“Why should I believe you? Do you know of the Old Bone?”
“Keeyaw! Keeyaw!” the strange bird called out, as if his wits had flown off. “Keeyaw is the one to watch out for. A bird’s curse is nothing next to his.”
I perched there silently, listening to the far-off chopping of Keeyaw, hoping the bird would leave me, or at least be silent, too.
“Of course. Every crow knows of the Old Bone,” he said. “But few know him.”
“Have you seen him?”
“All birds see the Old One, flapping around, flap, flap. But few see him.”
Just then Plum Black sounded distantly in the woods.
“Aawwwk.” The strange crow tried to sing like my family, but from him, it was disgusting and embarrassed me. I’d heard the mockery before while I was in the nest and always wondered where it came from. Maybe the bad part of a dream.
Then Fly Home’s rage warp sounded from the trees.
And the Lone Crow took off when my father shot past in a wheeling attack and followed him through the branches.
Directly afterward, my sister Plum Black lit beside me. “You didn’t eat anything from him, did you?”
“No.”
“He wanted to feed you. He watches where we hide food and steals it.”
“If he steals, why would he give it back?”
“He wants to be like your Plum Black and live in Our Mother of Many’s song.”
“Why?”
“He is lost, a Lone Crow, without family or song.”
“How could he ever join our family, born from another nest?”
“I am from another nest.”
“And from another song?”
“Yes. But I learned your mother’s song well enough that hers became my own. And in her old motherhood, she thought I was one of hers. First setting eyes on me, she called me Plum Black, and I’ve been Plum Black ever since. When it came time to feed you, your father did not chase me off either. But I grow too old to feed another’s. Soon I will be chased off. I will become the Lone Crow.”
“How will it end?”
“With the season of my own nest, I hope.”
“I will come to feed your nestlings,” I said.
“You say that now.”
And Plum Black, the Beauty of our aerie, lifted easily into the air.
“C’mon,” she said. “Hurry. The winds won’t wait.”
She flew off.
In the distance, my father continued his complaint, warning all Lone Crows and those of other songs to be wary.
crow’s nest: 1. A small lookout platform with a high protective railing and wind screen, located near the top of a ship’s mast. 2. Any similar lookout platform located ashore.
—THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
11. Tree
Our Giant was about to fall.
Keeyaw had that nervous excitement about him in the way he drove himself at Our Giant’s pulpy wound. It was there in the sound of his chopping. He’d spend all of his time there, until the end.
Night Time and Plum Black made giddy, savage dives at Keeyaw. They perched on the branch just above him, where they hacked away at the bark and sent tree dust and chips falling down on his mane. But Keeyaw kept swinging. His brainless attack on the tree weakened the spell of Our Many’s troubled song, so when she came to the part about My Other, the Promise of Pure Flight, who could see things just before they happened, he did not return. No bird dared light on our tree, and when Our Mother of Many sang out my name, I grew fierce and hissed at the strange beast below. But did he hear it?
It could have been his own head he sent against the trunk. He was far too lost in his manic need to fell things and haul them off to oblivion—lost, but still too great a force. I’ve seen the awe before in my father, how he can wait out a long storm and how his drenched feathers stick to their pins, showing the bluish-white color of his skin—skin under our own feathers just as ugly and strange to me as the face of that—no, there was nothing in that beast of the underworld anything like a bird. My father lit near and watched with his calm, fatalistic detachment.
Night Time wheeled above Keeyaw and let loose a long stream of excreta that landed across that man’s lifeless, colorless beard. But did Keeyaw see it? Or slow from his tireless pace? He cackled to himself and wheezed in anticipation. He took pulpy hardwood wedges and sent them deep into the incision he cut. He swung the frayed, pulverized head of his maul with all his clumsy might, and our tree quaked like bubbling doom.
Then Our Giant began to creak.
It whined like a wolf puppy.
The whole world began to tilt.
Keeyaw scampered off into the bushes. He had a clumsy gait, with his head hunkered down, as if Our Giant were headed right for him, and he hid behind other trees. All of us watched as my father watched, with rapt attention at Our Own Giant’s doom. Just then, when I thought it was going to fall, like water slipping through my ribs, like my worst dreams when my wings won’t work, it stopped.
I was waiting for the tremendous noises, the groundswell of thunder, the rumble, the aftershock, the echo from the hills.
But they never came.
Our tree leaned over now, slightly, hung up by the shoulders on another tree almost as large.
Everyone in my family, and crows I’d never seen before, looked on silently, expecting our tree to fall as if struck by a bolt from the sky. Instead the breeze rustled the needles and cones the same as always. The lone twine of a spider web shivered, suspended between the limbs of a tree half-severed from its roots. Only a small section of the trunk was cut up, like the mangled mane of a horse.
Keeyaw walked openmouthed back beneath our tree and studied it. He ran his hand over the shattered trunk as strange sounds came from beneath his beard, and he looked to the sky, dragging his tool, squinting upward. He began pounding the giant’s wound until the wedges fell out. He kept hammering away, looking spooked as if the injured giant might take sudden revenge and fall on top of him. Instead our tree remained upright in the embrace of the neighboring tree, as if the leafy neighbor were a lover and the two supported each other in grief.
As if I’d been flying all my life, I raised my wings and lifted in an easy, thick flapping motion. I flew like heavy liquid through and around the branches of our aerie and landed on a low branch of Our Giant right above Keeyaw. I lifted my claws, one claw at a time, and made sure they had a good hold of the branch. Then I held out my wings as if ready to fly again.
“Now,” I said to Keeyaw, “be gone! How many times must Our Giant beat you?”
I kept guarding Our Giant with my wings outstretched.
Keeyaw stepped back and looked up at me. He walked backward, wide-eyed and suspicious. Then he joined his mule and petted it as he reached deep into his knapsack and began other preparations.