Chapter 14: Tuesday Morning

Home Hill, California

February 1, 2005

Pa-Ho woke in the darkness of his hidey-hole, the snug corner of the human nest’s eaves where he slept each night. It was dry, safe, and his own, and within it lay his most precious things.

Food first: a crust of bread from the trash heap of a moving nest, a few walnut bits he had harvested by dropping the shells onto the big road and letting the moving nests do the cracking, and, best of all, a dozen or so of the white berries Kay-Dee herself had given him. He treasured them more than anything. Each morning he would take them from her hand, fearless. He knew, with a certainty as deep as instinct, that Kay-Dee would never hurt him.

And then there were his other treasures. Not food, but shiny and bright, things that caught his eye and spoke to something deep in his crow soul. A flattened bottle cap. An earring with no partner, dangling and delicate. A red bead. A shiny shell. Gifts, all of them, meant for Kay-Dee. He had left such things for her before—placed carefully on the human perch table out on the deck. But she never seemed to receive them. Instead, the portly human who barked at Pa-Ho in ways that were both unkind and oddly kind—like a performance of anger rather than the real thing—always came out to tidy the outer nest and carried them away. This seemed to be his role in the Kay-Dee murder: to remove things, to sweep them, to collect. Pa-Ho did not understand it, but he accepted it. Humans were strange.

The sky outside was paling. It was not yet Kay-Dee time, but soon. She always came at the same moment in her world, right before she left the human nest for whatever place she went each day. Pa-Ho did not know how she kept such steady time—only that she did. It seemed obvious that she did not use the sun to keep time like crows did. Maybe they didn’t know how to do that? That seemed a possibility.

For him, it was different. He marked her arrival by the sun, and the sun was always changing. Several days before, she came when the edge of light had just begun to touch the eastern mountains. Now, in the Sun-Longer half of the year, she came when the sun was just starting to peek over the mountains and become visible. Tomorrow it would be a little higher still. He adjusted each day, nudging his own sense of the sky to keep pace with her strange constancy.

He thought about Sun-Longer. Each day starts a little earlier and lasts a little longer. That meant mating season was near. Not yet—but close.

Pa-Ho thought about it as he shifted in his hidey-hole. Mating season was madness. The older males flapped and danced, their wings thundering, their throats raw with calls. They dragged bright trinkets and dead things before the females, hopping and bowing, strutting and displaying. And the females, cool as winter, watched without a sound, judging every wingbeat and every gift. He had watched it two years now, not as a participant but as a witness. This year, he would be expected to join in, to practice courtship with those of his hatch time. Though they were still too young to pair up and mate, they had to start learning the dance—like human adolescent junior high school dances. He thought he knew how. He had practiced in secret, awkward at first, less awkward now. He was ready, or at least he believed he would be.

And he wondered, as always, about the humans. The humans mated in every season, in every place. On the deck. In their rooms with the glowing boxes. Even in the great round container of steaming water outside. Pa-Ho had seen it all. If they behaved like this when it was not mating season, what would they do when it actually was mating season? Would they go mad as the crows did? Would they dance on the deck, wings spread, eyes blazing? The thought amused him.

But he still had tasks before Kay-Dee time.

First, relief. Birds did not foul their nests. When the humans said, don’t shit where you live, it was a metaphor. For crows, however, it was quite literal. Pa-Ho fluttered out of the eaves and landed atop the great white cylinder that sat below—smooth and round, one of the humans’ strange things. He shuffled to the far side, where no eyes would see, and released the great backlog of the night. It splattered down the metal curve, steaming faintly in the cold air, and he felt lighter at once.

It was his favorite pooping place. Every so often, a human arrived in a big moving nest and hooked some kind of connection apparatus from his nest to the cylinder for reasons Pa-Ho could not begin to guess at. And always, the human—it was not always the same one—used a tool of some sort to clean the mess away. That was why Pa-Ho liked it best. The white cylinder was self-cleaning.

