Corvus (25 page)

As I work, Chicken will approach my desk chair and utter a sound, a lowish
ehhhhhhhh
, drawing my attention to the fact she’s there. I know anyway. I hear her toenails clicking across the wooden floor. I call, she calls. (I like this, the way she passes to and fro, the way the house is her own, the way she allows me to live in it.) Another of her sounds is one like old floorboards, old door hinges, old gates, a low, reverberant creak. While I’m speaking to one of the girls on the phone, they’ll ask, ‘Is that Chicken creaking?’

When I come back from wherever I’ve been, I unlock and open the outer door. From inside, beyond the inner door, I hear Chicken call greetings. I call back. Usually she is in the hall, or emerges from the study to greet me. If I’ve been away for a few hours or a few days, she’ll run to meet me with wings outstretched, calling with what I like to believe is pleasure and welcome.

She comes, sometimes, when she is called. I, on the other hand, invariably do.

This morning I put on Jan Garbarek’s
Rites
, music with the suggestion of birdsong behind the plangent saxophone, to encourage me to the pensive, post-weekend optimism required for work. Chicken begins immediately to ring, or rather to shake and tug at her bells in what is clearly protest. (I assume it’s protest because if I turn the music off she’ll stop ringing.) Perhaps today she’s just not in the mood for plangent, melancholy saxophone music. This is another
thing that I have discovered only gradually, that Chicken has preferences in music. Some pieces or composers she likes. Others she does not, in a range from mild to pathological. The latter degree of hatred she reserves for the work of Benjamin Britten. When, a couple of months ago, an excerpt from
Peter Grimes
was played on the radio, she uttered a loud and horrified squawk before running at speed from the kitchen, where it was playing. (This was not chance. When an excerpt from Britten’s
Death in Venice
was played without warning last week, it evoked exactly the same response.) The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’, heard all too frequently at the appropriate season, will send her from the room (although neither so swiftly nor so dramatically) and induce a frenzy of prolonged, irritated bell-ringing. Rautavaara does not receive even the courtesy of protest. At the first sound of ‘Cantus Articus, Concerto for Birds and Orchestra’, a recent gift from a friend, Chicken pointedly left the room to spend the rest of the evening in the kitchen standing under the table on a strut of a chair. Olivier Messaien, birds notwithstanding, receives similar treatment. She is, though, interested in Schubert. She likes Bach.

By chance, I happened the other day upon a particularly tetchy American website concerning corvids and their activities. There, I read the opinion that keeping any corvid in a non-natural situation will provoke madness in the bird, and whilst it may appear affectionate and happy, it is in fact unhappy, in a state of mental anguish.
For a morning, I worried about it. I did so on principle, because it is my obligation to worry, but also because that thought has, in all my many years of worrying about Chicken, been the one thing about which I haven’t worried. It seemed to lead into a Freudian nightmare of denial, of wilful blindness to suffering. How might I know? How might I diagnose psychosis in her? Unhappiness? Considering the proposition, several things occurred to me. One was that the signs of unhappiness in birds and animals are usually quite obvious, in behaviour, appearance, demeanour. The other is that since it is difficult to find in any scientific literature anything that speaks in definitive terms of the cognitive or emotional life of birds or animals, to make such a firm psychiatric evaluation seems unwarrantedly bold. I looked at the website again. Then I looked at Chicken. The person compiling it was, I decided, quite wrong. If Chicken is mad, unhappy, anguished, then there seems little hope for the happiness of the rest of us, man or bird. Many things, I believe, tell me this and I can only hope that these things are true. Chicken’s voice is one way I like to think that I can tell her mental state, the intonations and inflection, what I infer to be affection and intimacy, her pleasure in greeting and regret at parting. It is, I think, a contented bird to whom I say good-night, after the elaborate ablutions have been performed, after doors are locked, the house prepared for night, Chicken settled on her top perch. She calls to me and I call to her as we express our mutual wishes for the other’s well-being, our hopes for the pleasant passing of the hours of darkness. We bow, as we did during our morning greetings. As I put off the light, I hear her scrape
her beak once or twice along the wall of her house. In the morning, if I’m downstairs before she’s up, I’ll hear the low, soft, extended growl interspersed with high, soft cooing, the unexpected music with which a rook awakens.

I
t’s early April when my friend Chris, a dedicated naturalist, phones from Lochaber to tell me that he knows where ravens are nesting. Do I want to go to see the nest? I do. He says that he’ll let me know when the young are nearly ready to fledge. Later in the day, I walk into town to buy a new pair of climbing boots. I’ve never seen a raven’s nest but know that they favour high and difficult places for nesting and my only boots are old, the soles too worn, the laces too rotted, to allow me to reach wherever it might be.

Chicken has put her nesting activities behind her for the year. In these newly bright days of spring, she’s more interested in seeking out patches of sunlight on the floor, moving from study to sitting room to kitchen, east to west, to find a place to sunbathe.

