by K. J. Emrick
So much for sleeping in on a quiet Sunday morning. Might as well go see what the day will bring. Maybe some tuna. I like tuna.
But I mean, seriously, who doesn't like tuna?
The dry food in my dish isn't tuna, but Darcy makes sure to give me the kind I like. It's just one of the ways she lets me know she loves me. I always have food in my dish and a place to lay my paws in between my busy schedule.
Darcy and I go back a long way. Cats don't exactly keep track of time, not like humans do, but she and I have been together for years. That's like, half of my lifetime. I think. There's this thing about one cat year equaling four years of a person's life, but I've never understood that. Maybe it has something to do with how lights that burn brighter burn twice as fast.
Maybe I'll figure it out someday.
Okay. I'm full, I'm rested—sort of—and I'm ready. Watch out world, here I come.
I always have a way in and out of the house. Sometimes an open window, but usually it's my secret entrance at the back. A gap made by a loose board in the cellar wall where it meets the support beams. I wish Darcy would install a cat door, but I don't really need one.
It's a beautiful day outside. I take a few moments to sit on the grass and blink at the bright sunlight. Nice. Since it's springtime, the world is becoming green and full of the smells that cats love. Warm dirt. Insects. Birds.
I love birds. They're so much fun to chase. No, I've never eaten one. Not that I wouldn't if I had to. I just prefer the taste of fish. And dry cat food. And milk. And catnip.
Love the catnip.
My day is interrupted pretty rudely at that point by Corvin the crow, cawing loud enough to wake the dead. Loud enough to make me jump a foot in the air, anyway. He lands next to where I had been sitting, all fidgeting feathers and bobbing head. His black feathers shimmer in the sun creating false highlights of blue and violet. He caws again, loudly, his wings fluttering and jittery.
"Corvin!" I yell at him, annoyed and trying to hide how my heart is thudding a mile a minute in my chest. "What are you doing?! Where did you come from?"
Corvin twists his head at me in that annoying way that crows do. "The sky. The sky. Where else would I come from, friend Smudge?"
I blink at him. He's serious. "That's not what I… Nevermind. Go away, will you? I'm trying to enjoy the sunshine." It was still early, but I wondered if I could find Twistypaws out and about somewhere. Have a walk or a run through the trees.
Just thinking about her made my tail twitch. In the good way.
Corvin hops around in front of me again, breaking up my daydream, leaning in and twitching his head back and forth to stare at me with either eye.
"Don't do that!" I tell him. "You know that freaks me out."
"Sorry, sorry!" he screeches. "Can't go away. Can't go away. Need your help. Need your help, friend Smudge! Caw! Need your help!"
With every word he's getting louder and louder, flapping his wings still, all black-feathered agitation. At this rate he's going to wake up the entire neighborhood. As much as I'd like to see Jon Tinker's sleep get interrupted like mine was, I don't need anyone seeing me with a crow.
"Shh!" I hiss. "Keep it down, already!"
"Need your help!" he repeats in a loud whisper that wasn't much better than what he'd been doing before. I swear it's like crows can only hold one thought at a time and even that was too much for their little bird brains.
Me and Corvin have a complicated, uh, arrangement. He's one of the crows who live in the town center near the park. Now, don't get me wrong. I can't stand crows. They're less annoying than dogs, more annoying than…well, you know the rest. But Corvin here has been a help to me more than once. So I tolerate him, and bring him a sparkly bit of broken necklace or bright piece of string every once in a while, and he acts like I'm his only friend in the world. Which, for all I know, I am.
Why do I need help from a crow, you might ask? Trust me. Some days I need all the help I can get.
"Okay, okay," I say quickly, looking around and hoping that no one has seen us. There's any number of cats in this town but where Darcy and I live—and the bed-stealing Jon Tinker, too—is on a lonely road that doesn't really go anywhere. There's exactly two houses here, and the neighbors don't have animals. No reason for anyone to come over this way. Still, I'd be more comfortable somewhere else. "Meet me in our tree, all right? We'll talk there."
