Song of the Crow

by Layne Maheu

  Perhaps the Old Hagbill was wrong, or I would prove her wrong, or the ignorance of the mad season had already proved her wrong. If only I could feed her enough, which was the only remedy she offered to her prophecy and the only possible escape. I flew to her far-off copse of trees, nearly dead, choked by vines and tufts of tawny weed life. Every day I flew to the Old Hookbill’s mountain, doubting her prophecy, and lit beside her, hoping to divine the source and reliability of her predictions.

  “They say that your body was caught by vermin and eaten while your soul was off elsewhere, flying.”

  “You see what is before you.” She whispered with long, trembling interruptions. “I cannot say what happens to me while I’m gone.”

  “When you fly into the future, have your reports ever been wrong?”

  “Many of my glimpses of what will be have yet to come about. Perhaps they never will. Yet we still have more future before us, do we not? Or some of us do, anyway. There is still time.”

  Usually the visions of Hookbill the Haunted brought a crow hope and awe, but her consoling was of no help and left me ill-at-ease. I was too afraid to learn more. Perhaps her predictions were more than just early-warning signals that could be avoided. I scraped the last morsel down into her horrid beak and took off.

  When I emerged from my thoughts, my wings had already taken me far out over the endless expanses, to the distant places where the wind ended and where it began. But even this cave, breathing in and out like the hot bellows of the earth, would be snuffed out by the flood. I searched the foreign woods for my old songscape and a tree that had long ago fallen to the underworld to become a stick in the doom of Noah’s nest, soon to float upon the face of the dead. I had to get back to that tree and that time, to feed in the way I’d fed Old Hookbill the Sagacious, the Woeful, the Wasted, trying to push food down that old hissing horn and into her ancient enveloping esophagus, red and convulsing, needy like a spider’s web. If I could only feed her, or any bird, fast enough, with juicy amounts large enough, perhaps I could avoid the oblivion in whatever form it might come. Maybe the flood wasn’t for years and years, or next season, or never, I flew hoping my wings might know more than I did.

  I flew through the drying season, and my wings grew dry. My feathers lost their luster, the purple cast of our family, and the black of my feathers turned coal-colored with dust. Rain did not fill the swamps, streams trickled away with themselves, and though the land remembered, water did not return to the cracked beds of its memory. The earth’s eggs grew afraid and did not leave the womb, clamped shut and dry. Dark pasture lands, green hillsides, and the tangle below the trees, all bleached. Only thistles and last season’s hollow husks cowered in the hot wind. Everywhere, all the broad world bred alkali, and the beasts who lived there came to the crow for help.

  The buffalo, with bones like blades, wandered to us from the field. “Crow,” it said, “you who imitates nature. Imitate the wind, so that it can bring clouds, and the clouds bring rain.” If the buffalo did say that, how would I know?—its lips discharging only the rime of famine. But I perched on its back and ate the mites there. Hogs came to us, unable to wash their hide, and laid themselves down. In the dust, one pig asked me to rid it of the ticks and lice assailing its raw wounds. I flew down upon its flanks and helped myself, eating what afflicted it. When I pecked at its festering scabs, it grunted and lifted itself, and I remembered the hog wasn’t dead yet as it let out an insulted grunt and waddled away on dainty hooves, kicking up dust.

  Even the catfish came to the crow for help. In the night, the walking catfish lost their way, and we found them in the morning on their sides, their skin cracked, their fins shriveled. They lay across the rocky lakebeds that held water now only in the fishes’ memory. There, we helped them on their way to the waters of the dead. And as the waters of the great lake retreated, we speared sticklebacks and minnows in the evaporating puddles of mud.

  Sparrows bent low to the packed-hard earth and fluttered their wings, bathing themselves in dust.

  “What if I see them during the morning?”

  “You won’t see them in the morning!”

  “But crows fly all day.”

  “Not your emissaries, you fool!”

  —CARLOS CASTANEDA, The Teachings of Don Juan

  2. Sleep of the Bloody Potions

  Only in Noah’s nest did I find abundance.

