Читать книгу Song of the Crow - Layne Maheu - Страница 8

Crows, and with them I include ravens, seem as though by convergent evolution to have something in their psyches corresponding to something in our own.

—LAWRENCE KILHAM, The American Crow and the Common Raven

1. Keeyaw the Terrible

I remember the nest that hatched me. My mother lined it carefully with the fleece of human and sheep, mane of horse, down of dogwood, but mostly the fray of twigs and grasses. At first that was the world to me, until I was strong enough to look out over the tangled latticework of twigs on the outside of our nest.

Then I discovered the sky, spread out above our cedar roof branches.

And from the sky came our mother’s call, low and urgent and gurgled through the broth of freshly dead things in her beak.

“Grow! Grow!”

She lit, a black ball of rattling feathers, scanned all around her, then lowered the quick clippers of her beak, smeared with blood and slime and victuals.

And my brother and I, we opened our beaks to the sky.

“Me! Me!”

We cried, naked and fierce.

“I Am!”

Until we were just blood-red little holes crying out for the minced guts of life.

Her beak worked in fits, shaking the foodstuff into us, then pushing it further with her tongue. That became all of the world to me. That and sleep. Sleep, and feeding, and our mother’s low mewing call.

Then I began to wake to other sounds, other crow calls, and our mother flew off to meet them. When the calls were near enough, I saw how the rest of my family would feed her, and how she’d dive back down to the nest and give us their offering. Before long I began to realize when it wasn’t Our Mother of Many coming down to us. The others were longer and more luxurious in the air. Our Many flew as if perpetually landing—the air and everything in it between her and wherever she wanted to be. And if she found our father or one of the other siblings feeding us, she’d look us over afterward to see if we were still plump and juicy, as if their inept feeding had sucked the vital juices from us. Her eyes told us she was the only one with enough patience and wisdom and past to love us, as if she were nourishment itself. Through the ragged fall of her feathers, her eyes peered down at us, cloudy sky-yellow orbs of concern, the only thing about her that was calm.

But when the others left and Our Many leaned low to nudge us, or cooed down at us with her horn barely parted and trembling like two reeds, a wondrous warmth filled the nest. A blue-black cast spread out and covered us like our mother’s worn patch of brood feathers, and sitting over us, she hummed out slow winding histories, or ballads of the afternoon, or long ancestral songs of nothing but names that repeated and trailed off and left me dreaming my baby bird dreams in a tree.

My Other woke me up for no reason—or the only reason—hunger. I found him ripping at the frayed weave of our nest’s inner bowl. He gulped on the air. “I’m hungry.” He clicked against the waddle. “I’m hungry! I Am!”

“Me, too.”

I looked up.

Above us, no mother.

No crow with worm in the sky.

Only emptiness.

Only a peaceable sun-filled blue. As if that were the sky’s natural state.

Then the sky sent a panic of bushtits our way, along with a lost little kinglet whose crest flared up into a red eye of agitation. He seemed even more lost, hanging on to the mixed flock. Their fleeing only excited my hungry brother. His eyes blinked, and his veins pulsed, and he flapped his naked elbows, ready to fly off to wherever small birds go. He wanted to eat them and become them and cry out their wee bird calls. There was no way he could have scared them, not with his round, splotched head much too big for him, wobbling around on a skinny neck without much control. His stomach was already engorged, but he kept stuffing it so that his twiggy legs could hardly lift him, which they did only so that he could get to the food before me. The points of our new pinfeathers did nothing to cover our gray and brown, liver-spotted skin. I laughed at the sight of him, but in pained recognition. Was I really just like him, so naked and helpless? No, worse. I was afraid of everything. A leaf blew past our nest and I shrieked and hid myself down in my own dung. But My Other saw it as an opportunity to fill his belly and raised his gaping beak to the sky, crying, “Me! Me! I Am!” as the leaf blew past, tumbling.

Then a disturbance took hold of the leaves.

The wind flew round in circles and gave no sign of going anywhere else. It grew in force until it shook the trees. They groaned. Their ancient arms whipped around in different directions, clacking against one another, making the sound of knocking antlers. Above us, the sky rolled up into a dark cloud mass and whispered along the limbs. Everywhere the wind said yes, first yes, then no, then yes and no in rankled argument with itself, pushing our tree as the sky and the leaves hissed.

A crow I’d never seen before hung onto the sky, blown sideways without making headway, calling, “Keeyaw! Keeyaw!”

“What? What do you see?” I asked.

Down in the familiar crags and burrows, I always asked my hungry brother what he saw. Because My Other was destined to be a crow of Pure Flight, at least in the eyes of our father. Already My Other could travel to the extremities of the nest and beyond, almost. He was an early hopper and climber and full of reckless curiosity as he teetered on the uppermost twigs of our nest. Above all things, our father valued this ability, as crows who possess it fly practically in legend. No other bird from our aerie had it. But My Other, he showed potential.

“What do you see now?”

The winds toppled him down beside me.

“Nothing,” he said, kicking his claws to stand back up. “I was looking for Our Many through the trees.”

“So was I.” I hoped it was our mother who’d frightened off the flock, bringing us more good gorge and spittle. “What’s taking her?”

But I already knew. Far back in the darkness of the egg, I’d felt the blows that landed in the forest and sent a tremor through our tree. I’d thought it was some dark force of the weather. But I knew now it was not only a beast but a beast human, Keeyaw the Terrible, doom of the trees, and I knew there must be others, all sorts of Keeyaw-looking creatures, chopping and mauling, driving a wedge into the pulp of the woods. But no. There was only one. One old, hairy curse on two legs, Keeyaw, the grim reaper of our trees, hunkered over the roots of the Giants, assailing them with his anger and dragging them away to the underworld. The thud of that beast working was like the struggle of my own beak, trying to muzzle my way out of the eggshell, or the clap of the flicker, drumming away at the bark, or the rhythm of the wind, my mother’s song, the pause of nightfall. The noise of him felling trees goes far back in my mind, to a time before sound and memory, where the boggy water never stirs.

I didn’t know if my hearing was getting better, or if Keeyaw was getting closer. But the crunch of his stone ax grew tremendous. With each blow, our tree quaked, and the wind scattered his hammering and brought it back again as if he were attacking all of the giants of the woods at once.

“Get up,” I said. “Get out there and look.”

“No one’s coming,” said My Other, kicking his claws to get back up. “He’s too close.”

“Close? He’s chopping us down.”