The following tale is the fourth in the series of tongue-in-beak stories I made up concerning the ancient relationship our species has had with the corvids-a group of birds whose most familiar members are crows, ravens and magpies. Though I have been accused of anthropomorphizing these birds, I beg to differ. Perhaps they corvo-morphized us.
Let Them Eat Corn
As the populations of all three species grew, Raven, Crow and Human strode hand-in-wing into the future. While Humans grew smarter and smarter, Crow and Raven grew wiser and wiser. By and by, humans began to take on an air of superiority over the other animals and looked down upon Crow and Raven because the birds have tiny brains and lacked opposing thumbs.
“We are best,” they boasted. “We are smart too, smarter even than Raven. Look at all the stuff we can make. Whatever the Good Lord did not give us, we can invent. We can out-fly, out-run, out-swim, out-dig, out-build and out-tool-make all the animals on Earth.”
“But look at the mess you’ve made!” Raven scoffed. “Much of the livable places on Earth have been despoiled by your inventions, to say nothing of your greed. You lay waste to everything you touch.”
Humans wasted a great deal, it was true, but there was no real complaint from Crow or Raven. And, there was another plague on, so carrion was everywhere. Life was good.
“I believe we have erred, Cousin.” Raven said after a gluttonous meal at the landfill on the outskirts of a great human settlement..
“How so, Cousin?” Crow opened an eye.
“Haven’t you noticed our human brethren are getting just a bit too big for their britches?” Raven said. “They’re all attitude these days. This tool—making thing you taught them—that was a big mistake. Remember I warned you at the time: ‘No good deed goes unpunished’? But no, you had to be the do-gooder. First you taught them how to make fire.”
Raven had never told Crow that he was the one who brought fire to the humans. Best let bygones be bygones, Raven thought. And why spoil his perfect non-interfering image?
“Then you taught them to cook, and then to make leather, and then clothing. You taught them how to till the soil and plant seeds, and how to irrigate. You taught them where to find clay, and how to make pottery. You taught them to read and write, and then, then you moved on to architecture. You taught them how to build stable structures that withstand wind and earthquakes and keep raindrops from falling on their heads. And finally,” Raven stopped to inhale. “As I live and breathe I hope this is your final teaching moment: you taught them how to smelt ore. Give it a rest, OK? Give them a rest. Seriously.”
“Well, excuse me, Cousin!” Crow was offended at the tone in Raven’s voice. “I was just trying to help. Remember how skinny and cold they were in the old days? I just couldn’t stand their misery. I had to do something.”
“Next time try minding your own business.” Raven and Crow had revisited this argument a million times. Raven thought Crow spent too much time dabbling in human affairs. “It’ll end up kicking you in the butt. And mine.” Raven predicted darkly. “Leave them be.”
Crow thought Raven’s complete lack of compassion hard to take. “I don’t know how you sleep at night, Cousin, after eating at their table the way we do and then bad-mouthing them as soon as your stomach is full. You refuse to lend a wing to help them when you so easily could. That’s what’s going to come around and kick you in the butt. Taking more than you give back.”
“Bad-mouthing?” Raven said with a great deal of irritation in his voice. “You want to hear bad-mouthing? Try listening to what these ‘poor skinny humans’ are saying.” Raven mocked Crow’s voice.
“Here’s a good one for you: ‘Crow is the harbinger of death. Where Crow goes, Death follows. Beware of Crow.’ And they have begun to fear and hate you, and by extension me because they still can’t tell us apart. After thousands and thousands of years, they can’t tell you from me. The dopes.”
“What?” Peeved and dumbfounded, Crow flapped his wings and strode to and fro on the branch. “They’ve got it backwards, we do not bring death, we just eat dead things. Huge difference.”
“Exactly,” Raven said, adopting the affronted tone he heard in Crow’s voice. He whisked his beak back and forth on the branch.
“We don’t even show up until the kill has been made,” Crow continued. “And even then we wait for the wolves, or eagles or someone to open up the body. It’s not like we’re birds of prey for orb’s sake, I mean, seriously.”
“I know, I know,” Raven raised a wing in agreement. “Alas, Cousin! In spite of your careful guidance over the millennia, humans remain essentially incapable of critical thinking, let alone actual reason.”
Raven never missed an opportunity to take a shot at his cousin over his obsession with humans and his addiction to meddling in their affairs.
After a few minutes of silence, Raven said in a low voice that rose with each word: “You want to know what just slays me? We corvids supposedly bring death, yet we don’t kill. Nope. Not us. But who does kill? Humans kill, that’s who kills.”
Raven towered over his cousin, glaring angrily. “Yet, you continue to mollycoddle them.”
“Well, disease kills too.” Crow said, still trying to be fair to the turncoat humans. “Look at what West Nile does to us. And humans, they get more diseases than we do. Their plagues, you know, those killed millions. Wiped whole villages off the map. Not once. Not twice, because here we go on plague number three. And that was just the bubonic.”
