Crows

by Charles Dickinson

  He busied himself for some minutes positioning the bag of food so it provided some slight cover over the mouth opening. As he worked he was conscious of his wounded wing. He had not tried to fold it since landing, and he did not think he could back into the small cave without doing so. There was not room for the wing in its present state, open and dragging along beside him, leaving faint swipes of blood on the floor when he moved.

  It was quite light out by then. The stars were gone entirely and the moon was only a transparent slice. Birds of every kind sent up a racket of morning greetings and boasts. Occasionally the crow saw a bird fly overhead. These dark bullet streaks made him very nervous. One bird might see him and the word would pass in an instant, from finch to sparrow to starling to hawk. Thus would his time run out.

  At the cavern mouth he shut his eyes and tried to fold his wounded wing. A pain large as the sky hit him. He felt a grating of something vital deep in the wing. The effortless track his wing had worked upon had been violently skewed. Nothing in the wing seemed to fit together any longer. He spread and folded his good wing. He did it again and again to study the machinery of muscle, bone, and feather that he had not given two thoughts to in his lifetime. He hoped to find a clue to the bad wing in the good. But there was nothing to be learned. He had been shot and that was all he needed to know.

  The crow stood still a moment. The pain made him dizzy. When he was able, he hopped across the floor to the spot of moisture and drank a little.

  Twin beams of light swept over the mouth of the pit. They were almost faint in the growing daylight; the crow thought he might have imagined them. Then he heard the crunching of stone, the sound of an engine, the engine being switched off. Doors opened and closed.

  The crow heard a man speak.

  The crow rushed back across the pit floor to the cavern opening.

  ARA SHIFTED, STOOD, and set another paper log on the fire. She lit a cigarette. Robert, who had been listening with eyes closed, looked over at her. She produced faint poppings of bone, stretching her arms high over her head, and pushing first one hip and then the other out to the side.

  “Have you heard this one?” she asked.

  “No,” Robert said. This was a lie. He had heard the tale from Ben almost three years before. He remembered the room and the night and the casual enthralling charm of Ben’s voice as he told it. Robert knew how the story progressed and ended; but he lied to encourage Ara, who told the story well.

  THE CROW WAS as close to panic as a crow was liable to come. The sound of men, of engines, filled the bird with a helpless dread. Predators the crow could fight against; the crow did not actually fear the hawk or cat or owl until that moment in the battle when the crow’s death was inevitable, the event of the next moment, and then the fear was of death.

  But the crow feared man. Man could reach beyond the limits placed upon him to do harm to the crow. The bullet that had wounded him was a perfect example. A sky black with hawks circling over the stone pit was infinitely preferable to one man looking without any particular curiosity down from the pit’s rim.

  With a flat, obstinate determination to survive, the crow folded his wing as close to his body as he could, and his fear of the men took a little of the bright detail off the pain he felt. Gravel shifted underfoot above. Men were talking in low voices, sort of sleepy and removed. The crow heard a scratch, a moment later a smoking black nub of burned match fell into the pit. The crow shuddered. He turned his tail feathers to the cavern opening and backed in. His bad wing snagged on one of the boards, closing the crow’s eyes against the pain, but then the wing came free and the way was clear. The crow backed as deeply as possible into the cavern, until he felt his tail feathers push into the V formed by the meeting of the cold pit wall and the stacked boards.

  The crow could not be seen from above. Only if someone made a point of getting down and looking into that opening could he be seen. If the crow had only hawks and owls to worry about he would have been utterly safe.

  The crow was tempted to sleep through the day and wipe from his memory everything he knew about his past, his present, and his future. He would awaken a blank. But then he would try to use his wounded wing—­if only the past would be erased along with his memory of it.

  From his hiding place he heard more men arrive; more wheels on stone, more engines. The light at the opening of the cavern intensified. The voices were excited, happy to be there. They went through a period of sociability and discussion when laughter was common.

  However, this gave way to long periods without conversation that worried the crow greatly. When the men talked he could imagine where they were—­if they were close or distant—­and he could judge their moods. But in their silence they could be anywhere.

  The men created high whining machine sounds of progressing octaves, and sharp, rapid hammering of iron on iron. Now and then something fell atop the pile of lumber with a boom! that stopped the crow’s small heart.

  Late in the morning he heard a man walking on the floor of the pit. He had never been so close to them. But though they removed boards from the pile and created a racket of machinery and iron, they did not discover him.

  Sometime later the crow heard one voice call above the noise and bit by bit the commotion ceased. Men remained in the pit, talking again in that happy tone of the early morning, but a comparative silence settled.

  Food smells reached the crow. He was ravenously hungry, having had nothing to eat since the few insects and crumbs of sugar cookie hours before. The torn bag of food remained at the mouth of the cavern but he did not dare try to reach it. He would wait until dark, when he knew from experience that men went into hiding.

  He was assailed by aromas of meat, fruit, sweets, coffee, and apples. They swirled down and became trapped with him in the tiny cave of wood. They made his wing hurt more; they put a fresh point on his despair.

