The Death of Alan Daw

Iain was the first to realise that Alan was missing. The whole crowd is here but him, he thought, or should that be ‘he’? Anyway, gossip and laughter, the usual hubbub lacking only Alan’s ebullient contributions. Iain glanced over his shoulder. Not there either. He started to feel a little concerned. It was an unwritten law that everyone got together at day’s end; a short period every evening when problems could be shared, adventures related and gags groaned over. Iain couldn’t remember Alan ever missing the evening blether. Should he go and look for him? It would be dark soon; if he was going to search, it had better be right now. He spread his black wings and launched himself from his perch on the highest branch of the ancient tree.
He banked to the left and spiralled downward around the tree, checking each branch, hoping Alan was perhaps huddled silently by the trunk, maybe in a huff about something or feeling a bit off-colour. The air hummed over each black feather, Ian’s mind subconsciously checking to ensure that all was well, like a driver listening to a thousand engines. No Alan. He veered off toward the Abbey. Flying vertically, he swept past a lighted window, startling a woman who had been looking out into the gathering darkness.
It was unlikely, but perhaps his friend was on the roof; had given the gathering a body-swerve and gone straight to roost. Methodically, he checked each eave, each chimney-pot, especially the one in which Alan had been born, right next to Iain’s own birthnest.
A gloom thicker than the evening was setting on Iain. He flew back to the sycamore and consulted with the colony elders. Consternation spread from branch to branch, laughter being replaced by a worried muttering.
By now darkness had settled in and made itself comfortable. Pipistrelle bats winged silently while looping out their sound nets, young tawnies made a laughable hash of the solemnity of hooting. But the Colony was cheerless. No search was possible until first light, many hours away. Iain tried to sleep and managed a little, but only disturbed by dreaming of the single full-grown dead jackdaw he had seen. The previous winter he had come across Eilidh Jackdaw, frozen beneath a red oak. She had seemed to merely be sleeping, but her nightblack plumage was cobwebbed by frost, a cage from which she seemed uninterested in escaping. But Eilidh was old and died in the depths of winter: this was summer and Alan was young. Hopefully. Still.
It was decided by the Elders in the morning, that enquiries should be made of other colonies and kinships, and everyone was given their instructions. It seemed to Iain that, young as he was, he was chosen to be sent to non-‘daws as a way to avoid embarrassment to the more venerable Colony members; that the envoys would fail and bring the Colony into some disrepute as badly-run and a bit wayward. But as a junior member, he could not turn down his assignment, and his discomfiture hardly mattered if there was a chance of tracking down his friend.
It was barely worth asking the Singers for information. Their heads were full of song and sex, thoughts of how to improve their performance in both fields and how poor their neighbours were at either. They were too busy to notice anything of anything else, but would be questioned on the off-chance. The magpies, known as ‘the Motley Crew’, disliked being questioned, denying knowledge of anything as a matter of principle. More likely to be of help were the more sensible and responsible woodpigeons and the rooks. The pigeons were nearer so Iain turned to them first.
They were usually to be found on the wide Abbey lawns. Their solemn demeanour led to their being known as ‘the Bishop’s Conference’. Portly and garbed in muted but impressive vestments, they seemed to walk the lawns in search of spiritual enlightenment rather than base food. They never expressed irritation at the raucous jackdaws, but would sigh as the Colony tumbled overhead, and continue their cogitations, wings clasped behind their backs.
Iain did not know the correct procedure in approaching such dignified figures, so he merely bounced down onto the lawn in front of the nearest Bishop. He was regarded with quiet surprise.
‘My word, young ‘daw, such energy at such an early hour! You will not be so spry at my age, you can be sure of that.’
‘Us ‘daws are just naturally spry your worsh…sir. Even the elders. I did not mean to make you jump, but we are missing a young friend of mine, Alan Jackdaw, and I was wondering if you or any of your colleagues may have noticed him?’
