The Wildings

by Nilanjana Roy

  I had too many troubles of my own to worry about Stoop for long, anyway. Nizamuddin has always been rich in hunting, and the Bigfeet leave wonderful things out for all of us in their garbage heaps, but there were too many crows, and more crowding in every day. Bitterbite and Bakbuk led several murders of crows out foraging most days and they were becoming more vicious, stalking us cats and stealing our kills whenever they could. One murder of crows left suddenly, led by Breakbone, and we heard they’d settled in the Jangpura market, across the canal.

  Then one day Stoop flew back with worrying news. “The Bigfeet are setting out poison,” she said. She tried to tell Breakbone, because she believed it was her duty to warn all other creatures, even the hostiles.

  “Get away with you, you bag of bones,” was what Breakbone said, “you’re just trying to keep us away from good feeding so that you and your flea-ridden friends can hunt without competition.” So Stoop said no more, but a week later, she came back to tell us that all the garbage heaps in the market were covered with black feathers. Breakbone and his gang had fallen victim to the poison.

  After that, not a single crow tried to leave Nizamuddin, even though more and more crows came flooding in by the day. Living became a desperate struggle; we kept our eyes on the sky, never knowing when their sharp beaks would attack again. “We have to do something,” I told Neferkitty one evening. That morning, I had seen the squirrels keening in a sad huddle, mourning the loss of yet another of their family.

  Neferkitty had a gaunt look to her, by then. She’d been a handsome, well-muscled queen but the last few months had taken it out on her—she’d melted down to bone and muscle. It was only later that I discovered she’d been feeding the kittens and nursing mothers from her kills, barely eating enough herself to keep tail and whiskers together. But her mind was as sharp as ever.

  “I have a plan,” she said. “It’s desperate, but it’ll have to do.” She told me the details and I agreed; it was desperate, but what other choice did we have? We would give Bitterbite and Bakbuk one chance—ask them to get half the crows to leave, perhaps to find homes a little further off, at Humayun’s Tomb with the peacocks and the bulbul songbirds. Or perhaps they could go even further out, to the golf course with its spacious, green grounds. If they refused, we’d attack that night itself. The dogs were with us. They had suffered equally from the invasion of the crows, and when we approached them to ask for a truce, their leader Tommy went further and said they’d stand by us and fight if need be. But there were only a few strays, and ours was still a woefully thin force.

  “It would help if we had the pariah cheels on our side, Miao,” she said. “Any news of Stoop?”

  There was none; and when I spoke to Conquer that night, your father was civil but distant. “Not our fight, Miao,” he said, “The cheels have moved on. Besides, I haven’t seen Stoop myself in many moons. She’s all right—my pinions would fluff and tell me if she was in serious danger—but that’s all I know.” I pleaded with him until his tail feathers began to ruffle in annoyance, and then I had to back off.

  It would have made a difference to have Conquer and his squadrons on our side. Without the cheels, the other birds refused to get involved.

  “Look at us,” said Spackle Sparrow and Grackle Sparrow. “We’re too small, Miao, the crows would make mincemeat of us in no time.” The pigeons had long since fled; Bismillah, the bulbul, said he’d do what he could, but he couldn’t put his brood in further danger. And Petuk and Potla, the vultures, had left for a long holiday, preferring the Yamuna river with all its pollution to overcrowded Nizamuddin.

  Neferkitty and I went to meet Bitterbite and Bakbuk. It was an unpleasant task; they were squabbling over one of their kills, though we couldn’t tell what animal it was. Just as well; sometimes it was best not to know. Bakbuk lifted his head; his beak was bloody, his eye angry.

  “You dare interrupt my meal, cats?”

  “Mine!” cawed Bitterbite furiously. “Mineminemine! I found it first, so I did.”

  Bakbuk stabbed at her, tearing a feather slightly. Then he turned back to us. “Well?”

  Neferkitty’s feathery tail twitched warily as she laid out our terms. All were welcome in Nizamuddin, but he would agree there were too many crows. Food for all—the crows as well as the other animals—was running short; the Bigfeet were getting restless and would soon take steps, as they had with the garbage heaps in the market. We didn’t want a fight, and there were many other parks and neighbourhoods; if half the crows would agree to leave, we could continue to live in peace. Would Bakbuk agree?

