The Crow's Call

There’s a saying that in a big city, like London, New York, or Jo-Burg, that you’re never more than a few meters away from a rat, and that, “Where there’s one rat there’s always a dozen more you don’t see.” Out here in the hills and woods, in the rice fields and little wall-less communities, I think the same thing can be said but not for the rats. For the crows. Their calls and creaks, the flaps of their wings and the snap of their beaks, are never more than a few seconds away from your ears, if silence is all you’re trying to listen to. There must be something to their sounds. All birds chirp and whistle or squawk and shriek, but those always just sound like the noises of animals. Things they do because they wouldn’t be themselves if they didn’t. The crows though, these ones specifically, the ones of the hills and woods and the ever cloud heavy sky, seem to have something more on the backs of their sounds. A sort of weight that marks a string of intelligence. If you see one crow call out into the evening wind, you’ll soon hear a few others, more faintly, a fair distance off. These calls are a direct response, like a wolf’s howl, carrying meaning and sense, not like the easily startled, and time forgotten, howls of the dogs we keep on our couches and door steps. When a crow calls it shows that they are speaking, but what do they say? I’ve often heard that these night-black crows were once seen as symbols of rejuvenation and a valued key to the cycle of life. Now, though, with their numbers so large and scattered as the stars behind our view, they are seen as pests, as ugly and lost things that peck and pick and scratch and strip away at our things and our crops. Do you think that’s what they say, with their calls? When they land on the powerlines or block out parking spaces or walk beside the road, do you think they are reminding each other of the stories that were once told about them? Of the gods and kings they were once seen as? Perhaps they don’t want to forget, so a crow makes it its job and goal to fill the wind with its call and creak so that its truth might find a crow who hasn’t heard it yet? If that’s true, that crows remember and try so hard not to forget, do you think they’ll ever try and get back to those times, to enter those stories and fly amongst the dreams of gods and kings again? Is that why they like shiny things? I’ve heard that the brightest thing in this world can be an idea, or a dream. If enough people think of a thing, and agree that it is a dream worth having, well, then those soft and inky pages do have a way of crawling out of the story and standing beside and among the real and breathing. Maybe that’s why they look for lost coins and dropped bottle caps and pieces of shattered glass. They could be trying to find the ideas and dreams that we are always leaving behind. With every day we live, and every breath we take, we become a little more “awake”, leaving behind those comforts and desires that rested so deeply in our dreams. A crow’s nest can hold many things we’ve left behind. The lost bits of change that rolled out of our pockets because we lost the time to save up for the future. Folded crumples of tinfoil from the food we spent so much love and time baking but never ate because, I’m too busy for a treat. Sparkly glints of broken bottles make for a nice addition to a crow’s nest, where initially it marked an act of thrown anger or a mistake that could never change. In all those things, however small and unseen, there lies a connection, some form of frayed and withered thread that links our own seemingly unconnected stories and dreams, our shiny things, to some impossibly large and shared story. A book with more pages than there are stars in between the crow-black ink of space. Everything we’ve ever done or thought, said or didn’t even notice can, with enough time and care, be restitched until all forgotten things can be found. Maybe, just maybe, that is why the crows flock and fly in such sun-blocking clouds, because each and everyone one of them, maybe without even knowing, is collecting lost memories and sharing connected stories through calls and creaks, the flap of their wings and the snap of their beaks.