by Layne Maheu
“C’mon,” they cawed.
“Hurry!”
“But I’m so hungry I could eat my own wings.”
“Don’t argue.”
And I didn’t.
“And don’t linger this time either,” said Plum Black as I took off, nearly blind now from my own ignorance of the world, having to follow Night Time again, since Plum Black had already flown far ahead of us beyond sight.
The oldest known American Crow in the wild lived until its 29th year. The next oldest, however, lived only to 14 and a half.
5. The Old Bone
Wanderers of the sky.
Without welcome.
No far shore. None near.
There was a hypnotic denial pushing our wings along. The Brave West Winds would protect us for as long as we rode them—zephyr, borealis, terra nimbus, aerial plateau. The farther we flew, the less our father could deny us a place in the trees, and the more I could believe that Our Giant had fallen and taken Our Many with it. Meanwhile, our wings took us far above the pull of the old earthly winds, where I could peer down at my own grief as though it still squawked there within the overgrown acres of vegetable life below. We three became the endless otherness of the sky. We passed like ghosts over the wreck of our old injured selves. Up here, the tranquility of the dust clouds covered everything at the horizon and blotted out survival’s harsh, repetitive drama.
All was wind, sun-chilled and steady.
It didn’t matter what was below—savanna, foothills, greenbelt, river gorge—the earth had no bearing on the winds we took. If we did skim the treetops, it was to dip below them and graze on the crunchy wee creatures that lived there. But I was afraid, deathly afraid, of the underworld and the slow behemoths that toiled there. Huge creatures of horn and beard and stretched, veiny teats chewed slowly and moved even more slowly, with a gentle, mindless nibbling across the face of the leafy earth.
“Hunger is the best teacher.”
Plum Black hopped down among their hilly bullocks and flipped over a cow patty, pecking at the dung dust for beetles. She swallowed them whole with a quick throw of her head, neglecting me in my begging.
In one field, Night Time called, “Get!” from his high perch, and we scattered.
It was only a dog, but one of Keeyaw’s, one I’d seen following around the Terrible, sniffing and lifting his leg at the roots of the Giants. The dog came out of the bushes and loped among the livestock as if she were a creature of singular importance due to her doggish ability to chase things. Without uttering a sound except the chuff of her breath, she lorded over those slow, mammoth creatures, much larger than herself.
“That dog,” I said to Plum Black.
“I know,” she said, with the faraway weather affecting her eyes. “I know.” She scanned the woods beyond the field, as if the lank, sinister Keeyaw would come out of the woods at any moment, bearing one of his gruesome implements.
“Keeyaw!” Night Time mocked us.
He grabbed hold of a branch and flapped as if in a fight with the tree. I thought his wits had flown off, that he and the branch had been seized by demons. He kept whacking at the air and riding the branch, getting it to bounce. He flapped and aphids fell to the ground. Tree frogs fell to us. Beetles, hoppers, crawlers, manna, giblets, kabob, all of it fell when Night Time flapped. Plum Black and I hopped to the ground and craned our heads to the sky, waiting in the rain of food. It felt as though Night Time were shaking the very Tree of Wonder.
There was the game of shaking branches, of balancing on flimsy limbs, of flying off with leaves in your mouth, of hiding them, of picking up stones. In King of the Hill, we fought and lunged for a stick at the top of a dung pile when I saw the most gnarled, untrimmed hooks I’d ever seen at the end of a crow’s legs glomming on to our thin trophy. The strength in those ancient, goitered knees, thick of bone, mocked the audacious waste of energy and optimism found in youth, all wrapped up in that pitiful little stick we fought over. The hooks didn’t move. They clutched so unconsciously tight to the stick that moisture dripped from the loam in his claws. It was a huge old bull of a crow, standing above those awful hooks, heavy with years and bumpy like ancient tree roots or land swells beneath his feathers. Like his hooks, the horns of his face were long, wild mandibles he must have stopped trimming ages ago. He looked at all of us with a crow’s one-eyed stare. Then, when he turned his head the other way, it was eerie in the way the God Crow was eerie, for the other eye was entirely scarred over. Even the scar had scars, as if the blown-out eye socket had bled and healed, then opened up to bleed all over again. The wound was like looking right into the empty space of his head, where his own death lived. It was like looking into his stubborn unwillingness to die despite its probability any day now.
