Kaiser and I walked back. A metallic taste burned in my throat. Blood spattered my coat and one long bloody streak marked one of the bay windows where a raven had struck in its madness. I shucked off my coat inside, let Kaiser in, and closed the door. Numb with shock, a shock nearly as visceral as I’d felt during the accident, I stripped off the rest of my clothes and wandered naked upstairs and took a sumatriptan and a Percocet and climbed under my sheets. Sleep is an inhospitable country if every time you roll over on your left side barbs of pain spike throughout your entire body, but I slept, and this time I did not dream. My sleep was like the snow, a whiteout, and when I woke it was as if the massacre had never happened.
I shrugged on a t-shirt and some sweatpants and wandered downstairs to feed Kaiser. The clock showed it was a little past three, so I had slept much of the day. Outside the bay windows, I saw a few wolves had appeared to drag off the corpses, at least three with maybe more circling deeper in the grove, ghostly shapes. The wolves should have thrilled me. Most people go their whole lives without ever seeing one in the wild, but I was too shell-shocked to wonder over their primal arrival, so intent on their feast they did not lift their bloody muzzles to see me watching them.
Near the birches, one fox, a splash of fiery orange, made a feast of his own, keeping a nervous eye on the larger predators. I felt sure watching that no one would ever believe me. In the years since, I have heard of ravens doing this up in Alaska when their flocks grow too numerous, driven by starvation or overpopulation. Surely, there is a natural explanation. Such rationality insulates us from suffering. I know I didn’t just imagine my mind spreading out to touch the minds of those birds. I felt their hunger and pain. I sensed the drained emptiness in their bellies and in that emptiness, a place where shadows seethed.
In that moment I felt I had seen the Enemy and I knew now what he could do. And I knew he could do the same to the human heart.
Snow kept falling and falling. I was about to turn away when I saw a fleck of black stir in a snowdrift nearest the bay window, a smaller raven struggling to rise. Alive, a lone refugee of the war. The fox and wolves hadn’t noticed it yet, but they would soon. I didn’t stop to think. Barefoot, I opened the back door and waded into the snow to fetch what I figured was a dying animal.
The door snapping shut behind me startled the predators. A large gray timber wolf lifted its muzzle from the red-soaked snow. It had eyes like white fire in the dark, lit from within. Too late, I remembered old man Kroll advising me about the .30-06 in the gun cabinet. Could I make it back inside if they came for me?
Yet I did not feel that same sense of dread as I had caught up amid warring ravens. Her glowing eyes held my own and I sensed her intelligence, her rightness in this wintry world. She belonged here as I didn’t. I write she even though I had no way of knowing for certain if she was the alpha female. In a fellow mammal I just remember sensing a distinct motherly presence.
“Mine,” I told the wolf about the surviving raven behind me. “I’m taking this one.” She huffed in dismissal and, with her tail bristling, retreated into the woods, taking the rest of the pack with her. I watched her go and then turned to my task.
I took off my sweatshirt, wrapped the bird in it, and carried it inside. The sleek black body quivered as I cradled it to my chest, holding it against my bare, goose-pimpled skin. Its eyes were sealed shut, covered in a gray film, like it was sick with some disease.
I thought about calling animal control, but it was already too late at night and I would have to also tell them about what I’d seen in the woods, try to explain it somehow. The sheer savagery. I couldn’t do it. Holding that breathing bird against my chest, I had this feeling it had been sent. A messenger from beyond. Wrapped in my sweatshirt, the raven made a muffled caw of protest, unhappy with the effort I had made to save it.
Unsure what to do next, I brought the wounded bird into the garage, found a discarded box, and made a nest of newspapers. I sat on the garage step and rubbed the glossy black body in my sweatshirt trying to revive it. The eyes never opened, but I could feel the tremor of its breathing in my hands.
I’m the caretaker, I remember thinking. And for the first time in a few months my life made sense, had some purpose. This is why I was put here, in the midst of this madness. I was here to care for things, and not just the house and dog. I had failed to take care of Maura. I couldn’t fail again.
Winter Visitor
I drove the twenty-mile trip to NMSU on roads slick with freezing rain, hemmed in by jack pine, the tamarack in their sphagnum bogs shedding the last of their golden needles. The ride gave me time to think. On a good day, once I crested the last hill the looming trees should have dropped away to reveal a vista of Aurora Bay, glowing green as a gem below, but in the storm the bay glowered, the same leaden color as the lowering sky. The vast inland sea of Lake Superior brooded beyond. I had been longing for a view of open water, for the clarity I hoped the sight might bring, but the choppy waters below frothed with whitecaps.
I had driven here because I desperately needed some normality in my routine. At school I paid for my standard coffee at the Commons where I searched out a class to attend from a crumpled semester schedule in my backpack. I hadn’t slept well the night before. Hell, I hadn’t slept well in months. I needed something else to occupy my mind, to keep it from returning to Maura’s vanishing and the accident. The brutality of the ravens and the lone survivor I’d pulled from the snow. The carrion bird of my brain circling bruised skies.
While I was scanning the schedule, I spotted my buddy Noah just coming in. Noah was one of a few people of mixed race on campus, athletic and good-looking in an all-American way, with dark, coppery skin and long-lashed green eyes he’d inherited from his white mother. A goalie for the Voyageurs’ hockey team, Noah happened to be one of the nicest people I knew. This morning, a blonde walked by his side, her extravagant hand gestures indicating they were in some kind of debate from a previous class. Instinctively, I ducked my head. Noah would have questions. He would want to know if I felt better, what progress I was making on The Land, when we would hang out again. Why did I feel separate from him since the accident? I can’t explain why I didn’t want to talk to him, except this: I didn’t want anyone’s pity, and there are few things athletes pity more than a cripple. For all these reasons, I slunk out of the Commons before he spotted me.
I ended up in my old anatomy class. Before I dropped out, I had a capable lab partner, Naomi, who wielded a scalpel like a talon, peeling back the leached skin of a fetal pig to expose a universe of sluggish gray organs that I dutifully mapped out in my notebook. “Poor Oliver,” I had said at the time, pretending he had been our pet, recently perished after a mysterious illness. “You poor, poor bastard.”
“You’re not supposed to name dead fetal pigs,” Naomi said in a flat voice, clearly repulsed by the notion.
The coursework varied between lab and lecture days, and today was one of the lectures so I could slip in a little late and find myself a place at the back. Professor Rhone was already busy lecturing by the time I snuck in. I waited until his back turned to the board, where an invertebrate had been neatly diagrammed, before I searched for a seat. I kept my head hunched, not looking to see if Naomi was in class that day, until I found a spot at the back. I unzipped my backpack and cracked open a Mead notebook and began to take notes. Hadean. Archean. Proterozoic. The words singing out from the professor as they had from the preacher’s mouth. I wrote as fast as he talked, my pen scratching out furious patterns, copying diagrams from the board, faithfully at first before my attention wandered and in the margins I began to animate a war between amoebas. All of life a struggle, from the dawn of time. Ravens warring in the snow. Our bodies at war on a cellular level. High up in the lecture hall, alone in my row, I heard the professor’s drone and the hum of the generator and the ice striking the glass of the skylights, a gust of wind bringing slanting sheets of freezing rain. My head felt heavier and heavier. There is nothing better than a good lecture-nap. I slouched in my seat and let my heavy head do the rest.