My new boots are whole and splendid. When I get home, I trog noisily around the house in them for a couple of hours before putting
them aside until the ravens have raised their young. They’ll have finished their building and nesting, flying with what they’ve found, what they’ve collected in the Lochaber hills, tangles of heather roots, strands of sheep wool caught on fences, other birds’ feathers, small twigs from the stunted birches that grow beside falling streams. In previous years, Chris has seen young ravens about to fledge towards the middle of May, but this winter has been mild and they may have laid their eggs early. We don’t want to go when they’re still being brooded, in case we frighten them from their nest, or too late, when they’ve already gone.

I think that I have always wanted to go to see a raven’s nest but I can’t be certain. I can’t remember what I felt before I knew corvids as I do. Now, I want to see these most intelligent of birds (possibly the most intelligent of all birds, not just of corvids), not simply from interest but from obligation too. I must because now they’re almost family.

During the weeks when I’m waiting to hear from Chris again, there’s enough spring around me to watch, sufficient birds. This is bird country, a place of cliffs and estuaries, flat land and mountains, fields and sea, the city like all northern, coastal cities loud with bird sounds, shadowed by patterns of flight, by mating and nesting, corvid caws and the insistent, rolling howls of herring gulls. High, wide north-eastern skies are suddenly alive with flight. Oystercatchers have begun nesting on flat roofs everywhere; hurrying, they draw trails of sound, their loud, insistent
peep, peep, peep
, across the city. In the gardens at Crathes Castle, a pair are nesting on the grass beside an ornamental pond. Gulls too are everywhere. In the city centre at night, they fly
through the bright white lights that flood city buildings, transforming them to luminous blue, lilac, silver against the darkness. They’re nesting above the line of sight, on roofs, on chimneypots; the evidence of gulls is there too, on the tops of cars, windscreens, pavements, their voices in the air. I seem to hear them calling in my sleep and through my dreams so that, waking in darkness, they feel so near that they might be on the end of the bed, keening, calling down my ear with the voice of sea-ghosts, souls wailing from the fastnesses of oceans.

On every street, awkward, grey-brown, fuzzed infant gulls are staggering on knock-kneed legs into the paths of cars. One runs at my approach along a pavement, thrusting his head in skittering fear through the bars of a cast-iron gate. Judicious ushering allows me to manoeuvre him from gate, pavement and danger into the safety of the garden. I close the gate as his parents shriek from the roof above.

The annual complaints have begun about gulls’ nesting, their ubiquity, their noise and mess. (One shits on my shoulder from height. In a small comparative study, I pay attention to the difference from corvid excrement. This substance has a gritty feel, a strong fish odour like very strong cod-liver oil.) A city-centre shopping arcade has hired the services of two hawks to keep the gulls from sharing the food of the al fresco diners (a rare enough experience in this climate anyway). Walking through town, I watch as a sandwich is whipped from the hands of a passing schoolgirl and swept towards the library roof gripped firmly in the yellow beak of a gull. She, fortunately, thinks it as funny as I do. Although I’m wary, as I always am in spring when the phone rings or the doorbell rings unexpectedly, fortunately no
worried, kindly person seems to have come upon a small bird alone under bushes, assumed it to be abandoned, and rescued it.

In late April, I receive an e-mail from Chris warning me to be ready. A friend of his, another naturalist, has told him that the young should be flying by the end of the month. I take my boots out again and clump around, this time with a sense of purpose. When I take them off, Chicken removes one of my new climbing socks from inside the top of my boot where I have stuffed it and runs away with it.

Chris phones back a few days later. He has been to reconnoitre and has found the nest. It’s high and difficult to see, but he thinks that the young are ready to fledge. I must go immediately. Alarmingly, he asks if I’m fit. Since I don’t know for what, I find it difficult to answer. These things, surely, are not absolute. I say that I think I am. ‘There’s gym-fit,’ he says darkly, ‘and hill-fit.’

I pack, make sure that I’ve redeemed the sock that Chicken stole, and leave for Lochaber on an afternoon more like July than the last day of April. It’s a day of mellow warmth, of clear, unbroken sun, the kind of sun that makes Scotland deceptive, other than it is, makes it seem unalterably idyllic, as if it’s always like this, green and gold and timeless. It’s a day which makes me, and possibly everyone else, forget winter, forget many shades of grey, forget cold rain, cold air, ice, unrelieved late or early darkness; transient amnesia, as if memory can be subverted so easily, just by a day of sun.

I drive out of Aberdeen, through Deeside and Strathdon. It’s absurdly perfect, film-set perfect; time-stopped, sun-dappled, quiet roads through ancient forests of oak and birch, Scots pine, aspen. Ahead of me pheasants skitter their vague, panicky way across the road. To the side lapwings flap broad, flickering wings over green fields. Oystercatchers potter and pick by rivers where waterfalls cascade in glittering ribbons. No cars pass.

Ravens are even more difficult to disentangle from superstition and myth than crows and magpies, for they seem still more firmly woven than crows into the foundations of human cultural exposition, into flood myths, Sumerian, Hebrew or Assyrian, or into the cryptic, fantastical stories that have always been the way we’ve tried to explain to ourselves the ineffable mysteries of our own existence. (It’s no wonder they appear in the way they do, as creators, all-seeing, bold, considered. We humans appeared late, stumbled hapless into a world inhabited by these intelligent, striking, canny birds. No wonder some of us believed that they created it all. Perhaps they did.)

