“You,” said Dar Oakley. “You could have a name.”
“I already have a name,” the one he spoke to said. “Crow.”
The rest laughed, but the Crow was in earnest. “No, but why do I need another?”
“Well,” Dar Oakley said. “Suppose you’d done a big, brave thing—”
That got a laugh too, but Dar Oakley cried out above the laughter. “It was you, wasn’t it you, who once pulled an Eagle’s tail, made her drop that Rabbit she had?”
“Fish, it was.”
“Ah, yes.”
“Big one.”
“Tearing it to bits by the river, and you just went right in there to annoy her, tug her tail, and kept at it till she turned on you, and left the fish. Which we all got.”
“I got least.”
“So now we tell the story,” Dar Oakley said. “But who’ll remember one day that it was you?”
“I will.”
“And when you’re gone?” The Crows grew quiet; that wasn’t a subject to be mentioned lightly. “How would it be if ever after we around here could name you as the one who long ago did that?”
The Crow stared up and down and around as though unable to gather this thought to himself. “So?” he said at last.
“So your name. It could be Pulled the Eagle’s Tail.”
“That’s a mouthful.”
“Well,” Dar Oakley said. “It’s a story.”
“Have you got one?”
“Mine is Of the Oak by the Lea.”
That was greeted with rapturous hilarity, but the Crow now named Pulled the Eagle’s Tail didn’t join in. He did dash and jab at one who teased him, and the rest cried out on him for it, Hey, hey, but it was sleep time now and the elders were shushing them.
The next day a Crow who’d been nearby on that evening came to Dar Oakley alone at the feeding-place, and said in the lowest of calls that she wanted a name too, if she could get a good one.
Her name, when it was found—and the other names that began then to adhere first to this Crow and then to that one—in time they came to be passed on to young, who in the names carried their mothers and fathers; and their young added others all their own. The names were carried away with those who departed the flock. Over the course of a hundred generations the names (like the names the People bore) were worn smooth the way river stones are worn rolling over one another, until the act or the place or the habit or the tale at the heart of a name could hardly any longer be discerned: but it was there, and still is.
Winter was hard that year. Snow fell early, and hardly ceased; it hid the carcasses of animals dead of cold or predation so that the Crows couldn’t find them. In the winter roost the Crows at evening were quieter; no sense wasting energy socializing when a long night lay ahead, and no easy breakfast in the morning. Crows were spoken of who hadn’t returned to the roost at the blue hour: caught, lost, too weak to find food. In the deep woods a Deer family—mother, father, yearling—became trapped within a sort of palisade they’d unwittingly made: they’d tread down the snow in a wide circle, nosing for hidden vegetation, while around that beaten circle the falling snow piled higher, till it was too high to leap. Safe within from Wolves, they died of hunger.
Crows found them, watched till the warming sun softened them, saved their own lives.
Dar Oakley rarely saw Fox Cap. When he and others flew to the settlement to look for provender, they saw few People at all; in the snow People went in packs like Wolves to hunt, and kept all they caught. Best anyway to stay a safe distance from such big, hungry predators: word was that Crow feathers had been seen in the settlement, black on the snow. When Dar Oakley did glimpse Fox Cap, she was wrapped in furs, and the People made no friendly gesture toward him. Bound in snow like the Deer in their habitation. It was good to have wings.
When the roost broke up, the Vagrant left the flock, and Dar Oakley’s Younger Sister flew away with him, out of the flock’s and her family’s way and their disapproval of her choice, for the Vagrant had never ceased to be an outsider. “Very well,” Father said on learning of it from the Servitor, “but they’d better not come near our bounds ever again.” Dar Oakley was sorry about it, since in the throes of spring madness he’d hoped it would be him she chose; he was ready to leave with her forever, wherever, but no. His parents still had one of their young from the previous spring to help them—along with the Servitor, to whom Dar Oakley gave the name Mate of One Mated.
Where was Fox Cap? He went to the lake now charged with snowmelt, to the greening woods, and she was in neither place; she wasn’t at the grove she had a special name for, not at the Wellspring or the Tall Rock, which also had names that she’d told him but that he couldn’t remember unless he heard her say them. He felt old without her, without his father and mother, without a freehold of his own. Himself alone. “Make her your mate,” the Vagrant had said or sneered, on his way away with Younger Sister, who never once looked back.
There was no battle in that spring; the People brought no bounty to the Crows and their hatchlings, and some of Dar Oakley’s flock regarded him resentfully, that he had nothing more for them. On a sultry day, suddenly hot, he was returning to the old demesne over the long moor from the lake and the settlement with a crowd of young ones who still thought he might produce something good if they stuck with him. The air was thick and wearying. Far off, daywise, silent lightning gleamed through clouds gray and white as a Goshawk’s back.
Dar Oakley was thinking about the People, and why they did what they did, when the flight of Crows was struck by a sudden gust, first breath of a gale, and in a moment he was alone in a shifting world, pummeled as though by something alive. Unable to hold to a direction, he was tossed far and fast, the wind bowling him bill over tail; the dark clouds came on fast behind and above as though to catch and swallow him. He wanted the cover of dense Fir-woods to break the wind and hold off the rain, but already he had been blown far from such places that he knew of. The first hard drops struck his wings and head even as he saw a stand below that looked safe—the wind as though taking pity on him threw him that way. It was nearly dark as night now, and would be darker in there where those black trees were thrashing the rain. Almost he felt as Fox Cap did, that he was being warned away from the grove, even as the wind propelled him in.
Anyway safe. He held tight. Rain falling that heavily could have driven him down to earth if he’d been in the open, maybe drowned him in mud. He’d heard of that happening.
The wind diminished. He flitted and groaned and shook his wet head. When he stopped, he heard those sounds continue: flit, shake, groan. He wasn’t alone in that stand. The noise of rain rattling through the Fir-limbs made the sounds of a wet bird hard to locate, and Dar Oakley peered this way and that—even a Hawk would seek shelter from this storm—when a distinct croak came from right behind him.
A large and seemingly elderly Raven sat perched on a branch behind and just above his own.
The bird took no notice of Dar Oakley, only stared into the dripping branches and the white world of rain beyond. Still Dar Oakley took the precaution of taking two sidewise steps away. He would be careful not to speak if not spoken to, as was the Crow custom with Ravens. But with a further glance he realized he knew this bird: he had seen it elsewhere.
“Master Raven,” he said, not able to discern its sex. He becked as respectfully as he could in the wet. The bigger bird turned one eye on him, and then away again. “Master Raven,” Dar Oakley said again, too curious now to notice the snub, “I have seen you before. You and another. Master, you were there, weren’t you, when the People”—the strange People word used for themselves came unconsidered out of Dar Oakley’s mouth, and the Raven turned again to look at him: not as though to acknowledge a Crow, but as though surprised to hear that word from one—“when the People left those others dead, and we all ate, and yourselves too—”