Crows (23 page)

But it did not.

The afternoon passed and the sounds made by the men gradually stopped. The crow heard the engines start and the wheels chew into the gravel as the men went away. And still the light did not return. The crow thought bitterly that that would be just like men: to work all day to create a false darkness.

He waited in the cavern for quite a long time after he was certain the men were gone. Their smell remained—­smells of food, smoke, effort, gasoline—­and the echoes of their machines rang in his brain. He would wait.

But little by little he began to feel better. The most dangerous part of the day was over and he was alive and undiscovered. Loss of light was almost worth that.

He passed a point when he knew it was safe to emerge. He hesitated only because he was afraid of the pain that awaited him when he moved the wounded wing. He had been on the ground for a longer period of time than ever before in his life. Flight seemed somehow remote, the talent of some other bird. He might have forgotten how to fly.

The crow came out of the cavern as carefully as he had entered. The floor of the pit where he had lain all day was darkly spotted with blood from the wing. Clear of the boards, he stood carefully. A bit of light caught on the feathers, giving them an oily, iridescent luster. His beauty reassured him. The breadth and strength of his good wing gave him brief hope that one wing could carry him out of the stone pit.

But he was not so convinced of that that he tried.

He looked above him. The men had put a roof over the pit, a roof of flat sheets of wood laid across narrow boards running from one side of the pit to the opposite side. An opening the size of a door had been left in this roof, and through this doorway the crow could see the evening sky.

The floor of the pit was also different. The piles of straw had been moved, and there were new scraps of wood, a pair of rusted buckets containing nothing, bits of paper, burned matches, cigarette butts, gum wrappers of balled silver.

The patch of water was gone, melted in the daylight. Among all the things left behind by the men there was nothing resembling food. The crow returned to the torn bag at the mouth of the cavern and found it had been nearly emptied. The orange was gone, compounding his thirst. The dried sandwich, the cookies, and the potato chips were all gone. All that remained were bits of sugar and flakes of plastic bag.

The crow pecked up the grains of sugar. But even these he was tempted to ration. They only made him thirstier, and they represented the sum of what he had to eat, aside from spiders, red mites, and snails.

In this sad state, he opened his wounded wing. The pain was surprising. He had expected something riveting, a pain that would blind him, but this pain was quite manageable. It seemed to him a stronger kin of the deep ache he had felt long ago when a boy had surprised him and struck him in the breast with a thrown rock.

He gingerly extended the wing out from his body. He awaited the pain that would signal the limits of what he could do. He listened for the grating of fiber and bone as it ran out of its intended track.

None of this happened. He was able to open the wing wide. It did not look correct, however. He had lost several feathers; he remembered them drifting away above him as he started his fall from the sky. The engineering of the wing looked askew. But he thought it might be well enough to fly him out of the pit. Once out, he would worry about the dangers of being on the ground in the open. He only wanted out.

The crow placed himself directly beneath the doorway in the roof. Efficient at flight, he hoped to rise the eight feet out of the pit with a minimum of wing beats. Then he would walk through a field of cats, so grateful and happy to be free would he be.

His folly extended only to the first downward beat of wings, when the true nature of his wound was brought home to him again in a pain that, for a long red moment, blinded him. He lifted a half foot off the pit floor then fell back with a cry he regretted; it had been so loud and full of misery and vulnerability that it would draw predators from miles around.

Afraid he had undone whatever healing progress had been made the crow tucked the bad wing to his body. Again, there was a not unmanageable ache, and the sense of the wing's natural mechanics being altered. But it no longer hung out to the side like a sign. And the pain had returned to a dimension he could bear.

Above him, across the roof laid down by the men, came a skittering of talons. The crow whirled in fright and jumped against a wall, embarrassing himself with his panic and breaking open a fresh wet bubble of pain in the wing.

The sky beyond the doorway in the roof was a deep soft violet, with stars like stitch holes waiting to be threaded. The crow noticed only that the darkness was not deep enough to hide in, although looking down into the pit from above would be akin to peering into deepest night. In that sense, he had an advantage.

He remained motionless against the wall.

The talons scratched overhead with a maddening lack of intent. The crow tried to estimate the size of the bird and guessed only that it was fairly large. A smaller bird would make no sound greater than a brushing of wood.

Presently a crow stuck her head over the edge of the doorway in the roof. She looked all around the inside of the pit, frequently pausing to inspect the air above her.

The crow had been correct; in the dark pit he was invisible. And as dearly as he wanted to cry out to the stranger, to mount her back and be lifted out of there, he remained patient, silent, still.

She called down, “Are you well?”

She turned her head to listen.

The crow said nothing.

The female flew across the opening in the roof; her form, briefly opened against the sky, seemed to the crow to be a gesture of faith, of vulnerability.

“I saw you fall,” she said. “I've been keeping watch over you. The men are building a house.”

Again she tilted her head to listen for his reply, and when no word came, she said, “Wait,” and flew off.

The crow moved to the mouth of the cavern, lest she had heard his pounding heart and fixed his location. The light in the doorway, once the color of a barn swallow, went to the color of a starling, then a crow. He waited with his eyes turned upward.

She returned holding in her beak a shred of apple that she dropped into the pit. The apple smelled delicious, cool and moist. It seemed to glisten out there on the open expanse of floor.

“Go. Eat,” she encouraged him. “I know you're down there. You must be starved and thirsty.”

The crow fought against the lure of that bit of apple. It tantalized him with visions of trees viewed from the air, their green balls of leaf spotted with scarlet fruit; of the gushing juice in his throat when he stabbed his beak through the apple skin.

He heard her murmur, “Maybe you
are
dead.”

She flicked her wings and crossed the doorway in the ceiling. A droplet of waste splashed down.

