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By Root 263 0

cautious birds. For instance, having long experience with poisoned carcasses, they do not taste first of dead food, but let the opportunistic blue jays eat their fill. The ravens watch, amused, to see if these bold greedy birds keel over in agony. Only when the jays are seen to survive do the ravens drive them off and settle in to feed. Davan had to use his father’s crossbow to kill the raven. One day when Krahe was gone, Davan sat on the front stoop of his little cottage and waited for the birds to gather in their usual browbeating circle of derision. As they laughed at him, stepping through the branches, he slowly raised the crossbow. They would have vanished at the sight of a gun. But they were unfamiliar with other instruments. They did not know the purpose or the range of the bow. One strayed down too far and Davan’s arrow pierced it completely through. Krahe drove into the yard and saw Davan standing over the bird. Amazingly, it wasn’t dead. In some fascination, Davan was watching it struggle on the shaft of the arrow, the point driven into the earth.

Krahe walked over and bent to the bird. He snapped the arrow’s point off and drew the shaft tenderly, terribly, from the bird’s body. For a moment the raven sprawled, limp and addled, on the ground, and then it gathered itself. The two humans watched as the bird simply walked away from them and entered the woods to die.

All of this time, overhead and out of range, the other birds wheeled. For once, they were silent.

“Let me see the bow,” said Krahe conversationally.

Davan handed it to him, prepared to point out its marvelous and lethal features.

“And the arrows.”

Davan handed those over too.

“I’ll be right back,” said Krahe.

Davan waited. Krahe walked across the yard to his woodpile, turned, and fit an arrow into the groove. Then he raised the bow. Davan stepped aside, looked around for the target, looked uneasily back at Krahe, then touched his own breast as the sculptor lifted the shoulder piece. Shot. Davan leapt to the other side of the white pine and vaulted off into the brush. The arrow stuck just past his shoulder. Then Krahe walked over and removed the arrow and laid the bow on the block he used to split his firewood. He axed the weapon neatly in half. He laid the arrows down next like a bunch of scallions and chopped them into short lengths. He walked into his house and phoned me. “If you see that boy running past your house,” he said, “here’s why.”

“You shot at him?”

“Not to hit him.”

“But still, my God.”

Krahe, embarrassed, would not speak of this again.

Davan had saved enough money from his pay (we thought) to buy himself a small old Toyota, dusty red with a splash of dark rust on the door where a dent had raised metal through the paint. The car now spewed grit and smoke on the road as he drove it back and forth to town. He’d returned to his room in his parents’ house and he resumed, every day, his chore of feeding the dog, though he never untied it from the tree.

That dog’s maple grew great patches of liver-colored moss and dropped dead limbs. The dog was killing it. Shit-poisoned, soaked with urine at the base, and nearly girdled by the continual sawing and wearing of the chain, the tree had for years yellowed and then blazed orange, unhealthily first of all the trees upon the road. Then one day it fell over and the dog walked off, calmly, like the raven, into the woods, a three-foot length of chain dragging. Only the dog didn’t die. Perhaps it had been completely stark mad all along, or perhaps it happened that moment after the tree went down when, unwrapping itself nervously, the dog stepped one step beyond the radius of packed dirt within which it had lived since it was a fat puppy. Perhaps that step, the paw meeting grass, rang down the spine of the dog, fed such new light into its brain, that she could not contain the barrage of information. At any rate, the outcome of that moment wasn’t to be seen for several weeks, within which time Davan had successfully raised dust near Kendra on illicit visits hidden from her father, and secretly