  In time the scents dissipated and the good-­natured talk of the men ceased. The noises commenced and continued throughout the afternoon. An hour after the meal break the crow was brightened to see the sunlight at the mouth of the cavern blacked out. It vanished as if swallowed by an instant night. The crow had been through eclipses (the spirit of the Smarter Crow passing across the sun) and so waited for the darkness to leave, the light to return.

  But it did not.

  The afternoon passed and the sounds made by the men gradually stopped. The crow heard the engines start and the wheels chew into the gravel as the men went away. And still the light did not return. The crow thought bitterly that that would be just like men: to work all day to create a false darkness.

  He waited in the cavern for quite a long time after he was certain the men were gone. Their smell remained—­smells of food, smoke, effort, gasoline—­and the echoes of their machines rang in his brain. He would wait.

  But little by little he began to feel better. The most dangerous part of the day was over and he was alive and undiscovered. Loss of light was almost worth that.

  He passed a point when he knew it was safe to emerge. He hesitated only because he was afraid of the pain that awaited him when he moved the wounded wing. He had been on the ground for a longer period of time than ever before in his life. Flight seemed somehow remote, the talent of some other bird. He might have forgotten how to fly.

  The crow came out of the cavern as carefully as he had entered. The floor of the pit where he had lain all day was darkly spotted with blood from the wing. Clear of the boards, he stood carefully. A bit of light caught on the feathers, giving them an oily, iridescent luster. His beauty reassured him. The breadth and strength of his good wing gave him brief hope that one wing could carry him out of the stone pit.

  But he was not so convinced of that that he tried.

  He looked above him. The men had put a roof over the pit, a roof of flat sheets of wood laid across narrow boards running from one side of the pit to the o
pposite side. An opening the size of a door had been left in this roof, and through this doorway the crow could see the evening sky.

  The floor of the pit was also different. The piles of straw had been moved, and there were new scraps of wood, a pair of rusted buckets containing nothing, bits of paper, burned matches, cigarette butts, gum wrappers of balled silver.

  The patch of water was gone, melted in the daylight. Among all the things left behind by the men there was nothing resembling food. The crow returned to the torn bag at the mouth of the cavern and found it had been nearly emptied. The orange was gone, compounding his thirst. The dried sandwich, the cookies, and the potato chips were all gone. All that remained were bits of sugar and flakes of plastic bag.

  The crow pecked up the grains of sugar. But even these he was tempted to ration. They only made him thirstier, and they represented the sum of what he had to eat, aside from spiders, red mites, and snails.

  In this sad state, he opened his wounded wing. The pain was surprising. He had expected something riveting, a pain that would blind him, but this pain was quite manageable. It seemed to him a stronger kin of the deep ache he had felt long ago when a boy had surprised him and struck him in the breast with a thrown rock.

  He gingerly extended the wing out from his body. He awaited the pain that would signal the limits of what he could do. He listened for the grating of fiber and bone as it ran out of its intended track.

  None of this happened. He was able to open the wing wide. It did not look correct, however. He had lost several feathers; he remembered them drifting away above him as he started his fall from the sky. The engineering of the wing looked askew. But he thought it might be well enough to fly him out of the pit. Once out, he would worry about the dangers of being on the ground in the open. He only wanted out.

  The crow placed himself directly beneath the doorway in the roof. Efficient at flight, he hoped to rise the eight feet out of the pit with a minimum of wing beats. Then he would walk through a field of cats, so grateful and happy to be free would he be.

  His folly extended only to the first downward beat of wings, when the true nature of his wound was brought home to him again in a pain that, for a long red moment, blinded him. He lifted a half foot off the pit floor then fell back with a cry he regretted; it had been so loud and full of misery and vulnerability that it would draw predators from miles around.

  Afraid he had undone whatever healing progress had been made the crow tucked the bad wing to his body. Again, there was a not unmanageable ache, and the sense of the wing’s natural mechanics being altered. But it no longer hung out to the side like a sign. And the pain had returned to a dimension he could bear.

  Above him, across the roof laid down by the men, came a skittering of talons. The crow whirled in fright and jumped against a wall, embarrassing himself with his panic and breaking open a fresh wet bubble of pain in the wing.

  The sky beyond the doorway in the roof was a deep soft violet, with stars like stitch holes waiting to be threaded. The crow noticed only that the darkness was not deep enough to hide in, although looking down into the pit from above would be akin to peering into deepest night. In that sense, he had an advantage.

  He remained motionless against the wall.

  The talons scratched overhead with a maddening lack of intent. The crow tried to estimate the size of the bird and guessed only that it was fairly large. A smaller bird would make no sound greater than a brushing of wood.

  Presently a crow stuck her head over the edge of the doorway in the roof. She looked all around the inside of the pit, frequently pausing to inspect the air above her.

  The crow had been correct; in the dark pit he was invisible. And as dearly as he wanted to cry out to the stranger, to mount her back and be lifted out of there, he remained patient, silent, still.

  She called down, “Are you well?”

