Song of the Crow. Layne Maheu
“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.”
Crows and their cousins in the corvid family, ravens, jays, and magpies, have spent hundreds of thousands of years taking advantage of our inventions. . . . They’ve been known to perform pitch-perfect imitations of explosions, revving motorcycles and flushing urinals.
—MICHELLE NIJHUIS, “SHADOW CREATURES”
2. Fall of the Giant
“Fly off!
“Fly!”
It was our mother. But from where? Where? Who could tell with the wind chasing her calls?
I saw her, a few trees away. She appeared on one branch, then another, then in an altogether different tree. But it was just the yes and no of the wind heaving her perch and whipping her feathers into a confusion of leaves. Why didn’t she swoop onto the nest and stuff food into us?
“Fly!” she kept calling.
“Fly!”
So what choice did we have? Though I’d never left the deep of the nest, I reluctantly climbed up to the fatal jump. There was no way we could survive it, but Our Many must have known there was no way we’d survive the falling of Our Giant either. And to die at least trying, even though you couldn’t fly yet, was a way to fly off to the Tree of the Dead. Any death before that was no death at all, but only a quick flight into whatever fate befell you—flies and maggots and stiff feathers and dust. The only way to become a true crow was to fly. Until then you were nothing, without a name; flying was all.
My Other was still in the deep of the nest, trying to stand back up, while I picked my way through the hurling twigs and stuck my beak into the headwinds. They howled yesss across my face. They howled yes and no in biting, utter cold. I’d never felt anything like it. But then, this was my first experience beyond the bowl of our nest. As our tree bent, the underworld was thrown into view, first one side of our nest, then the other. I was so scared and astonished, I would have kept going if it weren’t for my enormous bony feet holding me back. Below was a mad sea of branches thrashing every which way. What lay below all the layers of bushes and vines I could not see. But I was hungry to fly. Or fall. Or eat the air. I had to wrap it in my wings, if you could call them that, just bare bones and points. For this very reason, infant crows are discouraged from the edge of the nest. Some just cannot overcome the urge to lunge out and grab hold of the wind and plummet, or whatever the feeling is that takes hold of your wings, even though there are no feathers anywhere yet to fly.
It was worse than I could imagine. Our mother still urged us out.
But I found myself awed and calm in the stinging headwinds and wanted to take in as much as I could before casting myself down into the depths of a short life in the unknown.
The whole world swayed on its stem, complaining.
There was no bottom to the world, while our nest was filled with stuff from down there, or so I was told. I looked and saw only the green hurling movement below. Until I saw a sight yet stranger still.
Through the flying leaves and broken branches, I finally saw him, the monster, the mythic, the beastman, Keeyaw. He was much farther from our tree than I had thought. Not an army, or a gathering of many, as I’d learn was the case with his kind, but just one, one beastman like no other, separated from the rest