Sleek and dark as the forest night, the crow glided over the Appalachian ridges corrugating southwest Virginia. Wallens, Powell, Cumberland. Those were their human names, but for Old Crow they were Home.
He flew early each morning, before the mountain witch got up, because he didn’t want to remind her he had the freedom of the skies, and she did not. She’d tried when she was younger, but on her best days her long skirts barely cleared the ground. Now she’d lost even that. She couldn’t keep the right words straight in her mind.
During the first hour after sunrise, the crow chased a rabbit and tormented a stray kitten. He meant them no real harm, and after a few minutes tired of the play. Having lived too long, over a hundred years now, games quickly bored him, as did most everything else. He still felt grateful and loyal because of the witch’s gift, but he couldn’t remember the last time his long life gave him pleasure.
During the second hour he paid his respects at a crow funeral, of which he’d seen many during his time in the world. They’d gathered around the body and in the surrounding trees, hundreds of them, because it was late summer and more than the usual few families were on the move, to gaze at the broken fledgling on the path. According to rumor a farmer’s hunting dog was the cause. The alarm over the danger went out hours ago. But now they watched without noise, and after the appropriate time departed in silence but for the sound of all those flapping wings.
Old Crow felt grateful to be included in the rituals of his kind. In their black eyes he was no longer one of them. He was an outcast, barely tolerated because of his differences, but they still sometimes allowed him in. A century spent with the witch woman, Emer, made him something more than crow, although he hadn’t the language to say what.
On his way back to her he spotted an acquaintance, the scrub-jay, far below, hopping and bobbing his blue head about the forest floor. Old Crow dropped out of the sky, rustling his tail feathers as he landed in front of him.
“You can’t have my food!” Scrub-Jay scolded.
“I don’t want your food.”
“Well, you can’t have it! It’s not here!” But Old Crow had already seen him shove acorns, worms, and seeds under a nearby pile of leaves and bark. Scrub-Jay made several such caches in the area, no doubt a few more than he remembered.
“The woman feeds me well. And I’m quite capable of scavenging for myself.” To demonstrate, the crow hopped onto a log, pulled a stiff twig into his beak, and used it to fish a grub out of a deep fissure in the wood. Showing off, he then flipped the grub over to Scrub-Jay, who trapped it beneath a talon.
“Mine now!” the scrub-jay squawked.
Old Crow jumped from the log and fluffed his glistening black mantle. “Enjoy the fruits of my labor.”
“There’s a possum nearby. We can share.”
The crow was genuinely surprised by the offer. “No thank you.”
“He’s dead now.”
The crow knew the possum when he was alive, not that it made any difference. Once dead, friends were food, unless, perhaps, they were crows. But more than once he’d fed on the eggs and nestlings of crows.
“I mean completely dead.”
“I know,” Old Crow said sharply. “I know the dead very well. My kind invented death, haven’t you heard?” He wasn’t sure if this was true. There were stories. But he wanted to say a bold thing and so he did.
“I just thought. Well, the gossip is your woman isn’t doing so well. You might need to find another one to live with.”
“You shouldn’t listen to gossip. Where did you hear this?”
“Around. Just around. They say she wanders.”
“She has always wandered. It’s how she finds what she needs for her spells and cures.”
“They say she writes on trees. They say she speaks to herself.”
“When she casts a spell she is speaking to herself. Who else would she be speaking to? And she has always written on trees. She has always made her signs.”
What Old Crow didn’t say was writing on trees kept Emer from getting lost. She once knew the woods as well as she knew the many lines marking her own face, but now the simplest journey could be the cause of endless confusion. She marked the trees between her cabin and the nearest store so many times they were losing their bark. But no one needed to know this.
Three blackbirds landed nearby. The scrub-jay went into a panic, jerking its head in a series of sharp turns. “You can’t have my food! You can’t have my food!”
The blackbirds tried to talk at once, running around and flapping their wings. Old Crow stared at them. He’d been known to eat a blackbird or three when he thought it necessary.
Emer had fallen in the woods. One of the blackbirds suggested that now she was dead she might make a good meal.
Without a word Old Crow took flight.
The crow first met the woman when he was young and eager to try out everything in his surroundings, no matter the risk. He’d settled down in the middle of the highway to dine on some carrion, an unfortunate squirrel who thought she could outrun the humans’ automobiles. In those days, the crow was short enough to duck beneath their metal bellies. He only had to avoid their tires.
