even the fetid puddles that collected under rusting cars tasted as sweet as summer wine. Disclaimer: I’ve never actually had summer wine, but once I had the remnants of a fuzzy navel wine cooler that Nargatha had only half finished then pitched into her trash with her Poligrip. So, I’m not as uncultured as all that.
At night, the college crows invited Dennis and me to roost at the University of Washington’s Bothell campus wetlands. That’s right, yours truly officially became an academic corvid. The UW Bothell campus was empty and had been heavily barricaded during the height of the MoFo fray, which meant Dennis had to burrow a Dennis-sized hole to get under its barbed-wire fencing (and for me, the flightless wonder). A crudely spray-painted sign said “cordon sanitaire,” which I assumed was some sort of fancy French stuffed chicken dish and didn’t make a whale of a lot of sense to me. There were no MoFos or MoFo body parts in the campus—we searched—but we found evidence of science-y goings-ons; that is to say, Petri dishes and microscopes and lab coats that had blood on them. Tire tracks that zigzagged haphazardly across what remained of the flower beds told us that at one time, there had been a panic and an evacuation here. But now, UW Bothell was silent and calm, becoming greener by the minute, blood-and-tissue-lump–free.
During the nights, I took comfort in the black beings that shrouded the wetland trees above me. I got used to the college crow dialect, different from other murders I’d heard in passing, and learned more about crow culture. Roosting with Kraai’s murder, I found that crows are witty, enjoy practical pranks, and find the humor in everything, which felt right to me on a cellular level. Storytelling is part of the spine and lifeline of a murder. Even Kraai told comical tales of a time when he pilfered a garbage man’s wallet and, after rifling through its contents, dropped it onto a school playground. Once, he stole a pair of scissors from an unknowing MoFo family as they set up their garden for a piñata party, watching the ensuing Three Stooges hilarity from a weeping cedar. During this time, I became a sponge, absorbing and trying on my new crow suit. I held back my own stories because they were mostly MoFo-centric.
They invited me to their nests and I was asked to help feed the hatchlings, which was funny and delightful because those black puffs are already so full of ideas and personality, prebaked in a speckled egg. I was offered a desirable high spot in a western red cedar, but instead chose to sleep perched on top of Dennis’s newly muscled physique, rising and lowering with his every breath, a gentle lullaby to which I fell asleep. The wound on his side had healed nicely and now looked like a cartoon smile. It made me happy to look at, so perfectly and ridiculously Dennis.
Before the roost’s eyes closed for the night, a crow with singed contour feathers and an angry burn on the underside of her right wing would drop from above and administer a beak full of herbs to my injury. Her name translated as “Survivor,” but she told me she didn’t like it much. I asked her why and she said because she is a female and all females are survivors so it was massively redundant. I asked her what she would like to be called and she told me (again, my apologies, this is my attempt at a translation), “Pressa.” I prided myself on my self-taught flora and fauna identification, but whatever plant she brought was usually an earthy mystery. The clean herbaceous smells made me think of MoFo stories of witches and magic spells.
She always approached me slowly, head lowered. She took cautious hops forward, light on her feet.
“Trust me,” she’d say in a soft whisper, like a fizzy drink poured on ice.
It did take trust to allow her to get so close, to touch my traumatized wing. Trust, it turned out, was a very beautiful and fragile thing with a taste like wild raspberries and experienced only by the very brave.
“Will I fly again?” I asked her.
“Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t,” she said with a gentle rattle like beer bottles in a truck. “Both ways will be okay.”
One night, I plucked up the courage to tell her I thought she had nice pinions, to which she rolled her head and scoffed. Listen, I’m a work in progress.
