Life Without Crows

They say all the smart folk died off when the world ended. I don't hold that as the full truth, but it's certain there's no one left to measure a body's intelligence. I've heard that there was once a living in that: wandering around the country and giving tests to young folk. But that's all ended. There's nobody left to give such tests, much less write 'em. And people up this way never held with that nonsense.

What's the use of someone handing you a bunch of numbers and saying, "Here's how smart you are"? It sure don't make it any easier to get by in this world. Not then and not now.

Especially not now. You don't have to be smart to get by--not book smart, anyways. You have to be tree smart and sky smart and water smart. And if you aren't smart, then you just have to be determined--cussed stubborn, as my gram used to call me when I was a boy. It's why I'm still alive, why the others are, too. We're all too cussed stubborn to lay down and die.

Although that's not what the government folk told us. Back when they were up this way, before the sickness rolled around for the last time.

They drove up in their white trucks and walked around in their white suits and stuck us with big needles that hurt like anything. The needles caught up our blood, and then the folks in the suits spun that blood in some kind of machine. The lady doctor who took a liking to me told me it separated out the parts. Like you were baking a pie and once it was done you could dump it in a bucket and spin it hard enough to make the apples and the sugar and the flour and the butter all shake out again to be on their own. Some kind of magic, if you ask me--although she said she couldn't do it with a pie, so maybe not. Can't see how spinning a body's blood around is all that useful.

Anyhow, the lady doctor thought that some of us up here on the mountain might be special. That maybe something in our blood was making it impossible for the sickness that was rolling around the country and killing everyone to touch us. But I don't think she ever found what she was looking for in my blood, because right before she drove away with the other docs, she told me to stay away from people, not to congregate because that's how the sickness jumps from a body to another. And why would she need to tell me that if I was so special?

Anyhow, I did what she said. Wasn't hard, not for any of us up here. We don't live close enough to each other to congregate easily. And we don't like each other well enough to want to, even if it was easy. We're independent types; we live as we will, the way our folks did, and their folks, and the ones before them.

But that don't mean we can't work together if we have to. I worried for a while that if everyone was dying, then we were going to have to make an army, on account of all the other countries that might attack us once they knew we'd come up on hard times. I was 'specially scared of those countries that touched us on the pretty map that Miss Richley used to show us in school--back when I still went. But then we heard that the sickness was all over the world, that it had spread the way mold spreads on bread, starting in one little spot and then fuzzing the rest slowly. You can miss the mold when it's new, but later the bread smells too bad to even think of putting it in your mouth.

That's how this world is now that we're what's left in it. All fuzzy, and we're the little bit of bread that nobody's going to bother to try to get at.

It's not just here in the mountains; I've heard tell that they're others like us, still living. Spread out across this country and others, too, living wide apart because none of these folk were sociable and that's what saved 'em. Well, that and the fact that they all lived in the hard areas--the high up or the wide open or the dried out areas--the places the city folk never wanted to come to. The city folk left us alone, and now they're really leaving us alone because I've been given to understand that they're mostly dead. They lived too close--and that's dangerous. If you tend towards gathering with your brethren, well, then, you're gonna die with those same folks.

Although not everybody that got sick died. Some of 'em got better. Slowly, and a lot of them weren't quite right in the head--or in parts down below. The fever made some crazy and made even more unable to have kids. And left the city folk with nothing, all their easy ways gone just like that--they've always had things handed to 'em, lived their lives the way they wanted and not according to any natural plan. They depended too much on their machines to do for them, or other people to do for them. Now they're using up what they have and making do with what they can find--or what they can steal.

There's a lot of that going on down in the city. There's a lot of other nasty things going on there, too. We hear about it sometimes from the Guardies. Oh, they aren't the same fellas who used to make up the National Guard units back before the sickness wiped them out. These are men and women who don't have any training, only the need to feel a part of something, the urge to try to keep the peace, and the gumption to wear a uniform when nearly everything it stands for is gone.

