Thursday, March 22, 2007


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.

5 comments:

Maya's Granny said...

Ah, Dr. Crow was bound to try, you know. In Juneau the crows try to scare people into dropping bags of groceries so that they can carry off the contents.

Joy Des Jardins said...

Dr. Crow must have been croaking from the tree tops of his disappointment in you Robert....so very sad.

Robert Brady said...

These days, I generally fail to live up to the standards of the local wildlife. I could have done it easy, back when I was wild myself...

Anonymous said...

LOLOL cute story, Now if only you could find something that the monkeys wouldn't eat!

Perkunas said...

So I had this idea for a story once about the Ravens in Juneau who had learned from the Mammoths (before they disappeared)the history of the ice ages and what took place when way back BCE.

A raven in Powell River, BC, clipped my head once as a way of imparting his dislike of me walking across the street in his intersection.