  I found the Old Bone there, too, perched in the trees as if asleep. Even his good eye was asleep. When I showed up, though, it opened.

  “I’ve been waiting,” he said.

  “Waiting?”

  “For the Winds That Bring Spring Floods. I don’t know why they don’t come.”

  “Spring was so long ago,” I said.

  I wanted to tell him it was because I worked to drive away the floodwaters of Hookbill the Haunted’s prophecy by feeding her. But I chose not to say a thing, because the Old Bone would disperse the spell, or my belief in it anyway.

  “Perhaps you’re overdoing it,” he said. “Sure, keep the floodwaters back. But let a little through.”

  “How?”

  “Spare me,” he said. “I suppose you’re going into Keeyaw’s nest.”

  “Why don’t you come along?”

  “It’s unnatural for a bird to go below the ground,” said the Old Bone. “A bird needs the sky above; that’s the place to hide from the beast.”

  “But there’s so much food there.”

  “Only a fool would crawl in after it. Still, I suppose I’ll watch over things and call out if anything strange happens.”

  “It never does.”

  “Never—see, the word of a fool.”

  Still, we sat for days in silence above Noah’s busy rookery. The ark was a land formation unto itself, while the beastmen inhabited only one small cave of it just behind their crude opening. The rest of their home was dark and empty, except for a few cramped stalls where they housed their animals and all the food stores below. All day the Old Bone and I watched Noah and his family walking in and walking out of their ark, walking out and disappearing into the woods. The fields of their rookery were penned in with rough fences holding their huge land animals. Every evening the animals were herded up and kept inside the ark, and every morning they were brought back outside again. But the animals brought in at midday never made it back out. The fires the beastman loved so much burned constantly within, or at least thin ribbons of smoke escaped here and there between gaps in the logs.

  Once I saw Noah come up to the ark with a freshly fallen tree, pulled by his large land animals. After he had dragged it where he wanted it, Noah sat beside it all afternoon, very contented in the presence of the enormous trunk, where he petted his dog. The more they sat, the more they began to look like one another, he and his dog, happy and hairy and panting in the sun next to their immense treasure. After a while it seemed it didn’t matter what they did or where they went; I knew I could go in and out of the ark without any of the beastmen knowing.

  “I’m going in,” I said.

  I left the noonday sun for the strange aquatic light under the roof of the crater-sized nest. Flying down below the woods and into the cave of the ark was always against my instincts, as if Noah’s underworld nest was filled with an element heavier than air. I was afraid to breathe it in but could no longer hold my breath. Down in the pitch of the oil-colored light, I watched the small window to the sky grow smaller and dimmer and disappear altogether. The light that filtered through into the lower rungs of dead trees was silty, like a thicker air that smelled of mulch and bark. The branches Noah used to furnish his hell house still had wild twigs on them, curled up and flecked with dead leaves. The leaves fell into the dark as I passed. My eyes and wings were scratchy from collecting cobwebs.

  Down in the lower compartments, it was like landing on top of beaches, dunes, and hills of seed.

  I ate.

  I stuffed myself so full, I couldn’t lift myself into the air if I wanted. I would need a s
trong wind. Then I remembered the need to take an offering to Old Hookbill the Haunted. So I filled my pouch until I could barely waddle to the next compartment, where I found the headless, sewn-shut skins of animals, used as bladders to hold Noah’s bloody potion. One of them leaked, only a trickle. I would take just a nip and replenish myself until I felt well enough to fly again.

  Instead, I gorged myself on the narcotic juices stewing at the bottom of his stores and was absolutely weighed down, with rocks for wings and stars for eyes and the stars whirled round my head. I hobbled through the wooden caverns dripping with bloody opiate that begged me to drink more. I fell asleep across the fallen timbers and heard the noises that all the trees made when they were alive, the whole forest, lifting their knobby arms to the sun with leaves that spoke of greenery. I could hear the creaking noises the trees made while they grew and leaned into the wind and leaned back. I heard the turning of the worm in their severed trunks. I would sink right here into the rot of the ark, where the roots of the dead things would grow round my heart and strangle it. And I had dreams in which I was being thrown across the darkness by voices. My eyes leaked so badly that my feathers stuck together and I couldn’t fly.

