Ka

CHAPTER FOUR

Years before Anna Kuhn’s death, the small farm and house passed out of her hands. The blind woman and her unwell mother-in-law found it difficult to manage the boy Paul, Anna’s son, as he went through adolescence; in the language of the time he was willful, unregenerate—bitter and destructive, impossible to control. A local rich man, a mill owner and big farmer, a childless widower, offered to adopt Paul, give him an education, set him straight, if the two women would sign over their few acres to him; they’d retain a lifetime interest in the place. Paul’s mother agreed. I don’t know if she felt pain in doing so, or relief, or both. The rich man was named Hergesheimer; he changed Paul’s surname to his, and sent him East to study. It can be imagined that he was a reckless and intractable student, but I don’t know. After going through medical training (not all that arduous then), he went off into the world for several years, returning to the farm the day after his mother was buried in the family plot beside her first child and Paul’s grandparents. He may have already adopted by then the long black duster he later commonly wore, and the curious black wideawake hat, the front brim longer than the back and pinned up at the sides to form a point. He may have been wearing these things when he got off the train, when he stood at the porch of the house in the dust in his dusty boots, with his gun cases and his satchels of elk-skin.

Dar Oakley—even before he determined that this big black-bearded fellow was the same person as the boy who shot at Crows—knew he was seeing an enemy, and made himself scarce. The house was no longer his.

Dr. Hergesheimer seems never to have practiced much; perhaps his inheritance sustained him, or his later business interests. At that time he considered himself over and above any other pursuits or occupations a sportsman. He favored what were called the blood sports, and first among them all, Crow shooting, at which he was expert even then, and which he promoted whenever he could. His private reasons for this singular pursuit or obsession were of no account; Crows being the most destructive of agricultural pests—everybody knew that—the shooters of Crows did well to shoot them, and could take delight in it freely at the same time. It was both pleasure and duty, Dr. Hergesheimer’d contend, less sport in fact than crusade.

In the years—centuries—since Dar Oakley had first come storm-driven to this continent, it had grown to resemble in some ways the lands where Dar Oakley had begun life, across the sea. There was no stone tower, no Dux and his cohort, no Abbey of stones piled on stones; but by now the Oak and Beech forests that had covered the valleys and broad lands in One Ear’s time had been mostly leveled, just as the old-world forests where Dar Oakley had been born had been leveled long before. The wide land had greened over as though it had always been treeless, open, arable. Scattered houses acquired company, villages were made. It became the sort of land that’s suited to Crows: wide, long views, with groves here and there for hiding and nesting in and flocking to in winter; still-forested hills where the remains of others’ prey could be found, at least till the Wolves and big cats went farther away. People middens where the braver Crows could get the endless People waste. Stock to follow, chicks and eggs, the yards unfenced where the Foxes and Fisher-cats too got wealth. At evening the light of the sun went out and lamps instead came on in window after window.

There were differences, though only Dar Oakley noticed them, or cared to make the comparison. The log cabins they’d once built, as low and rude almost as the winter shelters of Bears, had come to be replaced by houses of painted wood, for which planks were cut at mills—it was Dar Oakley who learned what went on in those places by the waterfalls, who watched the raising of the houses and barns made from them, heard the ringing of hammers. The white churches too where People gathered, from which came the sound of their voices raised all together, while their Horses waited, some wearing in hot summers the hats of straw that their People wore too.

There was another difference.

Far away and long ago, Crows and other birds had followed the sowers in the spring, who cast seed from their bags over the plowed earth, step and cast, step and cast, and the birds took up as much as the earth did. Not here now. Like their secret burials, their hidden lives in houses, these People hid their grain from sight, pressed or packed it into the ground with an engine a farmer sat on—a thing resembling but different from the gun-carriages that threw the black killing balls—and was pulled along by big shaggy-ankled Horses. It seemed that no grain, no corn, was ever sown, and yet the crop came up, and not in heaps here and straggles there as the sower threw but in long, straight lines.

It didn’t matter that Dar Oakley didn’t understand the principle of Jethro Tull’s seed drill. Crows care about cause and effect where it profits them to do so; they don’t see it as general. Not many days after that engine went around, and given good rain and no frost, the long neat rows of green sprouts would appear, bursting the buried seed and pushing up through the soft bared earth. At the root of each corn plant, the kernel that produced it remained: one small mouthful of yellow goodness. And a step away another, and another, until the plowed and planted land ended.

It was the dawning of the Age of Gold.

Of course Dar Oakley says that it was he who first pulled up a green corn plant, shook off the leaves, and swallowed the sweet kernel. That it was his long study of People back to the time of the Crow clan of the Longhouse people that taught him that this wealth was hidden there.

Well, perhaps. What was certain was that People hated Crows for their depredations more than any People anywhere had ever hated them. With the coming of the great cornfields a war began between Crows and People that would last a century and more, and in some places still isn’t won or lost.

By early summer corn is high, and of less interest to the Crows: they can’t easily get at the ears within their tough jackets. Dar Oakley and his kin and neighbors still gathered in the cornfields, though, and voiced their calls, because ploughed ground yields grubs, and Snails, and Mice, and strong Crows at least could tear away enough silk from young ears to get a bite or a worm; every opened ear would then spoil in rain. Sometimes their calling would bring a farmer with his gun, children running and yelling, a wife shaking her apron. “There they come,” one Crow would call, and they’d lift away, move to a farther field.

The Crows don’t remember, and neither do People, when farmers first tried to scare them off by making those false People to stand and stare, bowing a little in the breeze but never changing place. Dar Oakley tells how he’d stand watch and call, Watch out, watch out when one appeared as though suddenly standing up, with big eyes like the bird-costumed specter of the Wolves gang. It was enough to make most Crows stand off a ways from one, the braver ones still snatching a corn sprout here and there behind its back, then taking off. But it wasn’t long—not more than a generation or two of Crows—before the difference between a man and a pair of crossed sticks, a pumpkin-head with an old hat on it, and a coat stuffed with straw, became clear. The young were taught, who taught their young in turn. Look him in the eye, shriek in his face, give him a poke in the eye. You see? You see?

The Crows finally came to delight in the figures; though Crows can’t recognize the many images of People that People make, the use of this one is so evident they can, and it has the effect on their sense of humor that a pun has on some People. They still like to pretend a little fear at first, then go settle on its outstretched arms, and crow in its face—for Crows do crow, in delight at wit and surprise: a sound you’ll come to know if you watch them. As the corn grew high the comical People were propped up higher, or they were left standing and hidden by the yellowing stalks; come late summer when the farmers and the hands, the women and children, came out to cut and shock the corn, the scarecrows fell amid the stalks and waste, lost their heads and hands. Dar Oakley was alone in seeing in them all the gaunt skeletons in his story, the bones of One Ear’s brother, the ragged men on the ground in Na Cherry’s old homeland. He could be startled coming unaware upon one, as though it might lift itself on its skinny arms and turn up its face to him.

However it was—the final cutting of the forests, the temperate warming of the earth (if it was indeed growing temperate throughout those dry regions, as hopeful opinion had it), or the widespread planting of corn, milo, and wheat—in those years Crows grew numerous beyond anyone’s understanding. Farmers watched tens of thousands of Crows come to winter roosts, “darkening the skies,” clouds of them rising from and falling again to the trees or the ground in elaborate aerial ballets that observers could discern no reason for (they were simply sorting themselves out in order of precedence, and the more Crows there were, the longer it took). It’s easy to imagine the awe People felt, the horror, too: the heart of the country had become infested, and the infestation was spreading like a ghastly necrosis. A rage to kill Crows swept over the wide middle lands that the Crows knew as their own; town after town posted a bounty for a dead Crow. For a long time the Crows were ignorant that a war against them was on, and for all their wits and their cautions, for all the well-remembered stories of fool Crows come to grief, they didn’t escape the People’s fury.