He soon became aware of the woman watching him from the side of the road. She looked no better than roadkill herself with her ragged clothes and dirty flesh, but beneath the grime he could see the youthfulness in her face and the sharpness in her eyes. She carried a large sack for gathering treasures—castoffs and trash and roots and seeds—detritus which only the smartest of granny women appreciated their hidden value. “Clever Crow,” she called him back then. “Clever Crow,” she whispered until in a trance he hopped over, and she added him to the collection in her sack.
He considered himself lucky she didn’t eat him or take him apart for some esoteric project or other. Instead, he became her constant companion, surprising since she lived alone and did not enjoy the company of others. Depending on her mood, if uninvited strangers ventured near her cabin she might send them away with stings and rashes and running sores.
But the mountain folk owed her much and hired her often for tonics and charms to protect themselves, spells for the sick and lovelorn. But she would not guarantee spells of attraction and sold them only when she needed food or money. Sometimes she would sell a farmer a special scarecrow, and the crow spread the word those fields were not to be touched.
No one liked or fully trusted her. To these people Emer was the outcast crow. But he stuck with her, and over time Clever Crow became Old Crow as she rewarded him with a long life for his loyalty, replacing his deteriorating parts as needed using spit and cobwebs and singsong words spoken barely above a whisper. As her powers grew, so did his.
He found her sprawled off the path among the phlox, bearberry, and creeping juniper. She’d lost her way again, became tangled in the undergrowth and went down. She sometimes forgot there was food in the cabin and went off foraging on her own. He should have been there.
She was poorly dressed for the cool morning weather. She wore her thin silver nightgown and she’d forgotten her hat and shawl. She lay motionless, staring at the sky, her long gray hair twisted and stiff with briars and sticky weeds.
“Old woman, are you dead?” It came out harsher than he intended, but most things did. His voice had no music in it.
“I don’t . . . know. Am I?” Her eyes did not move when she answered him. Her voice was flat and sounded as if it came from a distant place.
“Get up. You cannot lie here.”
“I don’t know how.”
He had no strength to give her, but he possessed serious power to annoy. He plucked at her shoulders and pecked at her legs until she rolled onto one side, then pulling at her sleeves made her get up on one knee. Further torments drove her to her feet, swinging her arms to swat him.
He floated up and made two barrel rolls overhead to remind her any attempt to catch him would be wasted effort.
“Who are you? Are you my husband?” He was alarmed by the tears on her face. In all those years he never saw her cry. If she were ever married it was before he knew her.
“I’m Old Crow. You used to call me Clever. Do you remember?” The idea of being her husband amused him. What was he to her anyway? She never gave it a word. The crow had always been a bachelor, but he loved the females.
“And my name? What is mine?”
She misplaced many things in the past few years, but this was the first time she lost her name. “Your name is Emer. You have told me it is Irish, but I don’t know what that means. You are my oldest friend.”
During the next few months, the crow stayed closer to the cabin and discouraged the woman from venturing out. She had plenty of food stored away, but if necessary he could kill a small rabbit or squirrel and drag it inside and leverage it with a stick into the fire. Like most crows, he was good with tools, but all these years in her company made him—what was the word she used? —her engineer.
But some days, if she were determined, he could not stop her from going out, either to the small country store, or the cabin of some acquaintance, or some favorite source for bulbs, seeds, or roots. For she was a granny woman, a witch, and although he was special, he was mostly a crow. He always followed her, flying between trees and bushes, perching on the edges of roofs or cliffs along her route, waiting while she completed whatever business she had, and then followed her back, cawing his signals, waking her up, reminding her of the safest way home.
Old Crow did the best he could, but he knew his assistance was not adequate. Some mornings she put her clothing on backwards. Other days she had difficulty dressing at all. He could pick the proper clothes for her and pull her sleeves in the right direction, and sometimes turn a blouse around using talons and beak if she hadn’t put her arms in yet, but he couldn’t button her up and she tended to fight him over zippers.
