Crow & Raven

Daybreak came. It arrived with no empty promises of spring warmth, only the winds off the ocean. They were warmer than the fronts that sometimes came from the Northwest, but that was only so much better; ice vs ice water. The ocean brought a damp cold. It hits you up front, sinks its salty teeth and cuts down to the bone. It can get through just about anything.

Just about.

Mornings have a philosophical purity about them. They are supposed to be the clear line between yesterday and today, what is done and what can be. It doesn’t feel the same when you don’t sleep. When insomnia sets in – real, “never sure when or if I’ll sleep again” insomnia – the mind begins to perceive time differently. One day runs into another, day into week, week into month. When the sun sets in the afternoon and rises late in the morning, winter becomes a thing in and of itself; a night with no end, only brief interruptions. The winter is one dark, amorphous blob of time that belies the spikes of light. Daylight becomes like a rash. You put up with it by convincing yourself that it’s temporary and it will go away again soon. Sometime you’ll be able to rest or relax. You just need to get over the hump. Get through the light and coast gently into the darkness. But then the night comes and your senses are on high alert. Every slight movement sends your eyes darting at the trees or the long grass. Always on the lookout for some predator. And there are of course the skies, an endless void filled with dots that could have died off hundreds of millions of years ago –

Other thoughts tumbled through Taka’s head as he stared vacantly out of the bus window. Occasionally his mind would roll back to the checklist of things he had to get done through the day, but mostly it was an aimless internal rambling about the wonders of nature; the shape of time, the personalities of the trees, the stories of the animals. The general weirdness that popped up on those long, empty, blurry rides. Not normal stuff. Not “on TV” stuff. Not the stuff you share with other kids on the bus or on the yard at school. He had learned to keep it to himself in order to the looks at bay and his teeth in his mouth.

One time stood out to him, the one time he had let the weirdness out for a walk. It was his first day of school. Mom had driven him up the road to the only bus stop in the area. In hindsight he wondered why they didn’t stop outside his house since, at the time, he was living directly on the bus route, but no matter. It was the first day of school and there had probably needed to be a headcount. No phones then. He had never been around so many children before. There must have been seven or eight all told. They were all different ages, all the way up to grade six, top of the mountain. He stood in line, third from the front, and looked over at his mother. She stood out in a wool sweater and doeskin pants, woven moccasins and a knit hat, waving him on with a proud smile on her face. The other moms were dressed strangely. Their clothes were bright and made from something he had never seen before. One lady had a jacket that was white with purple and red blocks on it with a zipper going up the top half. Another had a green windbreaker with shiny buttons and a zipper. Why both? The colours were bright and unusual, but he couldn’t take his eye off the material. They looked like they were made for toys, or from toys. They were like something out of the commercials he had seen on a video screen the one time when the weather was good and they got a signal from The City.

He tugged anxiously at the beaver pelt his nanny had fashioned into a jacket. She was a fine shaper, able to turn most anything into something wearable. Only a trained eye would be able to tell that he didn’t get it from a store, but the thought never occurred to him anyway. He never had clothes that came from a store. He had been in them but the shirts and pants all looked weird, like the jackets the ladies had on.

There was a kid in front of him that wore just such a jacket, the plasticky toy kind. His was blue and black with a basketball and some lettering on it in white and blue. Taka could make it out a little bit. It said something about Magic but the A was a star.

He struggled for a while to think of something to say. Some of the other kids knew each other already and fell into simple conversations, wondering what the new school year would be like, what happened on last night’s TV show, who was their favourite character, and so on. “I’m this one and you’re that one and he’s the bad guy and you have to be the girl!” Taka stood there like a well-disguised alien fiddling with a transistor, trying to communicate, trying to pick up a signal. The boy in front of him, a few years older, looked over his shoulder when some of the kids at the back of the line started giggling loudly. Taka saw the whites of his eyes, his bunched-up mouth. He looked at the little red dots all over his cheeks and nose and suddenly realized that the boy had red hair. Taka’s mouth fell open. He had never seen red hair before.

Anxiously he tried to think of something other kids might like to do. Mom and nanny had told him that most kids don’t hunt or fish, and often told him he “read above his age”, whatever that meant. Maybe it meant he read like this older kid. It was worth a shot.

“What books do you read?” Taka wagered, the question coming out at least twice as loud as he meant for it to be. “I like The Turn of the Table by Chad Flenderman but my mom says he writes pulp fiction for anxious housewives.” He smiled a little smile to himself. Yes, he thought. That was a sentence.