Then one day, Dennis, never a hound for histrionics, staged a protest. Although it was almost imperceptible to the untrained eye, to me it was as epic as when three million MoFos marched through Rome to protest the Iraq War, since Dennis hadn’t outright declined so much as a flea bath in his entire life. The concrete miles had been hard on his paw pads, and I suspected he was mildly disgruntled that we all expected him to perform impromptu marathons like some sort of Alaskan husky–greyhound hybrid, when really, he was a purebred slob. That morning, after Aura’s dawn symphony and a breakfast of worms, the phalluses of mushrooms, and somewhat regrettably, a can of Amy’s Organic Spicy Chili, I mounted Migisi’s beautiful back. As we were about to take flight, Dennis slumped onto his side and moaned. It was a deep, exasperated moan, surprisingly MoFo in nature. He rolled his lugubrious eyes at me, lifting a bloody, cracked paw pad, and I was absolutely horrified. I made a big fuss, stomping my feet and thrusting my wings around like the resurrected evil twin of a soap opera. Between melodramatic caws, I declared that his days of watching the sky for signals to run and dragging a SpongeBob SquarePants pillowcase filled with canned goods were over.
I suggested to Kraai that Dennis and I take up “grounds guarding” instead, which meant that while most birds were still freeing domestics and a smattering of Sky Sentinel crows monitored UW Bothell from the air, Dennis and I patrolled from terra firma, walking the perimeter of the university like a couple of cowboys. During our border patrols we ran into the increasing domestic population—packs of dogs and the occasional cat that Dennis lumbered after, with me screaming MoFo cries of “Here, kitty, kitty!” from Dennis’s thick back. We met a western rattlesnake who was terrified of us—the two-headed monster that we were—and slithered away at supersonic speed. We later told a slightly embellished death-defying tale of reptile ambush to the roost during the evening blue hour. We talked to rabbits and moles, snacked on earthworms and plump berries until one day, we came across something very strange.
Dennis and I were plodding along near old-town Bothell, with its once-quaint little storefronts and restaurants, whose glass had been busted in by birds and were now the homes and sacred roosting spots of said birds. We came to the intersection where a coffee shop, a convenience store, and a nearby post office faced one another. The post office was separated from the pack by an enormous puddle, a stain of recent flooding. Outside The Den Coffee Shop, we came across a migration. A large army of ants were streaming across the pavement, crossing a carless road in single file. I suppressed my natural urge to pulverize and rub them all over my body and instead tried to understand the reason for their fleeing. Once they’d spotted us, ant voices yelled panicked orders and strategic evasion techniques. I assured them we weren’t there to eat them, step on them, or rub them all over us for aesthetic purposes. There was a ringleader who I honestly couldn’t tell from the other ants except that she
carried her tiny frame like a gladiator who’d seen cities crumble.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?” I asked.
“We’re getting away from them,” said the ant’s leader, whose voice could shepherd planets. She waved her antennae like wands, communicating in chemical signals. Her pheromones danced in the air. The other ants absorbed these, listening in turn with their antennae.
“From whom?” I asked.
“The Weavers,” said the ant leader as if the words nipped at her mandibles. A collective panic spread through the ant line, hysterical mutterings elbowing one another, chaotically unintelligible. The ant leader yelled a command, antennae waving, and the ants filtered into perfect formation, silent and civil once again.
Weavers brought to mind my tropical avian friends, tiny yellow-nest craftsmen. It seemed odd that a bird native to Asia and Africa would be the source of a Seattle ant’s terror, but an uncaged zoo had certainly changed the dynamics of things. “Do you mean birds?” I asked. The ant army didn’t answer, so I pressed them. “I don’t understand, who or what are The Weavers?”
The mention of the name sent the ants into rippling panic again. The ant leader hollered another directive and the ants poured themselves into a glimmering formation, much like the dance of the starlings. They were commencing their retreat.
“Where are you going? I just want some answers!” They didn’t have the time to answer me. The ant leader had given them an order that caused them to shuffle, reforming into one incredible shape right before our eyes. One hundred ants wrapped their (I’m guessing) six hundred legs tightly together, the larger ants, including the ant leader herself, huddled in the center. With a final shouted command and flailing antennae, the cluster of interconnected ants launched itself into an enormous puddle. I let out a caw of horror. A mass suicide! The ants were so traumatized, they’d drunk the Kool-Aid and resigned to drowning themselves!
