Raven Saves The Day

By Daniel J. Bishop

Ga! Ga!

The world had changed since Raven had woken last, almost one hundred years earlier. White men had been panning gold up and down the rivers. In those days, the people had traded salmon and furs for the white man's spirit water, and Raven had sworn to put a stop to it. The people were taking too much from the land. They were forgetting to give thanks to the great spirits who provided. They were digging up and washing out the shiny-shiny things that Raven had hidden to line his nest. But when Raven had stopped in the white man's camp, the white man had offered him rum, and Raven forgot why he had come. After a while, Raven had flown back into the forest, wild and jolly, weaving like a rabbit among the tall hills until he crashed into a mountain and dreamed.

Although Raven kept one eyethrough the passing years, his sleep was deep. Change had come, and the world had moved on without him. There was still smoke in the air, hanging dull over the ground. Where the smoke climbed Raven's mountain it choked him. Because Raven wore his raven skin, he could not even cough.

The sun was too bright, even with the haze. It hurt Raven's eyes. Raven's stomach felt hollow and loose, like an empty bag.

Ga! Ga!

Raven's voice was too loud even for Raven that morning. He tried to nestle down into his nest on the mountain, but the smoke ruffled the shaggy feathers under his neck and made his black eyes water. His people wept and cursed under his mountain. The sound of it made drums pound in Raven's head. Raven blamed it on the spirit water. He blamed it on white men, and on the long-ago people who had traded with them. He tried to hide his head beneath the long black feathers of one wing, and then the other, but it did no good. He needed to fill his stomach. He needed to silence his people so that he could doze once more.

Now, it is the truth about Raven that once he touched the sky, he forgot about the drums pounding in his head, and they forgot about him. Raven was always that way. His skin could recover as soon as his spirit changed, and his moods were like the surface of a lake blown by the wind. Flying filled him with joy. He soared high. He looked upon the new world with wonder. He spread his wings like a hawk and drank in all there was to see.

Pale grey roads wound across the land from horizon to horizon, dark as Raven himself where the hard-packed gravel was fresh. Shining carriages, fish-scale bright, sped here and there along them like shiny-shiny beetles. Raven's world had passed away. He could see the tracks where it had gone, made of steel and spaced with cut timbers heavy with tar. Raven could even acknowledge that the world he had known was gone, in a way, because the world had changed many, many times since Raven had lit everything up with the stolen sun.

Still, Raven meant to shake things up. He wanted to help the people. Maybe, too, he would find something to fill his empty belly.

Ga! Ga!

Sometimes when Raven calls, he makes people jump. They look around--What was that?--to see Raven laughing at them, Ga! Ga! The raven call can be laughter, too. Sometimes, though, Raven calls out because he is sorrowful and alone, and that is the loneliest sound in the world. It can haunt a man all his life, and fill his dreams with poetry.

Fire is a dirty eater. Smaller ravens, pale with ash and greedy-mouthed, looked for tidbits of well-cooked meat that Fire had dropped. They circled hawk-wise, like Raven, only Raven flew higher and his net was wider cast. He was looking for the places where Fire had not been. He wanted the lodges whose medicine was too strong for Fire to touch.

Raven saw this house that Fire had turned from. He had been sleeping with spirit water in his belly long before men learned to throw their voices with the wind. He had never dreamed that they would learn to send their faces across the world on beams of sunlight. He did not know that rumour of Fire could travel faster than the flames themselves. He could not know that, as soon as he heard the reports, Skinny Jimmy Garou took three days to dig a trench around the line of his property, or that he had climbed onto his roof with the garden hose, keeping everything wet as long as he could. Raven had never seen a firebreak.

Looking down, Raven thought that whoever lived in the house must have strong medicine. Strong enough to turn Fire--maybe strong enough to undo what Fire had done.

Raven dropped to the earth. He took off his beak and changed his skin. Raven was laughing now. Mischief danced to the war drums in his heart.

Ga! Ga!

Jimmy Garou was as short as two wolverines stacked one atop the other, and built like a toad. People called him "Skinny" for the same reason they call tall men "Little." He was spread out on a cedar chair when Raven came walking up his driveway.

What Skinny Jimmy saw was an medium-old Native man with hair blacker than midnight and glossier than the moon. He was walking with the help of a long stick of dark wood, which was really his beak transformed. Raven wore the old style of clothing, worn leather trousers and moccasins.

"Howdy," Raven said, using a word learned from gold panners a century ago.

"Private property," said Skinny Jimmy, by way of greeting. "Can't you read the godamned sign?"

"Don't know no private property," Raven answered, only partly true. Raven knew what private property meant. He just didn't believe the words applied to him. He climbed the steps onto Skinny Jimmy's porch and sat. "Sun's hot today."

Skinny Jimmy snorted. "Make yourself at home. I'm just gonna step inside and grab my shotgun while you're sittin there."

"Suits me," Raven answered, as easy as that. "Maybe a drink of water and a bite to eat while you're at it."

"Maybe I'll pepper your ass with lead," Skinny Jimmy said. He got up and went into the house. He moved quick for a fat man.