The older boy turned his head slowly, peering over his left shoulder until he caught eye of the tiny furry talking animal behind him. He grunted a “huh?” and shot a glare that could have melted cement. Taka’s smile faded. He lowered his eyes. The signal was gone. Communications aborted. He went back to being a lonely alien.

The rest of the day hadn’t panned out much better. He couldn’t remember the details but he knew there was a point where another kid slapped him in the face for no apparent reason. He spent the rest of recess sitting under a rickety set of stairs that was meant to be a fire escape but was more often used as a jungle gym when the duty teacher wasn’t looking. He watched kids on the swings and teeter totter, flipping around on the monkey bars and wondered why he was there.

The train of thought kept a rollin’ as the bus made its way through the woods and onto the highway. It was a dead long ride and there was nothing but time to think. The 40-minute commute (each way, uphill and in the snow) was a part of the routine, the ritual. It was his time to check in and focus on the work ahead. Hunting an animal and cleaning it was easy enough, you just use a little know-how to track it down and do what works besides. Navigating high school was a different kind of everything. The animals were much more feral and vicious. It didn’t help that they could talk, and scream, and gossip.

And bite.

A few daydreams later, through an endless matte of white and grey that had rolled off the ocean, the bus pulled into the back lot behind the others. A steady stream of winter jackets tumbled out and poured into the old brick building. The school was a U shape made up of the old and new wings, with the new making up less than half of the building overall. It was connected by an overpass which faced the road, so that if one stood at the smoker’s fence and stared at it head on they would see one long building starting on the right, the new part, a set of steps up into the courtyard, the overpass above it, and connected on the left was the end of the old building. Past the steps was the hot spot, a little riser in the corner which led into the main doors – an oxymoron since they were in the courtyard on the lower level and didn’t lead into administration or anything that would constitute a “main” portion of the school. Inside were the payphones and some radiators where the more vicious animals dwelled, hence “hot spot”.

Today the courtyard was empty. Earlier in the school year it was a makeshift ring for a few fights, ground zero for a pep rally and student pride something or other. He didn’t fully grasp why they had all spent the afternoon standing around in groups while someone blasted last decade’s greatest hits. It wasn’t a dance, it wasn’t a show, it wasn’t a concert or a live performance. What was it supposed to be? It might have been field day, but he was sure that field day had miscellaneous sports, or half-sports. Long jump, hammer throw, things that didn’t require playing, just one odd skill. He had wanted to try archery, but –

He shuffled in through the metal doors lined with bulletproof glass. Someone had managed to smash it the night before. Where there’s a will there’s a way, he thought. The dry warmth from the radiators hit him at the same time as the musty steam of hundreds of snowy, damp jackets coming up to room temperature all at once. The warmer months were nowhere near as claustrophobia-inducing as the dead of winter. All the windows had to be closed to keep the heat in, and the hundreds of bodies having just come in from the cold were all driving up the temperature. The staff was helpless. There would be endless complaining if they didn’t keep the heat up but that meant seven hundred teenagers all sweating at once. The teachers, all there for hours by the time the busses pulled in, had enough time to acclimate, so they tended to stand around in summer wear even when it was freezing out.

Taka caught a glimpse of one of the oversized clocks whose sole purpose was to remind you that time was not your own – and you’re late. He was ten minutes late for the starting bell. The hall was mostly clear except for the kids who had been on his bus. The others had their head start and already made it to class. He stopped in front of the door and hunched slightly to look into the slim rectangular glass pane, through the wire mesh that made it all the harder to break. Mad’m Morghen was at the front of the class. She had a certain energy that day, the kind where her wide eyes never stopped moving, her thick arms gestured broadly and vaguely mimicked whatever she was talking about. To someone in her profession it was called total physical response, a communication tool for the benefit of secondary language learners. To a group of teenagers, it was flamboyant madness.

“Monsii Tackwa Tauwhiit,” she said with excessive saccharine emphasis. “Perhaps we have forgotten that our class begins promptly at the ninth hour, n’est pas?” Taka’s eyes bulged slightly. He knit his eyes together and reached for the proper response. What came out was something to the effect of “I late by bus. Roads and snow. All late, was.”

Mom had insisted he take Ishaza immersion so that, ten years from now when he was a world away and working a job that didn’t necessitate it, it would look good on a CV. All it had really done for the previous four years is teach him that he could not speak another language.

“I am not responsible for the timing of your transportation, Monsii Tauwhiit,” Mad’m Morghen continued, most of it going directly over Taka’s head. He got the spirit of what she was saying, if not the exact verbiage. “We all have our responsibilities and consequences when we fail to live up to those responsibilities. Rules are rules. We have them for a reason – “ and so on. Taka stood stone faced until he recognized the Ishaza for “detention” and “next time”. He had blushed the first few times she went off on a tangent like that, but by the time he happened to arrive late through no fault of his own on that one particular day, he had grown thick skin and lost the ability to feel humiliated. Worked hands build callouses.