‘We do not notice too much, young ‘daw, as we stroll these hallowed lawns. Our minds are on a higher plane. Or food. But I will most certainly ask my associates if they have noticed anything untoward in regard to your friend. What does he look like?’
‘Eh…black, sir,’ said Iain, realising at the question that his enquiry was pointless, the Bishops only noticed the jackdaws, he realised, as they might dead leaves blown across the sky above the abbey, woods and lawns. But, being a courteous young ‘daw, he thanked the Bishop and flew back to the sycamore to make a brief report before visiting his next assigned group, the rooks.
The rooks were a much different kettle of fish to the woodpigeons, thought Iain, and an image of a woodpigeon and a rook gazing into a steaming potful of fish almost made him grin. They were cousins of the jackdaws, its true, but were regarded by them with a mixture of amusement and respect. The rooks were known as the Society of Advocates. The name had spread from the clan of ‘daws that lived in the spire of St Giles’ Cathedral, from their sharp observance of centuries of black-gowned lawyers issuing from the neighbouring courts and gathering in knots on the cobbles far below. Just like rooks in looks and just like rooks in behaviour too. The human rooks seemed to have vanished but the real rooks, the real McCaw, had too many pressing cases in hand to disappear. They could be found in small clusters in fields, deep in legalistic discussions, brows furrowed and only missing the red-tape bound papers of their human counterparts tucked under their wings. Less amusing, though, was the fact that these disputations were not always without consequence. Occasionally, an advocate might be struck off and sent in exile from the colony. Such a thought sent a shiver down Iain’s spine.
The Society of Advocates met in a muddy field beyond the river and Iain had only to fly for a few minutes before he could see them below, fustian blending with the soil. He glided down nervously, aware that many beady eyes would be observing his approach. Iain knew that the rooks’ court held no jurisdiction over him, yet the knowledge did not seem to help.
He landed a respectful distance from the court and waited to be called. Some minutes passed and a rook approached at a dignified pace. Iain realised that although these birds were cousins, they were somewhat cousins at several removes. This rook seemed awfully tall. His legs were heavily trousered in feathers, making Iain feel exposed and childish, just a kid in shorts. The rook had a face that appeared to be composed of very ancient parchment, as if pages of decaying old law-books had stuck to it as the old rook peered short-sightedly into their depths.
‘Have you an appointment? No?’ The rook was a little displeased but cheered up on noticing an injudicious leatherjacket that had popped out of the ground by his foot. A swift bob and it was gone. He is now wearing that leatherjacket, thought Iain, or is it wearing him? Confusing, concentrate. Iain explained the reason for his visit. The advocate nodded a few times, listening intently while gazing into the distance over Iain’s head. He flapped his wings as if plunging about for a handkerchief. But he aint, thought Iain, rooks don’t use ‘em.
‘We will certainly look into this for you. I should think that an investigation could be up and running within four to six weeks. Depending on the availability of personnel, of course, everyone has a very heavy caseload at the moment.’
Iain would have thought that he was being teased if it were not for the well-known fact that rooks are humourless.
‘Your wayward friend will prob’ly have turned up long before then, I wager, having put us to lots of bother.’
‘What bother if you haven’t begun your investigation?’
The advocate raised his eyebrows at the impertinence of the young 'daw, or at least Iain thought that he did, it can be difficult to detect when a rook raises his eyebrows.
‘Meetings will have been rearranged, schedules disrupted, confabs confused! Our diaries are set months ahead.’
