Thirty-five
The clouds were moving like whitewater, streaming in lines to the south. Occasionally the sun would appear, adding bright, fibrous stripes to the oyster-colored mass.
Each time the sun would emerge the crow would look up, his dark eyes attracted by the sparkle.
Still, it was chilly and there was less sunlight every day. Winters here were just cold enough and the hills just high enough that soon the crow would fly south, as would the female pecking now at something in the ground far below, and their offspring. Three smaller birds, each about half his size. Altogether, this extended family—this small series of nests atop the white pine—numbered fifteen, and together they would leave for a slightly warmer climate.
This particular crow was the biggest. He was just about a foot and a half long and he had a wingspan of thirty-five inches. He weighed almost exactly a pound.
At the edges of the distant woods the deer were starting their walk up the hill toward the garden. They used to come only at night, but lately they had grown considerably bolder and would venture here during the day. One of them, a male, had even begun to scrape at a thick maple tree beside the garden as the rutting season began to draw near. The animals were growing their winter coats, a grayish brown shell of hollow, kinky fur that insulated them against the cold.
The crow turned his head from the deer when he saw something moving on the ground near his mate. A raccoon, perhaps, was stalking her. He screeched and the other bird rose instantly into the air and landed on one of the lower branches of an apple tree. His eyes darted back now to the source of the motion, and he saw it was merely a twig from a rosebush scratching against the side of the gray house.
The place had been empty for a week. No longer was it a source of almost ceaseless activity, with humans constantly coming and going, their cars rumbling up and down the long driveway. The deer, of course, had noticed their absence, too, which was why they had extended the small world of their browse to the remains of the garden during the day as well as the night.
Humans didn’t seem dangerous to the crow, at least not this bunch. But they were noisy.
Especially that one night in the middle of the summer.
The bird no longer remembered the details of what he had seen from the top of the pine, and—entranced by the lights that flashed everywhere, the lights atop the cars and the lights waved by the people—he hadn’t even witnessed the precise moment after that nearly deafening blast when a woman had picked the rifle up off the ground and heaved it hysterically against an apple tree. He hadn’t seen the brass casing fly free of the chamber when it slammed into the trunk.
It was actually the next morning, while one of the little girls was curled up in the strawberries, that he first noticed the twinkle, the flash in the grass. It was irresistible. Whatever it was, it was glimmering in the high early August sun. And with the child absorbed in her strawberries, he had been able to swoop down and gather it up.
He gazed now at the cylinder in his nest. It was bigger than the other items: the thin, crinkled piece of aluminum foil that he could actually bite through with his beak if he wasn’t careful and the perfectly round bead that had come off the wrist of one of the girls. The casing was a bit heavier than his galvanized carpenter’s nail, but the tube was hollow and so it hadn’t been particularly difficult for him to lift it off the ground and deposit it here in the nest. It was lovely to look at, and he treasured it. So did his mate. It wasn’t as flawlessly shaped as, for example, that bead: There was a dimple near the opening where he had lifted it off the ground, and a section of the rim—that lip at one end—had an ugly flat patch. But, still, the crow thought it was beautiful. The bird wouldn’t take it south with him—he took nothing with him when he flew south—but this summer and autumn it had given him a pleasurable sensation that, in his small mind, was rather like being full.
Now his mate lifted off the apple tree and flew up to their nest in the pine. Below them the deer started to dig at the weedy dirt. A squirrel scampered abruptly across the gravel driveway. A rabbit crouched behind the lowest branches of the hydrangea, his ears high, his nostrils twitching as he sniffed the crisp, autumnal air.
And behind them all, the house sat perfectly still.