She fell asleep most afternoons and he used these breaks to fly, gliding through the air making observations, patrolling for predators, and chasing them away with his harsh warning cries. Once freed from Emer duty, he was available to search for the sights which buoyed him, a lovely spider’s web perhaps or a wasp colony’s elaborate multichambered nest. These were not treasures to bring home or cache in a secret collection like a gathering of shiny stones or buttons or bits of jewelry. They were valuable primarily as memories, and he filled his aging crow brain with as many of them as possible. Isn’t that what wise creatures do, before their inevitable end?
Fall soared into winter, and winter meant not letting the flames in the fireplace go out no matter what. Old Crow couldn’t count on Emer remembering how to restart the fire or even wanting to. On freezing afternoons, she slept more, waking up only to take a bit of food from his beak or to accuse him of carrying unwelcome messages out of her troubled dreams.
Eventually the seasons circled to spring again and the rising warmth encouraged her to talk, but what she said often made little sense.
“How are you feeling today?” the crow asked, perched on her mountain of quilts.
“I am dead, sorry bird. Please don’t try to wake me.”
“You’re not dead, Emer, but you have been sleeping for quite a long time.”
“Can’t you smell me, stupid bird? I stink. I am dead.”
“You just haven’t been able to wash yourself, old woman, and that’s beyond my powers to help. Let me find a nurse somewhere in the hollers, or another granny woman to perform the chores I cannot.”
“I am hot and then I’m cold and then I’m hot again.”
“See? The dead feel neither cold nor heat.”
“What is your name again?”
“You once called me Clever Crow and then Old Crow. These have been my only names.”
“Well, shut up Old Crow or whatever your name is and let the dead lie in their well-earned peace.” She was silent for a time, but then added, “Just don’t leave me by myself.”
They had been through this charade a few times before. Periodically over the years Emer decided she was finished. She was dead, and all indications appeared to be this was a fact. She had no pulse. She had no breath. Her skin became discolored, her lips blue. The locals took her to a funeral home, and she’d lie there a few hours, but then in the middle of the night she would forget, or change her mind, climb off the mortician’s table and leave. Each time it became Old Crow’s job to find them a new place to live where she could start all over under a different last name.
She did this for decades. Sometimes the locals put up a gravestone, anyway, waiting for her body to return. Emer’s big secret was she had graves all over the Appalachians, each under a different last name.
But not this time. This was clear in Old Crow’s brain. There was no getting up this time, no changing her mind and climbing off the table. As spring sailed into summer Emer ate less and less, until it seemed she was living on air alone, and maybe the smells wafting through the cabin windows. She got out of bed only to go to the bathroom, but he wondered why she bothered since there was so little waste produced.
She slept entire days and most of every night. She became reduced to a speech of single words like wind, and dream, and empty, and crow.
For months, the crow wondered what he would do once his granny woman died. Could he organize a crow funeral, or would that have insulted her? Could he get the other crows in these mountains to come?
Could he stay in her cabin forever? This seemed unlikely, unless her reputation was such no one would want to trespass even after her death. It had been decades upon decades since he’d lived in the wild on his own. Could he do it again?
Old Crow began to notice his own changes. He had always had such sharp vision, able to spot a hint of food on the ground even when flying high in the air. But lately the world was always at dusk, his vision reduced, a time to find a roost and avoid the owls.
Before he met the woman the crow roosted with other crows in the same group of trees near water. There they shuffled and squawked, moving down through the branches as more crows arrived, exchanging gossip before settling down to sleep. Since moving in with the old woman he grabbed sleep whenever he could. She gave him so much to do there was little time for slumber.
Now he could barely keep his eyes open in the middle of the day. He barely noticed when his tail feathers began to fall out. He could still fly, but badly. He kept bumping into things. When his wings started falling apart, breaking down into cobwebs and bits of bark and leaf and yellowed witch’s spit, Old Crow knew his flying days were over. As Emer died, he was losing everything she gave him.
On their last day he hardly noticed when she climbed out of bed. He realized what was happening when she shuffled out the cabin door. He crept slowly behind her, losing feathers and talons, a withered eyeball, along the way.
Halfway through the yard she stopped, her limbs stiffening. She raised her arms toward the sky, and they froze. Old Crow dragged himself up her hardening skin with beak and broken claws, desiccated feathers, and fracturing bones, until in the crook of a branch he was able to rest.
He wondered if they would gather, all his dark crow kin. He wondered if they would grant him their minimal respect.
Originally published in Feisty Felines and Other Fantastical Familiars, edited by Kevin J. Anderson and Allyson Longueira.