Raven laughed, Ga! Ga!, because he knew his balls were made of stone.

Sometimes things just worked out for him because of those stone balls. Raven could make things happen just by wanting them to happen strongly enough. He could ride what would be and what might be like currents in the air, going whatever way he willed. Unless he was distracted. Raven could be distracted easily enough. He was a curious old bird, and loved shiny-shiny things.

Anyway, Raven must have been watching where he was riding down the world-currents that afternoon, because Skinny Jimmy came back out with two cold bottles, a jar full of pickles, and hands too busy to carry a shotgun. He set the cold bottles on the porch and plonked himself down.

"Pickle?"

Raven took it gingerly. He sniffed it, and it smelled good, so he took a bite. Crisp and sour. He liked the feel of the juice squirting into his mouth. Soon enough, he was holding the jar and Skinny Jimmy Garou had to ask Raven to share.

Skinny Jimmy twisted the metal cap from his bottle, and took a long, cold pull on his beer. Raven had half the pickle jar empty before he reached for his own beer.

"Don't know no pickles?" said Skinny Jimmy, but Raven was looking at his beer, trying to figure out the bottle top. Skinny Jimmy took it from him, twisted the top off, and handed it back. "No beer neither?"

Raven sniffed at the liquid inside the bottle.

"Sure this ain't spirit water?"

"It isn't no hard stuff, if that's what you mean. Just beer. You know what beer is, don't you, you crazy old coot?"

Raven bristled. "Ayah, I know what it is," he lied, and took a long enough pull to make himself choke. "Guess I like it alright."

Skinny Jimmy snorted. "I'm guessing you been in a cave the last twenty-so years. Or working in the circus, with those buckskins of yours. You gotta name?"

"Itcaku," said Raven, "is one of my names. But I have more."

"I'll bet. Was that Oatcake, or you got a name a man can pronounce?"

"People round here call me Raven," said Raven. "On account of my black hair, I guess."

"Well, my name is Jimmy, and people 'round here call me Jimmy on account of its being my name," said Skinny Jimmy. "I guess Raven will do as good as anything. There any of those pickles left?"

Raven nudged the empty jar with his toe. He had even drank the brine, which had gone down sour and salty and sweet all at the same time.

"Seems empty to me."

"Ate 'em all, you Injun bastard?"

Raven didn't answer. Instead he launched into a story, the one about him flying into the whale's mouth. How the fish came pouring in when the huge whale was hungry, and how Raven ate the fish instead. How Raven finally ate the whale's enchanted heart and used its skin to wash back to shore. When the people had seen the whale, they dragged it onto the beach, thinking it was a gift of the spirits. Raven had called from within, "the mouth!the mouth!" They heard Raven call and pried him free.

Raven meant well, to hear Raven tell the story. But when the people boiled the whale's fat, Raven could smell it in the air. So he came back in his human skin. Was it true that a whale had washed ashore here? Ayah. And that something big and black had flown from its mouth? Ayah, so it had been. Well, the last time such a thing had happened, oh, maybe twenty years back, everybody there had been killed, ayah, and that was the truth.

Ga! Ga!

So the people all ran into the forest and up the mountains. They were afraid of that black thing that flew from the whale's mouth. But Raven wasn't afraid. He stayed in the village and had all the fat for himself.

By the time Raven had finished, Skinny Jimmy was wiping tears from his eyes. Raven was a master storyteller. He knew how to make a man laugh.

"Story like that is worth a jar of pickles," Skinny Jimmy said. "More, maybe. You done with that beer?"

Skinny Jimmy went back into his house to fetch more beer and a cold ham. Raven leaned back and watched the sun chase clouds through the sky. He thought about the stories he knew. Skinny Jimmy reminded him of the old-time Grizzly Bear, a little, and set him to remembering how he had gone fishing with Grizzly. Raven was catching all the fish. They wouldn't bite on Grizzly's line no matter what Grizzly did. That Grizzly was getting madder and madder, so Raven told him that he was using his own stone balls as bait. And wasn't Grizzly just mad enough to cut off his own balls to try fishing with them?

Skinny Jimmy laughed through that story, too, so Raven told another.

When the day was done, and the tired sun started walking home to his lodge in the west, Raven had told most of his best stories. He had told how he tricked Heron into kicking Gull's stomach, because Gull had swallowed some fish Raven wanted. He told about the Creation, and how he had stolen the sun. He told some stories about Coyote, too, though he couldn't rightly remember whether they had happened to Coyote or himself. He told them as if they were Raven stories.

That Skinny Jimmy, he was only human, and a man can't listen to stories forever without wanting to tell a few of his own. So Raven learned things about this new world that he couldn't clearly see. Skinny Jimmy told Raven about Vietnam and Korea. He showed Raven his television, and laughed when Raven tried to puzzle out how the little spirits got into the box. Raven allowed that he'd have made a little mischief in the Sixties, had he been there. He sympathized with the back injury that retired Jimmy early, back when he was still skinny.

'Course Raven got Skinny Jimmy talking about Fire, and how Fire had been turned from Skinny Jimmy's house.