The second bell rang as Mad’m Morhen was in the middle of explaining the process for winter exams. They had a few weeks left to prepare and attendance was mandatory – that meant no one with a slip to leave for eight weeks to go lobstering was exempt. The exams were standardized across the Territory, she said, driving home the word “standardized” as if it equated to “royal decree”.

He had two minutes before the next bell. Two minutes to grab his gear and get to class. Little enough time to take a piss but he was going to risk it. As his wrist turned reflexively and worked the combination lock, Taka realized he couldn’t remember what class was first. Moreover, he couldn’t remember what day of the week it was. Solomani Haynan had the locker next to his, and was rifling through her books when he opened his mouth to ask. She was a lovely dark-skinned girl who often wore her hair pulled back in a tight bun, except during the holidays when it was elaborately braided.

“It’s Mid-Week,” she cut him off, shut her locker curtly and walked away. She did not make eye contact or lift her head, did not raise her voice. She was not callous or rude. She delivered the information and left. Shaking the cobwebs out, Taka considered the idea that he should make more of an effort to talk to the person he stood next to several times a day with something deeper than “what day of the week is it” or “what time is it”.

Another day.

He grabbed the sling pouch he had left in the locker from earlier in the week, grabbed a geography book and decided to take the risk of stopping at the bathroom before class. The pouch was far more important than the book at that moment. He had filled it with mixed nuts, seeds, some deer jerky and dried fruit to start the day off right. His water bottle was missing, probably somewhere at home, but fountains existed, so.

Taka rounded the corner and approached the bathroom, looked down the long, grey-bricked corridor at the low ceilings and scuffed floors, and briefly wondered how anyone could call the place a school. It was a hollowed-out brick with lights. Upstairs the ceiling was decorated with slats of old processed wood that had been in fashion when his mother was still there. He could look up through them and see the wiring and insulation. That part of the building reminded him of his grandfather’s chicken coop, how he could look down through the holes in the wire and see the animals in their cage. The other part, the new part, the one connected to the box he was presently standing in, was like a hatchery. All the young chicks, sex and gender not considered, were kept in that one little box away from the bigger, more hormonal raptors until such time as they could be mixed in with the general population. Put out for food or breeding, in other words. Where he stood was more territorial than the feed bag. The door to the gymnasium – a basketball court with no bleachers, really – was behind him. At his four o’clock was a corner leading to the parking lot, the entrance for dances, and between them was a vending machine which recently had the audacity to jack up the price of water by a quarter crown. Just ahead were the bathrooms. This particular set posed a problem.

The wall had been hollowed out to allow a little privacy and passing space. It was a blind spot where lookouts stood while business fleshed out on the other side. Most of it didn’t affect him in any way, but he heard the stories. Every now and then there would be a streak of blood on the wall or the door to one of the stalls would be ripped off. Last year he had pissed for six months with no door behind him. The school had a new one installed over the summer break, but it came off in the first week back. One stall still had a door, but that had to remain up so that drugs could be sold more easily. Taka figured having a door didn’t matter. There were no security cameras in the bathroom or the hall outside it. That was how those three guys got away with what they did to that girl. Her word versus theirs, and they were on the hockey team.

He walked tentatively to the door and put his ear close enough to hear but far enough to duck out of the way should it come flying open. No murmurs, but class was about to start so the odds were high it was occupied with a little last-minute business. He pulled it open just a sliver, just enough to hear the two voices going back and forth. They were hushed but brazen, trying to keep it down but not caring if they got caught. Taka slipped in, passed the up-turned garbage bin, smashed mirrors, graffiti on the walls, and approached one of the urinals. He parted his feet enough to avoid the puddle, undid his leggings and went to it.

“She’s a fuckin’ slut man,” one of the boys in the stall said between snorts. “All of ‘em are. You just have to know how to talk to ‘em.”

“Tell ‘em what to do, yeah,” the other one said. Taka could imagine the shit-eating toady grin plastered on his ugly toady face. The toady had a unique, agreeable mask that was the trademark of their species. It was a hangover from when they were earlier primates, when they would bare their teeth as a show of submission. “Punch ‘em out if you need to, boss”, it said. “I gots more”. He had heard someone in class refer to the toady as a “beta male orbiter” which, for his money, added up. The toady did not dare disagree with or question the alpha. The alpha had no time for that. They were too busy suppressing their insecurities to deal with a toady’s insolence.

