Ravens can live to be over a hundred and fifty, and are the only bird to be found in every temperate zone on this fuzzy planet. They are the big black knives that hover at angles over the red rock South in Utah. They group together in Alaska and run grizzlies off their salmon. No shit. A full-grown female raven, given a clean strike, can take a sphere of meat out of you (or a 1 ton bear) the size of a silver dollar. Like a melon baller with feathers.
Ravens are murderous, cowardly, fascinating.
Birds, on the whole, are the MEANEST creatures I've ever come across. I'd rather be in a small space with a Rottweiler than a Cockatiel. They are where the dinosaurs went, you know.
I saw a Raven still as stained glass- leaded fat obsidian- stretched against the beating wind at an arch in the Canyonlands last year. The wind nearly blew me off a long sharp precipice, and I was clutching one foot of the arch like an invalid when this fifteen pound bird snapped up like a kite beside me, turning its long wings at an angle so the 70 mph gale just held it there- ruffling, but stuck in space.
It seemed too big. It seemed as if I was having one of those Young Adult Fiction moments- that bit where the precocious child discovers there is more to the world than the grownups say. This bird was surely torn through some other plane, some other aniverse, and visiting to forecast dire things.
I was terrified. I dont terrify easy, but surreal floating raptors in hurricane gales will do it.
Oh Jersey Christ- the raven turned it head and noticed me.
This bird was no more than twenty feet above, framed by god's erosive masterwork, the Rainbow Arch, and it cocked its head that way that birds have and looked to see if there were any brains in my head. Its cheeks and neck had gone silver. I was possessed by an almost sexual attraction- it was DANGEROUS, you see. It rode between worlds. Here was a hunter in true sociopathic glory- no room for me, and nothing but a game offered by the bursts of air from badland furnace. I began to laugh- mad, horrible cackling at this beautiful atavism. I tried to stand, to totter over through the wind and let it tear the sinews from my arms, and skidded sideways in the gale instead. I tore a fingernail on rock.
The switchblade, black as black, shook its humped head at me, I swear it laughed- it knew me there, along the precipice of dry red dust, and saw that I was clever, if not as sharp as she. It folded, and snapped away- kites or burst vacuum- and flashed the sun off the planes of its back. The other tourists were staring at me. I was some other thing, they saw.
I later read that a raven gone gray was almost always over a century old.
1 comment:
I thought I posted something here already. Perhaps it's because it hit awfully close to home but, I was pretty affected by this little journal-of-sorts.
Fuck off with your affecting!
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