The strange thing—People and Crows both perceived it—was that no matter how many Crows the hunters bagged or the farmers poisoned, no matter how long the war went on, there never seemed to be any fewer of them. More, if anything. To People it seemed more than strange: it was supernatural, diabolic.

Likely Dr. Hergesheimer would not have participated in such speculation—he had no truck with the supernatural; he’d dissected bodies and found no trace of soul or spirit in them. A dead Crow was a dead Crow. In his duster and black-billed hat he was a Crow figure himself. He’d work steadily through a day’s hunting with his acolyte hunters around him, cigar between his teeth and the black rags of shot crows scattered over the ground. At the fading of the light he’d go over each corpse, turning it with his boot, looking among the dead for the one with the white cheek.

Dar Oakley had not mated again. He was much taken, though, with a brilliant and quick-minded female, whose mate was a strong old Crow of quiet disposition. Dar Oakley hung around her so much one spring and fall that her mate got used to him, and Dar Oakley became for the only time in his life (as far as he can remember) a Servitor. Her name was Digs Moss for Snails, or Moss for short. (The snails story is apparently a funny one, but I couldn’t understand it when Dar Oakley explained it to me.)

“You really never mated?” she asked him, when first they were friends.

“Oh, sure,” Dar Oakley said. “But—well, you know how it is.”

The old polite formulation was sufficient, even though she really couldn’t know how it was, not for him. But he left it at that. Ever since his time as a herder of the dead, a night bird, he’d decided that in the day, in Ka, he’d be as ordinary a Crow as he could be.

Moss was among those (they can be Crows or People) who are devoted to the diurnal, to the this and that of a well-ordered life (to the extent that any Crow life can be well-ordered) and yet whose poise and grace transform those things to worth above all others. Moss never kept a cache of valuables, as so many Crows do—Dar Oakley had by then lost a dozen such, full of beauties he would always regret, but for Moss what she did each in its season, the eggs she laid, the young she hatched, the food she found, the flights she took (she was a flier of wondrous offhand skill, never a show-off) were all the cache she required. Oddly, Moss reminded him of blind Anna Kuhn: her unwasteful motions, her open heart, the simplicities of her daily round. Dar Oakley thought or hoped that he could learn from her to return wholly into Ka. It was all he wanted.

In spring it was his duty as Servitor to watch over her and her mate in their nest-building and mating, and he remembered his mother’s Servitor, and how he had cooed like a Dove over their coupling. He thought of the Vagrant, too, and a certain day with his mother in spring—but he was old now and ought to be wise, and he kept his place on a nearby bough and only called soft encouragements and admirations. When the eggs were laid, he helped Moss’s mate (Dar Oakley can’t remember his name, or if he had one) feed Moss where she sat day after day. He thought his own offerings were richer, but her stolid spouse took no notice of that, merely put what he’d brought into her open mouth and went to get more.

Stronger than any People calendar, than any succession of People fasts and feasts (which were already in those years detaching from life-labors, planting, sowing, gathering): eggs laid each spring and brooded. Four eggs of Moss’s five opened at once at the common time, and the new year began; the tiny beings (they weighed less than an ounce just out of the egg but doubled in size every week) had to be fed, their great pink yawning mouths as large as all the rest of them. Dar Oakley conceived daring plans to get good food in quantity from People farms, using elaborate deceptions and cooperations, and he fell behind in the necessary ceaseless provisioning, of no matter what kind or quality.

“You,” Moss said at the nest’s edge, without reproach, “were to watch, while we hunted. Where did you go?” She didn’t wait for whatever answer he’d give; was off again. All the pink mouths clapped shut and the dingy little nestlings effectually disappeared in the sticks and leaves of the nest. Dar Oakley looked down on them gloomily. He wasn’t a good Servitor; he’d got bad at being a Crow.

The one duty of a Servitor that he could do well, and better than any other Crow, was to watch over his mistress and keep her from harm. Harm was everywhere, and always had been; but Dar Oakley knew something about harms new to Crows.

There’s an ancient Crow strategy—not unique among flocking birds—of all for one and one for all: a Crow under attack by a Hawk in the air can call for help, and quickly there will be other Crows in the air, a tight mass of them, dodging in and threatening and shrieking; the commotion brings in others. The Hawk can ignore threats, but the mass of Crows going every which way, Crows nipping at her tail, confuses and distracts her; she can’t make a choice of one Crow to go for, and so (if the Crows are lucky and steadfast) she doesn’t get any. She might, of course, and sometimes does; but every Crow has an equal chance of living another day.

The trouble now was that the old ploy was getting Crows killed every day, and not by Hawks.

Crows anywhere within earshot can’t ignore the cry of a Crow in trouble, which was what made Crow shooting as a sport or enterprise possible. The perfected Crow-call—like a big wooden whistle—mimicked the common distress call with sufficient exactness to draw Crows, whose calls drew other Crows. Hunters hid in blinds, two or three of them, and with shotguns the numbers bagged grew rapidly (it’s likely that Dr. Hergesheimer, like other Crow hunters, favored the pump-action shotgun that John Browning brought out in 1893: more shots before reloading). The Crows could see People building their blinds at the edge of the cornfields or in open country, piling brush on wooden stakes or on chicken wire, but they thought nothing of it; just more human labor, meaningless to them. If the hunters entered the blind with their lunch pails and whiskey and boxes of shells before sunrise, the Crows wouldn’t know about it.

On a still, damp morning an urgent call, well-blown, could travel far. Crows would be overhead quickly, in crowds, all shrieking at whatever unseen enemy had got hold of a Crow. The shooters then had many targets, sometimes too many. And here’s the surprising—the dismaying—thing: so long as the shooters kept hidden, so long as the blued guns couldn’t be seen, the noise of their firing and the dropping of shot Crows wouldn’t send the others instantly away. They’d discount the noise; they’d interpret the falling Crows as Crows falling on an enemy, Fox or Owl, and join in. Even when they’d scattered, the Crow-call could bring them back.

“It’s not a Crow!” Dar Oakley would cry, buffeted by the mass of hurrying wings.

“But what if it is?” they’d yell.

“It’s not!”

“But what if it is?”

If the Crows could have listened to him, Dar Oakley could have explained to them about hunting and hunters—though not why Crows should have become hunters’ prey. But he couldn’t explain it to all of them: the flocks now were too huge, they covered too wide a range; they filled not one tree or two in winter but tens and dozens, branches breaking beneath their weight. So there were always naive Crows, Crows Dar Oakley didn’t know, for hunters to call.

But it was more than that. Any bunch of Crows will come eventually to recognize a Crow-call, and know it’s not really one of their own. Old wise ones will tell young eager ones; parents will tell children. Expert Crow-callers can vary the calls to some extent, but in time every Crow-call loses much of its power over a flock.

Every Crow-call but one.

Dr. Hergesheimer prized his Crow-call even above his Browning shotguns. The reed was metal, the stopper of golden cherry. The barrel was of two woods: walnut over ebony (I believe this is what Dar Oakley has described to me); the walnut was cut away so that the ebony below showed through, and the black wood was carved with great skill and delicacy into a Crow. A dead Crow, wrapped around the barrel, wings awry, eyes closed, beak open. This call of his could draw any Crow, at least as Dr. Hergesheimer used it, and not once or twice only but many times, until the last time. It was unrefusable. Crows heard in it the cry of a lost young one. They heard the desperate voice of a mate in trouble—not any mate, my mate. They heard a Crow mourning for a killed friend, could believe they knew which friend, even if that friend was alive and nearby. They heard the whicker of nestlings, far from any nest.

