Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

PROLOGUE

There has come to be a great mountain at the end of the world. This mountain is not high but long and broad—and great because it grows all alone from a plain where no other mountains are. All around it are straight roads and soft fields—there are few stones even, and the mountain isn’t made of stone.

It continues to grow, and will grow for a long time before it begins to settle. Before dawn a yellow Caterpillar fronted with a plow moves over the flank of it, which quakes beneath the weight, for the matter of the mountain is still soft and loose. At first light a line of fat trucks moves up the mountain on traversing paths that have been made for them, and at designated places they empty what they have brought, voiding it from their rears in steaming heaps. The Caterpillar disperses and begins to cover it.

Some of it burns.

On either side of the mountain are lesser mountains, older and abandoned ones, lying now prone and grass-covered, fat men asleep and digesting their vast meals through the years. Only the heights of the newest are still open, piled with unswallowed stuff.

Along the roads leading down and away from the mountain toward the high city are houses and clusters of shelters. As soon as there is enough light, People begin to come out from them and ascend through the lesser mountains to the great one still open like a wound. They are women and children and old ones mostly; they bring sacks and buckets and other containers to carry away what they find in the new piles and what others have missed in the older and sinking ones. Smoke dims the rising sun.

The People are still climbing the paths when the first Crows come from their winter roosts in the dense trees along the river and out on the islands of the city’s river. A long and continuous line of them, passing by above the People, hundreds and then thousands. I suppose if the People were to describe the Crows to themselves, they might say that the Crows are like a black scarf drawn over the sky reaching from beyond the horizon to the mid-heaven. But the Crows don’t see themselves in that way; they don’t see themselves as a veil or a mantle or a black bearskin, they see themselves not as a mass but as many: each of them is one, one amid others, keeping a careful distance, never touching, each one able to see where all of them go.

They see the People moving slowly below them, the trucks with their staring lights. They know where they are.

And the People likely give them little thought. In other days and other places they might have blessed themselves, standing under such a soft-thundering cloud; might have whispered a prayer, or a rhyme, or a verse of some gospel; studied the flock’s undulations to learn something about the future, or the weather. But that time’s long past. The scavengers ignore the birds, or despise them—black beggars, rats with wings, they say. The children throw things at them or chase them from the piles until older People call them to their picking again. Sometimes Crows pursue a child, thinking it has something they’d like to have, or just for fun, the old cautions long since gone. The children don’t usually have what Crows want. What the pickers want is scarce, but of food for Crows there is plenty. The trucks disgorge it in tons, mixed with inedible things but still so much wealth that the Crows don’t need to compete for it.

I used to watch them. At evening or at dawn after sleepless nights, I’d stand at the window of a tower building in the hospital district of the same city, where on a high floor my wife was being treated and not cured. I’d look toward the mountain and see the Crows arise from the river island in their numbers and return again to the bare trees, though at that time I didn’t understand what they did. Perhaps the Crow Dar Oakley was among them then.

New diseases have arisen: I have one, and also some lesser ones subsidiary to that one. Debra died not of the condition that brought her to that hospital far from home in search of relief, but of a disease that raged through the district as she lay there: died as I sat beside her, dressed head to toe in fabric-like stuff, masked and gloved, unable to touch her at the end. Sick myself, mortally sick in more than body, I brought her from that city back to the old cemetery in the county where we had long had a house, this house in the north, my house. Which was as far as Dar Oakley, sick too, got on his own journey away from the long mountain at the end of Ymr.

There’s a weird clarity to the light here on these spring days, a clarity I don’t remember in this part of the world before: as though a region of dry mountain air has moved here, or is passing through. Morning skies of a darker blue than is quite real, and for all its intense beauty somehow sinister, forced, untrustworthy. I suppose it’s due to the ongoing ruination of the earth—well, the now unstoppable change in it—though I can’t give evidence of that.

Of course there’s plenty of other evidence. The trees, green already; plants proliferating that once minded their manners, and came out in sequence. So many birds you don’t see or hear anymore. Dawn’s not silent, but it’s underpopulated. But there are also birds around here that didn’t used to be: I’m sure there weren’t Mockingbirds hereabouts when I was a boy, or Orioles.

