or their color, stuck as they were just below my eye. I saw one, perhaps, a mere spindly blade of fluff. It dove as if injured, not quite a feather and not exactly white either, but a pale gray or absence of any color whatsoever and so an absence of Crowness and a portal to some strange otherness that would put the fear in my father and burden him.
“These are far too early,” he said with his horn clenched, “for normal feathers. They’re definitely not baby’s down.”
“I thought you were going off to watch the Keeyaws,” my mother said.
“I was. But now I’m taking this confounded feather to the Old Bone.”
“He is like you,” said Our Many, “or how you should be, maimed by the beastman, always off watching him. What will that prove?”
“He is the only other bird around with the paleness. He’ll know. He’ll know what our wintry son is all about.”
“I don’t care who knows. Surely you can see with your own eyes. Why don’t you help me find out what’s happening to the woods? Find out where Keeyaw has and has not been. For when the babes are strong enough, we’ll fly to safer woods.”
“The Old Bone will know about that, too. Fear not.”
The wind took his call and brought it back a second time, as Fly Home opened his broad, serrated wings until they covered all of our opening to the sky in black, and the sun shone through in iridescent greens and purples as they ripped through the air and were gone, throwing a sharp blast of air down over us.
“Fear not.”
Cooperative breeding behavior is rare in birds. . . . I have seen five adult crows at a single nest at once, all with their heads in the nest feeding young.
—KEVIN J. MCGOWAN, “FAMILY LIVES OF THE UNCOMMON AMERICAN CROW”
5. The Most Delectable
From the sky came all changes: sea-salt winds, clouds in the shape of fishes, hailstones, thunder, tree-drenched water, and hard winds that drove misfortune in the face of hope. It wasn’t unusual to have Fly Home gone all afternoon. But I had the unnerving feeling he’d be gone all night, and he’d taken the warmth of the sky with him.
Now the changes came from the deepest underworld.
Under a gathering thunderstorm, Keeyaw unhooked his huge, sullen land animals from their traces and gave up on trying to move the fallen Giant for the day. It had taken them all afternoon, and after much nervous yelling and flapping around, they’d managed to move the shorn tree trunk just a single length of itself in the direction of the highway. When the thunder rolled through the woods, it chased Keeyaw and his flock into their tent. I’d heard that there were fire breathers in there, which seemed true, as the smoke poured out of a flap on the roof and seeped through the seams. The sky was angry at only them, because they left their beasts outside, tied up, their backs to the storm and their ears flicking in the gray sheets of rain. Here and there the animals kept their unsurprised mouths busy on the wet leaves and grasses.
The sky flashed.
Thunder split the sky.
Perched far above us, encircling the nest, loomed a dark theater of crow faces, a council of gods staring down at our cold, water-wrinkled skin. These were the brothers and sisters from previous nest times, who numbered three, and who helped my mother and father in keeping the nest, since they weren’t old enough to begin nests of their own.
“Eeeeiiwaahh!” The one known as Squall cried out in fear of the sky.
“Don’t crack an egg,” cried Night Time.
“Bring on his own heart attack’s more like it,” said Plum Black.
It was common knowledge that upon hearing thunder for the first time, some fresh fledges drop from the tree like wet, heavy fruit, then rot in the mud like fruit, too.
“Let your heart attack this,” said Squall.
And he pecked at Plum Black’s shins.
When the thunder exploded again, Night Time made one of his wicked, uncanny mockeries and Squall stuck his beak down into his coat, wishing to fly off and hide.
“Hush.” Our Many cast a suspicious eye down at the hide tent of the Keeyaws, still full of humans, though the rains were letting up.
“None of you brought any food?”
“I did,” said Night Time.
“. . . and. . . ?”
“It was delicious.”
Night Time twisted his arrogant beak until it was right down over my face, and I thought I was going to receive a wondrous late-day offering, when he said, “Hmmm . . . his affliction seems to have—cleared up—a bit.”
“Your father pruned him.”
“I suppose he’s at all ends of the wind,” said Night Time, “where the Old Bone lives.”
“I’ve flown with the Old Bone,” said Plum Black. “I’ve seen him, and ridden with him, in the sky.”
“. . . and. . . ?” Night Time didn’t hesitate to mimic even Our Mother of Many.
“I can fly him to the ground,” said Plum Black.
“It’s not how fast,” said Night Time. “But for how long? And how far? And from where? It’s the intangibles.”
“Back when I was a fledge,” said Our Many, “the Old Bone was already old, and known as such.”
All of my family turned their beaks to my face, and their eyes blinked and wondered.
Like the portent it might possibly be, the quills and absence of quills burned there.
Where they’d been plucked.
Below my eye.
Morning came slowly.
Constantly I listened for my father’s return through the vaporous woods. Instead, I heard only the elder siblings call out and tried to guess how far. With time I could sense their wingbeats in their caws, and the ravines and open meadows had their resonant effect on their songs. As they moved in and out of earshot, I got a sense of our songscape and its traditional winds, long before I could venture out into it by my own wing power. Still, I heard nothing of Fly Home. Not even his far cry. Not even the dull echo of Keeyaw’s yelling could summon him.
With the beastmen below, pestering the fallen Giant to move, no one returned that morning with happy amounts of half-chewed creature: no pieces of caddis fly. No carrion beetle. No grasshopper. No
