were both above the nest, leaning over with a foodstuff so wondrous that Fly Home must have flown far to find it. Often our father returned with strange delectables from the human roost: meats made dark and rough by fire, sweetmeats wrapped in leaves, nuts and figs soaked in juice, and a thing called bread that my father liked to dip in fresh rainwater. He had a keen eye for all things human, and such offerings were his specialty.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
Our Many hushed me in discouraging whispers, as if Keeyaw were still near. But our father said, “From the beastman. By the sea.”
“Keeyaw?” I asked.
“No,” said our father. “I don’t like his nest.”
Our Mother of Many gave him a look as if to say—what? “You spend all of your time watching him, and you forget to raid his food stores.”
There was something about Our Father’s long, perching silences that made me and My Other strain our necks and blink out over the twigs of the nest with expectant wonder. Our father sat like a bird who had been long by the sea, who could swoop down and pluck things up from its briny depths. Not just clams and bright, juicy fish with wounded gills gasping on the sunlight. But utterly useless things. Shining metallic things. Like treasure. And nothing less.
“Me, Me, I Am,” cried My Other. “I Am.”
My hungry brother ate the most, yelled the most. He cried the most. He turned his baby’s blood-red beak to the sky. My father loved that beak and dangled food just above it. “Of course, my brave little flier, of course.” Fly Home laughed the deep, reedy laugh that was part of his song, and down came the food to My Other. Of course our father would prefer that beak; as it was the nourishing vessel to the promise of Pure Flight.
History speaks of the noteworthy flier, the Old Bone of Misfortune, who could fly in his sleep. He chased hawks and molested owls all through the deep of night, as if his flight were a manifestation of some strange, powerful dreaming. We’re also told of the remarkable abilities of the great flier Hookbill the Haunted, who flew not only in her sleep but while clutching tightly to the tree below her. Her soul took leave of her body. Thus unsheathed, she bore witness to amazing landscapes and events that far transcended the boundaries of the horizon and returned with news of these. She became a living oracle of sorts, dazzling crows and inspiring them with hope and awe. There were times when I felt My Other had inklings of this. He could see things just before they happened, like the great ones, said our father. In the promise of My Other’s wings was also the promise of the future, somehow, in my father’s eyes.
· · ·
Just then the woods sounded.
It was Keeyaw.
But he made none of his mournful hammering noises and so appeared with the impact of insects or grazing deer. Above us, Fly Home and Our Many pretended to look elsewhere, though all of their attention fell on the strange underworld animal. They watched as if taking in breaths without exhaling. Neither spoke.
We saw the hapless beastman scuttle out from under the bushes, peering from behind his desperate mane of hairy brambles. He seemed anxious, as if he’d forgotten where he’d left the fallen tree. Once he was in the clearing, though, he settled down and pulled his mule out into the open. He called sharply back into the woods, and a small group of Keeyaw-like creatures came to join him, a few of them with the same wild growth around their faces, but dark, like a crow’s. Others had smooth, serene, hairless faces, and with them came a mixed team of hoofed animals. Before long they had an encampment set up with tents and campfires and cooking pots and their animals tethered to the trees. One of the beastmen was slight and half grown, with no trace of a beard on his face, and he dawdled behind the others, lost in childish dreams, humming to himself and cradling a jawbone ax with the teeth of a dragon, or an ox, or some other monster, over his shoulders.
That was when I climbed out beyond the nest.
I picked my way up over the barbed scratchgrass and forbidding sticks and my toes hung up. In the open air, I felt acutely my impish nakedness and the whole world swam into being. Cloud, hill, nausea, carcass, bloody grin, gravity, constellations, illimitable depth. Out farther, I hung on to the spongy green cedar fronds and bobbed above the heights. Everything was much clearer, but that was fear. Then my mother’s beak hurled me back into the nest, and I hadn’t traveled nearly as far as I thought. Still, my new perch had a much better view than before.
“Careful,” our father said to me. “Careful. Watch your perch. Watch yourself.”
“Cursed,” cried my mother. “Just like his father. Left on his own, he’d do nothing but sit around and watch the ways of that thing human. Why? Why is our nest even here? So close to the road?”
My father only folded his wings into place. “The babes will be able to fly soon enough,” he said.
“They’ll need more feathers than that.”
My father only tugged at his own feathers. When he wasn’t off watching Keeyaw, he liked to watch the human go back and forth along a pathway made hard and barren by constant use, one man alone, or a small band riding other beasts, or whipping them, or traveling in great growing armies. If it weren’t for the traffic along the road, I don’t know if we’d ever have seen our father. For long vigils, he would sit in his tree above the road, his bulky brow stern and preoccupied. Just then he reached out for the air in the direction of Keeyaw’s tents, ready to fly.
“What?” said our mother. “Again? If you keep watching, you’ll just lead him here.”
“Lead him here? He doesn’t notice a bird. It’s as if the trees fall down on their own. If we could lead the Keeyaw here, then surely we could lead him away. No. He comes here following his own madness.”
Then Fly Home leaned again as if to dive into the wind but turned back to the nest. He bent his head far down to feed me again. But this time no food came from his beak. His sharp one-eyed stare watched me and watched me from different angles, then stopped watching me altogether, all except for the pale patch of skin just below my eyes, the patch where the white pinfeather grew. His glare was so fierce, I felt ashamed and had to hide my head down in my usual crags and burrows. The white feather’s appearance was like grief stuck to my parents, but especially my father, because he’d seen it before, on the skin of a sibling from his very own nest time, the one known as Hookbill the Haunted, whose tree had been struck by lightning and who had lost her eyesight. Then, half-dead and half-living, she’d returned from the Tree of the Dead, where she had gained the powers of divination and prophecy, and began uttering cryptic speeches because she lived now close to the God Crow, Who sometimes spoke through her in Its heady God Crow speech. How did I know of all this? My mother and father had discussed it all before, that time when my father ripped out the white pinfeather at its first appearance and the blood trickled down and dried on my face.
“Why?” my mother had cried. “Why?”
“So it will never grow back.”
But when the washed-out color reemerged, I overheard my father mumbling something under his beak, about how maybe I was a mockingbird, or some other foreign egg placed in the nest when no one was looking.
This time he lunged at the feather in one swift bite and pulled back on my face until my bones made a snapping