"The tree, the tree!" Corvin cries excitedly. "Yes, the tree! Meet ya. Meet ya!"
He flaps his wings hard and then he's aloft, not exactly gracefully, flying off toward our secret meeting spot.
For just a moment, I look up toward Darcy's bedroom window, growling at how Jon Tinker has ruined my day. I'd still be in bed sleeping next to Darcy if not for him. Not having early morning meetings with a crow.
***
It took me a little longer to get to our arranged meeting spot than it took Corvin. He can fly. I can't. I wish I could, sometimes, but I wouldn't give up being a cat to be a bird. Not ever. Even if it would be cool to know what it felt like to soar over housetops and swoop down on mice from above…
Ahem. Anyway.
I have to run through the trees surrounding the town, from one to the other, sniffing out a trail that I know very well but isn't marked in any way. I don't want anyone seeing me and Corvin together. Might give certain cats the wrong idea.
When I get to one particular tree with hoary bark on a narrow, straight trunk rising high up above the ground, I stop to get my breath. I hear Corvin up there in the branches, cawing at me to hurry up. My eyes narrow. This had better be worth it.
Scrunching down on my back legs, I wiggle back and forth, tensing, getting ready to spring straight up in the air like this just as high as I can. I grab the trunk with my claws and then look back down at the ground. About nine feet. Not bad, but I've done better. Scooting up a little bit at a time now, digging in with each inch, I make it to the lower branches and stop to lick my front paw. This one's been bothering me. Can't say why. Maybe it's going to rain milk.
Cat joke.
Leaping gracefully from one branch to the other I get to the one Corvin and I use for our clandestine meetings. He's already there, cleaning out his wings with his beak. I flop down on the branch, one leg hanging over into space, tail flicking back and forth. "All right, Corvin, I'm here. What's up?"
He holds up his one wing, still preening the other with his beak, telling me to hold on until he's done.
Oh, for Pete's sake, as Darcy would say.
"Corvin, I'm not hanging out with you all day while you take a beak bath. What was so important that you had to come get me off my own lawn?"
"It's gone!" he screeches, hopping toward me, no warning, just there in front of my face and screaming.
I'm not afraid of heights. No cat is, really. We've got an internal sense of balance that makes one hundred feet up in the air no different than five.
What I am afraid of, is falling. From a tree branch. With a crow jabbering away like a lunatic. That, I'm afraid of.
I scrambled to keep my hold. I'm pretty sure I was upside down at one point and hanging on for dear life. Corvin had nearly scared away another one of my lives, and I've only got eight left as it is. The branch I was on is narrow, but thankfully strong enough to hold a cat desperately clawing himself back upright.
When I got back up, I wrapped my arms tight around the branch, claws sunk in deep, breath heaving in my chest, and glared at Corvin. "Do that again, and I'll eat you for breakfast."
He had the good sense to hop backward away from me, but he was still screeching at the top of his bird lungs. "Sorry. Sorry! Just upset. So upset. It's gone it's gone it's gone!"
"Corvin!" I snap at him. He stops as I scream his name, my heart just starting to calm down, the angry frustration that's sweeping through me pushing aside the fright I'd just had. With a deep, slow breath, I lower my voice and try to speak calmly. "Corvin. Tell me what's wrong. What is gone?"
"My sparkly!"
he cries, throwing back his head and shaking himself all over. "Someone took my sparkly!"
Oh, for the love of catnip.
Crows collect things. That's why I can pay Corvin with junk I find on the ground. Give him a sparkling piece of pyrite from the creek, he'll do anything you ask. Bring him a lost earring, and he'll be your friend for life. I found that out the hard way. They're very possessive about their collections, too. Kind of like that dragon Smaug in The Hobbit with his gold.
Hey. Darcy owns a bookstore. Some of us cats can read, you know.
Anyway, if one of Corvin's "sparklies" has gone missing, it's no wonder he's so upset.
"Did you maybe drop it?" I ask him. "That hole in your tree doesn't have a door or anything. Did you check the ground around the tree?"