The Crow-call of Dr. Hergesheimer was hung around his neck on a lanyard woven of snakeskin; he called it a new Eastern model, scientific, but other hunters thought it possessed a dark magic they would never have. Its call could draw Dar Oakley even though Dar Oakley knew its secret. It was Death’s own siren, for as long as Dr. Hergesheimer possessed it. He hunted with it in the summer, when unwise young Crows in their first adult plumage could be drawn even if oldsters called caution; he hunted when Crows were in molt, stayed apart from others, and were harder to draw into the air, ashamed of their scruffy and clumsy old coats. He hunted in the fall, when flocks were dense, and Crows came in masses from the roost at morning, then passed over again at evening. And he hunted in the spring: that was when he could catch one of a mating pair with his Crow-call, and likely her mate would be near and rush to help her. Get them both. And be pretty sure their young would starve in the nest.

The young of Digs Moss for Snails grew through the spring, changing their plumage from camouflage brown to black, not as brilliant in iridescent color as it would be, breasts barred to keep suitors away, their eyes still baby-blue. They still begged for food, and the pink insides of their mouths continued to arouse their parents’ need to feed them; but they had begun to eat on their own and learn to fly, too. Short, clumsy hops that made Dar Oakley wonder how any Crow ever learned it. He’d follow Moss and the more daring fledglings to the margins of the Pine grove where her nest was hidden high up; she’d stop now and then for them to rest and gather courage, and set off again. She laughed with Dar Oakley—it was funny, it was heartening, it always had been, always would be.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s see who follows.”

She set off over the greening spring fields, and toward a big pile of saplings and waste that People had cleared there. One fledgling followed, calling, Wait, wait. Dar Oakley, suddenly troubled, went to a branch of the last Pine of the grove and watched.

An unseen Crow called for help.

Moss, hearing it, called in response, and so did Dar Oakley—the call welled up in him before he could stifle it—and Moss turned in the air, seeking the Crow in trouble. Her mate came winging in at her call, couldn’t have been far away; the compelling call for help came again and Dar Oakley cried with all his might, Fly fast, fly away fast, but it was too late.

Moss’s mate was struck first. Seeing him fall, Moss screamed and beat toward where he’d gone down. Another thud of a gun, and she twisted head over tail in a cloud of feathers and fell.

Dar Oakley raced, yelling, toward them and pulled up—nothing he could do for them—but the fledgling batted around the air that its mother had departed from, confused and crying piteously. Dar Oakley, dodging and twisting as though a Hawk were after him—an invisible Hawk he couldn’t evade—tried to push the fledgling away toward the trees, but it couldn’t listen or understand.

The third shot brought down the little Crow, hit but not killed, still flying, landing near the blind.

Dar Oakley, sensing which way the hunters must be looking—toward the woods and the nests—got himself around low to the ground and into a Poplar already in leaf. From there he could see into the blind and see the hunter: there was only one.

Dr. Hergesheimer, gun over his arm, came out from the blind, walked toward his kills. Moss and her mate were still; he gave each a glance and a kick. But the fledgling had righted herself and was staggering, dazed. Dar Oakley expected it’d be shot now, and wondered if his duty was to attack the hunter, distract him, maybe be killed himself instead. But Dr. Hergesheimer bent on one knee, laid down his gun, and picked up the fledgling. He examined it for a time. Crows were scolding now from out of range; Dar Oakley, too. Dr. Hergesheimer gently folded the little Crow’s wings against its body and put it in the big side pocket of his duster. He picked up his gun and set off, taking great strides, toward the road some distance away, followed by the curses of the Crows.

The obsequies for Moss and her mate that day were short and not well attended—this time of year Crows had duties to life, not death. Dar Oakley, crying loudly for his lady and her mate, felt a fury he had never felt before. He had known Pity. He had known Wonder. He had known a life past death. But this was an emotion unlike any a Crow had ever felt—as far as he knew, as far as a Crow can know what all Crows are capable of feeling. Dar Oakley now knew Vengeance. He wanted revenge for this, and he knew upon whom he wanted it, and he would bend all his powers to get it. He had yet to learn—but he would learn—about this cold drive and its imperatives: that it could take a long time to enact; that even when he got what he wanted, he would gain nothing by it; and that none of that mattered at all.

The remaining fledglings of Digs Moss for Snails still needed to be tended to, and Dar Oakley did that—his own hundreds or thousands over the centuries had taught him what he must do and how to do it, playing both parents’ parts. When the three were on their own—two males and a female, all now forever at threat—he began to travel. At first only around the circuit of Crows he knew, the nervous Crows of the local flocks that Dr. Hergesheimer had terrorized. And when he was sure they were with him—as sure as he could be, for Crows (like People) can listen and agree and be brave when the threat’s far off—he left the flock and went darkwise to new places and new Crows.

In all his many lives Dar Oakley had had to make his way among strange Crows, avoid being mobbed or murdered, take on the ways and words of others. He had had no single home of his own, which made him a little at home everywhere. Always careful to make the proper obeisances to the strong and the wary; always sleeping and foraging at a polite but not hostile distance. And, when he could, talking. That was what he did on this voyage: talk, when they’d listen.

About Crow-calls. About guns, and how hunters hid in blinds. What did they know, he’d ask these Crows, what could they tell Dar Oakley? Did they stay far away from hunters and guns? How did they warn young Crows that the Crow they heard might not be a Crow at all? They talked of these things at evening, the questions and answers passing from group to group, generating Crow noise that People a mile away could hear. Stay away is best, some Crows said: if you hide, you’ll be safe; they have to see you to kill you. Yes, if you hide you’ll be safe for a time, Dar Oakley would reply; but what if you banded together, went on the attack? No, no! If Crows ever could spy out hunters and mob them, they’d be shot even quicker! Well, maybe not, Dar Oakley said. A big gang of Crows might overwhelm a few hunters if they got in close enough, so close the guns couldn’t pick them out—why, they might shoot each other! Fly at them as though they were Hawks or Weasels, find them out in their blinds and let them have it, madden them with shrieking, spoil their day, steal their lunch, mob them as you would any threat—they’ll give it up. Maybe they will.

When he’d got a band of them thinking, and learned their thoughts, Dar Oakley went on. He felt, now and then, like those People the Brother had talked of: Brothers who walked alone from land to land telling their one story, carrying the rules for living and dying, winning over the strong and the thoughtful, who then won over others. Often he felt lonely: there were too many Crows in his life he missed. He’d go on.

He came to a wide region of treeless plain where there were no Crows, or at least no Crows who’d talk to him: singletons, shy and silent, not answering his call. There was a broad, shallow river as brown as earth, and a line of islands where water-loving trees grew—or rather where they had been growing, for all that remained of them were their trunks and a few large limbs. The tops had been lifted or torn away and were scattered leafless at their feet, and in the river, and for a wide distance around.

The destruction caused Dar Oakley to ponder, and to fear; he was reluctant to come close to it, as though hostile Crows kept him away, though there were no Crows at all. Far off across the flatlands a train crossed daywise to darkwise, a plume of furry black smoke, too far away to hear.

Two birds came and settled on the snaggled branch of a ruined tree. Ravens. It had been a long time since Dar Oakley had seen a pair of Ravens; he didn’t know what had become of them all. You could almost believe there were no more of them in the world, as though it didn’t suit them any longer and they were gone somewhere they liked better. But here were two, croaking in Ravenish.

