The squirrel drew his front paws close against his furry chest. "But you're a bird!" he said in amazement. "Why aren't you flying?"
"I've retired," said the raven calmly.
The truck took an exceedingly tight curve, and the squirrel nearly lost his balance on the chain. He recovered himself with a small squeak of alarm and stared at the raven. "Birds are supposed to fly," he said a little querulously. "Do you mean you're never going to fly again?"
It had come very gradually to the raven's attention that the motion of a truck on a gravel road is quite different from flight. There was a faint murmur of discontent from his stomach, distant as heat lightning still. "Never," he said grandly. "From here on in, I'm a pedestrian."
The truck hit two ruts in succession, and the raven lay down quietly and glared at the squirrel, who had balanced himself twice with a graceful flick of his tail.
"Personally," the squirrel continued, "I don't know that I'd care to fly. Unnatural method of locomotion, after all. Tiring, dangerous, exposed to all manner of injuries. Oh, I can see your point in wanting to get out of the business. But, after all, it's what you were born for. Just as I was born to be a squirrel. Fish got to swim and birds got to fly. God made them, high and lowly, and ordered their estate." He coughed apologetically. "Those last two lines weren't mine, I'm afraid."
"You could have fooled me," said the raven.
"All lives are composed of two basic elements," the squirrel said, "purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rain—this is nothing beside a life without poetry."
The raven lifted his head from the floor of the truck. "If I was a hawk, I'd eat you in two bites," he said weakly.
"Certainly," agreed the squirrel promptly. "And if you were a hawk it would be your duty to eat me. That is the purpose of hawks, to eat squirrels, and I may add, gophers. But if you ate me without any appreciation of your own swift-plummeting stroke and without a certain tender understanding of my mad, futile flight toward my tree, where my wife and family dwell—well, you wouldn't be very much of a hawk, that's all I can say."
He drew himself erect on the tailgate, as if he were facing a firing squad, having just rejected blindfold and cigarette.
"It's people like you who make things tough for the noncombatants," said the raven bitterly. He got up and walked to the back of the truck to look over the tailgate. The truck was approaching the ungardened path that led to the Wilder mausoleum. Remembering the roast-beef sandwich, he went back and picked it up rather awkwardly in his beak.
"Are you getting off here?" the squirrel asked. The raven nodded.
"Well, it's been very interesting talking to you," the squirrel said earnestly. "Do drop in if you're ever in the neighborhood. We have little get-togethers every Saturday night. If you're ever free some night—"
But the raven was gone, flapping heavily on stiff wings down the narrow path to the mausoleum. Turning his head, he saw the truck careening on its way. As soon as it was out of sight, he dropped to the ground and began to walk determinedly along the path.
I didn't want to walk, he thought, with that furry little bastard yapping at me. Squirrels get so damn enthusiastic about things.
The gravel skidded under his feet, providing very little for his claws to grasp and making his legs ache. The casually dashing feeling he had enjoyed on the truck before the motion began to affect his stomach was gone, and in its place came a mental picture of a somewhat carsick black bird stumbling along a slippery road that hurt his feet. It was an utterly undignified image, and the raven winced and put it from his mind. The raven believed, grudgingly and inarticulately, in dignity.
But he kept walking. Once he looked up and saw a swallow coasting down the sky. His wings jerked involuntarily, tugging like children at his body, but he did not take off. He walked on the gravel road and thought about the squirrel.
Goddam organizers, he thought. You get something good going, and somebody comes along and organizes it. He told himself that this was inevitable, the way of the world, but it bothered him. The raven would have been in favor of a movement in the general direction of chaos, consternation, and disorganization, had he not known that such a project would require the most organization of all. Besides, there would undoubtedly be a squirrel running it.
"Saturday-night get-togethers," he muttered into the roast-beef sandwich as he limped along. "Tiny little hot dogs with toothpicks through them. Crap." His feet hurt quite a bit, and the sandwich was getting heavy again.
Michael Morgan made no sound on the gravel, and when he said, "Good day, bird," the raven dropped the sandwich and sprang almost four feet straight up. He turned in the air so that he was facing Michael as he came down and he was cursing even before he hit the ground. "What a thing to do!" he cried furiously. "What a sonofabitching thing to do!" Michael slapped his thighs soundlessly, and from his throat came surfs of laughter as silent as lightning.
"I didn't know you'd take it that way." He gasped, putting out his hand to silence the angry bird. "Really I didn't. I'm sorry. I apologize." He looked closely at the dusty raven. "What makes you so touchy today?"
"I've had a tough morning," the raven said sullenly. He felt that he had acted foolishly. But he hated to be caught off guard.
"You dropped something," Michael said, pointing at the sandwich with a transparent foot. "And why in God's name are you walking?"
"I had a flat."
"Tell me why you're walking. I'm curious."
"Mind your own goddam business," the raven answered, but he said it absently and he did not seem to be thinking of Michael.
"Do you know what I think?" Michael folded his arms and grinned. "I think you've forgotten how to fly."
The raven looked at him in amazement. "I've what?"
"Of course," Michael went on cheerfully, "Like playing the piano. You know—you play beautifully, you don't even need sheet music. Then you look down at your hands and think, How did I do that, how am I doing this, what am I to do next? And then everything goes bang. You forget how to move your fingers, how to pedal, even how the piece goes. That's what's happened to you, my friend. You've thought too much, and now you don't remember how to fly."
"Go haunt a house," the raven said. He picked up the roast-beef sandwich once more and began to walk on. Michael matched his pace, talking as he did so.
"It comes from being around ghosts too much, lad. Very bad for you. You start becoming one, by osmosis, as it were. You start to forget things, the way they do. You move slowly, the way they do, because nothing in the world can rush you. Oh, you're well on the way, boy, forgetting how to fly. A few more days and you can join our chess club and have Mr. Rebeck push the pieces around for you."
The raven stopped walking and looked at Michael for a moment with something approaching pity. Then he put the sandwich on the ground and looked directly at Michael again.
"Watch me," he said. He took two quick steps and went into the air.
The wind dizzied him and made him a little drunk. He cleared a tree by a few inches, turned, and seemed to slide down an invisible tightwire to a smaller tree. Then he flew almost straight up for twenty or thirty feet. At the top of his climb he fell off on one wing and began to spiral gradually down like a sleepy leaf. He glided in small, angled circles without beating a wing until he was no higher than Michael's head. Then he made an ungraceful movement of his wings, seemed to skid a little, and was roosting in a tree off to the left, breathing hard, with his heart stuttering delightedly.