Darkness set in before the last of the children was finally located, so it was not surprising that two days later the museum received a sharp and rather uncharitable letter from the head of the boarding school. A meeting was held, at which three decisions were made:
1. Melanie was Melanie, and any thought of reforming her was ridiculous.
2. All schools should discourage girls from taking up non-sensical fads like wearing bells on their shoes.
3. Visitors to the museum should be asked, on entering the grounds, to remove all jewelry before it was removed for them.
The preceding events were, of course, unknown to me when I first met Melanie. She introduced herself by landing, apparently out of nowhere, on the redwood table where Marie Beals and I were having lunch.
Marie was delighted, I was somewhat less so. A raven in the air is one thing, a raven sharing a table with you is another. And to complicate matters, I didn’t even know what kind of bird Melanie was. To me she was simply the biggest, boldest and blackest I’d ever seen. For a full minute she stood motionless, with her eyes on me, like a vampire bat locating in advance the most vulnerable portion of the jugular vein.
“It’s obviously somebody’s pet,” Marie said. “I wonder if it’s hungry.”
Marie tossed a piece of bread on the ground. Melanie didn’t even bother glancing at it. Instead, she walked sedately toward my plate, removed a frankfurter and began to eat it.
Marie watched placidly. “She needs plenty of protein.”
“So do I. That’s my lunch.”
“Ravens, as you probably know, are scavengers. They eat carrion. So do we, if you come right down to it. A frankfurter is simply carrion that’s been cooked.”
Viewed in this light, the loss of my lunch didn’t seem so bad.
Marie, who turned nearly every occasion into a bird lesson, was explaining to me what distinguished the raven from the crow — the heavier beak, the wedge-shaped tail, the shaggy throat feathers. If the two species are seen side by side, the most obvious difference is one of size. But birds are seldom that cooperative, and anyway, using size as a means of identification is chancy. The far raven looks no larger than the near crow. (As an example of this deceptiveness I cite the experience of a friend of mine who was out on a condor survey with a Forest Service official. My friend was taken aback when the official pointed out as a distant condor — wing-spread, 8 ½ to 9 ½ feet — a not so distant turkey vulture — wing-spread, 6 feet.)
The difference to look for, Marie said, is that of flight pattern: ravens soar like hawks, keeping their wings stiff and straight, while crows flap a great deal, and when they set their wings to glide, the wings are bent upward. Though the habitats of the two species may overlap, in California the crow generally prefers to roam in flocks through the more cultivated areas. The raven is more of a loner, and like many other loners he seeks a mountain fastness or the solitude of the desert.
Melanie was no doubt surprised to hear this but her only comment was a hoarse, low-pitched Grub. She had finished my frankfurter, or cooked carrion, and was walking around the redwood table with the expectant air of a small boy at a circus: will the lion escape from his cage? Will the aerialist fall? Surely the bear will attack his keeper? Will the sword-swallower choke, the fire-eater burn, the elephants stampede?
For Melanie none of these things would have been nearly so exciting as what actually happened. In an effort to put a more comfortable distance between Melanie’s beak and myself I stood up too abruptly and my purse fell off my lap, strewing its contents on the ground — wallet, comb, lipstick, checkbook, pillbox, and my keys for the house, the car and the safe-deposit box. The lipstick was in a gold case trimmed with a green glass emerald, the pillbox was turquoise enamel on copper and the five keys were attached to a silver dollar. It didn’t require more than two seconds for Melanie to decide which item she wanted. Before I even realized what was happening, my key ring was airborne. Up, up, up, over the toyon tree, over the oak, over the sycamore, and to all intents and purposes, out of my life forever.
“Note the speed of a raven,” Marie said, “and its mastery of—”
“Those are my keys.”
“—air currents.”
“I can’t get home without them.”
“Ravens are what are known as static soarers, like the buteo hawks... Your car keys?”
“Yes.”
“Dear me, that is awkward. I was hoping you’d give me a lift as far as the courthouse.”
Melanie had disappeared for a moment, but now she emerged from behind an enormous Monterey pine tree and took up a position on the very top of it. According to Marie, who was watching through binoculars, Melanie still had the key ring in her beak.
“So far, so good,” Marie said. “However, she may have a cache up there — magpies and crows often have special hiding places for their treasures; perhaps ravens do, too. My climbing days, alas, are over.”
“Mine haven’t begun.”
“Well then, there we are, aren’t we?”
There we were, and there we seemed likely to remain.
By this time a small crowd had gathered, including a Junior Aide who told us a little about Melanie’s background, enough to convince me I’d better either call the garage or start walking. The idea of telephoning Ken occurred to me but was quickly cast aside. It is difficult for two professional writers living under the same roof to keep each other’s writing hours inviolate. But it must be done, and Ken and I had long ago worked out a system: he handles emergencies in the morning when I am writing, I handle them in the afternoon when he is writing. It was afternoon.
At this point Melanie looked down, saw the size of her audience and decided to improve the show. With a flirt of her tail she sallied forth from the pine tree. Circling it once to make sure all eyes were on her, she dropped the key ring, did a complete somersault while it was falling, then swooped down and picked it out of the air. Catching a thermal updraft she repeated the performance half a dozen times, each time letting the key ring fall a little longer and a little further. I could almost feel my heart fall with it, but Marie took a more philosophical approach to the new turn of events: “At least it tends to dispel the theory that she has a secret cache in the tree, and that’s all to the good.”
“I still don’t have my keys.”
“Forget about them. Admire the bird’s performance.”
Although it’s always somewhat difficult to admire a performance put on at your own expense, I did my best.
Since that day I’ve never seen any bird engage in such a complicated aerial game involving an object, though I’ve heard that golden eagles will play with stones in a similar fashion, and on a number of occasions I’ve watched them do barrel rolls while attempting to get rid of Swainson’s and red-shouldered hawks. Many birds drop and retrieve in the air, but the objects involved are usually food. I’ve seen ospreys and kingfishers go after fish that have escaped them, white-tailed kites after mice, jays and flycatchers and mockingbirds after insects. But only Melanie have I seen playing with a silver dollar and five keys.
Melanie had the stamina to continue her dazzling display indefinitely. Her span of concentration, however, was short and it was only a matter of time before she got tired of the game. The question was, at what point would she quit, before she dropped the key ring, or after?