He went closer, but not close. “Masters,” he said, and becked deeply.

The two turned to look at him, not particularly interested, but not moving away. Dar Oakley took that as sufficient permission and went to perch near them, though on a different shattered branch (what had, what could have, torn it in this way?). “Masters,” he said. “What can you tell me of the Crows hereabouts?”

The two Ravens turned to one another with a look that seemed to say, Has a question been put to us? Then one bent forward a little toward Dar Oakley. “Of Crows,” it said, “there are gnone.”

“Where have they gone? There are Crows everywhere.”

“As you say,” said the other Raven. “But gnot here.”

“It was a storm,” said the first.

“A storm?” Dar Oakley said. “Did a storm break these trees?”

“Oh, more,” said one Raven.

“It was a storm like no other storm,” said the other.

“How short it blew.”

“How loud.”

“But,” said Dar Oakley, “a storm will lay trees down, not take their tops. Was it ice? Ice will break treetops.”

“It was gnot Ice, it blew gnot Over but Up. Up.”

Dar Oakley tried to imagine this. “And the Crows? Was this a roost of theirs?”

Once more the two Ravens regarded one another knowingly, and turned to Dar Oakley.

“This was.”

“The storm carried them off.”

“Carried them Up.”

“Then all Down!”

They laughed their strangled Raven laugh, and ascended ponderously away.

Dar Oakley, alone, surveyed the distance. There were Crows elsewhere, surely, farther on; Crows and hunters of Crows, multiplying through the world as far as he could travel. Suddenly hopeless, he too rose and turned homewise.

He had seen, there in the shattered wood, the depths of People’s Crow hatred. But he hadn’t understood what he’d seen.

It had turned summer again when he returned to his home place: he’d been gone a long time. The Cattle had been let out into the pastures and the Crows and the Cowbirds followed their soft swishing tails, studying the dried plats of their dung for insects and worms, catching Grasshoppers and Mice stirred up by their big feet. Dar Oakley came to earth beside Ke Rainshower. “Say,” he said.

She gave him a curt nod. She hadn’t forgotten the gun that had not been a toy.

“Has that call been heard?” Dar Oakley asked.

“Call?”

“You know the one,” Dar Oakley said. “All us Crows talked about it, how it couldn’t be refused.”

“Oh that,” Ke Rainshower said.

“That.”

“Hasn’t been heard.”

“Crows haven’t been shot?”

“Oh they have been. Plenty. You knew Muleskin? Him. And Gra Brokenfoot. Ord One Egg. Others.”

“But . . .”

“There’s something new,” Ke Rainshower said, eyeing him. It was certainly something bad, and she seemed to blame him for it. Between jabs for bits of food, she told him what it was, the new thing.

It’ll be morning, she told him. On a branch protruding from a pile of brush or on a fallen shed roof, a Crow calls. It’s just an inquiry: Anybody there? Come here, come here. It’s a young Crow, a new Crow, and that’s interesting, so they come—hard not to. And when a few head that way, others follow. By the time they come close there are guns, and Crows go down, one, three, five. And when the unhit ones have fled, that cheerful little Crow begins again. Hello, hello! Jumping from perch to perch and stretching her wings. And the Crows return, cautious maybe, but how could there be danger? A Crow is perched there, not warning, not afraid.

And the hunters fire again.

“A Crow?” Dar Oakley said. “I’ve seen dead ones propped up to look alive, as if anybody’d be fooled. . . .”

“No,” Ke Rainshower said. “Alive. Calling, Come, come. Nobody knows how it can be, but it is.”

It was. It didn’t take a lot of walking and thinking and poking in cowpats till Dar Oakley knew who that Crow must be. He’d seen it crack its shell and come out into the world, had brought it food, had seen its first flight. “All right,” he said, and bent to lift off from the pasture. He could hear Ke Rainshower call, All right what? But he was away.

There were changes at Anna Kuhn’s farm since he’d last seen it: the corn grew almost to the edge of the yard, but Anna’s kitchen garden hadn’t been planted; the house was gray, its whitewash fading. And in the little grave-plot where Dar Oakley had first seen Anna Kuhn was something that hadn’t been there before: a tall smooth stone thing, pink or gray—it was hard to tell—that narrowed as it rose to where a wide-lipped pot with handles rested, a kind of pot he’d seen People use, and beneath it a cloth, its folds draped down the stone’s side. A ring made of flowers lay at its base, the flowers she’d always stop to breathe in, all withered. When Dar Oakley mounted to the top of the stone, he found the pot was solid stone too, and so was the folded cloth.

People.

He perched on the lip of the pot to look in, but it had no inside.

From the far side of the house he heard laughter, male laughter, which he connected to a wagon new to him and Horses tied up at the fence. He went over the housetop and into the big Cottonwood that grew there, whose branches shaded the yard that the porch faced. He moved carefully from branch to branch until he could see the porch and the People there. Dr. Hergesheimer occupied the long seat that hung by chains, his arms and legs spread wide. Others unknown to Dar Oakley stood or sat. And on Dr. Hergesheimer’s knee was a Crow. Dr. Hergesheimer put something in his mouth and held it with his teeth; the Crow leapt to his shoulder and plucked the morsel from between his teeth and swallowed it. The others laughed. The young Crow bent to Dr. Hergesheimer’s shaggy eyebrows, and one by one she drew the hairs through her beak, cleaning them as she would the feathers of a mate. Dr. Hergesheimer talked to her softly as she did this; then, laughing himself, he brushed her away. She mounted with a small cry to a perch of sticks that had clearly been built for her on the porch, and from there she becked and called to her beloved.

Yes, it was the one: the one who on that day had followed her mother out over the field, calling the begging call, more afraid to be left behind alone than to be under open sky. She seemed unhurt, healed.

One of those on the porch rolled tobacco into a white paper and put it in his mouth. Dar Oakley saw Moss’s daughter take notice of that; she stuck her head in that man’s direction, alert and waiting. When he took a match from a shirt pocket, her attention grew intense. So did Dar Oakley’s attention on her. The match—that little secret fire that People now kept about them—was struck on the porch pillar, sizzled and flamed orange, then yellow, and he touched it to the tobacco and shook it out. Dr. Hergesheimer’s eyes were on the Crow, a smile of deviltry in his black beard, and a couple of others also seemed to think that something amusing was up—and the little Crow, unable to bear it longer, dove to the man and with a neat, swift gesture that reminded Dar Oakley of her mother, snatched the burning, smoking thing from his mouth and flew to her perch with it. Everyone except the stunned one who’d lost his smoke exploded in glee.

The Crow, transfixed by her prize, turned it this way and that. Her tail spread and bent daywise; her wings lifted and cupped; her eyes were nearly closed, the haws slid over them. She applied the burning thing she held to the insides of her wings, this side, that side, bending her head deeply within. She was trembling with excitement. When the cigarette fell apart and the ember dropped to the porch floor, she followed it, hovering over it as though protecting it, putting her bill into the smoke.

Only when it was all out and cold did she return to her perch.

Dar Oakley now knew a thing about this Crow, and it was a thing he thought might be useful to him. The daughter of Digs Moss for Snails was a lover of fire, an addict of smoke: one of that widespread Crow confraternity that can’t resist the summons of fire, and don’t try to. She sat unmoving now, as though after great exertion, her bill open slightly and her body settling toward the perch. Dar Oakley felt an eye turned to where he hid in the Cottonwood—Dr. Hergesheimer’s; he’d felt it probing for him before he knew whose it was—and he slipped away.