Many Crows, though, calling and gathering at morning and evening.

I know that things can’t stay the same, that change is the whole of the law: but that not just the human world but the earth and the weather and life itself could be different at the end of a single lifetime from how it was at the beginning . . . you feel that the world, the earth, can die along with you. Can it? How can I believe that all around me is ruination unless I believe it was once as it should be, and I was alive then to see it? And how am I to know that this is so?

Well. My first thought—maybe it wasn’t even a thought—on seeing an obviously very sick Crow out in my backyard a year, no, nearly two years ago now, was only that I ought to go and bash it with a shovel, for its sake and to keep whatever was the matter with it off me and others.

I approached it warily—those bills are sharp—and heard from several directions the calling of other Crows, so close I thought I ought to be able to see them, though I couldn’t. The sick one made no attempt to get away, and didn’t even watch me come closer. Or so I thought then. It would take me a long time to understand that Crows, courting or walking a field together, never turning their heads to observe one another, aren’t indifferent to or unconscious of their neighbors. No. A Crow’s eyes are set far apart, far enough apart that he can best see very close things out of only one eye. Crows beside one another are, in their way, face-to-face.

Anyway, something caused me to pause and study this one—maybe because I felt studied. I’d never been so close to one not dead. I squatted down—the Crow voices (I could still see no Crows) grew sharper, the Dog barked, teeth displayed, tugging violently at the rope that kept him tethered to the house—and it all seemed to go still and silent. I forgot that I’d been afraid of infection, and bent close to look at the bird’s eyes—cloudy, I thought, not knowing then about the haws or inner eyelids of birds. On its cheek, if that’s the right word, was a patch of white plumage, like the white stripe in some people’s dark hair. From its beak came a murmuring sound unlike any Crow noise I’d ever heard. And I thought that, after a year without meaning (oh, more than one), the earth had provided me, out of some unsuspected mercy, with an omen.

Somehow I knew that he wouldn’t allow me to touch him. I set the shovel on the ground before him, and after some thought the Crow stepped up upon the blade, a nobleman entering his carriage, and I lifted it with care. I could state no meaning yet, but I felt I had responded correctly.

I know now that of course he was no omen, and was a provision of the earth’s only in a general sense. Later on Dar Oakley (for it was he, as old novels say) would make it clear to me that he was in my backyard by his own choice. Those Crows that I’d heard had not been crying out on the human enemy (and his Dog) in support of a helpless relative, but had been in the process of mobbing him, driving him away. A sick stranger. And my backyard was a refuge: other Crows would avoid People, but he was familiar with them; and he knew a tethered Dog was no threat.

Yet it was certain that he was sick, near death.

I brought him inside and lowered him, with the shovel, into my bathtub. I don’t remember why I thought this was reasonable—maybe to contain evacuations. Why do we do things like this, why does it seem proper to us to rescue one sick or lost animal when the world is so full of them, and we can likely do them no good? It was no different in its way from children burying with great ceremony one dead chipmunk or baby bird out of all nature’s surplus. I fed him bits of chicken and bread, or at least left them within reach. He moved little, but whenever I entered the bathroom he seemed to try to speak—seemed, even then, to have the intention to speak and not just to call or make sound. It grew dark; I turned out the light. He remained still—I’d have heard him move from my bed, which isn’t far; the house is small. I guessed he’d be dead by morning.

I’d forgotten water. I woke at dawn realizing that, and got up to bring him some in a shallow dish. Anybody as sick as he was would be thirsty, surely. He drank, tipping his head sideways to dip his bill in the dish, then lifting his head to shake the water down inside him. I sat on the toilet seat and watched. I was aware that something remarkable had happened, or was to happen, omen or no, and I’d wait.

What was he thinking, Dar Oakley?

He tells me now that he can’t remember much at all of the worst days of his sickness, and the story that I tell—the backyard, the Crows, the shovel, the bathtub—will have to do for him as well as for me. The one thing he knew and I didn’t was that he wouldn’t die. That would take more than a bout of West Nile, if that’s what this was.