  At some point, the strange singsong of a human voice carried me up and laid me back down. I kept waking up to the warm languor of being back in the nest again, but a warmer, darker nest full of sumptuous sleep and dried naked bones to keep me snug.

  Still in a stupor, I managed to stand up and pick my claws over the corpses of birds yet to be plucked and eviscerated. I hopped onto a set of goat horns on the table and, looking down, realized there was no body attached to the goat’s neck. In the room’s source of fire and steam, a plump beastwoman stopped her singing. She shrieked. Her face was surrounded by red, sweaty hair, and her mouth lined with nubby teeth. She turned on me and might have caught me, except her plump, whitish arms were petting a chicken, both of them bathed in the steam of a soup. At that instant, I caught a glimpse of the fiery ovens in the next room over. There was a dark, thin girl on her haunches with a mortar and pestle between her legs, grinding down bones, and next to her one of the long-haired sons of Noah, the largest and oldest, wearing an apron and applying concoctions to a large flayed skin. All around me were the excruciating tools of the butcher—the bonesmith, hornsmith, lapidary, and tanner. I flew off into the darkness and searched for an opening in the dark, realizing only afterward how lucky I was that I hadn’t been injured or bound.

  When I returned to the sky, I called out for the Old Bone and lit on his tree. From his perch, the Old Holy One spoke.

  “I was sure you’d ended up in Keeyaw’s pantry. You’ve been gone for three days.”

  “Three?”

  “Let me take a look at you.” The horrible scar on his head trembled, as if he were bubbling up inside the ancient eye socket. “Well, okay, for now. Then again, you got Old Hookbill the Blind to look after you, and she can only see three crows anymore, that I know of. You, your papa, and me. But me, I’m fading. I’m growing too faint for her. You know what that means, don’t you? When a blind one stops seeing you?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “It means you’re no longer under her protection. It means, soon I’ll just sing my song, and fall from the tree.”

  A local crow developed an entire routine of barks imitating neighborhood dogs; he barked like the dog next door, imitated the sound of barks from a long distance, whimpered like a small puppy, and whined like a dog begging for food.

  —CATHERINE FEHER ELSTON, Ravensong: A Natural and Fabulous History of Ravens and Crows

  3. Hookbill the Haunting

  To feed the Old Hookbill took courage.

  More and more I found her melting back into the scabby tree she came from. She seemed nothing more than a heap of cracked feathers and a rubbery skeleton, all curled up among the glittering objects she stole from the beastman and carried through the sky. She had more of the glittering trinkets down in the stick pile of her nest. She’d lined the bowl of it with a mat of decomposing feathers that I thought were hers but that turned out to be the pale feathers of all of the Misfortunes who had ever come under her protection. I looked for my own down there, brought by Fly Home seasons ago. “Oh, they’re there, all right,” according to Hookbill My Benefactor. I left my offering on a branch below her cankerous horn.

  “No,” she said. “Preen me. Preen me, then feed me.”

  She opened her beak, just barely, as if asleep. I felt uneasy about pushing the food down into her papery thin horn. She could barely lift her beak, and I felt she would suffocate from the food I left there. As I nudged her, I felt her give way, and she fell from the branch as a leaf falls, swaying, twirling upon the breeze as if floating downstream. But she landed like a dried-out cow patty, ready to break apart into chunky flakes.

  I flew down beside her.

  “You?” she said. “Is that you?”

  “I Am.”

  “For now. Follow if you can.”

  “Follow?”

  Her words were as feeble as the weak rasp of her breath.

  “Where I am carried,” she said, “follow me there. But I can’t let you in, where I’m going. You’ll have to find your own way.”

