Chapter Thirty-Eight

MY BOOTS ARE SPECKLED WITH MUD and blood and ice. The air is cold enough to hurt my lungs with each breath. There are dead crows everywhere. Obviously, a crow hunt would lead to dead crows, but it is different with them laid out like this. Frozen in their final standoff with mortality.

There are so many of them.

They’ve arranged the birds into the number they killed. The number 32 is shaped from the bodies of thirty-two bird carcasses. Feathers resting at odd angles, eyes now void of that shimmer of intelligence that I feel on me everywhere I go in town. Sometimes it feels like the crows aren’t thousands of individual birds but a single being somehow living in a thousand bodies.

I read the numbers as I pass them.

57.

82.

154.

I imagine the aerial view. From above, the field of dead birds would be laid out like a page of a child’s math homework. Exactly the view the live crows have now. I feel dumb as I imagine it. The crows don’t care. But then I think of Joe and his gifts, and I remember that Dr. Cornell said crows mourn, and I wonder if maybe they do care.

I wonder if they’ll remember this transgression.

I didn’t think the hunt would bother me this much, but it’s their little bodies, shaped into numbers, that gets me. It’s almost perverse. A parody of death. And even though they’re only birds on the field in front of me, it’s girls in a crawl space that I see in my mind.