In every culture ravens fly out of the days before memory, out of Distant Time and Dreamtime, to infiltrate man’s dream-life, the psychological haunting places where birds and gods seem one. One-eyed Odin of the Nine Worlds (Norse god of a wide and apparently conflicting portfolio of concerns: poetry, war, wisdom and death) had two ravens as constant companions, spies and bringers of news, whose names, Hugin and Munin, are Old Norse for ‘thought’ and ‘memory’. Ravens have been the inspiration for royal houses, have named constellations, led men to battle under standards bearing their likeness. Regarded as capricious
and all-powerful, ravens dominate the spiritual life of many of the cultures of North America, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. They are respected and admired for their observable qualities as well as their spiritual ones, their shadows moving over the ice at top of the world, sacred, spiritually powerful, protective intermediaries between the spirit world and the world of the living. In her book
Ravensong
, Catherine Feher-Elston describes the tribal groups Tlingit, Haida, Kwakiutl and Koyukon as ‘Raven’s children’. She writes too of her interviews with the shaman Medicine Grizzly Bear, healer and academic, who tells her that Raven, partner to the Great Creator, is able to intercede for both living and dead, to call souls back from, or to help them cross into, the spirit world. He talks too of the power of Crow, a different power from that of Raven; a power, among other things, used to protect soldiers in wartime. He describes the ceremonies and prayers used to extend Crow’s protection to family members conscripted to go to World War II and to Vietnam, and of the ceremonies in the sweat lodge when they returned, when Crow was called on to purify them after the terrible experiences of war. (The sweat lodge, a sort of spiritual sauna, heated by hot rocks or directly by fire, is an important place of prayer, meditation and ritual.)

The appearance of ravens in Western literature is sometimes less respectful. Charles Dickens in
Barnaby Rudge
obliges the fictional raven (modelled on his own pet raven) to utter phrases as searingly banal as were ever uttered by any raven, or indeed human, anywhere, especially one that shared a house with someone who should have known better: ‘Never say die!’, ‘Hurrah!’, ‘Keep up your spirits!’, ‘Polly
put the kettle on’, ‘I’m a devil.’ In his descriptions, though, he demonstrates a close knowledge of corvids: ‘he fluttered to the floor and went to Barnaby – not in a hop, or walk, or run, but in a pace like that of a very particular gentleman with exceedingly tight boots on, trying to walk fast over loose pebbles’. Edgar Allan Poe refers in his famous poem ‘The Raven’ to the eponymous bird rather unkindly, as ‘ungainly fowl’. Pliny redresses the balance by describing the funeral of the raven who, after years of affably greeting the citizenry of Rome from the sanctuary of a shoemaker’s shop, was killed in anger by a neighbouring shopkeeper (possibly because it despoiled his shoes). As can only be right in such cases, the culprit was lynched and the bird honoured: ‘The draped bier was carried on the shoulders of two Ethiopians, preceded by a flautist; there were all kinds of floral tributes along the way to the pyre which had been constructed on the right hand of the Appian Way …’

The road steepens towards Corgarff. The journey is one with built-in drama, for to take the road over the Cairngorms is to traverse worlds (admittedly, in a car, this cosmic matter can occur without much difficulty), to cross the vast massif, the mountains, Beinn a Bhùird, Ben MacDhui, Sgoran Dubh to the west and south, to be part of the high Arctic heart of Scotland.

Even the sight of snow poles lining the road, the snow gate standing open, redundant on this day of dark blue, sun-glinting roads, conjures the snow, although today the ski centre at the Lecht is brown and dry, the car park empty, the clanking paraphernalia of skiing sitting in idle silence. The road bends and curves and climbs. It’s always
scary, this road, although today snow and cloud and lowering rain are a memory of other journeys to the west, the ghost of the echo of us all singing one silly song or another fleeting in the air. The road climbs.
Engage low gear now
, and it’s almost dizzying, driving round and down the steep bends of a road that is like a doorway in time until suddenly it descends into another country. The east is behind me. It feels so immediate, over the Lecht and then in so quickly into Speyside, Granton on Spey, Aviemore, so quickly the signs for Newtonmore and Laggan, the signs for the west.

Driving into Lochaber, I feel as if I’m home, that shifting concept. I’ve lived in the east for more years than in the west but feel still as a bird might, turned by sun or star compass, by magnetic force, a sense of orientation within, lodged, like a pigeon’s, in the brain. (In the east, I always feel that the sea should be on the other side.) The weather here too is perfect after a winter of rain.

I remember that it’s Beltane eve, the last day of April, one of the divisions of the old Celtic year. A perfect Bealtuinn moon hangs in the deep blue velvet sky. Tonight, Beltane processions will wind up Calton Hill, one of Edinburgh’s volcanic hills. Fires will be lit; the May Queen will take her ceremonial place amid the Red Men and the Green Men, the host of revellers who congregate to celebrate the coming of spring. (If you didn’t know otherwise, you might think from the web photos that it was a celebration of painted men in underpants.)