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I squawked, hopping back and forth, scanning for a nearby leaf to throw out to them since this seemed unnatural, barbaric, and a perfectly good waste of an anting sacrifice for the benefit of my plumage. Wet ants are no use to anyone! Dennis stepped closer to the large puddle, his pendulous ears swinging, head cocked to one side. He was studying the ants. As I approached with a crispy maple leaf grasped in my beak, I suddenly realized that I’d misinterpreted the scene. The larger ants in the center of the cluster had formed pockets of air and were keeping the ant-made raft afloat. They drifted on the shiny surface of the water as one unit that had chosen to tackle a deadly element rather than face what they were running from. I couldn’t believe it! As a self-proclaimed ant connoisseur, I’d only known fire ants to do this, and here, these thatching ants had adapted, mimicking their southern cousins. Dennis and I watched the ant raft float farther into the large puddle toward the post office. The Weavers. Something told me it wasn’t a creative tropical bird that they were afraid of.
Dennis lifted The Golden Nose and sniffed at the wind, facing the direction the ants had come from. I hopped onto his back and we lumbered where The Golden Nose told us to, toward a MoFo physical therapy center and abandoned Bothell apartment complex. It really was only then that I noticed how quiet it was. Because of the crow patrol, many domestics had taken up residence in the Bothell area surrounding the UW campus. Chickens, goats, alpacas (who continued to instill terror in Dennis), pigs, horses, iguanas, dog packs, cats, even the odd ferret. But as Dennis and I trotted along the pavement, I realized that we were utterly alone. A pandemonium of parrots—Ghubari’s new crew—had taken up residence in the Bothell area, their ear-piercing banter echoing for miles—and there wasn’t a peep from them. Apart from the ants, we hadn’t seen as much as an aphid. This was the sign of some sort of mass evacuation.
Dennis picked up the strange scent as soon as we approached The 104 Apartments. He sniffed more frantically than usual, dangling ears stirring the scent and sweeping it up into his magnificent snoot. His gangly, udon-noodle legs propelled him. The apartment complex was quiet and glassless, modern but now overgrown and lacquered green. A Douglas fir, savagely uprooted during a storm, had at one point slammed down onto one of the building’s roofs, snatching a fistful of telephone wire with it. Since the building was relatively new, the Douglas fir had not won this fight; its bark was splintered, its trunk and spine severed midway. A brutal crime scene. I bowed my condolences.
Dennis started to whimper. He was agitated; I felt it in the muscles of his back. I hopped off him and went into detective mode. All around the broken body of the fallen Douglas fir were strange black-and-white lumps, each about the size of a packet of Doritos. As far as I could tell, the unusual blobs weren’t living, and they had a strange, acidic smell that burned the beak a little. It must have been torture for Dennis, who erupted into sneezes, his ears flapping like ping-pong paddles. The air felt tight, as if it was holding its breath, but then a quick breeze sent me another scent: the saccharine smell of slow decay. Curiosity had pinched my pinions and I hopped around looking for the source of the putrid aroma. It wasn’t in the intersection near the fallen fir. Not near the battered political MoFo signs tucked in the overgrown grass by the side of the road. It wasn’t in the overturned trash can, its insides long ravaged, its plastic outsides scarred with impatient talons. It wasn’t on or near the motorbike that had twisted itself around a stop sign. We found it tucked into a bored-out hollow in the fir tree’s side. The carcass, covered in filmy slime, looked like it had been regurgitated. I couldn’t make out what it was or had been, though it was about the size of a raccoon, a large bird, or a small dog. Its head had a bit of a shape, but the rest of it, seemed…digested. Dennis let out a long groan.
