Thomas Maltman
THE LAND (EXCERPT)
Ravens arrived the next morning, blown south from Canada as if by fallout. Big black birds with glossy wings and devil eyes. When I took Kaiser on his morning walk, I marveled at the storm of birds up in the barren grove, all bristly like wind in leaves. A hundred and then a hundred more, filling up the pines on the ridge. I heard anger in their croaky choir. So many, it was as if a seam had unzipped in the gray sky and out poured these birds, bickering in the branches like they had taken a wrong turn somewhere and couldn’t agree on which way to go next. Kaiser made a whimpering sound, like he could sense something wrong in the ravens, both of us stunned by the confabulation of their caw, caw, cawing. I had never seen such a wonder, both beautiful and terrible.
Branches creaked and cracked under the weight of so many birds, ravens on every bending bough, painting the pines inky-black. A shiver scratched at the base of my spine. When the migraines came on it felt like an electric storm, fast-moving flashes of light and dark gathering at the corners of my eyes, my world shrinking to a trembling tunnel. If I collapsed in such a place, I was sure these birds would drink my eyes from the sockets.
“Don’t be scared,” I told Kaiser, my voice a little loud to be heard over the ravens. “They call it a ‘murder’ when so many flocks gather. No, that’s not right. A murder is for crows. Flocks of ravens are called an unkindness. An ‘unkindness of ravens’ is the right term.” I coughed into my gloves, because naming them correctly had not taken away any of their dark magic. “I know, I know. Ornithologists are major fans of understatement where ravens are concerned.”
His hackles up, Kaiser turned back toward the house.
“Not yet,” I called after him. The old dog had shat himself the day before, right at the door to the backyard, and I didn’t want any more messes. It was only seven in the morning and I had meant to walk the dog and then get back inside and start working on my programming for The Land. The first week of my convalescence had passed and I had little to show for it. I knew if I had any chance of getting this project done, I had to establish a regular schedule: creativity only came if you made time for it. Let Kaiser finish his morning business and then we could take shelter. But the dog wasn’t cooperating, spooked by the ravens.
I figured he needed some encouragement, so I unzipped my pants. The cold nipped at my nether regions, but I shut everything out, the ravens’ sonic disturbance, my failures so far to make progress on my program, the sorry work I had done as a self-appointed detective investigating the mystery of Maura, the weeks I’d spent with my privates hooked to a catheter. The golden arc I managed to carve into the snow felt triumphant, but Kaiser only sat on his haunches, unimpressed. I quickly zipped my pants.
I shared the dog’s unease. It wasn’t just the sight of so many ravens massed together bothering me. I sensed something else stirring in those birds, a carrion cry up in their heads, a darkness that had harried them here. Inside my brain I picked up a vibration, a humming of fear and hunger ahead of the long winter night, joining with a sibling shadow inside them. These birds were only birds, I reminded myself, just animals, and so who knows why they do what they do, but I couldn’t shake a supernatural sense of foreboding. What had Pastor Elijah called the devil? The Enemy. He was here. I sensed Him. He had come with the birds. In the trees I heard the steady splat of their shit dropping from the branches as they emptied themselves. I put up the hood of my parka in case any winged overhead.
Finally, Kaiser finished his business and the two of us were hurrying through the falling snow along a compacted path we had made between the back door and the grove. Flashes of color lit up the edges of my vision, dark approaching wings, the onset of another migraine. This one was going to be a doozy. I was jogging as quickly as my aching hip would allow when I slipped in the snow and went down hard, striking the back of my head. Before I could rise again, the migraine had me in its talons, pinching until it punctured through membrane. I cried out thinly, so intense was the agony, as I fell back in the snow. It was like the shadow I had sensed up in the birds’ heads had overtaken me, pecking and shredding light and sanity from my brain.
I believe I went unconscious. When the pain finally released me, I believe I even dreamed, encased in the warmth of my parka. I woke to a nightmare. I woke when Kaiser stuck his icy muzzle right into the soft of my neck and let out a snort. The pain yet softly thrummed behind my temples, but I could see again. I climbed unsteadily to my feet. I woke to the rage.
I stood up in the ringing din, in the falling snow. The reek and scream where ravens dark as bruises blotted the pines. Something must have torn up inside their heads. All these years later, I can still feel it inside me. A rip in time. Whatever tissue that had penned the boiling shadows inside their brains at bay disintegrated. Or, when I stood I snapped a branch, sharp as the report of a rifle.
All at once they lifted from the trees, flinging their bodies from the branches, screeching, rising into the sky and then diving with talons outstretched, one whisking right past my head. Still groggy with the remains of a migraine, I didn’t even duck. At first I thought they were attacking me. I was about to be the first man in America to die by being pecked to death by an unkindness of ravens, or carried off like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. The air whirred around me, a maelstrom of beak and talon. Then I saw one impale its beak into the chest of another. Those two plummeted to the ground, locked in their fatal embrace. I realized what was happening. They were killing each other, killing their own kind. Mothers and brothers and friends. Hundreds battling. Whirling black feathers and bones cracking. The thump and thwack of bodies smashing into the icy ground.
