Читать книгу Song of the Crow - Layne Maheu - Страница 16

They may share the “cognitive capacities” of many primates. . . . To date, all the experimental results point in the same direction—in various trials, corvids [the crow family] have scored better than chickens, quail, pigeons, rabbits, cats, elephants, gibbons and rhesus monkeys.

—CANDACE SAVAGE, Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies, and Jays

9. Wind of the Long Journeys

God the Crow spoke to me, and no other bird seemed to know or care. Maybe Its Mightiness kept in constant contact with everyone in the same way that the wind washed over the woods and moved the trees. The morning’s wind came in pure and steady and made the trees want to fly. They flapped their branches as best they could, wishing they were crows. And I had to be ready, as the God Crow had decreed. Everyone has a patron wind that guides his wings. I needed one to fly and forget, to go to a land beyond Keeyaw, where I was no longer the Misfortune, where no one would know my face.

But in the plentiful winds, everyone forgot about me anyway.

Alone in the nest, I had too much room to hop around and scratch the tufts of sooty feathers that grew from my skin. I’d reach my claw toes over my head. I’d stand up straight and stretch my legs, pulling them to make them longer and working my wings, flapping and flapping so that the great beyond might take me to its promise. But just at the moment of release, I had the same anxiety I had when I looked out over the edge of the nest and saw nothing but the air and the leaves below, all turning and swaying above the endless underworld. It was a great fear in me. It was glandular, ancestral. It grew up from my skin like my new charcoal coat. All I could do was to grab hold of a branch, hold my wings out, and wag them slowly.

Over and over again, between feedings, at night, awake or asleep, I had the same dream.

I’d leap from our tree and keep rising until the world dropped out from beneath me. In the sky there was no forest and no valley and no human city burning on the horizon. I’d be lost in the clouds without perch and keep going. That, or I would fall and my legs would weigh me down like the bough of a tree and pull me under and smash my hollow bones across the face of the underworld.

My nightmare was upon me one day when the wind blew in brilliant and clear and pushed the clouds from the sky. The sunlight swarmed all around me in and out of the nest. Trees rocked on their stems and creaked until they loosened. This wasn’t one wind but a treacherous force of many hidden currents and names. Under the conflicting furies, the world was coming apart. All except my family who rode the invisible waves as I’d never seen them before.

My elder siblings dropped from the sky, and the wind tore them from view. Their feathers splayed like wild leaves. Seagulls soared in outrageous circles; starlings shot past in agitation as if the wind might scatter their flock. Farther off, my mother and father looped around each other, rising until they disappeared like ashes into the sun. Surely this was a favorable wind of pure sources.

Keeyaw was able to negotiate these superior currents and make his way to Our Tree. But the dreadful blows against Our Giant had no force.

The wind took the grim keeeyaaack and sent it awash. He flailed as if he were underwater, swinging his implement through an unction heavier than air. And my family shot past. “Fly,” they cried, and were gone, behind the bending trees.

“Fly!”

I looked down from the heaving nest. The scrub and grasses all trembled, pointing in the same direction from fear. I stretched my legs out again, elongating the bones so I could see out over the edge, and the instant I lifted my wings, the wind ripped me away.

Before I even knew it, I was gone.

Was I flying?

Falling?

I rose and fell at the same time. I tumbled. My wings worked too fast for what little they did. I smacked up against other trees and branches and whacked into a tangle of twigs, where I tightened my talons and tore at the cones and needles, breaking the twigs free. But I managed to hang upside down, sideways, right-side up, until I edged my way to a thicker part of the branch and cried out. The wind engulfed my cries in the oblivion of its sad siren.

The elder siblings, when I saw them, kept playing in the violent currents. They were joined by strangers and dove in groups, in pairs, in singles. Crows swarmed in ragged formation, more crows than I’d ever seen, diving, rolling, lifting into the caterwaul. Some of the strangers’ caws I’d heard before. Some were entirely strange to me.

Seeing my brothers or sisters, I called back. But to no avail. Like shooting stars, the minute I saw them, they were gone.

And though I heard him through the trees, Keeyaw seemed much smaller now, his threat like the trailing off of the wind.

I called and called.

But the wind ate my caws.

“Where?” Our Many called back. “You are, aren’t you?”

“I am!”

“You are!”

Like a black fireball, the welcome Mother of Many lit beside me, her feathers rattling. She clipped at my eyebrows and neck. “You are, of course. You flew, didn’t you?”

“I did?”

“Such a strong flier,” she said, covering me with crow kisses and the exaggerations of a mother. “In such a strong wind, the Wind of Long Journeys. So—” she took me in with a proud, wide-blinking love, “that must be your wind.”

“I’m hungry,” I cried, and she bit me hard near my eye.

“Not so loud. You’re not in the nest anymore. And you can’t fly—not well enough. So you must be silent. You must. Wait here. Not a sound.”

But where could I go? I could barely hang on. And she flew to a split in our tree, where she withdrew a long and drooping head with a spine attached. “Here. In celebration,” she said. “Your first meal as a crow.” I pecked at the catfish brains, all mealy-good with rot. She watched me with pure love, following every movement of my clippers. “I thought I was going to have to coax you up from the underworld, which would have been hard to do today in this wind, your wind. Look how far you flew. But listen,” she said. “There is the hawk. If you cry out, he’ll pluck your feathers and you’ll watch as he eats your throat.”

“The hawk?”

“And the owl.”

“The owl?”

“At night you must be absolutely still. And quiet.”

She gave me the last bit of catfish. Even bone—hard nubs from the prickly spine.

“Owl?” I said.

“Listen. Do you remember the raven?”

I nearly coughed up the sharp, scraping bone.

“These are just as bad. No, worse. They’re waiting for the time you’re like this.”

Just a few trees away, I could still see Keeyaw, but his anger looked foreign to me, foreign and mute, just as it had sounded when I’d first come from the egg.