Next, water. Pa-Ho launched himself uphill, wings sweeping, until he reached the great round structure that loomed above the human nest. To his eye it was a water hoarding structure with a hard shell, smooth and branchless, perched on its own pad of stone. He was certain it held water. Why the humans wanted to keep water locked up instead of using their fine pond on the deck—where Kay-Dee and The Loud One and others splashed and bathed—he could not guess. That pond made sense. But a water-pond sealed in iron? Meaningless. Humans were weird.

In truth, it was the Kingsley Manor firefighting and pressurization cistern: twenty-five thousand gallons kept in reserve to satisfy the insurance company. A blend of one-third filtered gray water and two-thirds fresh well water. Non-potable for humans, but perfectly suited for watering the hardy plants around the house, washing down the decks, and—though no one knew it—for crow baths and drinking.

What Pa-Ho knew was that a bent pipe jutted from its belly. From that pipe a puddle always formed, clean and cool. He hopped down, dipped his beak, and drank until he was satisfied. Then he stepped into the puddle and flicked the drops across his back, spreading his wings, working the water through his feathers, taking the first of at least six baths he would take that day. This was his drinking and bathing hole. No other crow knew of it—not yet. He would share it if they did, but for now it was his alone, his secret.

He shook himself dry, feathers sleek again, and took to the air. The mountains were brightening now. Soon the sun would crest them, and when it did, Kay-Dee would appear. She always did. And she would hold out her hand, and he would take the white berries, one by one, from her fingers.

It was almost time.

Pa-Ho rose higher, wings pulling him above the human nest until he reached the tallest tree on Home Hill, a coastal pine that stood like a sentinel over the slope. From there he faced west, the ocean still untouched by the sun, though the sky itself was brightening by the minute.

He read the weather. Crows were good at it. They watched the sky, the sea, the currents of wind, and they listened to the old ones—wisdom passed down from beak to beak. The stories were simple but true: When the air presses heavy on your wings, rain is near. When it presses light and the horizon shows clear, the day will be open and bright.

The air pressed light today. His feathers told him what his eyes confirmed—the horizon was sharp and blue-gray, the sea still and waiting. No fog would form, no rain would come. The wind off the ocean would rise later, but not enough to tear through the sky and ground the birds. It would be a cold day, yes, but a beautiful one.

Satisfied, Pa-Ho launched himself from the treetop and circled down toward the coastal oak that stood near the human deck—Kay-Dee’s tree, as he thought of it. This was where his murder gathered to watch the nestling play her beautiful noise, all except him. He sat on the railing itself, closer than any of them dared. The other crows still flinched from her, frightened of the human child despite the beautiful noise she made for them. Foolish. Kay-Dee would never hurt a crow. He knew it the same way he knew that cracking acorns was more trouble than it was worth. It was distrust of Kay-Dee simply because she was human and they had always been told to fear humans. Blatant speciesism, Jake Kingsley would have said had he thought about the situation. And he would have been right.

The first edge of the sun broke over the mountains to the east, setting the sky in gold. Pa-Ho tilted his head, listening. He could already make out the silhouettes of humans moving back and forth within the nest, shadows against the glass. It was time. He opened his beak and began to call her name, the sound sharp and rhythmic:

“Kay-Dee. Kay-Dee. Kay-Dee.”

The glass door slid open and Kay-Dee stepped onto the deck, her voice sharp in the cold morning air.

“Pa-Ho! It’s Caydee, Caydee, Caydee—louder than thunder!”

He knew his name, and he knew hers. The rest was just human-cawing, too big and strange to follow. But he didn’t need to understand the words. He could read her mood. She was happy, yes, but grumpy too. That was the leaving-the-nest-for-the-day grump. He had learned the pattern: every morning like this, she gave him the berries and then vanished into the moving nest until the sun was nearly gone.

There had been a time—not so long ago—when he would only take the white berries from her hand if she held them out at a careful distance. He trusted her more than any other human, but even then he had kept a gap between them. That changed after the great storm, when food was scoured from the hill and the murder’s young cried from their nests. Kay-Dee had stepped out onto the bridge with all the berries she had, and she had given them to him. Every one. Pa-Ho had carried them back to the roosting grove and shared them with the younger crows, who survived because of it.

In that moment he had known—truly known—that Kay-Dee was a friend of crows. She would not harm him, not now, not ever. And so far, he had been right.

