by John Crowley
The weather was growing colder. Families began to leave their freeholds in the evenings and retire to the communal roost that was forming for the winter. As food grew scarcer it wouldn’t be possible for a single family to hold off the many others in search of provender wherever it could be found, and the family’s land would anyway cease to produce enough for all the members. So they joined the majority, and went wherever they went, and came back at night with everyone.
It was a good time in the year, though, at least until winter grew deep. The roosting-place changed from time to time, but for some years it had been a wooded island far down where the river widened, thick with Poplars and several kinds of Fir, and some tall giants too, Oak and Ash. Crows in ever-greater numbers came in as the sun set and the clouds colored, yakking away as they winged down the river, or out of the daywise-dark sky, out of the vanishing sun or from the mountains. There was even a crowd of Rooks who joined them nightly at the frontiers of the roost, chattering together and all at once about their affairs, impossible to understand even if anyone had cared to try.
This was the first roost Dar Oakley had known, and his heart rose and he gave voice as Crows strange to him, young females, too, came to be beside him or below him or above him on the incoming evening flight, so many. His mother and father were somewhere in the throng, and brothers and sisters of Dar Oakley’s from earlier years and far freeholds. They had their own company, enough of them vagrants or newcomers to make their own family seem like old permanents, and he wouldn’t see much of them through the winter; his father would spend evenings with Crows of his status, his mother with hers, see you in the spring.
What a roar they made, settling in those branches, calling to friends and foes, shouting out their opinions to one and all, moving from branch to branch and saying, You! Oh, you! There you are, here I am! and a hundred other meaningless but not useless remarks—older and bigger Crows, louder and better-friended ones, made their way by such greetings into the middle of the crowd, where in the freezing nights they’d be warmed by the mass of Crow bodies around them, while younger and smaller ones went to the outside. Toughen them up, their elders thought, keep with their friends. The young ones hopped from branch to branch, getting as far in as they dared, males around females, females beckoning males—young Crows who wanted mates in the spring had better look now. Hello there, hello! Better to be high up than down low, if you could find a place: those down low were often shat upon by those above, awaking in the morning to find white streaks on their black coats, lots of laughs for others.
It had grown nearly dark on a certain evening, with a big moon rising, and the Biggers were calling, Settle down now, settle down, when a thrashing or commotion began in the woods on the far bank of the river, a noise that for a moment stilled the Crows who heard it. Something large was coming through the underwood over there, and something else coming after in pursuit. The Crows started up yelling at whatever it might be—always best to cry out on any predator, though you might benefit later from its leavings—but what was it? Too early in the dark of the year for Wolves . . .
A Deer, a small female, burst out into the moon’s light, taking staggering leaps toward the river. After her came—were they Wolves? No, not Wolves, like Wolves but not, and making sounds that Wolves would never make hunting. And after them came two others, taking long steps, upright on two legs.
“It’s them!” Dar Oakley cried, and cried again over the noise in the trees.
“Them? Them?”
Dar Oakley could see, as the Deer plunged into the river, that fixed in her flank was a stick, one of the kind that the two-legs had carried—that’s what they were for. The Wolf-like ones leapt in after her, trying to bite and swim at once; she could hardly hold her head above the water. The Crows were shouting alarms or encouragement or just marveling. Dar Oakley leapt from branch to branch, crying, “Them! Them!” as the youths around him nearly lost their perches laughing.
The two-legs were at the water now too, wading in like Bears up to their waists before striking out with their forearms. The Deer reached the island and the shadows and it was hard to see, the Crows pressing in and shoving for vantage. She’d never have found the strength to mount the rocky bank if it wasn’t for the animals harrying her from behind—it was impossible to tell how many of them there were as they flopped and skidded over the rocks and the mossy logs. But the Deer was failing, her legs were buckling, they were leaping for her throat. The two-legs then made the island and came up the bank, and that was too much for the Crows—many of them rose up and into the treetops to get as far as possible from this thing happening, as they would have for anything they couldn’t account for, and who could account for these hunters?