Debra was never a lover of Crows, which was the sole exception I can remember of a thing produced by the natural world that she had an aversion to. Something about their raucous greed, that they ate the eggs of smaller birds; they looked like criminals to her. If she had been still alive, I would certainly not have been allowed to bring a Crow into the house, especially one sick and infected. It seemed strange to me that he showed no fear or even apprehension about being in my house and in my presence, but it didn’t seem strange to me that he was here. I tried to explain it to Debra, in the way we explain things to the dead, as if they still needed mollifying, or convincing; as if they still had a say.

In a few days he could lift himself to the tub’s edge, clutching the porcelain with his seemingly inadequate but actually very flexible and useful feet. When he began to take trips around the house, leaving long white stripes on the floor and the furniture, I opened the windows and bade him good-bye. He flew to the sill but went no farther for a long time, his mobile head twitching this way and that. Curious about this constant act, I did a bit of research (in a bound volume of an old encyclopedia) and learned that Crows, like most birds, can’t turn their eyes in the socket like we can; to change their view, to look in a new direction, they have to change their posture. That sharp, rapid head movement is the Crow equivalent of a shifting glance.

Of course—it tends to happen, doesn’t it?—when it was clear that he was well and could leave, I didn’t want him to go. And I supposed that the only reason he hadn’t gone was that I’d kept up with the provisions. But I had also from the start been talking to him: random remarks and inquiries—How are you today? Feeling better? It looks like rain this morning, and so on. I do the same with the Dog, and the moon; solitary oldsters do. I had no way of knowing he understood; after all, the Dog seems to, and I know how little he does.

But no. The Crow wanted to stay in order to converse. And when I knew for sure he understood me—it was easy to set a few tests to prove it—I wanted to understand him.

I wish I could put together a coherent history of how I came to learn Dar Oakley’s language. It was he, not I, who knew it was possible that we could speak and understand one another’s tongues, because he had done it with others in other places far away. When I began to write notes about the work, I wrote down only what he told me, not how I learned to hear it.

What I wrote, and then went on writing, was nothing like a transcription. Crow talk, Crow jokes, Crow histories have the brevity of koans, or Confucian analects; their richness is in the speaking, like sign language in sounds. Translating from one human language to another is no comparison. A long time ago Dar Oakley had to make his way into Ymr—the name that he gives to the human world—and it was a way full of wrong turns and dead ends; I had to make my way into Ka, the realm of Crows, in order to bring back his story, never knowing if I understood aright what I carried.

But you see, right there: in every human language we talk about ways and paths and bringing and bearing things along them. We come to a fork in the road, a parting of the ways, we take a wrong turn. Crows never talk in that way. But if I couldn’t, I’m not sure I could tell a story, or recount a life. We are beings on the path, always wondering what’s beyond the next turning. Crows live in a wide, trackless space of three dimensions. If I have in these pages replaced the real Crow speech with a human speech different in meaning and affect, it’s because I had no other choice.

What I certainly remember is the daily honest effort of learning, his effort and mine, and our—well, wouldn’t it be friendship that I earned in those days, spring turning to summer, summer to fall? Of course I may be mad, not just confused. The Crow may be a being that can have no sense of me, who has perhaps said nothing to me at all, and this is only a story I have told myself. In any case, what you have before you, imagined Reader—all the story there is or can be—is what I think was said, and what I believe I heard. The tale of how he left the city and the City Crows, and by what ways he came to me, was the first he was able to tell me, the first I was able to understand and write down. And then more, and then the rest: how it began, how it will end. Beginning here.

PART 1

DAR OAKLEY IN THE COMING OF YMR

CHAPTER ONE

Before the mountain at the world’s end was built on the river plain, before the high city there grew up, before most of the Ravens went away into the forests of the deep North, before the People’s long rage to kill Crows, before Dar Oakley’s sea-journey to the West, before the Most Precious Thing was found and lost again, before the ways were opened to the lands of the dead, before there were names in Ka, before Ymr came to be and therefore before Ka knew itself, Dar Oakley first knew People.