“I have no idea, buddy,” I told him. The loose folds of his skin wobbled as he shook his head. He backed up at warp speed without looking where he was going like Nargatha on her Rascal 615 mobility scooter. Dennis didn’t like this one bit, and given his nasal acuity and the state of the unidentifiable body squashed into the corpse of a tree—a sort of Russian doll of night terrors—I wasn’t about to argue.
I had taught him well. Instead of facing whatever had partially consumed an unidentified being, he ran us away from it at top speed, the wind in our fur and feathers, self-preservation first and foremost on our minds. I had plans to enlighten the crows on watch duty with these new findings, but I didn’t get a chance.
We found that as we approached the barricaded UW Bothell compound, the serenity had been severed. Adrenaline turned the air static, and Aura was humming in panic. The crows stationed to guard the compound had left their posts and were fluttering just outside the campus’s barbed-wire perimeter, their alarm caws croaky and hoarse. Dennis slowed as we neared them, watching them dive from the air and swoop over several mounds. The bodies of six crows. Their bones were picked clean, gleaming white under a pewter sky. I felt my knees buckle, and I squeezed my feet to stay on Dennis’s back. The crows’ furious calls echoed hauntingly and were picked up by other birds who sang and spread word of the killings that had happened right at our doorstep. They called for the rest of the college crows to return to home base. I stared at the bones with sand in my throat. I had never seen a dead crow, had never been faced with a mirror of my foundations. Is this what went on underneath my skin? These brittle slivers of pearly white? The tiny skull with boned beak? Are these really the roots of us, just an insignificant collection of sprig-like connectors, a rib cage no bigger than a MoFo palm? Is this little nest, this smattering of splintery white twigs, what makes a crow? What makes me? I had always had trouble with self-identification, but perhaps never more so than now. Dennis’s shoulders slumped with his heavy sigh.
“Who are they?” I asked the frantic crows.
“Sisika and Chogan, Croa, Tuk, and...” he couldn’t finish, this crow I’d come to know, whose name translates as Lucky Peanut Balanced On The Highest Branch Of A Very Particular Cedar At The Wetlands, so I’ll just call him Sam. “They were part of the guard grou
p. I don’t know when they ventured out of site. We should’ve...” He stopped himself. Crows are not known to dwell on should’ve-would’ve-could’ves. They are too busy living.
“What has done this to them? What could have ambushed a crow this way? Six of us at that?” I asked, nausea rising in guts I was very glad to have. I thought of three brothers with eyes like flames and bodies made of stripes.
“I don’t know,” said Sam, breathlessly. “But we will not stand for this. This is an execution. This is an act of war.” The Blackwings are known to hold grudges for generations. A crime against one is a crime against all.
I heard them coming. The sky turned black as Kraai and the college crows returned from a Freedom Fly to the grim display outside our safe zone. Hundreds of crows filled the space all around the six skeletons, screaming out their caws of grief. Kraai landed on the grass among the bone bodies, touching down like a single feather, and he let out the sounds of sadness from deep inside him. None of the murder shied away from looking at the cluster of white cartilage, at the bodies of family members. Some crows stayed airborne, circling their pain from above, diving through branches with their chorus of grief. I realized that this was a crow funeral. Dennis seemed to know this. He lay down with his head on his paws and kept his breathing shallow out of respect, his amber eyes following the looping birds above. After some time, the caws lessened until there were no sounds but the rustle of leaves and the wind that ruffled feathers and whistled among the gleaming white remains. Then two crows I didn’t yet know approached the bones. One touched a slim wing bone several times as if to gently kiss it with her beak. The other placed two twigs on either side of the bodies. Many of the crows took turns bowing from wherever they sat or perched. I didn’t know the six crows who had been taken, but I still felt the loss. I thought it felt as if the python at the zoo had gotten ahold of me, as if it had coiled its muscular middle around my chest and was squeezing out my final breaths. It felt like how I missed Big Jim and the life I’d known. But I also felt the love that sizzled and frothed around us, a love that touched through life and extended to the bones of six beings. Sometimes you can feel two very different things at once—both searing pain and joy, feelings as deep as the ocean.
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