“Oh yeah!” Raven said sarcastically. “Let’s talk about the Black Plague!” His irritation erupted into outright anger as he spoke. “They cluelessly spread a disease across Europe, letting it wipe out a sizable chunk of their population, and who do they blame? Not the stupid little flea that started all this. Not the cats who the humans foolishly killed, who otherwise would’ve eaten the rats that carried the fleas that bit the humans and made them sick. Oh, no! They never blame themselves for being relentlessly myopic and stupid. But they heap all their guilt and blame on us. Us!“
Raven stomped up and down the branch as he ranted, shaking it so hard, Crow tightened his grip, lest he fall off.
“They act like we killed all those millions,” Raven seethed. “There’s a difference between killing and eating you know!”
“For truth,” Crow agreed, nodding. “And it’s not like they were doing such a great job dealing with their infectious dead. Look at yonder landfill, they’re still just tossing bodies on it. We do them the favor of removing the carcasses, thereby improving the sanitation of their cities and preventing the further spread of disease, we’re suddenly the bad guys? Sheesh.”
“‘Harbingers of death’,” Raven mocked. “You like that name, Cousin? After all you’ve done for them? I’ve told you over and over and over again. No good deed goes unpunished, Cousin. And here we are.”
Crow was depressed. He’d taught humans everything he knew, that was true.
“They were naked,” he said, “and hungry and shivering. Without the sense to come in out of the rain when I found them. And now, they are fat. They walk the streets of glittering cities dressed in the finest fashions and they live in fabulous palaces. We’ve shared feasts for millennia, as friends. Why do they now forsake us?”
Crow grabbed his breast feathers in his beak and tugged.
“Oh, stop it!” Raven said. “Seriously. Who needs them? Who’s ever needed them? No one, that’s who. But who’ve they needed? Us, that’s who. Fine! We’ll just stop being their janitors. Let them eat their own dead. We’ll see who forsakes whom.” Raven was extremely irritated.
For a while, Raven and Crow stopped eating the piles of dead humans resulting from their plagues and wars. During the boycott, they took to the cornfields.
“It just doesn’t satisfy like meat.” Raven said, turning his beak in disgust. He didn’t care for corn as much as Crow did and he longed for the eight essential amino acids found in meat protein. Nonetheless, he refused to eat human flesh, at least where they could see him.
As it happened, Raven and Crow came upon a human in the cornfield. “Shhh!” Raven hissed, and stuck a wing out. “Wait. Watch.” After many minutes the human had not moved, so Crow and Raven moved closer, walking on the ground through the cornstalks toward the immobile human.
“Allright,” Raven said with a sigh of relief. “It doesn’t seem to be alive.”
“But is it dead?” Crow asked as Raven leaped to the shoulder of the human. “Can we eat it?”
“That depends,” Raven said as he hopped over the straw hat to the other shoulder, “on your definition of dead, Cousin.”
Crow looked up at Raven from the ground and tilted his head to one side. “I don’t think it’s human, though it looks sort of like one. It’s wearing human clothing. Or rather, this thing, whatever it is, is made from a pair of denim overalls and a red flannel shirt stuffed with straw.”
“It’s definitely not human, Raven said, joining his cousin on the ground. “But it is a reasonable facsimile.”
“But why would they put a fake human in a cornfield?” Crow asked.
“Who knows?” Raven said, as he pecked at an ear of corn. “I stopped trying to figure these creatures out about a millennia ago. And you know, I sleep better for it.” He looked at Crow pointedly, a kernel of corn stuck to his beak.
Crow kept up the scrutiny of the fake human. “Wait!” he said, leaping up to stand on the hat. He peered downward over the brim of the scarecrow’s hat.
“I know what this is!” he cried out, looking down at his cousin. “It’s art! It’s a sculptural piece.”
“In the middle of a cornfield?” Raven asked. “That is odd, don’t you think?”
“Tremendously,” Crow said. “But, on the other wing, it also could be quote unquote an installation. Meaning the cornfield is part of the Great Artpiece. You know, the Great Universal Narrative. Not that I get the association between the stuffed fake human and the cornfield, though.” He shrugged. “But modern art is sometimes like that.”
“What are you talking about?” Raven said, looking at his cousin as if he were speaking gibberish.
“I’m saying,” Crow said with exasperation, “that they’ve been oddballs from the get-go, these humans. Have they not?”
“That would be an understatement,” Raven said and dug his beak into his wingpit. “They used to be quite humorous, however.”
He missed the old days, when he could laugh and joke around with the humans, before they decided they were the only intelligent life on Earth.
“They were adorable then, weren’t they?” Raven said wistfully. “Back in the day.”
Crow and Raven polished off a few more ears of corn and took to the skies, spreading word of the meat boycott far and wide. While their stomachs hungered for flesh, Raven and Crow refused meat. At least that was the ideal; in practice, well, sometimes the instinct to survive is quite irresistable. Neither Crow nor Raven ever had their priorities so screwed up that eating ever took second place to politics.
“Looky there!” Crow said, his voice rising to the high-pitched squeal that meant only one thing: meat on the ground.
The two swooped down and perched on a rotting corpse of an animal that might’ve been human once. Today it was food.
“The Food Chain is Always Right,” Raven said and buried his head in the dead flesh.
Crow nodded at the ancient corvid proverb and beaked himself another chunk.