Dar Oakley didn’t have that name then, or any name. It would be eons before Crows had each a name, as they do now; then, no, they had no need of them, they called those around them Father, Brother, Older Sister, Other Older Sister; those they didn’t know as relations, or forgot in what degree, were spoken of as Those Ones, or Others, or All of Them There, and so on. And since they had little to say about other Crows or very much need to talk about them when not in their presence, this was enough.

But without names it’s impossible to remember stories, and hard to tell them. So Dar Oakley will begin as Dar Oakley in this one.

There weren’t many Crows then. Or rather there were very many, all around the world; but not many in any one place. Where Dar Oakley had been hatched and fledged, except in the winter roosts that drew Crows from far away, there were not more Crows than any one of them could know by sight and voice. If it were to happen that an unknown Crow came trespassing among them, he or she would be seen off, or at least kept at bay a long time; many seasons could pass during which a strange pair would remain strangers, and even when they were accepted, no one would forget they weren’t really Us.

Dar Oakley’s parents were two such. Where they came from, where their birth flock had its demesne, why they left and came here, Dar Oakley never knew: for as soon as they could, they forgot it themselves, each wanting only to belong here, one of these Crows; eventually they would be as disparaging about newcomers as the rest. Even so, from their birth Dar Oakley’s older brothers and sisters were looked on with suspicion, everyone sure they could still detect something different, something not-Us, about them: and one by one they left the flock, to seek out brothers and sisters who had left before them, or to be strangers elsewhere, no one knew where—or indeed if there was a Where or a There to go to.

So these Crows weren’t just like the Crows in the fields and woods beyond my house.

But that demesne between the wide, shallow river and the forest was a fine one for a flock such as that one was then. Most years the river flooded its plain in the spring, which kept the tall growth and the young trees down. There were mussels and fish in the river—when the Salmon ran, a family of Bears would fish there, and their leavings were rich—and there were grubs and Voles and quick red Newts and a thousand other things in the earth. Crows ventured across the river and up over the foothills of the stony and densely forested mountain, but never very far; nor did they often go far into the woods that began where Hemlocks grew at the river-meadow’s edge, though they claimed them as theirs to an indeterminate distance. The woodlands provided them with the cadavers of small animals, with snails and slugs and the eggs and nestlings of other birds when such could be got, and big dead things they could pick over with the Ravens when the Wolves were done with them. There was enough for all, but not much more. Winters were hard, and they ranged farther then for food, even over the heath to the big lake that lay darkwise from their demesne; but the rest of the year they stayed close to the places they were born and claimed as theirs. Far beyond where they went were other Crows, Crows they had no dealings with, and who themselves rarely left their own demesnes.

That was how it had been forever, a past too long and featureless to be remembered, and rarely spoken of. When they talked, these Crows mostly talked about the weather.

And then the People came.

A long while after that, for all the wealth they’d get as a result, for all that they flourished and multiplied as never before, old Crows of that flock would sometimes say, I wish they’d never come over the mountain, or crossed the river; I wish they’d never come at all.

They could say such things because by then Crows had learned the trick of thinking that the world could be different from the way it is, and therefore to wish it was.

Dar Oakley invented that. So he would say.

Dar Oakley’s family freehold was far off from the others, one that had been claimed by the parents in the early years when they were outsiders. It wasn’t rich. It fed his mother and his father, his mother’s Servitor (a melancholy male who had loved her since he was a fledgling), and himself and two sisters. They were the nestlings of that spring who had survived infancy, their coats still not the lustrous black of grown-ups, all three of them still needing to be watched, though they didn’t think so themselves. And a young vagrant such as Dar Oakley’s parents had once been, who kept warily apart and had yet to communicate much with the rest but who was tolerated, perhaps for long-ago’s sake. In autumn Dar Oakley reached the age to be a watcher—not all by himself, his task was only whatever word was given him by his mother or father or the Servitor perched in a high spot. Through the day they all moved over their reach of ground, walking its well-known hillocks and streams, looking for anything interesting and possibly edible. At each move they posted a watch, a couple or three of them who listened for calls from distant families and watched the sky and the trees and the ground for Hawks, or Foxes, or other intruders. Only after the call-and-response was done—All right? All right here, as I see—would they descend to eat.

