Winter Moon

issued from the bird.

"Somehow you control these animals from a distance. Telepathy,

something like that? From quite a distance, in the case of this

bird.

Sixteen miles into Eagle's Roost. Well, maybe fourteen miles as the

crow flies."

If the traveler knew that Eduardo had made a lame pun, it gave no

indication through the bird.

"Pretty clever, whether it's telepathy or something else. But it sure

as hell takes a toll on the subject, doesn't it? You're getting

better, though, learning the limitations of the local slave

population."

The crow pecked for more lice.

"Have you made any attempts to control me? Because if you have, I

don't think I was aware of it. Didn't feel any probing at my mind,

didn't see alien images behind my eyes, none of the stuff you read

about in novels."

Peck, peck, peck.

Eduardo chugged the rest of the Corona. He wiped his mouth on his

sleeve.

Having nailed the lice, the bird watched him serenely, as though it

would sit there all night and listen to him ramble, if that was what he

wanted.

"I think you're going slow, feeling your way, experimenting. This

world seems normal enough to those of us born here, but maybe to you

it's one of the weirdest places you've ever seen. Could be you're not

too sure of yourself here."

He had not begun the conversation with any expectation that the crow

would answer him. He wasn't in a damned Disney movie. Yet its

continued silence was beginning to frustrate and annoy him, probably

because the day had sailed by on a tide of beer and he was full of

drunkard's anger.

"Come on. Let's stop farting around. Let's do it."

The crow just stared.

"Come here yourself, pay me a visit, the real you, not in a bird or

squirrel or raccoon. Come as yourself. No costumes. Let's do it.

Let's get it over with."

The bird flapped its wings once, half unfurling them, but that was

all.

"You're worse than Poe's raven. You don't even say a single word, you

just sit there. What good are you?"

Staring, staring.

And the Raven, never Jutting, still is sitting, still is sitting .

Though Poe had never been one of his favorites, only a writer he had

read while discovering what he really admired, he began quoting aloud

to the feathered sentry, infusing the words with the vehemence of the

troubled narrator that the poet had created: " And his eyes have all

the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamplight o'er him

streaming throws his shadow on the floor--" Abruptly he realized, too

late, that the bird and the poem and his own treacherous mind had

brought him to a confrontation with the horrific thought that he'd

repressed ever since cleaning up the soil and other leavings on June

tenth. At the heart of Poe's

"The Raven" was a lost maiden, young

Lenore, lost to death, and a narrator with a morbid belief that Lenore

had come back from-Eduardo slammed down a mental door on the rest of

that thought.

With a snarl of rage, he threw the empty beer bottle. It hit the

crow.

Bird and bottle tumbled into the night.

He leaped off his chair and to the window.

The bird fluttered on the lawn, then sprang into the air with a furious

flapping of wings, up into the dark sky.

Eduardo closed the window so hard he nearly shattered the glass, locked

it, and clasped both hands to his head, as if he would tear out the

fearful thought if it would not be repressed again.

He got very drunk that night. The sleep he finally found was as good

an approximation of death as any he had known.

If the bird came to his bedroom window while he slept, or walked the

edges of the roof above him, he did not hear it.

He didn't wake until ten minutes past noon on July first. For the rest

of that day, coping with his hangover and trying to cure it preoccupied

him and kept his mind off the morbid verses of a long-dead poet.

The crow was with him July first, second, and third, from morning

through night, without surcease, but he tried to ignore it. No more

staring matches as with the other sentries. No more one-sided

conversations. Eduardo did not sit on the porches. When he was

inside, he did not look toward the windows. His narrow life became

more constricted than ever.

At three o'clock on the afternoon of the fourth, suffering a bout of

claustrophobia from being too long within four walls, he planned a

cautious itinerary and, taking the shotgun, went for a walk. He did

not look at the sky above him, only toward distant horizons. Twice,

however, he saw a swift shadow flash over the ground ahead of him, and

he knew that he did not walk alone.

He was returning to the house, only twenty yards from the front porch,

when the crow plummeted out of the sky. Its wings flapped uselessly,

as if it had forgotten how to fly, and it met the earth with only

slightly more grace than a stone dropped from a similar height. It

flopped and shrieked on the grass but was dead by the time he reached

it.

Without looking closely at the crow, he picked it up by the tip of one

wing.

He carried it into the meadow, to throw it where he had tossed the four

squirrels on the twenty-fourth of June.