He hops a little bit this way, then a little bit that way, obviously upset. "Thought of that. Thought of it! Not in the grass. Didn't bounce away. Didn't fall. Someone took it!"
"All right, all right." I can see I'm not going to get anything else done today unless I help Corvin with this. "Let's start over. What did you lose? What did this sparkly look like?"
He goes on to describe it, in halting details like a crow will, and with lots of questions from me to clarify what he's talking about. "Sparkly string" could mean anything.
In the end, I've got a pretty good idea of what he's looking for. A necklace (people feather, Corvin had called it) made of diamonds (star stones). There was something else about it, too, something that looked like a sparkly snake. One of those necklaces that are shaped like a letter S, or a flower or something. I can only translate Corvin-speak so far.
"Where is it? Where is it?" he asks me after I'm satisfied with the description. "Need it. Need it!"
I can't remember ever seeing Corvin this agitated. There's something more to this than just losing one of his many baubles. There was something special about this one. "Corvin, I'll help you find your necklace. Er, sparkly people feather, I mean. Why is this one so important?"
He looked away from me, his beak open just a little and his tongue flicking inside his mouth. His deep black eyes won't stop moving.
"You have to tell me," I insist. "If I'm going to help you then I need to know everything."
He puffs out his chest and then lets the breath go. "Need it."
"Sure. You told me that. But why?"
"Need it!" he repeats. "Need it for her! Want to give it to her."
Her? "Wait a minute. Corvin…do you have a girlfriend?"
If crows were capable of blushing like people do, that's what Corvin would be doing right now. "New crow. Just moved in to the park," he explains. "Pretty. Pretty crow. Want her to notice me. Want her to like me."
"Oh. I get it. You want to give her the sparkly as a gift."
He caws once, softly.
Maybe I'm a sucker for anyone in love, but that did it for me. Now I had to help him. I'd had my own adventures in love, after all. Me and Twistypaws had been seeing each other for a while, and things just kept getting better between us, but I remember when I had to chase her cute gray tail all over town just to get her to look at me. I know what that can be like.
"Tell you what," I say to the sulking black crow. "I'll race you to your tree. Let's find this girl her present."
***
I was a lot more careful about getting up Corvin's tree. If he got agitated or excited again, I wasn't going to risk falling to my death. I've heard a fall like that can wipe out all of the lives you have left, all at once. This cat isn't dying today.
Corvin's tree is at the edge of the park. It's tall, with lots of branches to climb in. Right above one branch is a knothole big enough that I could have crawled inside and curled up for a good nap, with no Jon Tinker bothering me. This was where Corvin lived, and where he hid all of the things he found. The hole was full of string and shiny bits of foil and other things I could see from the ground.
"Was here, was here," Corvin explained to me once we got up there. "Now it's gone. Need it back."
I listen to him with one ear as I peer over the edge of the branch to the ground below. Yup. If the necklace had fallen it would have landed in short grass, making it easy to spot. It wasn't anywhere to be seen. "Do you think maybe it fell down there and someone found it? A person, I mean. Someone might have picked it up from the ground."
Like you did in the first place, I almost added to Corvin.
The crow was already shaking his head emphatically. "No. No, no, no. I found my sparkly fair and square. Put it in my tree. Right there. Right there! Saw it last night. Still there. Sun went down, still there. Went for breakfast this morning. Sun still down. Down, down, down. I came back. Came back, it was gone. All dark still."
I understand what he's saying. People can't see in the dark. Not like cats can. Or crows, for that matter. So, if the necklace had dropped out of the tree after dark, and if it was gone before sunrise, the chances of a person picking it up off the ground were slim. There were lights in the park after dark but not in this area. This part was always in shadows.
So. It wasn't taken by a person. On to the next idea.
If you think it's weird for a cat to be solving problems in his neighborhood, well, you might be right. This is me, though. I'm a different sort of cat. The animals in Misty Hollow all know that they can come to me with their problems. I can't always help, and I don't always want to help them either, but I do what I can. I enjoy it, actually. Darcy has her ways of helping her human friends, and I kind of do the same for the cats and the birds and the others that don't have anyone else to turn to.