  Before Bakbuk could say anything, before I could do anything, Bitterbite flew at Neferkitty, slashing fiercely at her face. Neferkitty screamed as the crow’s sharp talons shredded her ear. “Trucebreaker!” I cried in shock, leaping out of Bakbuk’s way. “We came here under truce terms!”

  Neferkitty, despite her bleeding ear, was now swatting at Bitterbite, but I could see the rest of the murder swarming into formation. “Neferkitty, follow me!” I howled, and we both fought our way out of there. If the dogs hadn’t helped us, we wouldn’t have made it.

  Bakbuk’s hoarse, mocking caws followed us: “Come to us next time and we’ll tear you to shreds, you furbags! Nothing will make us leave, you hear? Our trees. Our park. Our kills. Ours!” The sky was black with crows, cawing and shrieking their defiance.

  We rejoined our clan in the small park at the back. None of us had much to say; we didn’t need to link to know that we were all apprehensive of the night to come. Instead of even considering the situation or offering some sort of solution, the crows were now on guard, and there were so many of them.

  “Neferkitty,” I said after a while. “Should we attack as planned, or is there no hope?”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” said Neferkitty, her black fur gaping here and there with red where the blood still streamed from her cuts. “It seems desperate, doesn’t it? Perhaps it’s us who should leave.”

  I’d thought about that too, but the idea of leaving Nizamuddin, turning our backs on the neem trees and the familiar alleys, abandoning the rooftops we’d played our stalking games on as kittens … it was too much, and how would we shift all the cats?

  The crows could take flight, map neighbourhoods, find trees; it would take one cat scout many moons to locate a suitable territory. Where would we find a place that had enough scavenging for so many of us, that was free of other cat clowders, that didn’t have too many predators, that was close enough to Nizamuddin?

  And even if we did … in the vast shared memory of Delhi’s cat clans, I could see not even the faintest pawmark that indicated a successful migration. Cats were not birds; we grew up and lived in the same territories as our mothers and fathers, and that was that. I said as much to Neferkitty.

  “It sounds crazy, I know,” she said. “But Miao, we can’t go on much longer. With the crows here, we’ll starve this winter; we’re all weakening, and who knows if we’ll be able to protect the next litter of kittens? We have to think of the unthinkable.”

  We would have talked further, but there was a great beat of wings, and then we heard the high, pitiful screaming of one of the young stray pups, and the sound of the caws rose until we were nearly deafened. Nizamuddin was under attack.

  YOU HAVE TO IMAGINE it for yourself. All of us, cats and dogs, squirrels and mice, hedge pigeons, mynahs … scattered in disarray, while great black clouds of crows poured out like smoke descending from the trees. The noise! The rustling of their wings, the crescendo of caws—it was deafening and confusing, some of the smaller animals could do nothing but run up and down, making targets of themselves, the poor things. The squirrels ran back and forth along the branches, getting picked off two at a time; the mice scurried in desperate circles on the ground. It was terrible.

  That first hour was dire. Neferkitty got out there, of course, and did the best she could, along with the fighting toms. The dogs helped, but soon we were bombarded by clusters of cro
ws. The only thing that saved us was that the crows weren’t proper fighters. They were from different families, unused to fighting in formation, and I suppose they hadn’t really expected much resistance. They made a fearsome racket, but they weren’t attacking in order—any old group would take off any time it felt like it, and they banged into each other, in the air and on the ground. They squabbled too, and stabbed each other when they grew cross, and that saved many of us. Bakbuk got so annoyed with his best fighters for diving before he did that he snapped at three of them, wounding them so badly they had to retreat.

  Even so, they had the advantage of numbers—however badly they fought, each injured crow was replaced immediately by another ten, and they covered the grass with the black of their wings. Neferkitty kept her head. She had crept into the trees, and she moved fast from branch to branch, from neem to the flame tree to the laburnum, attacking the crows from behind, attacking their leaders just as they were poised for take-off, ducking back into the leaves if they tried to turn on her. The pups stood with us, the Nizamuddin strays, barking their heads off, bounding into the thick of the press, not letting the crows land.