Dar Oakley liked to take a wind-shaken perch absurdly high in the tallest tree around, where he could see threats come from miles off, if there had been any threat, which there had never been in his short life; the common threats to cry out about—a Weasel, a Fox, a Hawk—were close at hand. Often enough he wasn’t really watching, only looking; sometimes he’d forget to eat at his turn, gazing over the far reaches beyond the flock’s habitations, wondering what that was that he could see but not quite resolve. How far that way could a Crow go?

He had a talent for getting lost on sleepy afternoons when the others lay listless in the autumn sun or nodded in the Hemlocks: gone by the time his mother called for him, too far to hear her. Much as he loved his family and still followed his mother and father as he had in the spring, he never minded finding himself alone. He liked thinking, when he was far away, that he was overseeing or standing in places no Crow of his flock had ever gone to.

Never lost, though, really: not when that dot of certainty like a compass needle behind his bill, between his eyes—all Crows have it—could always point him north, billwise they say, and thus also daywise, east, and darkwise, west. (Crows—at least nowadays—have oddly no word for south. Perhaps that sense in their heads means both south and north at once. I’ve never determined.)

You’d probably not believe me, Dar Oakley said one day to the Vagrant, if I told you how far from here I’ve been.

The Vagrant, poking in the mud of a pond’s edge for larvae or Frogs’ eggs or whatever else might turn up, said nothing in response.

I’ve been where there are no Crows at all, Dar Oakley said. None anywhere but me.

No such place, the Vagrant averred.

Oh no? said Dar Oakley. Go as far as I have.

The Vagrant stopped his hunting. Listen, fledgling, he said, in a low but not soft voice. Long ago I left the places where I grew up. I was run out. Never mind why. Always between then and now I’ve been on the wing.

Dar Oakley had stopped eating too. This was more than the Vagrant had said in all the days he’d been nearby the family. On the wing, he said again, as though he resented it. And nowhere there’s no Crows. He poked at what might be the remains of a small Frog, dead in a drying puddle. Might have liked it better if there was such a place. But no. Nowhere. I’ve been driven off by Crows from here to sunrise. ‘No Crows,’ oh sure. He shook his head, either in disbelief or to shake a nasty taste from his mouth, and took off for a farther spot.

I say it’s so, Dar Oakley called after him, chagrined.

He flew. Daywise the lifting lands could be seen glowing through the thin poles of the dead bog-wood, and the bare moorlands where the hunting was poor. He went to the crown of a tree he liked, a spreading Oak close to the forest’s edge. If ever he were to find a mate and engender young, he thought a crotch of this tree would be the place to build, though he knew the choice would be hers, not his.

If ever.

From a swaying limb, Dar Oakley’s wide, sharp sight gave him a big angle of the far lands to study. A mile off (though Crows didn’t then count in miles or in any unit of distance) he could see Rabbits in the clover, and farther, a cloud of Rooks rising and settling. Farther off than that, the sparkle of the lake, which he knew about, between the folded wings of the hills. Clouds farthest of all.

He would like to have gone where the Vagrant had, if the Vagrant told the truth. He was sure he’d have enjoyed it more, wouldn’t have been so dour and silent afterward. He’d have won over the Crows he came upon, telling stories of the places he’d been and they had not. He wouldn’t have been run off as the Vagrant had, and when he chose to leave, they’d have taught him which direction to go, to places far from any Crows and full of other things instead.

One eye just then saw, down near the foot of his Oak, a small movement in the fallen leaves and husks of old acorns. He knew what it was, or anyway what sort of thing it was likely to be. He fell as soundlessly as he could to the spot, and stabbed at it even before he alighted. The Vole that had stirred the leaves made a mad dash, but Dar Oakley’s foot was on it and his bill struck it hard. Thoughtfully he took it apart and ate what could be eaten.

