The children in the valley grew up learning the song before they learned much else, taught by parents who’d learned it from their own parents, a simple call-and-response meant to be sung to the crows that gathered every morning on the fence line at the edge of the orchards.
Crow, crow, crow, you quote,
Tell us what the old ones wrote,
Sing it plain and sing it true,
We'll believe whatever comes from you.
It was meant as a game, mostly, a way to keep small children entertained during the long chore of orchard work, watching the birds tilt their heads at the sound of small voices and pretending the tilts were answers.
Except the crows in that valley had always seemed a little too responsive for comfort, arriving at exactly the moment the song started, leaving at exactly the moment it ended, and every so often, rarely enough that it never quite became undeniable, one of the older birds would let out a series of calls that didn’t sound like ordinary crow noise at all, clipped and rhythmic in a way that made the children go quiet and the adults find some sudden reason to be elsewhere.
Nobody in the valley would say outright that the crows understood the song, or that the strange rhythmic calls meant anything, because saying it outright would mean deciding what to do about it, and it was easier to let the tradition continue exactly as it always had, a children’s game that everyone privately treated as something closer to a agreement. The orchards did unusually well, year after year, better than the soil or the weather should have allowed, and nobody wanted to be the one who stopped singing and found out whether that had anything to do with it.
The children grew up and taught their own children the same song, the same tilt of the head expected from the birds, and if any of them privately wondered what exactly the old ones had written, and how the crows had come to know it, they kept that wondering to themselves the way their parents had.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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