  The offering of grain I had brought from Noah’s nest lay scattered in the dirt. I thought of gathering it up, as her last meal. But when I turned around, there was Noah’s dog, huffing and chuffing and all too eager, its mangy beard slick with spittle and dust. It woofed Old Hookbill up in its jaws.

  I flew up to spear the dog, needling it with my call.

  “Bite harder,” said the old bird in her scaly voice.

  As the dog lunged and bit, Hookbill’s feathers cracked more loudly than her bones, and that was the last sound she made. With the old rack of a bird in its mouth, the dog jawed on her a few more times, and then dropped the mess of feathers at its paws, panting. From the trees, I knew right away that old Hookbill was happy to be released from the suffering of her bird’s body. Her solace burned bright in the eyes of the beast that had changed, as the dog blinked at me, full of Hookbill the Erie’s weird, sagacious ways. With its nose, the dog rolled old Hookbill’s charcoal-stiff body across the dirt. It licked at the feathers of the dead crow a few times, then stooped down and lightly carried the withered carcass in its jaws.

  The dog turned and trotted down a path through the woods.

  I followed.

  It’s too easy to follow the beasts that toil across the earth on all four legs, or two, having to slog along step by step. With them, you’re stealthy without even trying. The dull, shaggy animal didn’t even know I was following. But old Hookbill the Heady would look up at me, using the dog’s eyes—eyes she inhabited now as the animal loped through the thicket, unaware.

  Once upon a time the gods were closer to this earth; once they walked among us and sat at our tables. But that was long ago.

  —LEWIS HYDE, Trickster Makes This World

  4. The Many Faces of Crow

  The shaggy mongrel carried Hookbill the Hollow, or what was left of her flattened corpse, back to the foot of Noah, where the beastman and his family were busy preparing their nest. In the trees above their rookery, I saw Plum Black. She, too, was following the dog’s trail, swooping silently from branch to branch. Also in the woods laced with smoke from the beastmen’s preparations, I saw the Old Bone and my father.

  Seeing me, the Old Bone spoke quietly, or what was quiet for him.

  “It was on a day like today that they brought the Mother of Many here.”

  Much of the nest was shrouded in smoke from the beastman’s fires. Above the flames hung large vats of molten pitch that burped and fizzled, making the sound of an evil brook spewing its bluish, blackened smoke that spread out above us and blocked the sun. In the funnel of smoke, the tree branches shivered and bristled, as if trying to fly away. Below were cauldrons of bitumen, pitch, and oil. Noah waved the smoke from his face to see what was in the dog’s mouth. He
made a face at the mongrel and then turned his attention back to his work. He dipped a straw implement, somewhat like a broom of fern leaves, already dripping with the black ooze, into a vat and slip-slapped it across the bottom of his nest. All of his sons did the same, turning the naked trees of the ark to the glistening, oily color of night. When the afternoon’s light broke through clearings in the smoke, it was magnificent. The logs showed through with a cast beneath the black glaze, now the color of shallow swamp water, then of copper’s polished glint.

  The youngest of Noah’s sons, who was rarely any help in Noah’s activities, moped in the bushes beyond the smoke. Then even he noticed something in the dog’s mouth. He watched as the dog placed the crow corpse down on the dirt and studied it—Hookbill the Demented, studying her old demented self. On a childish whim, the son picked up the corpse and dipped it into the molten concoction. Then he held her up over his head, thick with pitch. He made the strange whinnying sounds of his kind as he climbed the scaffolding to the ark and used her as a paintbrush. Feathers stuck to the logs. One of the other sons protested, and the two argued. Old Hookbill’s carcass became so plastered to their nest that the young boy just left her there—embossed, wings out, enraged, her beak opened in a screech, melting into a wing.

  Then Noah himself walked near to see what the commotion was about.

  “Now look what you’ve done.”

  I searched for the God Crow, wondering why I could suddenly understand the strange sounds of human speech. But I saw only the Hookbill in the eyes of the hound and she barked up at me.