Papershufflers! Desk jockeys! Red tape wranglers! Quill quiverers! Iain tried to content himself with thinking up a series of derisory names for the august body of advocate rooks
He tried to forage a little on his way home. He had eaten nothing all day, but had little appetite. He checked in at the evening meet, no news of Alan, made his report to the elders and then turned in early. Already he was aware of rumours in the colony…Alan had left to join a more prestigious clan or he had fallen for a young ‘daw from elsewhere and mated out. But that was just crazy talk. Abandoning the colony was almost unheard of and Alan loved it here, you’d have to break his wings, his legs to keep him from home. He tried to settle down to sleep. For such a young ‘daw, Iain had quite a decent roost. In the lee of a large chimney and sheltered by corners of slate and lead, it was a comfortable spot. But tonight the wind got up something fierce. It tore around the roof, the chimneypots keened dully, the woods boomed like a maddened sea. Iain, sleepless, gazed at a large moon occasionally hidden by hastening, ragged cloud. His pale blue eyes seemed to hold onto a little moonlight whenever the shadows fell.
Soon after daybreak Iain set off again. The rest of the colony watched him go. They would search too, but the general opinion was that Alan was dead, they would find, if anything, only his corpse.
Iain headed out over the woods. They stretched for hundreds of wingbeats around. As he flew, he kept an eye out for big sparrowhawk. The missus hawk. Her husband wasn’t anything to worry about but she, she would rip your wings off as soon as spit. He did not notice the large black shape that dogged his path.
He was resting on an oak branch when he heard the voice. It was low and appeared to come from several directions at once, even from within his own skull.
The voice said, ‘Young jackdaw, you will never find your friend in this land. He has long reached Farflight.’
Iain could now make out the speaker. A large lustrous carrion crow sat on a branch a couple of wingbeats above and behind him, the sun beyond making it difficult to see his features. But he sounded old.
‘I have been informed of your search. You should have come to me first.’
The last words carried a note of amusement, the creature knew that a young ‘daw would fly a mile rather than approach a carrion crow.
Farflight. Iain’s beak made an absurd clopping sound as he tried to say something, anything to hide his fear. The crow shrugged his shoulders a little, his plumage shifting like an oversized, borrowed greatcoat.
‘My name is Aleister Crow. It is a name with which you may be familiar?’
Iain tried to nod his head, tried to say that he had, but could not.
‘Cat got your tongue? No mind. If you can stir your little wings, I can show you the remains of your kinsman.’
Iain thought for a moment that he was in the middle of a very nasty dream. That he was at his roost and not transfixed on a branch being told of the death of his best friend by the most infamous member of the Coven, the collective name for all carrion crows. But the moment passed, and Aleister Crow remained real, corporeal, a dense fragment of feathered ill-luck.
‘Follow me and stay close, Mrs Sparrowhawk has just given up on her latest diet.’
Iain took his advice. Two wingbeats of his own for every one of Crow’s soon took its toll and he was relieved when they arced down to an alder by the river. Below them on the river path was a young human. Iain was puzzled at the creature’s plumage, broken browns and greens, until he realised that the human was trying to look like the woods, like a woodcock blending with bracken.
‘Watch what he does.’
The human slowly pointed a long object toward a robin singing powerfully on a hawthorn.
‘Watch yourself, young Robbie!’ Aleister Crow rapped out in his allaround voice.
The robin jumped and disappeared into the bushes as the object held by the human made a tremendous crack. The branch that the robin had sat on splintered.
Iain found his voice, ‘What do you call that object?’
‘Some call it a thunderstick, and some, the branch that kills, but I find it simpler to call it a twenty-two. This human used it to kill your friend.’
Iain felt a shiver go through him, a shiver totally different from the one that helped him wake up on a frosty morning. The human’s face twisted on missing the robin, and he scanned the trees for his target or the noisy crow that had scared it off. But he was unable to penetrate the shadows with his paltry human vision.
Aleister said, ‘He’ll keep. Follow me.’
Within a hundred wingbeats they had stopped again. Crow said nothing, merely nodded groundward, his eyes remaining on Iain.
Alan lay on a deer-path below. Still as a rock. There were no signs of injury, no wing broken on wire or wall, no decapitation by hawk.