Dar Oakley can’t explain to me why Crows who love fire do so, or what the experience of it is for them, but he says some always have, that it’s a part of Crow life, at least for those who have the need. They seek it out, they step right up to it, handle embers in their hard bills, let the smoke into their feathers and up their nostrils. I didn’t believe it, had never seen or heard of such a thing, but since then I’ve had an old hunter and then a logger hereabouts tell me, Oh yes, Crows are drawn to fire; you can see a Crow hover over the chimney of a stove, or stand at a campfire that’s abandoned but not quite out—they’ll lift their wings, pick up burning stuff and dance around with it, spookiest thing you’ll ever see—but they do say Crows are devils, now don’t they?

When he was first in the world, Dar Oakley says, Crows didn’t encounter smoke that much. Fires set by lightning were rare; so were People. A Crow could live her whole life and never see fire. When the lives of Crows and People had become intertwined, and People owned fire and produced it in many forms, devotion to it had spread. Old Crows who loved smoke inducted young Crows in the practice, but the response to the smoke and sparks wasn’t taught or learned; it came from the soul. (He didn’t say exactly that, but I have no other way to state it.)

Is he, Dar Oakley, one of them? Any Crow might like the smoke, he says, but only some will do anything at all to get it. And playing with fire the way Moss’s daughter did is strange to him; all other beasts, he says, are afraid of fire. He doesn’t say that he is. Moths gather at flames, and burn; People stare into their fires, hypnotized. Are Crows ever burned, burned badly? That old hunter who says he knows all about Crows told me that once he saw a forest fire started in a nest, a big nest of sticks: had some loving Crow mother brought home a burning brand for her young ones? Dar Oakley in my house gazes at the orange airs that dance over the embers in the stove, and I see him tremble faintly, his feet move in shuddery steps, his wings tempted to rise.

Why do they do it? What is the fascination? It seems to me that fire is the only thing in Crow life that has a meaning for them beyond the thing that it is: but I can’t say, and they can’t say, what that meaning is.

In summer Dr. Hergesheimer chained Moss’s daughter to her perch. She learned that she couldn’t fly off when the leather cuff was on her ankle, after trying several times, being caught by the chain as she rose and then hanging helplessly, flapping upside down, until the laughing Doctor lifted and righted her. So there she’d spend the noonday hours while he slept away the heat in the curtained house.

That was when Dar Oakley came to talk to her from within the Cottonwood. Hello, hello, she said when he first spoke to her, but that was what she said all the time, and it wouldn’t rouse the Doctor. Sometimes he’d dare to bring a treat for her to eat—a strawberry, a Grasshopper, the fat leg of a Frog—though always careful to remove all traces of it from the porch before he flew away.

“Good?”

“Good, good!”

“Good.”

He tried to get her to remember who he was, but was never sure she did. He talked to her of her mother, how good and beautiful she’d been, and how her daughter reminded him of her. He told her of her brother and her sisters, one who had mated in the spring and was raising young of her own.

“You should see them,” he said. “They remember you.”

“Oh,” she said.

Except for the love of fire, the daughter of Digs Moss for Snails knew nothing about being a Crow: what Dar Oakley sometimes felt he had forgotten, she had never learned. She’d never been part of a flock, hadn’t courted or been courted; hadn’t mobbed an Owl with a gang of wild young ones, discussed a dead animal with hungry elders, learned to play Drop the Stick. She still spoke in the whiny voice of a fledgling, though she was grown now, and she never would learn grown-up speech. Dar Oakley supposed she was stupid.

What she did talk about was Dr. Hergesheimer, whom she called One—the Crow designation for a high-status Crow whose gender isn’t known. One gave me a squirrel to eat, which One had shot, she’d say. One took me into the field and let me fly and see Crows, and I came back to One.

“You know that he—One—kills the Crows that come when you call. Don’t you?”

“I just say hello,” she answered. “Hello, hello.”

“Your mother and your father were two that he killed.”

“Oh.”

There being nothing more to say about that, Dar Oakley spoke of the one thing that he thought would catch her attention. He told her about the great fires that One Ear’s people long ago had set, how far they reached, how the smoke rose up above the treetops to meet the clouds. He told her about the thick smoke of shrieking trains that rose up full of sparks, how the cinders they threw off started grass fires in dry seasons, how the Crows would gather at the long blackened edge in the still-warm white ashes, lifting their wings and possessing the smoke in great draughts.

She listened, one attentive eye on him, but he couldn’t tell if she could really imagine fires such as he told her of or could only respond to fire that she encountered.

Or fire that she started herself.

Concealed once in leaves and evening, he watched as Dr. Hergesheimer toyed with his Crow, taking her kisses and tickling her throat. After enough of this, she probed with her bill gently in his ear and in his collar as he smiled patiently, and then in a pocket high on his waistcoat. She pulled out a match, a wooden match that she seemed to know had been put there, and Dr. Hergesheimer did nothing to stop her flying with it to the broad rail of the porch; there she carefully laid the match and put her foot on it. She pecked at it, at the red head of it, striking with care and persistence until—Dar Oakley was taken by surprise, wouldn’t have thought it possible—it burst hissing into flame.

She’d certainly known it would. Cautiously but deliberately she picked it up by the stick’s end; her stance altered into the fire-lover’s, contorted tail and wings lifted, into which she pressed or shook the flickering match, her eyes half-closed but focused till it was out. Dr. Hergesheimer could be heard laughing, uh uh uh.

Hunters tend to admire the prey they favor: to hold the prey in esteem is to increase the hunters’ self-esteem. Crow hunters all knew that Crows were smart, “wily,” capable of feats of insight that those who didn’t know them as the hunters did would have dismissed as impossible. They could remember faces of People who’d threatened them, and keep the memory for years. They could imitate Dogs, Cats, People. They could start fires.

Yes, Crows were smart, they all agreed: but the hunters were smarter. There were plenty of Crows who’d dispute that; but just as many, even proud as they were, who wouldn’t.

One respect in which People could never be outdone, not by Crows or by any other living thing, was in the laying of plans. All through his multitude of encounters with People, this was what astonished Dar Oakley most: how People could see forward to the days after this day, and perceive as though they beheld them the consequences of doing the thing they were now doing, if after they had done it they then did another thing that depended on the first thing. Dar Oakley couldn’t do any of that. But up in the Cottonwood that summer evening he felt scenes or pictures come and go as if they were before his eyes, though they were not before his eyes. Not pictures of what would be, but of what the would be was going to be made from: the match that Moss’s daughter lit. The smoke of a long prairie fire. The innocent calling of Hello, hello. Theft and precious things. The cigar of Dr. Hergesheimer. Spring; and courting; and mating. The dense autumn flocks more vast than any ever before, their cries rising to the sky, so multitudinous that no single voice could be distinguished in the sound.

Each day produces in all its fullness the day that follows it. He didn’t know how, but he knew that much. And if the right things are done or the wrong things left undone, what comes to be won’t be what was to have been. It won’t be the future that this day now contains; it will be another thing. He didn’t yet know what the right things and the wrong things were to do and to avoid, but he knew that it was he, and Moss’s daughter, and Dr. Hergesheimer, who would do them, and bring that altered future forth; and after that, nothing.

The days went on, and among the things they produced was a new People engine for Dr. Hergesheimer, and after that a new dwelling.