  Neferkitty was bleeding heavily—some of the wounds of the morning had opened up again. But the owls had woken up and rallied around her. Hootem and Hutom made darts from the safety of their hole in the ancient laburnum tree, getting in some good shots and buying Neferkitty a little breathing space. But the beat of the black wings never stopped; it seemed the trees were spewing out crows nonstop, one after another.

  Bitterbite was in between us and Neferkitty, with a proper murder of crows, six of them who had clearly seen fighting before. I measured the distance between us and shuddered—the thought of trying to get to her, or her trying to get to us, through a thicket of sharp beaks and blood-hungry claws, was not pretty.

  There was a hard thud and I felt something bounce off my back. I whipped around, my whiskers quivering, and found myself staring at a tiny, terrified, chittering squirrel, who was tugging its furry tail around itself in fear. “If you please,” it said through chattering teeth, “a friend sent me. My name is Aaaaooooo ooww owww.” I was too shocked to even take a swipe at it, but before I got my brains in order, there was a second shock.

  Flying so low that her plumage skimmed the ground, Stoop shot over us, braking in mid-air to hover, hummingbird-fashion. “Miao, meet Ao; this is Jao,” she said, depositing another small heap of tumbled fur on the ground. “Friends of mine; keep them safe for me, you hear? No time to explain. We’ll touch talons later.” And then she had pulled out of her brief hover and shot away, a lethally fast, soaring streak aimed like an arrow at Bitterbite.

  The crow never saw what hit her, Tooth, your mother was that fast. There was a ripping sound, a desperate squawk—that was all, and then we saw a bundle of black feathers falling out of the sky. Bitterbite was gone, and before the crows in her murder could react, Stoop had done a three-point roll and come back at them with her talons extended. Two more plunged down to the ground. A third screeched in pain and flapped slowly over to a nearby branch to rest; the fourth tried to engage Stoop in battle and had his wing torn off; Bakbuk flapped his wings in fear and fled. Bakbuk was the kind of crow whose caws were louder than his courage—he didn’t like getting his feathers bloody.

  But as Stoop rose above the black mass, their caws now deafening, we could all see that something was wrong. She flew at an angle, dipping her right wing slightly, and seemed to be in pain. The crows saw it too. The birds that had ducked and weaved out of her way started to gather again, massing behind her even as she tried to gain some height. It’s odd—they didn’t attack her in a group, but every so often, one of them would dart out from its murder and fly at her, staying just out of range of her talons.

  TOOTH LOOKED INTO MIAO’S EYES and then away. “Counting coup,” he said, his eyes yellow and sad. “It’s a classic crow manouevre when they’re faced with a predator bird on its own. Cornered, a cheel can take on a murder—even injured, we’re—well, let me demonstrate.”

  Tooth’s talons slashed viciously at Miao’s face. She felt the rush of air on her whiskers, felt the claw miss her nose by a millimetre—and then the cheel was offering her a wet leaf, impaled on one of his deadly, curving nails. “It was stuck on your cheek,” he said, “kind of annoying to look at.”

  Miao had too much self-control to mew, but she quickly washed a paw. “I see what you mean about speed,” she said.

  “Crows are cowards,” Tooth continued. “They don’t like getting hurt. So instead, they take turns coming up close to the predator, close enough to disturb our flight patterns and paths, but pulling back before they get hurt. If they come in one after another, weaving and ducking around a predator, especially a wounded one, they’ll tire the predator out, cause confusion, get the raptor to use up all its energy in useless attacks. And then, once the predator’s weakened, that’s when the whole murder will attack …” He turned away and ruffled the ends of his feathers. “So that’s how Stoop died.”

  Miao hesitated, and then gingerly, not knowing if Tooth would be angered, she put her head up and very quickly, brushed it against the hawk’s feathery face. Tooth jerked his head back, his eyes flaring bright red for a second, and then stilled.

  “No, Tooth,” she said gently. “That wasn’t how your mother died.”

  STOOP’S WINGS DROOPED, continued Miao. She appeared to be losing height, but awkward as she was, she kept ahead of the crows, using her right talon to fend off attackers.

  “Don’t worry, Miao-ji,” said a squeaky voice near my paw. “Stoop knows what she’s doing.”

  Does she? I said sharply—I wasn’t used to talking to squirrels. Flying by the side of your foes when you’re badly injured doesn’t seem like much of a plan to me, squirrel.