So this morning, as she sat down, he landed beside her and hopped onto her knee without hesitation.

“Kay-Dee, Kay-Dee, Kay-Dee!” he called proudly.

She grinned and shook her head. “You really are a bird brain. And your toes are spiky. I can feel them through my jeans.”

He realized she was chiding him in human talk. But playfully, not seriously. She often did that. It was endearing but he didn’t know why. Crows had emotions and did show them to other crows through speech or body language, but they didn’t display false emotion for amusement or deception. It was truly a human trait.

Then she pulled the white berries from her pocket. Always ten. No more, no less. One by one she fed them to him. He ate the first five, carried two away—one in his beak, one in his crop—to join his stash, then returned to finish the next two.

“Click-Click,” he told her. Crows had manners and he was thanking her for the berries.

“Yer well-cum,” she told him, a human term he recognized as ‘click-clank’, the crow expression of polite gratitude.

At last he rose, wings spread, and flew to the roof of the human nest. He landed on the strange metal thing that breathed warm, moist air and always smelled so good. He didn’t know why, only that it did. It felt wonderful on his feathers on an early Sun-Longer morning, and from there he could see all of Home Hill.

The blue moving nest rolled down the drive. Kay-Dee was in the back, her face a small pale shape in the glass. He cried her name once more—

“Kay-Dee, Kay-Dee, Kay-Dee!”

—and watched until the moving nest disappeared from sight.

With Kay-Dee gone, Pa-Ho set out to forage. Early Sun-Longer was the hardest time. No rain meant no worms, no fog meant no slugs. Acorns were still scattered, but always more trouble than they were worth—too hard, too bitter, too much work for too little food.

Walnuts, though. There were walnuts. They dropped from the trees near the big road, and the squirrels carried them off and hid them. That was where the crows came in.

Pa-Ho had been taught the trick when he was still a downy fledgling. His mother and father had shown him how to watch the squirrels, how to mark where they paused, where they scratched, where they buried. Never rush in too soon, they had warned. The squirrels will fight for their stash. You had to be patient, watching carefully, waiting until the squirrels were lost in their own squirrel-business. Then you made your move.

Pa-Ho was good at it. His family was known for it, in fact. Walnuts cracked by moving nests were one thing, but walnuts stolen from squirrels—that was an art. The payoff was rich and oily and worth the risk.

Pa-Ho left the human nest behind and winged toward the grove of trees near the big road. Moving nests thundered past constantly, loud and faster than any crow could fly. He had noticed a pattern: on the mornings when Kay-Dee left in the blue moving nest, there were always more moving nests on the big road. He did not understand the connection, but he knew it was real.

He chose one of his favorite perches, a pine tree with needles thick and green even in early Sun-Longer. The cover was perfect. From here he could see the walnut trees strung along the road’s edge. They were bare now—no fresh nuts clinging to the branches this late in the season—but that didn’t matter. Random walnuts still littered the ground beneath, and the squirrels were always at work, finding them, carrying them off, and burying them in their secret places.

Pa-Ho waited, silent, hidden. The squirrels scurried, busy with squirrel-business, their tails flagging as they darted through the grass. They were clever creatures. Not crow-clever, of course, but clever enough to know what it meant when a black shape loomed above them. A crow in the open sky meant a crow waiting to steal, and they would defend their stashes with fury.

He had seen what happened to the amateurs—crows who tried to blunder in too soon or too bold. Torn legs, broken wings, bloodied feathers, all from squirrel teeth. Squirrels fought like demons when defending their food.

But not Pa-Ho. He had been taught. Identify the site from cover. Wait until the squirrels were busy or gone. Move only when the way was clear. Get in, get out, quick as a flash. If you were spotted, flee at once and vanish into the trees. The squirrels would forget soon enough and return to their frantic digging.

Pa-Ho shifted on the branch, black feathers blending with pine shadow. His eyes tracked a squirrel scurrying along the roadside with a walnut clamped in its jaws. He watched where it paused, where it scratched, where it buried. A mark. A promise. A prize for later.

Smooth. Always smooth. That was how you hunted walnuts.