The engine was a four-wheeled wagonlike device that moved without a Horse or an Ox or even a Goat like the little wagon that the boy Paul had had long ago. It moved itself, as though it were a beast; it made a continuous growl like a beast’s, and a steady rhythmic clatter like hooves on a road, and its hot breath came out the rear. But Dar Oakley knew it wasn’t a beast. The Crows had seen, in the last harvesttime, a huge yellow machine that also moved by itself, creeping over the land, smoke pouring from a chimney on it; with slow force it came into the cornfields as the People cheered, and in the course of a day it ate all the corn, chewing and chewing and roaring and roaring. Then it rested. Then it went away, and the People (who had watched the whole thing) went in to pick up what it had left, which was a lot, and there was some for Crows, too, when the People had gone. This wagon of Dr. Hergesheimer’s was the same: a thing that moved by itself because of fire.

The new dwelling wasn’t new; it was the Hergesheimer house, a three-story house on a bare rise painted a dark purplish color, with details picked out in another color, the fashion when it was made. A large gray barn beyond, and outbuildings and yards. From it and to it more People came than merely the Doctor’s hunting companions; two were women, one apparently a mate. (I suppose Dr. Hergesheimer had inherited it on his stepfather’s death and felt he could then marry.) Anna Kuhn’s small house was shuttered and unattended to. On the porch of the new dwelling Moss’s daughter sat a new perch, or in cold weather could be glimpsed behind the large bay window. Dar Oakley watched Dr. Hergesheimer pile his new machine with his guns and supplies and set Moss’s daughter in it, in a cage of wood and wire, and drive away; Dar Oakley followed, but the machine went far and fast and he didn’t dare go close enough to see where they went. He knew what they went to do.

Another new thing was that when the moved-by-itself car returned days later, it brought back not only Moss’s daughter but the Crows that Dr. Hergesheimer had bagged: Dar Oakley could guess that the grain sacks in the carrier at the car’s rear held them. Black feathers were blown back in the car’s wake as it went up over humps in the road, raising dust. Once returned, and after Moss’s daughter had been lifted out and secured, Dr. Hergesheimer brought his sacks of Crows into the back of the house and shut the door.

Before, the hunters had simply left Crow corpses to rot away, or be eaten by scavengers. If there was a bounty on them, they’d tie the dead ones together by the feet and sling them over their shoulders or toss them in their wagons. Not now. Now the hunters—some known by sight to Dar Oakley, some strange—brought their kills, one or two or more Crows, to the back door of the big house, and went away counting money.

Dr. Hergesheimer had gone from hating Crows to wanting them.

But if that was so, why were the corpses then brought out in tubs from the back of the house, not by the Doctor but by others, and dumped in a pit at a distance, where they were sprinkled with something from a red can and set afire? Black smoke of burning black birds. Dar Oakley thought of the land under the Abbey on the island that he had entered with the Brother, the burning pits where the unlucky souls of People were thrust, blackened and distorted, at once dead and not. That was in Ymr, where such things could be. These Crows were dead, dead as dead. Nevertheless he was appalled: the dead Crows, moved by the force of flames rising, seemed to try to escape. He wouldn’t watch—no Crow could—and went away.

Soon he came back again.

This is the patience of vengeance: when he wasn’t eating or sleeping, Dar Oakley was watching the Hergesheimer place and noting what went on there. It was boring but compelling. As winter deepened he saw Moss’s daughter set out on her perch less often; it was harder here than at Anna Kuhn’s house to get near to her without being seen, and it wasn’t the time yet or the place for the Doctor to see him. Snow fell thinly and the wind carried it over the flat farmlands and piled it in drifts and heaps; it blew from the peaked roofs of the purplish house like plumes of smoke. Crows ceased to be brought or burned at the house, but one warming day a wagon drew up to the back side of the house, and the driver and Dr. Hergesheimer in his shirtsleeves brought out wooden crates and loaded them into the wagon, crates filled with bottles packed in straw. One box cracked as it was being put on the wagon, and a few bottles fell out; Dr. Hergesheimer in a fury shouted at the wagoner. Money changed hands. The wagon departed, and Dr. Hergesheimer, breathing cold clouds, went inside.

When he thought it was safe, Dar Oakley let himself down and examined the remains of the bottles. The black stuff they had contained stained the snow; Dar Oakley tasted it. It was the bitterest thing he had ever touched to his tongue. Yet something in the taste was known to him, something that tasted of the burning of the Crow bodies. It was the same thing, whatever thing that was.

A noise in the house caused him to rise away.

Dr. Hergesheimer’s Genuine Pot-A-Wottamie Crow-Gall Digestive Bitters and Blood Strengthener. That was what must have been in the bottles. How do I know this? Because an advertisement for it appears in the pages of the Farmers’ Cyclopedia of 1915, which I acquired along with other books of no value when the local library gave up at last and cleaned its shelves and basements. There are ads for a lot of things in this fat, cheaply printed thing: Browning shotguns, chicken-wire fencing, dynamite for stump removal, seed, steam harvesters to hire. And medicines, which was what Dr. Hergesheimer’s tonic was advertised as being. Besides the stylized Crow on the label, there is the profile of an Indian with black feathers in his hair, facing a black-bearded man in a high collar and cravat. A tiny faucet has been let into the Crow’s middle, from which a black drop descends. The Crow’s face is distorted into a strange patient ecstasy, with blinkered eyes: a face the Doctor had certainly seen many times. A bottle cost a dollar; you could get a dozen for ten dollars. It differs—I think this can be said—from nearly all other patent medicines of its time in containing at least in part what it claimed to contain: bile from the gallbladders of Crows.

Spring: courting, mating. Mates seeking out mates in the dispersing flocks, thinking of building. All Crows are capable of things in that season that they are not in other times, heroic things, surprising things. Dar Oakley knew that well enough. He also knew that the changes he felt occurring in himself were happening now for the first time to the daughter of Digs Moss for Snails—or would happen if a male was there. And knowing that, and feeling as he felt, he perceived what he could or would do next. It was unlikely, hardly possible, but it was as though he could see himself doing it, see out of his eyes today what he would see tomorrow; as though what might be done had been done already.

She was still shut up in the house in this season. Crow bodies were warming now within, but cold rain still fell and froze. Springs had been warmer in the land of his birth.

He could see her, when he dared to come close enough, behind the large window on the darkwise side of the house; when he perched on the ledge of the window and rapped on the glass, her head turned his way, and she lifted her wings as though to go to him, but then remembered she couldn’t: the leather shackle that tied her to the perch was on her leg. Still he performed for her, his body moving in what for Crows is the equivalent of making faces. On each day thereafter he brought a gift and laid it on the window ledge. She studied the gifts, though she couldn’t have them, pointing her face toward this one or that one: a brass bullet casing, a fragment of glass, a bent nail, a tarnished silver thimble. He’d lift one or another of them, change their arrangement. Yours, his stance would say.

But he’d have to do more. The time would soon come when she was no longer able to be wooed, when for all his gifts and charms he could no longer win her and carry her off: not in the mood. He’d have to get into the house, and soon.

How Crows can do things that astonish People—appear where they shouldn’t be, come into possession of things they can’t have got—isn’t really different from how Rats or Raccoons or even Cats do similar things: by persistence, constant investigation, endless trial and error. When People find that an animal has done something apparently impossible, they are seeing just the end of a long, secret process. Dar Oakley had come to know that house in ways even its inhabitants didn’t, every loose board and minute hole and fallen brick, every door that was opened to admit this person or that and when and how often, and they never caught him at it. He gave up on each possibility that he couldn’t use and then returned to it again and then again just to be certain, while keeping all the others in memory. So when at dawn one of the females went out of the kitchen with a pail in each hand for the Pigs, Dar Oakley knew she would leave the door open behind her; he was there and could slip in behind her back.

He was inside. He knew houses: how the ways within them twist and turn, how the ceiling hangs over the head oppressively. And he knew just where Moss’s daughter was: past this darkwise place, through this door ajar.