In doing all that he forgot what he had been thinking about, but when the Vole was in his crop, the thought bloomed in sudden force in his breast. Far. He looked around himself. He could hear from several directions his family and other Crows calling, saying the things they always said, locating one another. What would they think or do when he didn’t answer?

His heart rose. He bent his legs deeply and lifted his wings high, and as he leapt up with his tensed legs he beat down with his wings—the leap upward that had taken so long to learn when he was just out of the nest, that he did now a hundred times a day, but this time remembering those first attempts even as he did it with a new purpose; and when the leap-and-wing-beat had got him off the ground, he scrabbled upward as though climbing the air with his feet, and beat again and then again, and he was aloft—and before he’d stopped marveling at the thought of how impossible this had once seemed, how easy now, he was far away and going farther.

All day he flew. Now and then he’d settle and walk awhile, eye out for food, feeling a little exposed with no one on a branch above him to call Danger, but for the same reason exalted, a kind of creeping laughter in his throat. Then he’d be off again. He reached the great lake, which he had never seen; he could have gone by stages around its margins, but on an impulse he crossed it, its wrinkled surface under him for a long way, almost too much for him. Partway across he rested at a small island amid a clump of water-loving trees and found slugs to eat. Then he went on. On the far side he had reached a distance from home that it would be impossible to retrace before dark.

And then there he was. He was sure of it. He took a perch in a low tree of a kind he felt he had never seen before, and listened. He could hear the day: the few songbirds not napping, a Thrush, a Lark. Hush of wind; an Elk’s bellow far off in the gloomy forest. Nothing more, and none of his kind to see or hear. He called, not loudly at first, just Where are you? No answer came. A little louder. Still no answer, not the faintest echo of his call.

Too far for Crows. His brain felt hot, and his eye-haws winked.

Just to be sure, though, he flung his body sunward again. Too far wasn’t quite far enough. He went up higher than necessary on warm currents rising from the sun-heated earth. He wondered if it was possible to make day last longer by flying straight toward the sun, and somehow getting under its descending. He was so lost in imagining this, and in the feel of his strained muscles and the emptiness in his gut, that when his billwise eye caught the beings on the earth below, the sight startled him into a sudden roll.

He’d wanted new lands and other things to see. And now look at this. He righted himself and banked that way. There were four: one big and slim-legged like a Deer or an Elk but not either of those, and one shaped like a Wolf—Dar Oakley had not often seen Wolves, but often enough to know this wasn’t one. Those two were four-footed. But the other two stood upright like Bears when they reach for berries on high branches, or threaten. Mostly hairless, though, pale flesh showing, as though skinned. Their necks and forearms were laced around with something that caught the late light and shone like ice or mica. The four walked all together, friends, in a way that Dar Oakley had never seen four such different beings do. In their long, slim forearms the two-legged ones held sticks as long as themselves, resting on their shoulders—for what? Dar Oakley stalled in the air above them, trying to see every detail of them—were those skins flapping around their middles? What were the thick paws of their feet? Then as he circled he saw one of them raise the stick from his shoulder and lift it skyward, toward where Dar Oakley was, and then the other pointed more darkwise with his.

Dar Oakley banked away, alarm breaking on him. Up darkwise and black against the low sun was a Falcon; he knew its shape instantly, as though it matched a shadow in his brain. Making toward him, sharp wings slashing air.

He was in the open, too far to make the nearest trees, though impelled that way irresistibly anyway. The Falcon was gaining on him and climbing at the same time. There was only one way to evade her, and it rarely succeeded: you had to let her fall from her height upon you, she readying herself to strike you with that huge foot, and somehow cause her to miss. Then she would fall below you and have to climb back above you to strike again. It’s the way a Falcon strikes: descend at an awful speed onto you, crack your head with a downward blow of a clenched foot, and then grapple you as you fall killed or stupefied to earth. She’d rarely do it otherwise. Hawks are powerful and ferocious, but not inventive. They don’t have to be. It’s their prey that needs to think.