When the old bird flew off with the stick, we saw something else just as ghastly as that one sunken hole in his head and all the gory emptiness behind it. He grasped the stick with just one set of claws, and where the other foot should have been hung a single sharp bone, severed below the knee. None of us followed, stunned by the ghostliness in his head and now the sharp bone swinging below him.
But, “Come on,” he yelled with a weary patience, not turning around. “Come and get your stick.”
It was strange to follow that old crow through the woods, staring at that one splintered bone that he dragged through the sky. It was a crooked bone that had obviously come to some violent end and, with most of the old crow’s tail feathers missing, was all too visible. I nearly smacked up into some branches from watching him. He had a knowledge that lived solely in the actions of his black feathers, and if he ever stopped flapping he would surely fall, having lost too many feathers to glide. He descended slowly, wagging those stiff tree-branch arms, until he lit on a tree leaning over a stream.
And there we saw him, Doom of the Woods himself, Keeyaw, standing upright in the stream, so strange and tree-like, as wet as he was, with his gray weeping tendrils soaked to his head. It seemed as though Keeyaw might also be a creature of water, for he stood half-submerged in the soft current that sparkled with daylight. Through his stiff, wet beard, he spoke, but to whom or to what I couldn’t tell, as if he were addressing the woods and the sky.
“Look at this place, so gorgeous and peaceful. Like paradise, isn’t it?”
Keeyaw reached into a satchel dripping wet around his shoulders and took out a tool. He had three tools, each with a handle, and he threw them into the stream.
“Take these back.”
Two sank and one floated, moving downstream like a long-necked water-fowl. Back on the banks, he moved more easily. He sat down and began lashing a good-sized rock to his ankle, using woven vine. As he tangled the vine ropes around his legs, the one-eyed crow spoke.
“I was hoping Keeyaw was going to feed his dog. But that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Look who’s here.”
Above in a clearing, the God Crow circled and lowered Itself until It landed all the way down on the banks directly beside Keeyaw. The Bird had a supernatural splendor. The sheen of Its coat alone was a purple-black corona of light. But did Keeyaw see It, or turn his head away from the lashings around his leg? No. The God Crow took a few double hops, folded Its mighty wings, and began pecking away at the far end of the vines, weakening them all at one spot. Keeyaw kept his attention on his ankles, unaware of the Goodly Bird. Finishing Its work, the God Crow flapped off, fully luminescent in Its black, crow-blue way, and lit in a tree far above us. Its tail feathers twitched in a motion much like an eye batting, and though It glanced now here and there, It was intent on the scene below.
“Although God is everywhere,” said the old crow, “sometimes It is at one place more than the others. That’s called focus.”
The old bird squinted with his scarred-over eye as if seeing particularly through that.
Keeyaw of the weeping tendrils seemed even more tree-like once he was upright again. He bent low to pick up the rock lashed to his foot, and the rock made him clumsie
r as he struggled back into the stream, using both of his arms to cradle the weight before his chest. He sloshed out to the middle and spoke again, but this time to himself.
“I sacrificed everything. Everything I could think of. Chickens, lamb, oxen, even fishes—though they are not domesticated. Either to save the world. Or drown it—right now. Just get it over with.”
“Impatience!” God’s imminent Caw fell over the far reaches of the woods, so that afterward all the singing of the birds and insects was magnified. “The world will not be cured through impatience.”
“And drowning it will?” said the old crow as an aside. He shivered as if ridding his feathers of some unpleasant dust but then resigned himself with a shrug and scanned all around him, trying, it seemed, to hide his thoughts from the Goodly Bird.
Below, the strange tree-like beast of the two elements heard neither of them but kept muttering to himself.
“I did wait until my sons were old enough—old enough to fend for themselves and their mother—before I offered myself up, so that the world might be saved—this world.”
The beast looked up into the sky, squinted, and closed his eyes tight.
“To save the world.”