She was delighted to see him; she wasn’t a Crow who knew what was likely and what was unlikely for Crows to do. “What did you bring?” she asked.

“I brought myself,” Dar Oakley said. “All yours.” And he becked deeply. And Moss’s daughter, aflood with what it is that makes these things unrefusable, returned that beck as well as she could from the perch, and Dar Oakley becked again, and she again, and cooed a certain familiar coo. She may not have known what she did, but she knew how to do it.

The perch she sat on in this room was wider than the one outdoors. It was a ring perch, meant (I’d suppose) for a parrot now gone. With a quick hop Dar Oakley was beside her on it. The sky beyond the window was brightening dangerously. Dar Oakley studied the thing wrapped around her darkwise ankle with first one eye and then the other. He paused to respond to her sounds, to nuzzle and groom her, and then he bent again to the leather strap and the thongs that held it tight. Studied it with his bill, tugging and poking. Meanwhile Moss’s daughter began grooming the feathers of his head, and he paused to make sounds of appreciation. She spoke, and he grasped her bill in his, and shook it in play. The course eternal, except that at the same time he was busy undoing the strap that held her. No, it was too hard. He hung upside down from the ring and tried the thongs instead where they wrapped around the perch. Better. He drew one through the knot like a Robin pulling up a worm.

Footsteps suddenly loud in the house.

“Not One,” Moss’s daughter said.

Dar Oakley pulled out the other thong as quick as he could and dropped from the ring into a mass of plants and furnishings in a corner just as the female who’d taken slops to the Pigs came in. She stood for a moment in the dim room, listening, turning her head slowly as People do to see the thing they think they heard. Then—maybe a bit of sun struck the window ledge—she could see something that surprised or puzzled her; she went to the window, lifted the sash, and looked down at Dar Oakley’s love offerings. Mine, said Moss’s daughter softly. The woman shot a glance at her—Dar Oakley concealed behind the aspidistra thought she’d understood the Crow’s word, but of course she hadn’t. She turned again to the things on the ledge, leaned out to touch one of them, another one, with a sort of distaste or revulsion. Then she swept them all up, thrust them into the pocket of her apron, and bustled purposefully from the room without shutting the window.

Now, Dar Oakley whispered. Now, fly with me.

I’ll be caught and fall.

No. You won’t fall. I won’t let you fall.

One will come, One will put me back.

No. We’ll fly, out the window, there, out into the air.

I can’t. I won’t.

More footsteps now in the house, different ones, falling harder, louder, faster. Dar Oakley swept up behind Moss’s daughter, wings beating, driving her from the perch. With a cry she fell, but her wings supported her; she rose. A sudden flurry of Crow in the air of the papered and carpeted parlor, at once love and struggle, and he turned her the way she had to go. In something like a Crow version of holding hands they flew, almost touching wingtips, to the window, and there he had to lead her out—she was trying to turn back, saying, One, One—but then it was done, they were flying daywise into the bright air and the morning. Behind them they heard a cry, an animal bellow, a cry of rage. Dar Oakley didn’t turn to look back, and Moss’s daughter, crying too, followed him. And Dar Oakley had a sudden thought: I found a way into the house of a great black Crow and stole the Most Precious Thing therein, and I will be pursued. He seemed to have lived so long that he had come to the end of things possible to happen, and from now on what would happen was only what already had.

Hello, hello, cried Moss’s daughter, joyfully; hello, hello, flying high and free with her mate toward the last of the once-great Beech-wood.

This I hadn’t expected a Crow, or Dar Oakley, to be capable of: bending a natural urge to other uses, fooling innocence. Machiavellian. Had he learned too well from People? Had his urge for revenge purged him of decencies that even a Crow might be expected to feel? I had to wonder. Did he think, as he and she courted and nested, of Digs Moss for Snails, whose Servitor he had been, the beloved mother of this Crow that he had ruthlessly made his, and did the thought cause him regret, or shame for what he’d embarked on?

Well, no, I guess not. It seems that—though they mate for life and defend and support their mates fiercely—Crows aren’t all that faithful in practice; there are Crow philanderers, Crow hussies, and what we label incest is meaningless to Crows (and so is innocence). Of course Moss’s daughter wasn’t actually Dar Oakley’s; and though Dar Oakley had seduced her with a purpose other than love, as far as I can tell from asking him, he hadn’t just pretended to feel something in Dr. Hergesheimer’s parlor that he didn’t really feel: I think he and all Crows are incapable of that. Anyway Dar Oakley was mated with the daughter of Digs Moss for Snails in every Crow way; pretty soon they started building a nest together. Their first attempt at a family failed, but that’s not unusual for a new bride only a year old. They wouldn’t remain mates for long, but that wasn’t because of anything within the ethos of Ka, or within Dar Oakley’s false heart, either.

At the end of the summer molt, when Crows are spry and happy again, when the job of mating and raising young has gone by successfully or otherwise, when the winter roost is assembling and Crows are choosing to go in this direction or that, to this gathering or that one, then Crow hunting has its high season.

Dr. Hergesheimer had been little seen by any Crow that summer. Whether he’d hunted somewhere else or hadn’t hunted at all—only one Crow wondered about that; but Dar Oakley had flown far and had no news of him. That was odd, but by the time he appeared again in the demesnes of Dar Oakley’s flock, Dar Oakley had been able to prepare, and—more importantly—to see that as many Crows as he could inculcate, induct, persuade, and win over were also prepared.

When he came, Dr. Hergesheimer came alone, which was strange. He drove in the move-by-itself wagon, which slowly bumped and coughed its way over the stubble and the furrows and then through the tall grasses up to the edge of the Beech grove, the roost of Dar Oakley’s great flock. In the open bed in the back were no guns and none of the usual equipment; it was empty except for one long tool and two smallish red boxes. For a long time after he had stilled the truck he only sat in it, a black lump, hands on his knees. The Crows were largely gone at that hour, out in all directions foraging in the drought. The Beech leaves were already turning. Dar Oakley, out of sight, grew restless watching the Doctor do nothing at all; he had to struggle with an impulse to fly out above him, show his face.

Not yet.

Dr. Hergesheimer at last got out of the truck and went to the rear to remove the tool and the two red boxes. Carrying them, he walked out across a dry streambed to where the trees grew most densely. He put down the boxes, and with the tool he bored a hole in the earth—that was what this tool was for, one of the countless tools that People used, each for a different purpose. When he had pulled up the augur and knocked the dirt from it, he knelt to open the boxes, and from them he took a number of red cylinders and carefully slipped them one by one into the hole, tamping each one down with a willow stick he picked up. The last red cylinder he messed with awhile for reasons Dar Oakley couldn’t perceive, and then put it, too, into the hole, and from it he uncoiled a long thick thread or thin rope, black and stiff, which he laid out across the ground, clearing space in the grass and earth for it to lie flat and straight. That was tempting; Dar Oakley wondered if he ought to drop down and tug at it, pull it away, but thought not. Let him see more of what the Doctor was up to.

When all that was done, Dr. Hergesheimer walked back to his wagon and sat on its footstep. He took a flat bottle from one pocket and bread from another and ate and drank. The shadows of the trees lengthened over the grass.

Dar Oakley had never understood why Dr. Hergesheimer had for so long hated him. Actually, he never tried very hard to understand it; he knew the boy and the man hated Crows. But it was Moss’s daughter who had revealed to him that it was he alone, Dar Oakley, that the Doctor sought. How could she have learned such a thing, not being a particularly smart Crow? It took her a while to make clear to him how Dr. Hergesheimer would point to his cheek when he talked to other hunters or with farmers whose fields he crossed with his guns. White cheek, the gesture meant, she was sure of it. With her in the field where she called Crows to their deaths, he’d point at his own face—white cheek—and then to the sky and the trees where Crows were and where the Crow he wanted might be.