Dar Oakley made for the impossible trees, feeling that shadow over him, unable to turn and look up lest he lose speed. He knew by the sudden silence of the falcon’s threshing wings that she was descending, like—Crows had no word for it then, like an arrow, a shot. Somehow sensing the last possible moment for it, he somersaulted, reversing his course. The Falcon fell past him with a talon-punch, so close to him he could see her yellow eye and open bill, feel the wind from her wings. He rolled over and began to climb.

The reason the trick doesn’t work is that the Falcon gains altitude faster than a Crow can. Dar Oakley tried to wing upward and at the same time angle toward the trees. As he aimed that way, he saw—he’d never forget—the two stick-wielding beings, still lifting their sticks upward.

When the Falcon was high enough, the trees were almost close enough, as though reaching out to gather him in. And it could have gone either way, but as the Falcon dropped again Dar crashed into the trees, losing feathers, nearly breaking his neck as efficiently as the Falcon could have done it. He was safe. Unlike an Owl, she wouldn’t pursue him into the dense foliage; she’d quit and hunt elsewhere. Dar Oakley, panting open-billed, eye-haws overdrawn, heart thudding as though to exit his breast, hugged a Hemlock branch and made himself small.

She might wait, though, might hang a long while making lovely patterns against the sky. Their awful patience. Dar Oakley crept deeper into the thicket, feeling a cry extracted from his throat, the cry of any Crow for help: Come, come, trouble, trouble, not far but near, the worst there is. Knowing he had put himself beyond help.

Yes: the Falcon now sat perched on a bare branch, out beyond the thicket where he cried aloud. As he looked she dropped heavily, dodged at the Hemlocks where Dar Oakley hid, her strong wings beating at the branches to scare him out. He wanted to flee, to be in air, utterly foolish as he knew that to be. He kept crying out, now as softly as a flightless nestling on the ground, just enough to keep his head and his heart in his voice and so do nothing, not move a feather. Her eyes looking in at him, large and pale as noon sun, with a black ball in the center—no, surely she couldn’t see him.

After a while she went away, but how far? Dar Oakley stopped crying. The sun had almost set now, and he was alone in a place he’d never been. He hadn’t ever spent a night beyond calling distance of his family. Good night, Mother. Good night, Father. Good night, Others.

What if the wood he’d plunged into held an Owl?

Soft hush passing by him in the deepening darkness, just night wind, maybe, surely.

He slept, waking in the night over and over, to listen, stare into the dark branches. Beings moved around him, up the nearby trunks and down on the forest floor, scratching and rustling—the usual ones, likely, and no threat to him, but still. Dawn came, taking forever, the red glow daywise worse than the darkness. With the sun, Dar Oakley remembered the strange beings he had seen—he had forgotten all about them in the flight for his life and the night.

He unfolded a little in his thicket. Sore. That Falcon couldn’t be near, now; except in the spring, when everyone was up at first light to feed their young, Falcons were late hunters. Mist lay over the ground he could see, dispersing. He left the branch he had clung to and got going, hopping from foothold to foothold in the thicket (how had he ever got in here so deep?) until he could make open air and fly.

The strange beings were all gone, four-legs and two-legs. But there, on the dry knoll where they had stood, the sticks they carried were thrust into the ground, pointing upward. Something thin and feathery hung from each, and stirred in the mist. The sticks that they had lifted toward him, and toward the Falcon.

He skimmed the place, but was somehow unwilling to settle and study it. He banked darkwise, his wings recovering their strength; wanting to be far from here and near Crows again.

Dar Oakley couldn’t know then, nor did he know it for long afterward: the two People who had come here with a Horse and a Dog, who had watched a Crow battle a Falcon and escape, had seen a sign. He wouldn’t have known what a sign was, and sometimes even now thinks perhaps he doesn’t understand, truly. But he and his troubles had been a sign for them. The sign had told them, In this place, between the mountain and the lake, you will escape the enemies who drove you from your home places; here you can build again, raise young, bury your dead. They had left their spears there struck in the earth to mark the sign they had had, so they could return.