The two-legs reached the tangle of animals, and with harsh cries they pulled the snarling ones from the now placid and surrendered Deer. Then the larger of the two-legs straddled her body, took her neck in his two pale hands, and ripped it open. Blood spurted richly, black in the moonlight.
No, it was not with his hands he had done it but with another sort of thing he had somehow all along been carrying, but it was only Dar Oakley who understood that; the others were baffled by the impossible behavior in the dark and the struggle.
They rested, briefly, their Servitors (as it was clear the four-legs were) stirring around them but not daring more. Then together the two of them lifted the Deer, flung her on her side, and with the tool (now it was clear to all it was a thing they wielded, it caught a flash of moonlight), they tore it open down its breast to its vent. It took only a moment. The Deer’s guts slid glistening out, and other parts; with the tool one hunter took the liver just as though he had reached in and tugged it out. They pushed away the rest, like Wolves showing little interest in it, and the four-legs fought over what was good in it.
Above in the trees the news went from bird to bird: the two-legs were dragging the emptied Deer, her head knocking the rocks, into the river. Swimming strongly each with one arm, bearing her up with the other, they brought her over the shallow river to the shore. For a while their animal helpers, left behind, called furiously after them, or went on messing with the mass of offal, but one by one they went into the water to swim across.
What were the Crows to do or think now? It was dark, fully night, the moon high and small. Crows don’t see well in moonlight and almost never chance a flight. But those riches lay down there on the ground, and they each thought how they could reach them in the morning before others did—or should they at first light go over the river and see what those hunters had left? Surely they couldn’t have eaten it all. It kept them from sleep, thinking and talking, changing place to look out over the river to where a dim glow could be seen that none of them understood.
At morning there was no sign of them across the river. There was smoke and the smell of burning (the oldest among them knew the smell; fires in that land in a dry summer were rare but memorable). And the Deer was gone entirely: no skin, no skull, no bones, nothing. Where had they gone? Some of the young ones followed Dar Oakley up and up into the morning to see, going out following the way he had gone that first day—and there! Out on the moorland between the river and the rise of the land they saw them, the two-legs, and the Deer as well: her four feet affixed somehow to a sapling stripped of its branches, carried swaying between the two-legs, the four-legs sniffing at its lolling head. And there on the high ground were others of their kind.
Yes, they were here: they were as Dar Oakley had described them, though the flock soon grew tired of his telling the story. Nor for all his bragging was he the first or only Crow who knew of such ones. They were strange to the Crows of his own demesne, but word was that Crows roosting with the flock had tales of the beings, things they’d heard from some other Crows somewhere. One young female claimed to have seen them herself. She seemed not to find them that interesting. Dar Oakley schemed to perch beside her.
“What are they called?” he wanted to know. “How do you name them?”
“Called?” she asked, in a sort of disdain. “Why would we call them something?”
“Things are called by a name.”
“There was no reason to talk about them,” she said. “They were just there.” Her attention was drawn away from Dar Oakley to other youths, but then she seemed to remember something, and offered it to him. “The thing I heard about them,” she said, “is how much they leave.”
“Leave?”
“Don’t use, I mean. And if you dared to go get it . . .” But then, done with him, she gave him a quick beck—a polite dip of her head—and was gone.
Over that winter Crows in twos or threes, sometimes in dozens, went the way Dar Oakley had gone, to the place on the high ground beyond the lake. Soon there were more of the beings settled there than those Dar Oakley had seen, if the two who had caught the Deer were even the same two as had marked this spot with their spears. They all looked alike to the Crows at first, and it was hard to tell how many there were—a few were small, young ones perhaps. They had begun piling up on the plain some things, things that were like great nests, or (some said) burrows above the ground, shelters like the heaps of boughs and leaves a Bear will sleep under all winter, or perhaps like the stones a Caddis Fly sticks together to hide within—for they were indeed made of stones and sticks and wattles, whitened somehow the way a Heron’s nest is whitened with ordure; and the beings, for whom the Crows had still no name, went in and out of them, so that the Crows couldn’t tell if the same few were appearing over and over or if many were hidden within. More of these dwellings or nests were being made, too, whenever the Crows came to look.
