Читать книгу Song of the Crow - Layne Maheu - Страница 14

Raven and some crows go picking berries. Raven eats the berries. He lies and tells the crows that it was a band of raiders that took them. He even plucks out his own feathers and tries to make them look like the raiders’ canoes. The berry juice, he says, is blood from the struggle.

—Raven Gets Caught in a Lie, LOWER COAST SALISH OF VANCOUVER ISLAND

7. Into the Unseen

Gray morning, ashen fog.

In a whoosh of wingbeats came our father. Perhaps this time he’d made his pilgrimage to the Old Bone, because the news had deformed him. His beak seemed larger from having to deliver the horrid word, and the burden of knowing had turned him into a confused, lanky monster, shining like one of our family, only so many times larger, with wings as wide as the trees. One wing spanned our entire nest, and he hurled past us without landing. But the whump of his wings told us he’d stopped somewhere in our tree.

We could sense him in the branches above, waiting.

My Other cried out.

Then our father blew past us again, tumbling through the fog. He turned and lunged onto the nest. The news had completely outweighed his ability to land, and he warped the bowl-like shape of our nest, and Our Many wouldn’t be happy about that.

My Other and I both looked up at the long, curving mandible that I hoped would give us food and not the horrid word. But then I realized that this was not our father. Perhaps it was the Old Bone of the Holy Realm here to pass judgment. The fear of my Misfortune burned hot across my face, and the great black bird gave me his one-eyed stare of mirth and scrutiny. The eyes that peered through his ragged mask were predators. He gulped and his beard rippled—an awful, hoary rippling of feathers with each gulp. Then his beak parted and he gripped my whole head in the vice of his horns. He bit down hard, with a force I’d known only from the time my father had plucked me. Was he plucking? Or feeding? It seemed he was tasting me, then spitting me out, and I felt the pang of rejection all over again.

“Sorry,” he said. “You’ll need plucking.”

He spoke strangely, with a huge, slobbering accent. Still, the sage old bird beamed with pleasure. And I shrank into the nest, searching upward for a sign.

“Me? Me? I Am.” My Other stood himself up and opened his throat out wide.

“Oh! You’ll do.”

The monster’s beak opened, and down came his curved, obscene horn. With a sickening, slithering sound, the beak pierced right through My Other. Then the raven snatched My Other up with that eerie opening and flew off with him, leaving behind blood-stained twigs and feathers. I remember the heavy swooshing sound of the wings, vwhump, vwhump, vwhump, as he fled.

“Fear not,” My Other called out, clenched in the very horn of his death. “I’ll always watch over you.”

I thought that those were his last words, but as the monster’s beak cracked down on his tiny wing bones, my brave brother cried out to be fed, even as he was carried off to be eaten.

“RAVEN!” came the calls from my family.

“RAVEN!” hollered my father, who tore in from nowhere and speared the monster and kept after him. A whirl of black feathers erupted in the air, and as My Other was carried off in a tangle of wingbeats and cries, all that remained were a few feathers of the murderer, floating down in the fog.

Long after My Other was gone, my family shrieked and called and clapped their wings, going nowhere.

“Raven!” cawed my siblings, in calls that trailed off into disbelief.

“I Am,” they cawed, in the same way My Other had cried it, but with a longing and loss that happens when a bird goes to the realm of song.

Our father came in from his futile chase and opened his maw in a rage, but no sound came out. He cleaned the slime of the raven feathers off his beak, scraping either side of it against the bark. He moved to call again, heaving and furious, but no sound came out. Then he flew next to our mother and tried to calm her, craning his head sideways and crouching low.

“I Am!” she cried and flew in a circle around the tree.

She landed above the nest and cried, “I Am!” gaping down, looking through me and into the soiled part of our nest. She took up a stone of old excrement and threw it in a hard, heavy chunk down her throat. She circled our tree and landed above me. “I Am,” she cried and flew around the tree. She kept circling and landing like that, groping through the fog.