Dar Oakley turned for home. He thought he had come far, but returning now, it seemed not that far at all. Before the sun had reached the height of the sky he heard, from somewhere in the bogs and meadows that he flew toward, the call of a Crow.

No one believed his tales of the ones he had seen, of course, because he had (his father said) told too many such stories since he’d learned to talk, and too few of them had turned out to be quite as he’d told them. Dar Oakley didn’t want to go back to the place, though he told himself that soon he would; now and then in the dark of night he would feel that Falcon whip past him and the terror of that foot, and wake with a cry. One day when the Vagrant and the Servitor were teasing him about the story, he challenged them loudly to go with him, if they dared, and see the place, and the beings if they were there; and with much laughing and pretend fear and mock displays of courage, they went with Dar Oakley to the place, complaining about the distance and the toil, resting at the same lake island where Dar Oakley had rested. The way there was drawn in his brain.

There were the two sticks thrust in the ground.

See? You see?

But since that was all, and no beings approached, the other two were happy to carry the story back, making great fun about the wonderful and never-before-seen pair of sticks, and on and on till Dar Oakley wished he’d never convinced them to go there. He didn’t go again, and hoped that (true as he knew his story to be) everyone would soon forget about it and stop shouting, Sticks! whenever they saw him.

The weather was growing colder. Families began to leave their freeholds in the evenings and retire to the communal roost that was forming for the winter. As food grew scarcer it wouldn’t be possible for a single family to hold off the many others in search of provender wherever it could be found, and the family’s land would anyway cease to produce enough for all the members. So they joined the majority, and went wherever they went, and came back at night with everyone.

It was a good time in the year, though, at least until winter grew deep. The roosting-place changed from time to time, but for some years it had been a wooded island far down where the river widened, thick with Poplars and several kinds of Fir, and some tall giants too, Oak and Ash. Crows in ever-greater numbers came in as the sun set and the clouds colored, yakking away as they winged down the river, or out of the daywise-dark sky, out of the vanishing sun or from the mountains. There was even a crowd of Rooks who joined them nightly at the frontiers of the roost, chattering together and all at once about their affairs, impossible to understand even if anyone had cared to try.

This was the first roost Dar Oakley had known, and his heart rose and he gave voice as Crows strange to him, young females, too, came to be beside him or below him or above him on the incoming evening flight, so many. His mother and father were somewhere in the throng, and brothers and sisters of Dar Oakley’s from earlier years and far freeholds. They had their own company, enough of them vagrants or newcomers to make their own family seem like old permanents, and he wouldn’t see much of them through the winter; his father would spend evenings with Crows of his status, his mother with hers, see you in the spring.

What a roar they made, settling in those branches, calling to friends and foes, shouting out their opinions to one and all, moving from branch to branch and saying, You! Oh, you! There you are, here I am! and a hundred other meaningless but not useless remarks—older and bigger Crows, louder and better-friended ones, made their way by such greetings into the middle of the crowd, where in the freezing nights they’d be warmed by the mass of Crow bodies around them, while younger and smaller ones went to the outside. Toughen them up, their elders thought, keep with their friends. The young ones hopped from branch to branch, getting as far in as they dared, males around females, females beckoning males—young Crows who wanted mates in the spring had better look now. Hello there, hello! Better to be high up than down low, if you could find a place: those down low were often shat upon by those above, awaking in the morning to find white streaks on their black coats, lots of laughs for others.

It had grown nearly dark on a certain evening, with a big moon rising, and the Biggers were calling, Settle down now, settle down, when a thrashing or commotion began in the woods on the far bank of the river, a noise that for a moment stilled the Crows who heard it. Something large was coming through the underwood over there, and something else coming after in pursuit. The Crows started up yelling at whatever it might be—always best to cry out on any predator, though you might benefit later from its leavings—but what was it? Too early in the dark of the year for Wolves . . .

A Deer, a small female, burst out into the moon’s light, taking staggering leaps toward the river. After her came—were they Wolves? No, not