CROW COMPLAINS TO THE BLACK-FEATHERED GOD

Sometime during the day yesterday I remember hearing Dr. Crow making some weird sounds from atop a cedar. He wasn't calling or conversing with his colleagues, he wasn't practicing being a frog or just carrying on with his general mumbling at the state of crow politics or whatever, he was making a sound I hadn't heard before: sort of a long drawn out gravelly complaint-sounding sound, that went on for quite a while. I later recalled this because of the shiitake log-related stuff.

Yesterday morning, on my way out to restack some wood and thereby clear a space for my next raised bed (greens, herbs), I stopped at my bunch of oak shiitake-logs-to-be, stacked near the stone stairway. I selected one, drilled the holes, got the bag of spore-impregnated oaken plugs and hammered them into the holes. I usually do one log in the morning and one in the evening. Then I put the bag of plugs down beneath the hammer and went off to do my tasks.

Later when I was going in at evening I stopped to do another log, got the drill and... looked everywhere for the bag of plugs. I was sure I... It wasn't in any of my pockets. Maybe over there. I must have left it on the kitchen table. By the sink? In my workroom? Toolshed? Out by the mailbox? On one of the woodpiles? The splitting stump? I checked everywhere I'd been, but couldn't find it. Then while I thinking where else I might have been, I looked out into the far part of the garden and there the bag was, lying on the ground. I couldn't have dropped it; I would never carry it out there in my hand, I thought as I went to get it.

When I got there I saw that it had a big beak hole right in the middle (the unmistakable beakmark), that scimitared expertly downward, corvinically splitting the bag to get at the contents. There were a couple of plugs nearby. The good doctor had been anticipating maybe beak-watering shrimp senbei, or even chocolate almonds if god be kind, or potato chips the bag looked like it might hold some high quality potato chips-- he had broken it open and found... pieces of raw, fungoid oak! Yuk! Ptah! Ptah!! That must be when he flew to the treetop and croaked to the black-feathered god that long lamentation about his troubles with these people who live for him in this house they built for the purpose, yet treat him in this manner.