“That’s like the fifth this month, man,” the alpha continued. “I gotta watch out or I’ll burn my balls off.”

“Yeah man,” the beta said, “can’t be too careful. You don’t know what those sluts are carrying. Could be anything.” He chuckled submissively and took another sniff of the toot.

“Might get The Bug, me,” the alpha said, laughing. There had been stories about The Bug floating around since Taka was really young, arguably too young to know what sex was, but when The Bug appeared and started spreading, the whole kindergarten got the message: don’t do anything with your genitals, or you will die.

“When’s the next party?” the beta asked, “Gotta see if I can get away from the old man and get inner. Fuckin’ guy’s always got me workin’.”

“Ayah, like you,” said the alpha. “I’m always ‘board the boat with the old man but ya gotta get some time off. Work hard, play hard, son.” Toot toot. “Next weekend it’ll be, I figga.”

“Yees, son,” the beta said, his toady grin ripping audibly across his face. A moment of silence while they digested the toot. Taka finished up, drew up his laces and started towards the sink to wash up. “What’s on for today then? Ya goin’ ta class er wah?”

“Hain’t likely,” the alpha said. Taka could hear him step off the toilet and adjusting himself. He had less than fifteen seconds. He flicked the water off his fingers and started towards the door. “Might just take the day for some R and R, son. Get huntin’, kill me a faggot—” the door came flying off hits hinges and hit the wall. The alpha and beta tumbled out of the stall, the alpha with his chest up, fists cocked and eyes bulging. He was ready to tear some flesh from bone, by tooth or knuckle. The beta’s grin was so wide that his cavities were visible.

The bathroom was empty.

Later.

Lunch. A little freedom, a little down time.

The routine varied, but only just so. Anyone past grade 9 was free to leave school grounds, provided the appropriate note had been handed in at the beginning of the year. There were a few things to do within walking distance; a pizzeria, drug store, dollar store, convenience store, gas station, ice cream bar. A Truckstop in several different varieties for those biding their time until they left for the next town. A little further there were a few restaurants gathered around the causeway, a long pile of rocks with a road on it that lead to The Island. In a different world, the scenic ocean view and abundance of seafood would have made a great tourist trap.

There had been a time when Taka would be the first person out the door to go off. At the time it was more about getting away from the school than doing anything in particular. Most of the time he had sat quietly at a table while friends or associates spent their parents’ money on overpriced fried potatoes, while he waited until the walk back to sneak a handful of seeds and nuts. Other times they would slip into the dollar store penniless and leave with a few pockets full of candy or powdered juice packs (put a straw in and inhale just right and you can breathe coloured smoke). These days he was less inclined to go to a place he didn’t want to be to spend money he didn’t have on things he didn’t want to impress people he didn’t care for. He had even less inclination to steal things he didn’t want at the expense of people he didn’t know to impress people he didn’t respect. Those friends were all off with different groups, and just as well. People grow apart.

Lunch was deer jerky and wild rice, a few more seeds and nuts, a few dried berries in the bottom of the pouch. It was not as if he had an entire pantry in his locker, just a few pouches and containers of odds and ends, stuff that would sustain him when he forgot to pack a lunch. There was a time when mom took care of that. Times change.

For the first few years the library had been his safe haven. In elementary they weren’t allowed in the library unsupervised. There were only the weekly stops to pick up a book – in five minutes, no lingering or dilly-dallying, you better know what you want before you see it – and he was usually so rushed the things he got weren’t that interesting. The shelves at home were filled with a variety. Philosophy, history, quality fiction and literature, religious scriptures, meditation, poetry. Mom had taught him to read, but understanding was his responsibility. By the time he got to high school he had cleaned out the home library. At school he typically went for the untouchables; penny dreadful, pulp fiction, atlases, encyclopaedias. The stuff that made mom’s brow furrow and toes curl. He would usually leave them in his desk and read them for a few minutes at lunch, getting through them over the course of the week, then starting over with the new week.

Now, in late secondary school, the game had changed. For the first few years the library had been his safe haven. He could take out “however many books he needed”, and did so. No upper limit was a dream scenario. Some hoarding instinct had kicked in and he found himself checking out seven, eight, nine books at a time for fear he would come back a day later and the library would have been burned down. He seldom finished them, however. With more choices there was less of an ability to find something specific to his tastes, so he just checked out whatever looked good. A few pages in and he would lose interest and move on to something else. Soon the choices became overwhelming. With fewer choices he had found there was more certainty he would enjoy what he was getting, ostensibly because he had no choice but to go through with it. The freedom overwhelmed him to the point he stopped finishing books, resolving only to get one or two that he could really get into. But there was the school’s budget to consider, which focused less on quality and more on quantity. People don’t usually donate their best books.