Kaiser and I stood in the vortex, stunned by their savagery, the birds’ minds bleeding red, all pulsing shadows. The birds did not see us. They shuddered at each impact. They flew all around us, but we were not touched. What a terrifying thing a nightmare is when you stand in the midst of it.
How long it lasted? How long? Time elongated.
When the battle was done, the shadow lifted, ascending like breath, one last gasp before perdition. Around us lay the dead, dozens bleeding out in the snow. The Enemy gone. It had taken all morning for so many ravens to fill up the pines on the ridge, but they died in a few minutes.
The survivors, most of the birds, winged off north again, climbing vanishing ladders of snow into the clouds. Black feathers clotted the ice, pinkish streaks of blood and bird brain. We stood in the middle of it, untouched. A great silence spread and deepened. The pain in my mind quieted.
Kaiser and I walked back. A metallic taste burned in my throat. Blood spattered my coat and one long bloody streak marked one of the bay windows where a raven had struck in its madness. I shucked off my coat inside, let Kaiser in and closed the door. Numb with shock, a shock nearly as visceral as I’d felt during the accident, I stripped off the rest of my clothes and wandered naked upstairs and took a Sumatriptan and a Percocet and climbed under my sheets. Sleep is an inhospitable country if every time you roll over on your left side barbs of pain flare throughout your entire body, but I slept, and this time I did not dream. My sleep was like the snow, a whiteout, and when I woke it was as if the massacre had never happened.
I shrugged on a shirt and some sweat pants and wandered downstairs to feed Kaiser. The clock showed it was a little past three, so I had slept much of the day. Outside the bay windows, I saw a few wolves had appeared to drag off the corpses, at least three with maybe more circling deeper in the grove, ghostly shapes. The wolves should have thrilled me. Most people go their whole lives without ever seeing one in the wild, but I was too shell-shocked to wonder over their primal arrival, so intent on their feast they did not lift their bloody muzzles to see me watching them.
Near the birches, one fox, a splash of fiery orange, made a feast of his own, keeping a nervous eye on the larger predators. I felt sure watching that no one would ever believe me. In the years since I have heard of ravens doing this up in Alaska, when their flocks grow too numerous, driven by starvation or overpopulation. Surely, there is a natural explanation. Such rationality insulates us from suffering. I know I didn’t just imagine my mind spreading out to touch the minds of those birds. I felt their hunger and pain. I sensed the drained emptiness in their bellies and in that emptiness, a place where shadows seethed.
In that moment I felt I had seen the Enemy and I knew now what he could do. And I knew he could do the same to the human heart.
Snow kept falling and falling. I was about to turn away when I saw a fleck of black stir in a snowdrift nearest the bay window, a smaller raven struggling to rise. Alive, a lone refugee of the war. The fox and wolves hadn’t noticed it yet, but they would soon. I didn’t stop to think. Barefoot, I opened the back door and waded into the snow to fetch what I figured was a dying animal.
The door snapping shut behind me startled the predators. A large gray timber wolf lifted its muzzle from the red-soaked snow. It had eyes like white fire in the dark, lit from within. Too late, I remembered old man Kroll advising me about the 30.06 in the gun cabinet. Could I make it back inside if they came for me?
Yet I did not feel that same sense of dread as I had caught up amidst warring ravens. Her glowing eyes held my own and I sensed her intelligence, her rightness in this wintry world. She belonged here as I didn’t. I write she even though I had no way of knowing for certain if she was the alpha female. In a fellow mammal I just remember sensing a distinct motherly presence.
“Mine,” I told the wolf about the surviving raven behind me, “I’m taking this one.” She huffed in dismissal and with tail bristling retreated into the woods, taking the rest of the pack with her. I watched her go and then turned to my task.
I took off my sweatshirt, wrapped the bird in it, and carried it inside. The sleek black body quivered as I cradled it to my chest, holding it against my bare, goose-pimpled skin. Its eyes were sealed shut, covered in a gray film, like it was sick with some disease.
I thought about calling animal control, but it was already too late at night and I would have to also tell them about what I’d seen in the woods, try to explain it somehow. The sheer savagery. I couldn’t do it. Holding that breathing bird against my chest, I had this feeling it had been sent. A messenger from beyond. Wrapped in my sweatshirt, the raven made a muffled caw of protest, unhappy with the effort I had made to save it.
Unsure what to do next, I brought the wounded bird into the garage, found a discarded box, and made a nest of newspapers. I sat on the garage step and rubbed the glossy black body in my sweater trying to revive it. The eyes never opened, but I could feel the tremor of its breathing in my hands.
I’m the caretaker, I remember thinking. And for the first time in a few months my life made sense, had some purpose. This is why I was put here, in the midst of this madness. I was here to care for things, and not just the house and dog. I had failed to take care of Maura. I couldn’t fail again.
Thomas Maltman’s first novel, The Night Birds, won an Alex Award, a Spur Award, and the Friends of American Writers Literary Award. In 2009 the American Library Association chose The Night Birds as an “Outstanding Book for the College Bound.” Little Wolves, his second novel, was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and won the All Iowa Reads selection in 2014. He teaches at Normandale Community College and lives in the Twin Cities area with his wife, a Lutheran pastor, and his three daughters. This excerpt is from his third novel, The Land, which was published by Soho Press in October, 2020.