However that was, Dar Oakley was certain that no matter how much the Doctor had hated him before, he hated him more now, when the little Crow he’d caught and raised had been stolen from him. Perhaps that was why he sat there unmoving: he was waiting for the Crow he loved to return to him.

It was now the time the Crows began to return to the trees. Dr. Hergesheimer roused, stood, and lifted the Crow-call from where it hung on his breast, wetted the stopper, and called. The call wasn’t Distress, it wasn’t Rally, it was a simple Here I am, where are you? Dr. Hergesheimer blew with his hands cupped at the end of the call, moving them expertly to control the air flow. It always amazed Dar Oakley that the sound made by a Crow-call—even when blown by an expert, even the sound made by the Doctor’s magical call—was actually not the sound made by any living Crow, and yet it could reach deeply and instantly into Crow hearts. Into his, Dar Oakley’s, too. Crows were already answering, Crows who were making for the Beech grove, calling, I’m coming, I’m near; their responses earned other calls from other Crows. From far off they could see that the hunter was no threat to them, had no gun.

The roost was filling.

Dr. Hergesheimer had let his Crow-call fall and lit a cigar when both he and Dar Oakley saw Moss’s daughter come in. She cried to see him—perhaps she knew him by the smoke, but she certainly knew him. Hello, hello, still the fledgling’s seeking cry. She left the crowd she’d come in with and fell, crying all the while, to where the Doctor sat. He laid the cigar on the stepping-place of his wagon, and lifted up his hand to her—you could see the grin within his black beard. Dar Oakley called to her, Come away, come, danger, danger, but Crow calls don’t carry names—they’re a different order of speech—and Dar Oakley also didn’t want to alarm the gathering Crows so that they scattered. Because this was their moment, confused and unsettling as it had become.

He descended from his perch and beat down toward where the Doctor stood. Shrieking defiance, he turned his white cheek to him. It’s me, here I am, he cried in challenge, in fury: all the fury of his father finding the Vagrant with Mother, the fury of Va Thornhill’s Crows in the rout of the Wolves gang. He hadn’t actually been able to imagine very exactly what would happen after this challenge, since he’d formerly expected a gun, a pursuit, and now that was out. He settled on the ground, staring down his enemy first with the darkwise, then the daywise eye, challenging him to come on.

There was no way to understand what the Doctor did then: he laughed a big, warm laugh. He cast off Moss’s daughter and took strides toward Dar Oakley as though to converse with him. He even waved his hand. Like a shy female with an aggressive suitor, Dar Oakley lifted off and then settled again not far off, closer to the trees. Dr. Hergesheimer followed. Did he mean to capture Dar Oakley with his bare hands? The Crows in the trees were calling, querying, warning, changing places, the Biggers closer, others scolding from farther off.

Well, this’ll do, Dar Oakley thought, this’ll do. Dr. Hergesheimer came closer, talking in words Dar Oakley didn’t understand but pressing him farther into the grove, sometimes shooing him like a farmwife shooing chickens when he seemed to want to go elsewhere. But elsewhere wasn’t where Dar Oakley wanted to go. What must happen was happening, though for no reason Dar Oakley knew: Dr. Hergesheimer was within the home place of a multitude of Crows.

At the same time he first smelled the smoke.

While Dar Oakley and Dr. Hergesheimer were doing their strange dance or seduction, Moss’s daughter had picked up the Doctor’s abandoned but still burning cigar in her bill and carried it to the grove of trees, and there taken it to earth near where the Doctor’s black thread ran out, to play with it, have her way with it. The grass there, dry with drought, caught quickly. Almost the last thing on earth Dr. Hergesheimer saw was the smoke rising from the grass, spreading, his beloved Judas Crow hovering in delight over it, the dull fire advancing. He ran that way with a cry of horror, then saw it was too late and turned to run the other way. But now Dar Oakley gave a cry, one cry, all his force and power put into it, a cry no Crow could refuse to answer, and the Crows, led by the Biggers Ke Rainshower, Long Bill, Fa Hawthorn, and a dozen others all calling with all their might, descended on him with more following, Dar Oakley, too, crying, Strike! Strike! Eyes! Eyes! Let One have it! Don’t stop! The Doctor stalled, astonished; he flailed at the attacking birds, who executed their drill flawlessly, close-packed yet never touching, a corps de ballet swirling around their principal. His hat was lost. The noise was terrific. It was no mob; Dar Oakley had taught them well, there was no dodging in and away as at a sleepy Owl. Do harm, do harm! Get One! They got One: they stabbed Dr. Hergesheimer’s ears, they got his eyes, or at least blinded them, though he covered them with his bleeding hands. Maddened with fear he stumbled, roaring and batting at attackers he could no longer see. He had to get away from them, just get away, and for a moment he did break away from them and ran.

But, blinded and disoriented, he ran the wrong way: within the grove, not out.

Dar Oakley had seen the sparkle of strange fire in the grass, creeping steadily as though with a will of its own along the line of string that Dr. Hergesheimer had laid down. He had a moment in the uproar to puzzle over it, snapping and popping like outsize matches going off one after the other. Moss’s daughter was following it along, fascinated, oblivious to everything else, the screaming Crows, the bellowing Doctor. She’d drop close to it, land by it, follow it, ascend again. It was fire in perfection.

The Doctor had given up trying to reach that sparkle; he was lost among the trees, bumping into them, shying from the sound of beating wings, reaching out to fend off Crows, who had mostly ceased to torment him and only sat above him and cursed. The choking smoke of the grass fire had turned that way in the wind; the Doctor stumbled over a root and fell facedown, struggled to rise, guarding his bloody head. Dar Oakley almost felt pity for him, a pity that was altogether unlike Pity, and delicious to feel.

The fuse reached the charges in the hole.

The explosion must have been heard for a mile, but Dar Oakley didn’t hear it, or see it, or feel the blast of it; only for an endless moment—this anyway is what he says—he was up in the open air with Dr. Hergesheimer beside him, the two of them immobile and alone in silence, their two souls bound for different states. Then nothing.

So Dar Oakley got his revenge. His opponent was destroyed, which was what he’d wanted and sought, and which—he had been sure—would be good for Crows. But many Crows had also been blown apart, their fragments mixed with the Doctor’s, perhaps: the daughter of Digs Moss for Snails, certainly, and some number of Dar Oakley’s friends and relations, he couldn’t know which because he was dead, as dead as they were, whichever they were. This had not been foreseen in Dar Oakley’s plan, or what counted for Dar Oakley as a plan. As in many of the great tales of vengeance achieved, Dar Oakley’s vengeance destroyed the avenger as well.

The dynamite that Dr. Hergesheimer had planted under the Beeches by the dry streambed was also revenge, and his too turned back on him. Certainly he killed instantly the Crow he had so long hated, along with a number of other Crows and himself. There were farmers in that long war who used dynamite and claimed a hundred, a thousand dead Crows from a few standard sticks of Dupont Red Cross planted in the right places. Even Crows who’d got used to evading every other mode of attack, every other device for Crow reduction, couldn’t defeat that one. The only problem for the farmers was that when the dynamite had done its work, and the shattered tree limbs and the dead Crows were piled and burned, in the next season there would still be Crows, and in the next season more, until there were just as many as before. My Farmers’ Cyclopedia tells of one farmer who, after setting off dynamite that killed twenty Crows out of a big black flock, was asked if that had discouraged them. Well, he answered, them ones it did.