Anyway, I remember when the real Guardies came by for the last time, after the doctors had been here but before the world ended. They were looking for looters, and we just laughed at them. What the hell were some fool looters going to steal here? But then the Guardies said they thought the looters had holed up here, after stealing a bunch of stuff from stores in the city. We laughed harder. There isn't anybody living up here we don't know about, least of all city folk, who can't walk in these woods ten minutes without getting lost or tripping over a tree root and spraining their tender ankles. These mountains might make a good bolt hole for someone used to them, but no way some city slicker's gonna hide out for any time up here. Heck, even the Guardies don't like to wander around; they say the woods are haunted. There aren't any ghosts up here that haven't always been here, so none of us are scared. And we tried to tell the Guardies that. But I think what spooked 'em was the fact that we still have crows up here, and down off the mountain, those black beauties are nothing but a legend.

My gram once told me that the crows would have their revenge for what the lowland folks did to them, and I guess this is it. Those big birds are laughing at the folks who the sickness picked off the same way the crows were killed in the cities and out in the country around the cities. 'Course, that isn't country at all, just closer to it than the city is, with enough trees and cricks for folks to think they're roughing it. City people shoulda come up here to the mountains if they wanted to rough it. They coulda tried living out a winter and a summer and then told us they were tough. But I'm losing track of my thread, and I don't want to forget to talk about the crows.

The churchies used to say that crows were the devil's birds. Which is sorta funny given how a few of the churchies up this way play with snakes--and wasn't that the way the devil got Adam and Eve thrown out of the garden in the first place, by dressing up like a snake? I don't remember any tales of the devil dressing up like a crow. I do remember an Indian legend about how a raven stole the sun and gave it to the world. I've heard another one about how a crow talked the Great Spirit into giving fire up. Either way, the stories hold that a big black bird brought us something full of fiery goodness to make us warm and keep the night away a bit. Stands to reason, I guess, that killing off this bird was the wrong side of stupid. I mean, who was going to look out for us, once he was gone?

The blue jays died off, too. Not by man, or not on purpose anyway, not like the big families of crows, but the blue jays disappeared. It's said that disease took 'em, and maybe that's how it happened. I don't much care for jays, pretty as their blue feathers are, so I haven't paid attention to them. Not the way I do to the crows. I leave the jays to Ellen Johnson down the way a stretch, and Jeb Tobias up on the Smoke Edge Ridge. They trail around after the jays and try to learn their secrets the way the old folks used to claim to know 'em.

Me, I follow the crows around. They know me now, after all these years, and they put up with me stumping around the mountain after them. I know where all the big roosts are, and I've passed many an evening watching the crows fly on home after a day away. It's a sight, watching the tree shake as bird after bird flies in and finds its perch for the night. They make a lot of ruckus: caws and little creaky purr-like noises that sound like a young 'un settling back into a down pillow. And pretty soon the birds quiet down, and the leaves stop moving, and when night falls, there is just silence. The birds sleep, and that's when I close my eyes and imagine how it must have been down in the lowlands when they killed off all the crows.

I was never clear why they did it. Farmers never held much love for the birds, and I guess if I had a whole field of corn or wheat, I might get a little upset over the idea of a crow or two stealing it. But I sure as shoot wouldn't have wanted to kill them off entirely. But they did it, the farmers and the city folk, and them who lived around the cities and hated that the crows liked it there, too. There were whole parties of people holding crow shoots or poisoning the birds. They called them dirty birds, said they were noisy and a nuisance.

The lady doc told me that a lot of the crows down below weren't killed by man, but by disease. She said that there was one disease that hit the crows just like it did people--maybe worse than it hit people--but that the crows didn't spread it to us. Then there was another sickness that when it first started, it just killed birds--crows included--but then it changed, the way the city ladies change their hair color from day to day, and all of a sudden crows weren't just dying, they were being blamed for spreading the disease from spot to spot as they flew around. That was when people started to kill them off for real.

My gram always said it was the churchies who started the killings, that they were full of a hatred for things that were black and sounded like evil when they talked. I was never convinced that the churchies were behind the crow killings--the lady doc didn't seem to buy it, neither--but Gram always blamed them. She said they likened black things to their nasty old devil, held them as evil. Things like black birds and black cats and black marks on a body, like that mole she had over her collarbone that turned sort of star shaped and lumpy a year before she died.