And he heaved the rock before his chest out into the watery element. The rock splashed, his lashings disappeared, and . . . “Ahh . . . Ahh,” he uttered in shock and fear, until he, too, disappeared, pulled under the waves.
Soon the woods all around us were calm and in their natural state, as if the stream had opened up and engulfed all of the earlier agitation.
The one-footed, one-eyed crow flew over to a fallen log and hopped his one-footed hop until he was directly above the calm of a pool, looking down. And so was I. The water was as clear to me as a memory, where I felt I could just reach down and pluck up a pebble. But the pool was deep enough, too, for the beast to have drifted there, bobbing below the current, attached to his rock. He undulated calmly, his gray hair fanning out like eel grass, his arms out at his sides.
I looked down at the strange, soaking beast with unutterable dread. How were we ever going to get back to Our Many and the most merciful Tree with him drowned?
“You’re not worried about them.” The old crow looked right through me, as if his scar could see past my eyes and down my throat, into my guts. “You’re worried about all that stuff Keeyaw’s throwing back into the water. Rocks, tools, himself. What else is he going to throw into the drink? That’s what you’re worried about.”
“I Am?”
“Kee-Yawwww!” the old crow cawed. “Kee-Yaw!”
Keeyaw looked up through his watery whiskers and began flailing and kicking until the water above him erupted in bubbles. Then the beast himself burst through the surface, gasping and crying out. He lunged for our log, and we flew to safety. When we landed, Keeyaw was already hunched over on the banks, vomiting water.
“I couldn’t—” he retched up small amounts. “I lacked—I couldn’t—Forgive me.”
“Good man, Noah,” God called back in Its commanding, reedy caw, then spread Its mighty span and took to the air.
The half-blind crow flew after It into the woods, and they were gone.
This Noah—why had God the Crow called him Noah?—picked up the frayed ends of the vines lashed to his feet, severed now where the great God Crow had worked Its magic, and the creature spoke again to the air: “But . . . everyone? The innocent, animals, children, everyone? Then me, why not me? Surely there must be some other way. Cannibals, sure, drown the cannibals. I’ll even help. But everyone?” The beast Noah began yanking on the vines. “Oh, sleep, sweet sleep, why have you forsaken me?”
He kept moaning, but it all became gibberish as he hung his head in anguish with his legs still bound.
The old bird reappeared again a few days later, as if he knew what was happening all throughout the woods, including where we were and how to direct us to his advantage so he could steal a dog’s meal, or an egret’s.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked me from the scarred, doomy, blind side of his head. He stood like an old bull crow, proud but dim-witted, unable to realize that his aerie had long ago been taken from him.
I said, “Yes.”
“Do you?”
“You’re the one-eyed bird who keeps showing up in the woods.”
“But you. I hear the Mother of Many in your song.”
“You know her?”
“Now, be a good bird. And come along.”
And slowly he took off, humping and flapping with big heavy heaves, the frayed branches of his wings barely lifting him up.
“You know of Our Many?”
The thick old crow gave the impression of having heard me but also of following some faint, long-vanished wind that had a constant pull on his arthritic wings. To follow him was like abiding some dark change in the weather.
“I have a taste in my beak for the dead things!” he yelled. The Old Half-Bird shouted as if everybody else did, too. He had bad ears and leaned down toward my beak, then yelled, “But I don’t know how to kill them! That never stopped me, now, did it?”
Then he hurried ahead of me, heaving and flapping as always. He was not a fast flier but was steady and never slowed or took rests—which for him probably wouldn’t have been rests at all, having only one leg to rest on. At first I thought his wits had flown off without him. He led me to the long, watery expanse known as the sea. We flew past the edge of the woods, and the pastures of rock and sand until he was calling out over the great crashing noises. “There,” said the old bird, perhaps the only word he’d spoken all day. From the sea came beautiful swirling currents of air like a field you could glide on. It was here under the green ocean swell that I noticed other birds that swam like the old bird. Fat little offshore birds dove underwater and just raced below the waves for fish, unable to glide but flapping and pushing their heads against the salty ocean element. The Old Half-Bird was not as fast as these, as he pushed his head against the air, but he could go longer than any bird I knew. And if I squawked at him to stop, he only grinned back at me with that gory wound of an eye seeing me more clearly than any normal eye. That, or he just wouldn’t hear me, heaving and humping in a fight with the air.