The crow moved carefully out of hiding to the spot where the apple lay. He did not look up at her, but she would hear his motion and see his shadowy presence as he devoured the apple. Its grainy meat and sweet juice was the best food he had ever eaten.

She was gone when he finally looked up for her. But she returned with another chunk of apple, and after dropping it into the pit she flew away to get more. A dozen trips she made, until the crow had more apple than he wanted; he feared all the apple bits would make the men curious when they returned. Apple seemed almost to cover the floor.

Finally, he said, “Enough.”

She patiently waited at the edge of the opening while he ate. She kept watch through the porous walls the men had erected that day, walls the crow could not see from the pit floor, walls built more of air than wood. It was dark above her and below her. The night was full of peril, but better to be in the air than in the pit the crow had fallen wounded into. The golden-­lighted eyes she saw in the distant trees and the dangers scented on the wind she could survive, knowing there was a crow in more danger than she was. She flicked her wings and crossed the opening.

The crow had eaten his fill of apples. A burning like the fire of the red mites had begun in his chest from eating too much of the sweet fruit.

The female was still above. He saw by the dipping and pivoting of her head, and the quick flights back and forth across the doorway, that she was extremely uneasy. No crow liked being out after dark. The night made crows doubt their existence.

“Can you come down here?” he called to her.

She considered this request such a long time he wondered if she had heard him. But she was afraid to make that short flight down into the pit. The opening might close over her once she was inside.

She said, “I can't. I will help you as much as I can from up here, but I can't go down into that place.”

She waited for the crow to reply, to pose an argument to her refusal, but he did not.

“I'll bring you food,” she said. “I'll warn you of danger, if I'm able. And I'd help you escape if I thought I could. But if I went down in there I'm afraid I'd never get out.”

She seemed to be speaking into a void, the crow was so quiet.

But he understood her perfectly. He would not have gone into the pit under any circumstances, given the choice.

He asked, “What if they build the house above me and I can't get out?”

She could not answer this. All day she had watched the men work and she had asked herself the same question, without arriving at an answer. Each succeeding day and each succeeding layer of the house would only seal the wounded crow in more tightly.

“Don't think about that,” she said. “How badly are you hurt?”

“I was shot in the wing.”

“Your wing will heal and then you will fly up and out. You will sleep and forget this ever happened.”

“But what if they work faster than my wing heals?”

“Don't worry. There's no point in worrying.”

He had other frightening questions, but they did not merit examination. He preened his fathers in the dark. The wounded wing ached like the memory of a distant death, but he also thought he felt a mending taking place in it. The female remained for a time and her nervousness only increased. The crow finally told her to fly home, to rest.

She did not argue, but promised to return in the daylight to watch over him. She flew once quickly across the doorway. “Will you be all right?”

“Yes,” the crow said. He felt himself expanded by her, doubled in both possibility and hope. “Thank you for everything.”

And the female, freed, flew gratefully out through the walls of the house and away.

T
HE MEN DID
not work in the pit at all the next day. The crow, from his hiding place, heard their pounding and machine cries above him, but the sounds were softened and less threatening; they might have come from a place above the clouds. He felt safe enough to slip in and out of sleep. In these naps he lost only brief slivers of memory, recent past minutes, and he was quick to recognize his plight upon awakening.

The light outside the cavern mouth did not change appreciably throughout the day. He was therefore unable to gauge the passage of time. Only after the silence following the men's departure had lengthened did he guess the day was nearly over.

Then a chunk of apple fell to the floor of the pit.

“Are you safe?” she called down to him, her voice somehow altered.

The crow came carefully from his hiding place. His good wing was stiff and sore as he stretched it out from his body. The wounded wing he left folded against him; he was hungry and did not want to spoil the meal by having to face the despair of slow healing.

He went to the apple and ate it quickly. The female was away getting more. Up through the opening in the roof over the pit the crow saw a second roof, this one with an opening like the first roof. The rectangle of sky the crow could see was being reduced daily. He shivered and dropped the apple bit. The new house was closing him in; the visible stars had been a comfort, something familiar in the night. Now that was being taken away from him, like an eye slowly closing.

The female crow landed at the edge of this new opening. Another chunk of apple fell from her beak and made the long plummet through the top doorway, then through the second doorway, and down to the floor of the pit.

“You won't come closer?” he called up to her.

She flicked her head away.

“You seem so distant,” he said.

“They are working very fast,” she reported. “The walls that I could fly through yesterday have all been covered. They have covered those walls to make a second pit atop yours.”

She asked, “How is your wing?”

“I don't know. I haven't tried it yet.” He was thinking that each day it seemed the difficulty of getting free increased; height added to the walls of the pit until they towered into the sky and he was caught at the bottom looking up at a bare star of light impossibly high above and out of reach.

“Try the wing,” she urged, her voice all enthusiasm.

He moved the wounded wing out from his body. Again he extended it bit by bit, gauging the pain or absence of pain at each point on the wing's extension. There was an ache of stiffness at first but as the wing spread this diminished. With the wing full out, the female cheered from high above.

“How does it feel?”

“It feels better,” he admitted. Even the interior track seemed to be in order.

“Good enough to fly?”

“It felt good yesterday,” the crow replied, “but when I tried to fly—­it felt like I'd been shot all over again.”

“Flying
is
another matter,” she said.

He looked out across his spread wing. He was full of doubt. His heart burned.

She called to him, “Are you going to fly?”

“Maybe with another day to heal I'll be able to fly out.”

“Do you have another day?” she asked. “Only by the greatest good luck have you survived two days. It is good luck that you haven't been found. It was good luck that I saw you fall in there. But can you risk that luck holding?”