'Course, she had a reason to dislike the churchies. She ran up to this part of the mountains to get away from her husband, my gramps, who was a churchie of some importance back in their home town. He memorized the bible and sang loud and did everything he could to stop my gram from following the crows around in what he called a wicked way. Guess when you got scars like she did, you get to resenting everything about the one who put 'em on you.

There aren't many churchies left up here in the mountains. Or anywhere from what I hear. Those that still believe must be holding their faith close and keeping to themselves, and who can blame 'em? Their god didn't do much to end all the suffering when the last wave rolled through, and I bet they're hard pressed to explain how that happened. I've heard that in the worst days of the sickness some of the churchies closed themselves up in one of their big buildings and prayed night and day to be spared. They drove from miles around to get to this pray-in, made one big congregation--the wrong thing to do if that lady doctor was right about gathering, and I reckon she was. They all died, one right after the other until the only thing left was the hymnals and the special grape juice they like to pretend is other things.

Oh, I've been to church a few times, back when I was a boy. It's where I heard about the snake and the garden. And other things that didn't hold a lot of sense to me. Truth be told, I didn't like church much, didn't understand most of it, although the singing was kind of pretty. Never could figure out why they'd spend all that time worrying about what comes after this life. Surviving on the mountain's hard enough without losing sleep over what comes next.

I might have gone back though, for the singing and the pretty girls, except I'd heard too many times from Gram that the churchies didn't like crows, and I was crazy for them even then. Gram said the churchies didn't like black cats, neither, and I worried about our black cat Thorn and what they might do to her. She's long dead. All the cats are dead. Everywhere. They died out along with the pigs and the chickens right after the first three waves of sickness hit the country. The lady doc said the monkeys died, too, but I've never seen one of those, so that news didn't hit home for me. Thorn didn't die from any sickness, though; she passed on when I was young, died of old age mainly or maybe she was just tired of following me around after crows.

After her, I never warmed up to her kittens or theirs, neither. It didn't hurt my feelings when the latest ones died from the sickness. I found the female cat lying half in the stream, all clenched up like she'd had a cramp that wouldn't let go. The male wouldn't go near her body. But I found him a few days later, back in the shed with the firewood, all clenched up the same way. I had to bury them quick, and I knew not to touch them with my hands. You learn that fast up on the mountain--something dies in an off way, you don't touch it, you don't eat it, you just take it far away and bury it. And you pray that nothing dies near your water supply. I made sure to get my water up stream from where the first cat had died. It took longer to fetch water from then on, but who knew what kind of bad things were in that ground where she fell?

I think about how the crows used to drop dead too, before they started killing them down in the crowded places. Crows were harbingers, my gram used to tell me, and the lady doc said they foretold of bad things that might hurt us in the same way little birds sniff out gas in the mines. I wonder, if the city folk had left the crows around, maybe we'd have known about the sickness sooner. Maybe we'd have been able to stop it, or beat it back. I don't know much about sickness, don't know how a body fights something that can't be seen, but I know that Gram said the crows and jays were like a dog barking in the night, warning of a person coming up in the darkness, maybe intent on doing harm. Once you lose that dog barking for you, you lose any chance of getting a jump on the bad thing.

I hear dogs sometimes up here. They run wild now. So many of them from below, their people gone. Don't know why they come up the mountain, maybe they have a special sense that there's people here--even if they don't know what to do with people anymore other than hunt them. They run in packs, and we kill them when we see them. It was strange at first, taking aim at a dog, but it got easier the more we heard about them attacking people, especially young 'uns. And they chase the deer, run them until they foam and panic and fall down exhausted. A few weeks ago, dogs ran a deer clear into the Hanson's stream. Rotted there after they got done with it, took four grown men to move it out of the stream. And they didn't even know it was there till the Hansons started getting sick from their own water. Damn dogs.

