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.