  She turned her head to listen.

  The crow said nothing.

  The female flew across the opening in the roof; her form, briefly opened against the sky, seemed to the crow to be a gesture of faith, of vulnerability.

  “I saw you fall,” she said. “I’ve been keeping watch over you. The men are building a house.”

  Again she tilted her head to listen for his reply, and when no word came, she said, “Wait,” and flew off.

  The crow moved to the mouth of the cavern, lest she had heard his pounding heart and fixed his location. The light in the doorway, once the color of a barn swallow, went to the color of a starling, then a crow. He waited with his eyes turned upward.

  She returned holding in her beak a shred of apple that she dropped into the pit. The apple smelled delicious, cool and moist. It seemed to glisten out there on the open expanse of floor.

  “Go. Eat,” she encouraged him. “I know you’re down there. You must be starved and thirsty.”

  The crow fought against the lure of that bit of apple. It tantalized him with visions of trees viewed from the air, their green balls of leaf spotted with scarlet fruit; of the gushing juice in his throat when he stabbed his beak through the apple skin.

  He heard her murmur, “Maybe you are dead.”

  She flicked her wings and crossed the doorway in the ceiling. A droplet of waste splashed down.

  The crow moved carefully out of hiding to the spot where the apple lay. He did not look up at her, but she would hear his motion and see his shadowy presence as he devoured the apple. Its grainy meat and sweet juice was the best food he had ever eaten.

  She was gone when he finally looked up for her. But she returned with another chunk of apple, and after dropping it into the pit she flew away to get more. A dozen trips she made, until the crow had more apple than he wanted; he feared all the apple bits would make the men curious when they returned. Apple seemed almost to cover the floor.

  Finally, he said, “Enough.”

  She patiently waited at the edge of the opening while he ate. She kept watch through the porous walls the men had erected that day, walls the crow could not see from the pit floor, walls built more of air than wood. It was dark above her and below her. The night was full of peril, but better to be in the air than in the pit the crow had fallen wounded into. The golden-­lighted eyes she saw in the distant trees and the dangers scented on the wind she could survive, knowing there was a crow in more danger than she was. She flicked her wings and crossed the opening.

  The crow had eaten his fill of apples. A burning like the fire of the red mites had begun in his chest from eating too much of the sweet fruit.

  The female was still above. He saw by the dipping and pivoting of her head, and the quick flights back and forth across the doorway, that she was extremely uneasy. No crow liked being out after dark. The night made crows doubt their existence.

  “Can you come down here?” he called to her.

  She considered this request such a long time he wondered if she had heard him. But she was afraid to make that short flight down into the pit. The opening might close over her once she was inside.

  She said, “I can’t. I will help you as much as I can from up here, but I can’t go down into that place.”

  She waited for the crow to reply, to pose an argument to her refusal, but he did not.

  “I’ll bring you food,” she said. “I’ll warn you of danger, if I’m able. And I’d help you escape if I thought I could. But if I went down in there I’m afraid I’d never get out.”

  She seemed to be speaking into a void, the crow was so quiet.

  But he understood her perfectly. He would not have gone into the pit under any circumstances, given the choice.

  He asked, “What if they build the house above me and I can’t get out?”

  She could not answer this. All day she had watched the men work and she had asked herself the same question, without arriving at an answer. Each succeeding day and each succeeding layer of
the house would only seal the wounded crow in more tightly.

  “Don’t think about that,” she said. “How badly are you hurt?”

  “I was shot in the wing.”

  “Your wing will heal and then you will fly up and out. You will sleep and forget this ever happened.”

  “But what if they work faster than my wing heals?”

  “Don’t worry. There’s no point in worrying.”

  He had other frightening questions, but they did not merit examination. He preened his fathers in the dark. The wounded wing ached like the memory of a distant death, but he also thought he felt a mending taking place in it. The female remained for a time and her nervousness only increased. The crow finally told her to fly home, to rest.

  She did not argue, but promised to return in the daylight to watch over him. She flew once quickly across the doorway. “Will you be all right?”

  “Yes,” the crow said. He felt himself expanded by her, doubled in both possibility and hope. “Thank you for everything.”

  And the female, freed, flew gratefully out through the walls of the house and away.

  THE MEN DID not work in the pit at all the next day. The crow, from his hiding place, heard their pounding and machine cries above him, but the sounds were softened and less threatening; they might have come from a place above the clouds. He felt safe enough to slip in and out of sleep. In these naps he lost only brief slivers of memory, recent past minutes, and he was quick to recognize his plight upon awakening.

  The light outside the cavern mouth did not change appreciably throughout the day. He was therefore unable to gauge the passage of time. Only after the silence following the men’s departure had lengthened did he guess the day was nearly over.

  Then a chunk of apple fell to the floor of the pit.

  “Are you safe?” she called down to him, her voice somehow altered.

  The crow came carefully from his hiding place. His good wing was stiff and sore as he stretched it out from his body. The wounded wing he left folded against him; he was hungry and did not want to spoil the meal by having to face the despair of slow healing.