  Ao kept her squinty eyes on me. “Been watching Stoop for many days, Jao and I have. Stoop often flew near us but never hurt us, never even threatened us. It was different with the crows. First, the crows went after my mum. Then the crows went after my dad. Then there were just the two of us. We didn’t know what to do. We sat at the top of the trees, scared to come down to the ground and feed, scared to look for shelter. Every time we came down the tree trunk, the crows attacked. Then one evening, there was Stoop, resting on the high branch above our heads.”

  The squirrel took a deep breath, her fluffy tail quivering nervously. “Jao took his courage in both paws and said, cheel, cheel, may we speak? She whipped around, her red eyes glaring at us, but in curiosity, not challenge. I was scared. But Jao said, cheel, maybe you’ll kill us, maybe you won’t, but those crows, they’re going to kill us anyway. That’s the truth. So we’re asking for help. Cheel, you’re a predator, one of the big ones. We’re just squirrels, us little ones. But perhaps, sometimes, the big ones look out for the little ones?”

  Jao pulled his head out of his bushy tail and nodded in confirmation. Ao touched her tail to his, gently, and went on. “Stoop stared at us for a long, long time. She said nothing, just took us in with her tired red eyes. So I spoke up next, seeing that Jao had been so brave. I told her about our mum, our dad, what the crows did to so many of the little ones. And as I was speaking, suddenly, Stoop put her beak out and picked me up by the middle. She brought me close to her great sharp talons, and I thought, this is it: a cheel will get me instead of the crows. I hoped she would kill me fast. But instead, she just looked me over, closely. And then she put me down, and said, almost to herself, this has gone on too long. It was the next day that she flew in, landing on our branch, and told us: get on my back.”

  Jao nodded, holding his paws together as he took up the tale. “We were scared, my teeth chattered and I could hear Ao squeaking in fright, but we got on and we stayed on, holding hard to Stoop’s feathers. She took us first to the roof—over there, that house, can you see it?—and then she told us what she planned to do. You know the rest; she’s brought us to you, and now she’s off putting her plan into action. Stoop knows exactly
what she’s doing. It’s all under control.”

  I looked up at the sky. The crows were close to the perimeter of Nizamuddin, now, near the saint’s shrine, and three of them were tagging the small black dot that was Stoop’s form in the sky. It seemed as though she was towing a flotilla of crows behind her; the trees down in our park were bare and empty. They had to duck every so often to avoid the thick tangle of electric lines, and the brightly coloured kites the Bigfeet kids were flying from the roofs. As we watched, the trio slashed at Stoop, in arrow formation; she wheeled sideways, and stabbed back at them, but again, she was dropping, and then the trio closed in on her, and she went into a steep dive, the crows cawing in celebration as they followed.

  Jao squeaked. “Over there,” he said. “Do you see?”

  Stoop did a triple roll and shot, unbelievably, upwards, slicing through the black wave of crows like a claw going through butter. There was no sign of a damaged wing now, no sign of distress as she arced towards the sky.

  Too late, the crows saw the still dots hovering motionless at the corners of the park. Cheels from the next colony, dozens of them, scattered at intervals across the horizon in tight knots of ten or so; others rose up now from the surrounding buildings, from the edges of the roofs and the crowns of the telephone poles and trees that were scattered through the dargah. Led by Conquer, they formed a kind of net around the confused cloud of crows, hemming them in, almost herding them, the way dogs will sometimes herd their pups. And now, the crows could see that Stoop had led them into a trap—straight towards the tangle of power lines that criss-crossed the perimeter of the dargah.

  Without Bitterbite and Bakbuk to guide them, the crows were in disarray. Some flew into the powerlines, and with more and more birds colliding into each other, they were soon in a tremendous tangle—and then there was a spark and a horrible smell, and first one and then another of the powerlines went up in flames, taking more crows with them. Three of the best crow fighters tried to take on Conquer himself, but the feathers flew as the massive cheel fought back, and soon he rose triumphant, if somewhat worse for wear, above the vanquished crows. A few murders veered to the right and the left, but the cheels closed formation on them and the air was thick with their torn wings and hoarse cries. Some crows—a small cluster towards the back of the murder—managed to get away, screeching their dismay and surrender as they plunged for the safety of the trees, clearly on the run. We never saw them again.