Crow roosts on the outskirts of large cities have been estimated to be of a million birds or more.
6. The Phenomenon of Crow Leaves
No matter how far the Old Bone led me, the winds from the setting sun always led to the Nighttime Roost. We’d look and see a small band of crows, and we’d rise to become them. We’d find another murder of birds in the trees and circle down to them, or we’d just meet the others in the sky. Whatever bountiful and mysterious number it is beyond seven—that was how many birds we were, all flying in the same direction. As our numbers grew, so did our voices.
Soon we were a whirring cloud of black wings, filling the valleys and canyons of the sky. The far-off ends of our flock moved like a dark smoke over the treetops and the hills. The clouds of us joined other darkening clouds, and we descended, circling, flying back into ourselves. The trees below us called out, and their branches exploded into a confusion of crow wings that took off when we landed. When would we ever be done calling and bickering and preening and greeting and turning over leaves and ripping small twigs from their branches and filling the trees with crows? Long after we descended on the marsh of the roost, the clouds of bird wings kept coming, not in one straight descent on the Tree of the Roost but landing like a swarm of locusts on the outlying woods. On our own tree, the flock seemed to part, and many would avoid the same branch as mine.
“Do we have to be around all these birds?”
“Stay with me!” yelled Plum Black through the flapping and drifting of wings. “Don’t worry about them. We’re staying. You made it, you did!”
“Well, not the Roost, precisely,” said Night Time, imitating our father’s love of the Lofty and Gathered Knowledge both Cryptic and Commonly Understood. “But the Late Summertime Roost, frequented by vagrant
s and thugs. But you’ll make it to the Great Roost. In time, in time.”
Night Time nodded to me from his branch like a bird full of musty old crow-lore and peppy things to say.
As darkness fell, the last few birds lit over the swamp. They flew in sad circles trying to find a spot, crying out, where the trees already dropped, heavy with crows, and no branch hung unattended, and there under the full force of the moonlight over the water did our hoarse, needy, happy, sour voices finally calm to a murmur, and the lake water lapping the shores made a quiet rhythmic sound like the close breathing in and out of a mother as she combs and cleans the feathers around your eyes and face, one by one, even the pale ones, folding them into place, where they belong.
“Shhh. Go back to sleep,” said Plum Black. “Time for rest now. Time for sleep.”
Winter came, and it delivered the deep, tranquil sleep known as the Phenomenon of Crow Leaves.
The phenomenon occurs when the leaves of fall abandon their branches. Then the bare winter trees foliate at night with crows. Only then can we assume the lofty attics of the Giants’ psyche. Trees learn what it is like to travel far and wide and gather bright, useful knowledge of the world. And crows experience once again what is second nature to them, to lean quietly into the sky with a gentle, enormous repose, to spread their wings, this time not to fly but to gather those who can. Yes, trees love their green summer leaves, but in winter, without their Crow Leaves, they become lonely and depressed.
Also, we came to the Roost to gain a hook-hold into the vast knowledge of the world and to bicker over the arcane principles that held it in place. Here in the clash of nasal calls, I learned to decipher the many trills and squabblings of foreign dialects. At the Roost we learned of who had died, who was now oldest, who had braved a journey to the Tree of the Dead. We learned how to pluck an eagle midair, how to begin a storm at sea (by dropping a pebble from a specific cypress into the bay), what animal of the underworld looked most like a crow (the elephant), and what animal was spiritually most like a crow (the elephant). As dusk darkened to night, I sat in the branches heavy with crows and listened to all the stories that wove the world up into its illimitable fabric. And if you shimmied your way onto the Tree of Science, there all voices were hushed in the presence of those most venerated and learned birds whose knowledge was inexhaustible on any subject imaginable: that, for instance, of fish—fish that had a pebble in their heads, fish that hid in winter, and fish that felt the influence of the stars.