"Weren't so hard a thing," said Skinny Jimmy, in a voice that meant it was hard. "Rented me a backhoe, dug a trench around the place. The fire came, right up to there, but it couldn't get through. You can see where the lawn's scorched. Grass is turned brown over there. When the fire came, I was on the roof with that there hose, spraying everywhere so much as a spark crossed over."

Raven was a sly old bird, and he knew when the spirits were trying to talk to him. That beer wasn't spirit water same as rum, but there were spirits in it, and he'd begun to tip his bottle into the grass when Skinny Jimmy wasn't looking. But he made it look as though he was keeping up with Skinny Jimmy, beer for beer. Every time Skinny Jimmy went into his house to get two more bottles, old Raven would scrape some of the cedar off the bottom of Skinny Jimmy's chair with the lid of the pickle jar. Raven had a fine collection of cedar shavings under his knee.

Now the sun had come all the way into the west, and was standing on the edge of the world.

"Look at that beautiful sunset," said Raven.

No sooner did Skinny Jimmy look, than Raven popped the cedar shavings into his mouth. He drank in the last of his beer and started chewing, fast. Skinny Jimmy didn't even have time to look around before Raven spit out the red-brown glob of chewed-up cedar, plop!, right onto the crotch of Skinny Jimmy's jeans.

"You sure made a mess of yourself," Raven said. There was mischief twinkling in his dark eyes. Skinny Jimmy would see how he'd defecated himself. He'd have to go into the house to change his clothing. Raven would steal his backhoe--if he could find out what that was--and his green water hose. Raven would make great magic.

But Raven hadn't stopped drinking that beer soon enough, and some of those spirits were still whispering in his ears. He had lost track of the world-currents he had been riding on. Things were getting out of his control. Whole logs of shit don't pass through denim, and Raven had already told the story where he used the same trick to steal fresh water. Skinny Jimmy wasn't fooled, and he wasn't laughing.

"Godamn you!" Skinny Jimmy cried, jumping up. The chewed-up pieces of cedar fell onto the porch. Raven couldn't help laughing.

Ga! Ga!

"I'll fix you, you bastard!" said Skinny Jimmy, and he ran into his house.

Raven lost no time. He jumped up and ran off the porch, scattering shiny-shiny beer bottles as he went. He had no time for sunsets. He could sense those world-currents now, like trying to fly around the edges of a tornado.

Raven didn't know what a backhoe was, except that you could dig with one. So he just grabbed that shining green medicine wheel and ran. Skinny Jimmy came pounding out of the house, shaking the porch like the stone men shake the mountains during summer storms. And boom! Skinny Jimmy made thunder.

But the shotgun blast didn't hit an old Native man, and all Skinny Jimmy saw was a big old black raven flying away with his garden hose.

Ga! Ga!

Raven flew around the places Fire had been. He sang and he chanted. He shook that hose like a rattle and beat it against the ground, until every last drop of water hidden within it was free. He flew all over the places that were burned. Children came out and asked, "What is that crazy bird doing?" They hadn't heard the old stories. But some of the adults remembered Raven. Some of the older children had heard his tales around summer campfires.

Everyone saw Raven making magic. And some of them laughed, and some of them didn't, because Raven's medicine was powerful even when he was wrong.

Raven saw that it wasn't so easy to tell who his people were anymore. Some of those people who pointed and said There's Raven wore white skins. Some of the people laughing loudest should have felt their ancestor's bones twitching in their graves. Raven did his best. He rode the world-currents. He made strong medicine for all the people. In this new world Raven couldn't tell a man by the skin.

At last Raven grew tired. Skinny Jimmy's pickles and ham were heavy in his stomach. Beer was heavy in his blood. His spirit ached from grappling with this new world, and making strong magic is hard work. He dropped the medicine hose and flew back to his nest on the mountain.

The war drums had gone from his head. Raven settled his thin weary bones for a short nap. He kept one eye

Maybe Raven made a big magic and maybe not. He laughed to himself when he woke up five years later, for he was pleased with what he saw. He stayed up on his mountain for a while. He told himself how he had saved his people. He remembered the old stories. He remembered Skinny Jimmy's face when Raven had spit out that cedar dung, and Raven laughed a long time.

Those old trees, they think they like Fire. Then Fire comes walking through the forest again. Fire is like the old woman who helps at births and speeds along the dying. You always wonder what she's hiding under her blankets. Fire gave those old trees their start. When Fire walks in the forest, old trees die--but where Fire has been, new trees can grow. The aspen and the young birches, they like the big empty spaces that Fire leaves behind. Fire's heat cracks the cones of mountain pines, lets the seedlings escape toward the sunlight.

The people groan when Fire comes. Fire is very, very dangerous. But lodges can be rebuilt if everyone works together, and sometimes they remember that they are one people again. Food grows well on land where Fire has walked. Rivers do not stay angry forever. The salmon always returns.

Smoke came up Raven's mountain again. Fish was hanging in smoke houses. Caribou was being roasted on fires.

Raven spread his inky wings, and flew away to visit his people.

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