Crow seemed to read Iain’s mind. ‘The twenty-two throws a tiny fragment like a hard little pebble into the target. I’ve put some rowan leaves around him. Nothing like rowan leaves for a warning to keep off.
Iain barely understood what Crow was talking about. He sat and considered the carcase of his friend.
‘This day is going to get worse before it gets better’, said the crow, ‘you have never, I assume, carried out the necessary ritual on a departed kinsman?’
No, he hadn’t. But to Crow’s surprise, the young ‘daw dropped from the branch and landed gently by Alan. And plucked out his dead blue eyes.
This would allow a bond to remain between Alan and the clan, allow him to see a little, through Iain’s eyes, of the lives of his friends and family when he wished, from Farflight, where all birds’ understanding goes when the body fails.
Above him, Aleister Crow looked impressed in spite of himself.
As Iain had dropped through the air he wondered how he would feel on ingesting his dead friend’s eyes. On doing so, he felt invigorated; happy that Alan had, in a way, been brought back to the colony, would be able to laugh at the jokes and tricks of the clan at play.
It began to rain. Waterdrops like tiny bones began to clatter off every leaf in the wood. Millions of snaps, clicks that filled Iain’s head and drove out thoughts of Alan, clan and even Crow. It grew heavier and shook Iain from his trance. Crow indicated with a sweep of his wing that Iain should follow and plunged into the open, ignoring the elements. Iain wished that he was a raven, because they can fly in the rain without being touched by a single drop. Within moments they were in sight again of the human, now more bush-like than ever with his collar up and a hat pulled low down his face peering out like that of a pig trapped in a holly.
‘We can catch up with him again’, said Crow, ‘see ya’. He disappeared into the murk.
Iain flew home and told the elders what had happened. They were grim at the news and talked of how such things were once common, the humans with the loud sticks, the lines of the fallen strung barbarously on fences.
‘Nor is it a good thing, young ‘daw, that you have been in the company of Aleister Crow. He is not fit company for any self-respecting jackdaw. The Society of Advocates have a file on him as fat as a Bishop’s arse. We know that most humans mean us no harm and so we deign to treat their roofs as our own, but the carrion crows hold them only in great contempt. Wickedness from humans is no excuse for wickedness from jackdaw nor crow neither. As long as you live on our roof, you must abide by our rules, and a prime one is: No fraternisation with Aleister Crow!’
The chief jackdaw’s term of office would be over by the new moon, but Iain guessed that the next elder to serve would be just as strict on the subject of Crow. The young jackdaw had a feeling that Crow would not be easily ignored, and had a nagging temptation to seek out the crow and seek his aid in avenging the slaying of Alan.
As he flew from the Abbey the next day, it did not seem to him entirely accidental that he saw Crow winging across the parkland and into the cover of an enormous lime tree. It was as if Crow knew that Iain would want to see him and was casually making himself available. But this did not occur to the naïve young jackdaw as he glided on Crow’s path into the cavern of lime leaves.
The lime tree stood isolated on the grass. It had an air of secrecy about it; the air of an uncharted island on a green ocean where the great beeches, ships in full sail, could see the island but not approach it. Inside the island tree the light was almost submarine, filtered into greenness. It took Iain a few moments for his eyes to adjust. He felt more like a frog in a pond than a bird in a tree. The trunk and branches were covered with a powdery stuff like green soot, which helped to muffle to almost nothing all outside sounds, few as they were. Iain decided that he preferred the black soot on the chimney- pots of his home.
Crow’s words were made flat, uninflected and stripped of the undercurrent of amusement that Iain had detected in his previous meeting.
‘It is doubtless that you have been warned against associating with such a blackguard as myself. Yet it was obvious to me from watching you fly that you desired a meeting, something in the dip of a shoulder, a hesitant turn. Different to the clumsiness of a merely youthful and inexperienced aviator. I think that the death of your friend has revealed to you that the world is no mere playground.’