Smoke came from holes in their tops.
Now and then there was a Deer, or an Elk, even a Boar they had caught, and some number of them would be going at it with their things; they’d hack at it, with amazing ease getting a leg or a rib cage detached and then taking the flesh from it in long strips, which they didn’t always eat right away but hung up on a thing of branches they fixed together (wonderful to watch them, their hands and the things they held, how quick and clever) that they set before a pit or hole where they kept a fire going, never large but never fading to smoky nothing, now and then throwing in sticks or dung so that sparks and flame shot up and Crows fled away.
Crows, at least Crows then, were wary birds, easily alarmed by novelty. They could not have imagined such things as they now, undeniably, witnessed; but Crows are also hardheaded and practical, and would prove (in the long relationship that this flock was just now setting out on) very adaptable. It wouldn’t be long before the new creatures and their ways became familiar, and though other smart animals never lost their fear of fire and of the smell and sound of People, Crows soon didn’t mind. They’d never seen fire managed before, even those few who knew what it was at all, but here it was, and before winter’s end it had ceased to frighten them; it became part of the way things were. And yes, the beings did leave a lot: rotting carcasses at the settlement’s edge, offal they didn’t want. Crows might not know swords and spears, but they knew offal. If you dared to get it, that disdainful female had said.
“But why do they let their four-legged ones at that meat and not take it themselves?” the Vagrant said to Dar Oakley in a hungry week of ice, as they overlooked the midden. “Those ones are an annoyance, that’s for sure.”
“I wonder,” said Dar Oakley.
They watched the beings tussle and square off, small ones and large ones, differently colored and framed. Was feeding beside them like feeding among the Wolves, who paid you no attention? Or would they argue with you? Hard to know. Keep far from them and nibble at the margins.
They saw newcomers arrive, following new beasts unknown to the Crows, heavy and tall like Elks but short-necked and dull; the two-legs pushed and harried them and drove them in a herd from place to place but never slew or ate them, and the Crows wondered: Who of these served whom? Then a new thing came in, impossible to describe to those who hadn’t seen it—even some of those looking down on the settlement from the winter-bare trees seemed unable to see it at all. One would say, It’s like a fallen tree rolling down a hill, and others would say, No, it’s like a Deer caught in a deadfall and trying to pull free, and those who refused to see it at all would shrug and depart. Dar Oakley had no description to give, but he saw clearly what it was for: a big mild animal in the lead tugging at the wooden arrangement following on after, the two-legs tugging at the animal’s head or striking it gently now and then with one of their eternal sticks. They were all doing one thing: moving something along too heavy to carry. With it they brought in thick boughs, stones, and other matter they for some reason wanted.
They also brought in others of their kind. One day as Dar Oakley watched from above, many came out from their shelters in seeming excitement and went to walk alongside the mover, pushing it as the animal pulled, into the settlement, up to a house. And from it was lifted one who could not stand on his own legs. Thin as though starving. With great care and under the eyes of all the others, this one was carried by two strong ones to the shelter—Dar Oakley thought of the Deer he had seen carried over the river and beyond. His hair (Dar Oakley felt it was a male) was the strange long plumage-like hair they all had, but his wasn’t dark and glistening; it was as white as Hawthorns in spring. He looked around himself at the place and the sky and the trees—his gaze pausing at the lone Crow on a bare branch—and then he was borne within. Dar Oakley on his perch and his kin on the earth beneath watched that shelter as though something striking might come out of it, but nothing did.
“Better get back,” the Vagrant said, looking darkwise.