I've shot 'em. Shot four just last month. Mid-sized mutts that came too close to my house and had the nerve to growl at me in my own yard. I'm a good shot, and I was ready for them. Heard the crows passing the story on for some distance before the dogs reached my house. Then the crows up in the tall trees near my back room let loose a story that even a city person might have understood. "Danger!" Caw, caw, caw, caw. Saved my life, they did. Didn't need more warning then that to grab my rifle and put those curs down. Bam, bam, bam, bam. Four dead dogs and meat to put away for the winter.

Gram used to like dogs. I mean to have around, not to eat. I used to like them all right, and there's still some folks up here who have hounds to hunt with, who even let them in the house. But it's rare these days that a dog that shows up is anything but a rogue. Running with a pack, fallen in with a bad crowd. The crows know it, too. They never act up that way for bear or wolves or the wild cats that have wandered back into the old territory now that humans don't stand in their way anymore. Dogs were one of us. Dogs are too human, too much a part of city and country and every place in between. Crows cry at them; crows cry at city folk, too.

Even when the crow killings first started down in the lowlands, the crows here seemed to know it, like the story was being passed up from their city cousins. And the birds knew anyone from off mountain the moment the people showed up. The crows would caw and flap their wings, hopping from limb to limb as they followed the city folk. I guess they knew them by their awkward footsteps, by their boots that creaked in the cold or the sandals that slapped against the bottom of their feet in the summer, or their too-clean smell. Then, once the sickness started, they knew them by the big government trucks and ugly white suits.

Nowadays, there aren't many government folk coming up here anymore for the crows to react to, but when they do come, you know it. Every black bird in the area sounds the alarm. They hate government folk, although I guess you can't call them government people anymore on account of their being no real government left. But they act like they're still in charge, act like it's still their job to regulate and educate and even liberate all of us from the mountains. Like we'd want to be liberated? There are more of us left standing here after the last wave than anywhere else. That should tell them something--like maybe living cheek to jowl with your neighbor isn't the best idea. Like maybe you shouldn't be too dependent on someone else finding your food or your clothing or making you warm for the night.

We've heard that down below there are gangs of folks who cause trouble. They steal and they take women if they find them out alone. They don't know how to provide for themselves other than to rip what they need away from someone else. They don't come up here, though, because if they did come up here, they know we'd kill 'em. Up here, we're fine. We've always been fine.

The used-to-be government folks that do come up tell us we need to breed more. Like we're nothing but prize cows or something. They said we should find someone who also didn't get sick and make babies together, that our kids would repopulate the earth. We all laugh at them. We don't need instructions on how to pick a wife, or how to create young 'uns. And we've got no interest in populating our mountains, much less the Earth. That isn't what the government used-to-be's want to hear. They have a plan, and aren't interested that we see no sense in popping out babies on some cussed timetable written up by a guy in a white suit. Especially when we can't figure if these used-to-be government folks plan to watch us making these babies--an idea that starts most of us to shuddering.

It does seem clear that they want to take our babies away from us. A while back, they tried to take more than that, got a bunch of our young people together and loaded them in their big government truck and snuck off down the mountain. But the crows told me, and the jays told Ellen and Tobias, and we all told everyone else. And when we caught up with those used-to-be's, we took our young folk back. The government people said they'd just wanted to study them. But we listened to the crows and the jays, and heard the sound of a pack of the city folk's dogs in the distance, and we knew that the young people they'd taken from us would have never come back if we hadn't stopped them before they were off the mountain. So we herded the used-to-be's into their big government truck and pushed it over a cliff. The used-to-be's were alive when they fell; they weren't alive anymore once the truck hit ground--we checked to make sure. Then we took our young people and went home. We're independent, but we look after our own.

If the Guardies come looking for the used-to-be's, they'll find a bunch of bodies--poor souls who lost control of their truck and flew right off the mountain. Or maybe they'll think it was foggy and their folks lost sight of the road. Anyway they look at it, they'll say it's natural cuz they can't very well come out and admit to having sent folks up here to kidnap our young men and women for breeding. If they wait long enough, the crows will have picked the bodies clean, and there'll be nothing to see except the skeletons of the people and their truck wrapped around them.