Except dogs. I have to draw the line somewhere.
Anyway. If Corvin didn't drop his necklace out of the tree, then where did it go? That's the question here. There's not a whole lot around here, just trees and the open area of the park and…
The trees.
Corvin isn't the only crow who lives here. Crows like to take sparkly things. They aren't choosy about who they steal from, either. Add all that together, and I'd be willing to bet that one of Corvin's neighbors saw his sparkly and took it for themselves.
"Corvin, I'm going to go talk to some of your neighbors, all right?" He nods, miserably, still looking into the knothole as if the necklace would spontaneously pop back into existence there. Poor guy.
Whoa. Poor guy? Let's not get carried away. He's still a crow.
I sigh to myself. Doesn't mean I won't help him.
From this branch it's a short jump to another that leads to the branches of a different tree and then over to another one across a five foot gap of open space. I land in the limbs of a tall birch tree with peeling bark. My presence doesn't go unnoticed.
"You leave!" A plump, heavy crow whirls on me in a menacing way. Where Corvin is all jittery energy, this crow looks old and slow, like a big bloated lump with feathers. His beak is tucked into his chest, and his chest is puffed out to make him look even more swelled up. "You leave! Go somewhere else."
"No, I stay," I mock the crow. No feathery balloon is going to tell me what to do. "I'm looking for something for my friend Corvin. Maybe you've seen it?"
At the mention of Corvin's name the crow suddenly comes to life, feathers flapping, neck craning, eyes bulging. He stands up and only then do I get a true sense of how big he really is. Huge, is the word that comes to mind. He easily stands head and shoulders over me, with a beak as long as my paw and a nasty glint in his eye.
"Corvin!" he shouts. "Do not speak to me of Corvin! He is not welcome in my tree!"
"Um," I say, backing up, "Corvin isn't here. Just me."
"Do not speak the name of Corvin!" he repeats in his loud, deep bird voice, starting to turn slowly in a circle. As he does, I see how crows in the other trees have popped their heads out to watch the commotion. There's only about a dozen of them in the park altogether, and it looks like every single one of them is here now.
Here, and glaring at me.
Fantastic.
"Oh, good," I say, trying to ma
ke the best of a bad situation. "Since you're all here, let me ask you a question…"
Quickly I describe the necklace as Corvin had described it to me. Using crow-speak I tell them how the sparkly was lost and asked if anyone had it. Actually, what I asked was if anyone had found one just like it. You can't ask a crow if he's stolen something. The answer is always no because in their minds they just find things. They don't steal. If they happen to find something that looks just like a thing someone else lost, that isn't stealing. Not to a crow.
I get several caws in response to my question, all of the crows telling me one after another that they don't have anything like that. They all offer to show me things they do have, unable to resist showing off how much better their stash is than their neighbor's, but none of them have what I'm looking for. To make matters worse, big monster crow is still shouting about Corvin and trying to menace me off his tree.
"Will you calm down?" I finally say to him, frustrated and annoyed that I'm spending my whole Sunday on this. "I just wanted to ask, all right?"
"Corvin!" the crow shouts again in that slow, resonant voice. "You must leave my tree!"
"Oh, for the love of catnip." I've had just about enough of this bird. I don't care if he does have size on me, I think he needs to learn some manners. Maybe if I bite off a few of his tail feathers he'll just shut up.
"Father!" a softer, feminine voice says, interrupting my thoughts of maiming the big blowhard. Along the branch a girl crow hops toward us and flaps her wings at the bigger bird. "Father! Stop it. Don't speak of Corvin so!"
Oh. This is the girl crow that Corvin is sweet on. Okay. I can kind of see it, I guess, with those sleek feathers and that beak with its little curve. Cute. In a bird sort of way.
Her father isn't backing down, though. "Jessamine, you will not be with Corvin! I forbid it! I forbid it!"
Does this guy have any volume other than obnoxious?
Jessamine knocks her head into her father's chest a few times until he deflates, his feathers settling back down, his beak parting as his breathing slows. "You are my only daughter," he says to her.