Through those nights, as the Crows in their winter trees flitted and slept and woke and the Owls on muffled wings hunted the forest’s black edge for whatever showed itself, the little settlement between the long lake and the winter mountain lay silent. The doors of those for whom the Crows had as yet no name (nor a name for doors or houses, either) were barred and the small windows blocked up; their animals kept them warm, and at night when they slept in heaps together they smoored their fires so that they might be built up again in the morning with sticks and straw and dung. The smoke rose out the roof-holes and caught stars. Stories were murmured and children engendered; the stripped meat of the Deer and other beasts, smoked and dried, was chewed; mothers chewed it for their babes. On the coldest nights the long red Wolves could be heard on the mountain calling to one another, and when spring was near and hunger was sharpest they came down to walk at night amid the alien smoke and the houses, sniffing at the doors, and the ones inside in the dim dark could smell them too.
In time nights grew shorter. The People came out of their houses in the dawns into the mist and the holy sun, and got ready to work and to build.
Thus the cold moons were passed, though the Crows hadn’t marked them, Crows having no theories about how moons come and go or how many of them there are. They know very well how the days grow longer and the sun higher, and they know when winter is at last truly gone and won’t return; they know it not only in the weather and the forests but in themselves, a sort of madness beginning in their breasts and worsening by the day until it seems to them they have always been this way and no other, as though it’s they who cause the mad Hares to come out and battle in plain sight, the green Woodpeckers to rattle the dead trees, Toads to belch in the swollen ponds.
We People think we feel overweening desires, joys, furies, in spring, but those are mere vestiges of what the greater part of the living world feels. I suppose it’s like having a whole year’s lusts and longings packed into a few weeks. Dar Oakley says he’s seen enough springs, old as he is now, and says he’d prefer not to see another come: not in the world or in himself. It’s just too hard.
By now the great winter roost was shredding, as though a disaster had befallen it. All the flighty Rooks had gone in a cloud to where Rooks go. Families sorted themselves from the restless crowd, couples separated from families, and young ones talked about going�
�going anywhere, going just to go. Two of Dar Oakley’s siblings were drawn away one wet, mild morning with a swarm of young Crows related to them and not, without a thought and without farewell, going out to Who-Knows-Where, somewhere far from here, to spread, to reduce the land of no Crows by a little more. As they were subtracted from around him on that morning, Dar Oakley felt his own shoulders tense as though asked to take wing too.
Why didn’t he follow? he wondered, and still wonders. He was the same age as his fleeing, chattering siblings—Older Sister older by only a few days, and wasn’t he the first to leave the nest? His mother had told him so. Wasn’t he a Traveler, even then? So he’d told the Vagrant, who’d scoffed at him for it. Maybe what kept him from the exodus was that desire or bent in him, hard to recognize much less acknowledge, even if there had been words for it: that bent to be alone.
What he told himself was that he wanted to remain near those beings on the plain. He might not have gone far in his young life, but no one else had ever come upon those ones. He wanted to keep watch on them, his own discovery.
“Come along,” Father said to him, startling him; he hadn’t heard him step close. The big Crow (he seemed bigger than ever this day) was in a state, imperious, impatient. “We’re off.”
“Off?”
“Home. It’s what’s to do now.”
If you are a Crow barely full grown, it’s hard to grasp the coming of new seasons. It takes a longer life not to be taken by surprise, not to ask yourself, What? What’s this? and get no answer. The answer is, This has been, and will again be, but even older Crows sometimes forget that till it comes around again, and then they know.
“Home?” Dar Oakley asked, but Father had already flown to rouse another of his family, the one Dar Oakley called Younger Sister. She’d returned to the roost after first flying off after the departees, and now sat sullen and regretful. Then he went on around the fast-emptying roost, calling for kin he couldn’t see. The Vagrant answered, but wouldn’t follow, indifferent to Father’s urgencies. Dar Oakley decided he’d do nothing until others did who knew what it was they were to do. Maybe he’d go look for something to eat.