It's what crows do, keep things clean. Stupid of the city folk not to realize that. It must have gotten ugly when they killed off all the crows. Even up on the mountain, we get road kill. How much worse was it in the city, when the squirrels and groundhogs and raccoons died on the road and just lay there rotting?

Maybe that was how the sickness started. The lady doctor never told me how she thought it had begun. She never told me much at all. Just looked at me with no answers in those big brown eyes that I could barely make out through the clear mask she never took off. That big white suit didn't keep her safe. I heard that she died in the last wave, the word passed from a cousin of a friend of a woman who lives near Jeb Tobias. Everyone around knew I was sweet on that lady doctor, even if we never did anything about it. She may have been sweet on me, too; I was never sure. I know she liked my company, but it's hard to tell if a body's heart is thump-thumping in love when it's covered up in a bulky white suit.

I made her a little marker, out near the spot where I buried Gram and my parents and even Thorn. Doctor Sarah Litton. When I'd first put the marker up, I'd written only her title and name. Figured it was pretty bold of me to mark her spot as if she was one of us, much less try to sum up her city life with a few of my ignorant words. I figured she'd have a fancy gravestone somewhere, with all her schooling and her picture and a button you can hit to call up her voice--I loved her voice. Even through the big helmet, she had a pretty voice. But then I heard how the people who died during the last wave were just thrown into deep pits, their bodies burned because there weren't enough people to bury them. I didn't like to think of Sarah burning. So I took her marker up and made it read, "Here Lies Doctor Sarah Litton," so I could pretend she was here with us on the mountain.

A few months later, I took the marker up again and added, "She tried to help." It seemed to pretty much sum her life up, at least for me. I know I'll never forget her, even if I have to move on. It'll take time, but one of these days, I'll stop by Ellen Johnson's for some of her berry wine and sit a spell--long enough for her to figure out that I've come courtin'. Although I worry that her jays won't get along with my crows, so maybe I should set my sights a little farther from home and on a woman who doesn't tend toward birds. But Ellen does make a fine sweet potato pie--a body could get used to eating that--and it's said that crows and jays are related, so maybe they could make nice if they had to.

Just like Ellen and I could make nice if we had to. Or if we wanted to. Life goes on, after all. And Ellen is a nice woman and easy on the eyes. She might make life a little nicer, a little softer. Certainly, she'd add sound to my house and warmth to my bed. I'm just not sure I'm ready for that. Not sure she is, either. We take our time up here. Don't rush into things the way city folk do--or did. Not enough of them left nowadays to rush into anything except disaster. Life is hard now, and they're not prepared for it. They never expected to have to work this hard just to survive.

When Sarah was here, I heard one of the other doctors tell her that life wasn't going to be worth living if the world ended. He said that he wasn't sure he could keep fighting because life would be hard and sharp and nothing would be easy. Sarah looked around at my cabin and my little vegetable garden with the twisted old apple tree by the side of the house. She'd taken in the firewood dumped in a messy pile, waiting to be chopped up and put into the shed. Then she looked at me as she took more blood from my arm. I was sweaty, having just finished fixing up a piece of roof that had leaked something fierce during the last storm.

"Some places it's never been anything but hard," Sarah said to that other doctor. Then she smiled at me, and I remember that I wished just once I could feel her skin against mine the way a man and a woman could feel each other. She didn't look away, and I saw her smile turn sad. "That's why these people will survive."

I suppose she was right. There's nothing here but what's always been here. The sickness took a few that lived way down the mountain, but mostly, it left us alone. And the crows thrive. They fly free here, no one shooting at them, or poisoning them, or making them sick. And someday maybe, when they've forgotten what the world used to be like, they'll move back down to the lowlands and start over. They'll repopulate the Earth.

Maybe we all will.

Gerri Leen lives in Northern Virginia and originally hails from Seattle. She came to fiction writing late in life and writes stories in many genres, including fantasy--often centered around mythology--science fiction, horror, crime fiction, and romance. A complete list of her published and accepted work can be found at her website: http://www.gerrileen.com.