Crow, sitting on a branch near to its meeting with the trunk, reached out a foot and crushed a shield bug, then flicked the remains into the gloom below.
‘A human, long ago, described life, human life, as encapsulated in that period when a bird flies out of the night through a window, across a firelit hall, and into the night again through a window opposite. A few moments of light, vision, in surrounding depths of darkness, blindness.
For us birds, the humans, probably, if they were to think on it at all, think the hall a very narrow one, the firelight flickering and dim. But, of course, we fly in night as well as day, our existences not constrained by mere human understanding of it.
So it is most vexing when one of them crushes one of us as I did that bug. The little creature’s myriad family might wish to avenge him, though I doubt they think much of that kind of thing, and if they did I think that they would be incapable. We, on the other hand, wing, are very capable. Do you wish vengeance? Shall the human suffer?’
Iain began to speak and immediately halted, shocked at the sound of his voice in the dead still air. It was as if his voice had been changed just as he had been changed by Alan’s death. He realized that the choice given him by Crow was just the latest in millions of choices made by every creature every day and night, largely without even recognizing the fact. An image came into his head. He was standing on the lawn in front of one of the huge beeches in an autumnal gale. As the wind stripped the tree of its thousands of leaves, he had to identify which would be the next to be torn away. If he chose wrongly he would die. Then memory intruded, the memory of the moment before plunging from the abbey roof on his first flight. He had practised for that, short flight-hops from chimney to chimney, and watched friends and family make the leap, had been coaxed and encouraged by his parents. But this trial was to be endured alone. Alone but for the shade of his dead friend and the presence of the dread Aleister Crow. There can be only one maiden flight.
‘Well, Iain Jackdaw? Shall we go a-hunting?’
‘As he aims I can stoop upon him- a brush of the wing on his right cheek and he turns, I pluck with a peck his eye from its orbit. Swallowing it will give me insight into the human ways. Humour. Aqueous. Do you get the joke? No, I think my humour goes over your head. The insight is real enough but it fades with time.’ He glowered down at the jackdaw below him.
‘It is something I have done before. Without the eye he will be unable to kill. You might object that he will simply use the other eye, but humans are peculiar, they seem weaker on one side than the other, their hands for example, if they were birds, they would fly only in circles. Strange creatures.’
Iain knew that the elders did not lightly try to restrict the activities of the colony. Adventurousness, curiosity, were elements to be encouraged, the means by which new sources of food were found, new dangers to be given a wide berth. A colony of jackdaws that turned inward, that looked away from the world, was likely to have its collective head torn from its shoulders by a passing goshawk.
Crow was no jackdaw-killing hawk, but at the same time he appeared just as dangerous. The elders and the Advocates must have heard this kind of thing from Crow and his ilk before. Had heard it and rejected it. Yet that had not stopped the human in his destructive ways. What would Alan have done? Satisfaction in putting an end to the human’s evil actions through another evil action would not have been Alan’s way. If he was watching from Farflight now, Iain knew that his friend would be hoping that he would make the right decision, choose the right oak leaf.
‘I will not follow you in this, Aleister Crow. I am not an owl to fly in the darkness that you describe. Vengeance may be something indulged in by your fraternity, but it is not by mine. I will inform the Colony fully of the human’s behaviour. They will tell the Bishops, the Advocates, the Motley Crew, the Singers. Everyone. Perhaps even the unrained on ravens. The human will find the woods a silent and empty world when he walks them, they will reawaken on his departure. Perhaps the silence of his path will allow him to hear a small voice of conscience within. I thank you for bringing me to Alan and thus allowing the ritual of passing to be performed, and now I must return to the clan.’
Pompous little twit, thought Crow, as he watched Iain fly off abbeyward, that little jackdaw needs some devil in him. This reminded him of a poem. He struggled to remember the title, narrowing his eyes in thought, “The Jackdaw of Reims”, that was it. Impressed by his own feat of memory he flew off in search of the human.