“No,” says the Servitor—Dar hadn’t known the old Crow was so near to him. “No.”
And then Father’s there, his feathers all still erect and flecks of blood on his cheeks, taking his place on the nest’s edge and there making a few hasty becks and motions, just enough to count, and it seemed to Dar Oakley that the drumming of his father’s heart could be seen in the feathers of his breast. His mother moved for him, tail rising, so that he could press beneath. It wasn’t easy; it never is. She cried aloud as he did so, strange noises Dar Oakley had never heard before; and the Servitor made them too, or his own sounds that were like those of hers. And in a moment it was done.
Often in that day and subsequent days was it repeated, not always succeeding, but often enough: “Enough,” the Servitor said, “so that he knows every one of those eggs she makes will have a chick of his inside it.”
Fate went on unfolding more things for Crows to do. Mother began producing a clutch of blue-green eggs speckled browny-black, and the others had to feed her where she sat—she’d starve before she’d leave them unguarded for more than moments. There were spring-hungry beings abroad. Even other Crows wouldn’t mind getting an egg if they could catch her off the nest. Standing too close, threatening and horridly friendly, till they were driven off by Father returning.
She sat all day and night; her mate slept near her, and in the evening and at morning the others, farther off, could hear them talking together in soft voices, call-and-response, things they’d said before: old nests, old days, young ones long gone off. In the morning the others went out to get from the thin spring provision enough for themselves and more for her, to keep her hale and fat so that her eggs were thick-shelled and held strong young.
“How many are there now?” Dar Oakley asked. He put a morsel into his mother’s mouth.
“Five.” In general, five is as high as Crows can count. Five is the last number before many.
“Will there be more?”
“I hope not. Five is quite enough.”
Flowering plants filled the sunlit edges of the grove, glowing in the long sun; a multitude of gray sticks had produced in the usual way a multitude of colors in a multitude of shapes, as though they had been hidden within, waiting to be brought forth. Birds whose names were unknown to Dar Oakley but whose songs he knew were also brought forth by the season. Where had they all been? He could hear but not see them.
“They’re nesting too,” his mother said, “and don’t want to be seen. But keep your eyes open.” She moved gently on her brood. “It’s a good sound,” she said. “A providing sound.”
She seemed to feel something below her, rose a little, settled again.
“I was the first out of the nest, wasn’t I?”
“First out?” his mother said. “Oh yes. You fell out.”
Dar Oakley laughed—he knew the story, which was why he asked for it.
“Kept poking your head out and over the edge, no matter how often I’d push you down. Big gawky head on you, long scrawny neck. Then one day as I was stuffing the others, I just saw your little backside go over the top.”
It was his own earliest memory: hurtling down through the branches to the forest floor, his fall broken by undergrowth. Everything for a moment still and silent, even himself—something made him motionless, bill shut, calls stopped. After a while—a long while, it seemed—his father came down to him, bringing a shred of some fatty flesh, and popped it into his pink gaping mouth. Keep still. He was many days too young to even try to fly; every parent of every kind of being in that wood had babies to feed; Dar Oakley had scarce odds of not being eaten before he could fly.
“I should be dead!” he laughed, hearing her tell the tale again. “Dead and eaten.”
“Dead,” his mother said. For days they’d fed him as often as they could, though not often enough for him, and kept him hidden where he lay, dull and mottled against the earth, until they could get him into the air and the trees. And they did: the Servitor yelling encouragement, his father prodding until his son managed to hop into the air, little wings beating—his father actually got under him and bore him up to a branch, where he clung on, alive. And learned to go higher.
His mother moved again on her brood, and then stood a little, taking care, peering down below her breast where the brood patch was thick. “Well, well,” she said. “Here we go again.”
Nests are fearful places. Dar Oakley thinks it’s funny that People suppose birds live in their nests. Big, highly visible structures, full of helpless infants who have to be left at least briefly while their endless provender is acquired, just barely smart enough to keep their heads down and their mouths shut? Dar Oakley’s own young have over the years been eaten by Stoats and Martens, by Jays and Shrikes, drowned in rainstorms, spilled out, shoved out by greedier siblings and not so lucky as he. It’s nothing but worry, such worry you wish you didn’t care about them at all, when you care about them more than anything.
Fate.
“Now,” said his mother, in a kind of cool fury, pushing the cracking egg upright with a foot. “Now we begin.”
So much food has to be brought for those new mouths that in the spring Crows change their ways: they become hunters. In later times, when the People began paying more attention, it would be said that Crows could devastate the songbirds of a region, ruthless, pitiless Crows, black killers. But in fact no matter how many Robin babies or Wagtail eggs a Crow will snatch, somehow there’s never a shortage of Robins or Wagtails come the next year.
So Father and Younger Sister brought to the nest in the Pine tree hard-won half-swallowed naked hatchlings of whatever sort, and coughed them up for Mother to tear to pieces to stuff her own with; and the Servitor with a Linnet’s egg in his bill, to feed them the yellow yolk and the forming chick inside, the shells, too. Did their parents mourn in their hideouts in the underwood or the rock ledges? The Crows didn’t think about it, though they could admire the courage of some tiny Finch and her mate who’d fight off a Crow, give him what for with all their might, make their specks of young not worth the getting.
Dar Oakley meanwhile had a different plan.
All through the busy days he’d been thinking of the ones in their shelters on the high ground near the lake. About their bounty, how carelessly they’d throw wealth to their helper-ones. There’d been enough there in one place to feed a nestful of young all spring, if it could be had. He thought about the big-jawed four-legs, baring teeth like Wolves to snarl at one another. He thought of how the Crows sometimes had to contest with Vultures for carrion; those naked-headed birds were so much bigger than the Crows, slow and ungainly with their huge trailing wings, that it was hard to get in among them and reach the richest parts. It took at least two Crows—one to tug hard at a Vulture’s raggedy tail, then dance away when the big head swung around in anger to drive you off, while another dodged in for a bite. Then it would be the first’s turn. Many Crows could play the trick at once, and each get more.
So if Dar Oakley could find Crows brave enough to join him in that . . . Those four-legs at the garbage, they had tails, didn’t they? It’d take more courage to pull one than to pull at a slow-moving Vulture’s tail, but courage—he had courage, and others did too. Those beasts were quick, and liked to chase things, so the more Crows at the midden, the more confusion they could make, and the more food they’d get.