And after lunch, every day without fail, was SSR; sustained silent reading. One story, and not from the bargain bin the school got their books from, was that the students had tested lowest in the region for literacy, so a plan was instituted to make reading mandatory. In practice, the 15 minutes of quiet time between lunch and class was meant to make the cattle docile before filtering them into the pen to be stuffed full of knowledge and tased with information.

So it felt.

That one day he had been sitting there, tonguing some of the fibrous jerky out of his teeth, eyeing a copy of The Sacred Texts mom had given him last holiday. It was the sort of thing he’d expect one of the alphas to do as a gag. See him there, broad grin plastered on, holding the scriptures. “huh huh huh. They done tolt me to reed, so I’s doin a read o’ da good werd, huh huh huh”. And the crowd goes wild.

It had been the only thing in Taka’s locker. Mom had insisted he keep a copy for inspiration, guidance, wisdom in time of doubt and so on. They weren’t strictly religious in any sense, or with any sect, but with hindsight Taka would come to realise that he had been raised in a fairly religious household. It was just that all religions were equally valid, important, and a path to the All-Knowing, Lord of All The Worlds.

He flicked through the pages, letting his mind wander, focusing only on the page and the piece of deer stuck in his teeth.

Did We not open for you your heart and lift from you the burden that weighed heavily on your back? And did We not elevate your renown?

Truly, with hardship comes ease.

Truly, with hardship comes ease.

So when you are free, exert yourself, and let your desire be for your Lord.

That one had always sat right with him. Despite the strife that had reared its ugly head in recent years, passages like that, and the ones that could be summed up as “The Seer knows your heart and your intentions”, helped him keep some of the monsters at bay.

He heard their voices coast over, unencumbered by the murmurs that rose from other parts of the classroom. “Silent” was a loose term when it came to SSR. In some classes it meant still as the grave, in others it meant “just shut up most of the way so I can get this marking done”. In this classroom, there were rules for maintaining order – rules for rules sake - and exceptions for the exceptional. Case and point, a table of girls near the window were busying themselves with maintaining the illusion that they were working together on mandatory reading for social studies later in the day with that very same teacher, the one who had saw fit to reprimand Taka for the crime of being on a late bus. This chatter, of course, catered to Mad’m Morghen’s well-pronounced ego and was thus considered “acceptable talking” by virtue of being a necessary evil – at a reasonable volume, of course. All others, keep shut.

“What’s that savage boy reading Sacred Texts for?” one of them said to another. “I didn’t think they had no religion.”

“He ain’t a savage, he’s just pretending,” said the other. They were dressed in the standard uniform of their caste. It is well known to zoologists the world over that teenagers self-assign into designated groups based on important markers, like popularity, sportsmanship, income, etc. This particular group’s shared function was not especially clear, but they were notably wearing solid-coloured sweaters on specific days. This day being Mid-Week, it was dealer’s choice. Two of them were wearing the same shade of yellow as the Queen Bee, not a coincidence. These two, at the far end of the table, wore pink and sky blue.

“I hear’t he was, though,” the first one, in the blue sweater, said, leaning in for a whisper. “Like that’s why he’s always wearin’ them animals and stuff. Like he must be!” she turned up her face with a disgusted scowl. “It’s so gross! Them poor animals!”

“He ain’t though,” pink sweater said. “His mumma went nuts them years back when his father oft and run out, or she run him out or somethin’ like that. So now he dresses like them savages ‘casue he can’t afford normal clothes.”

“Well then how he ain’t one?” said blue sweater. “I mean two monkeys shop from the same store, like a fella says.” Pink sweater slapped her scornfully on the arm.

“Go on,” said pink sweater. “that haint right, talkin like that. You know what they do to them peoples up at them camps in the woods. With the schools and everything.”

“Schools?” blue sweater’s face screwed up like she had just shot lemon juice. “They got schools for savages?”

“They haint really schools,” pink sweater continued. “They just kinda keep ‘em there and try and get ‘em to talk so you can understand ‘em, like. Try to give ‘em religion and all that so they ain’t so wild.”

“Does it work does it?” asked blue sweater, genuinely curious.

“I dunnow,” pink sweater said. “I heard all kinda stories from my mumma and deddy though. They said that ain’t no place to be. Used to hear on the playground when I was a tinker, the ol’ ma’am used to say “if you kids don’t act right they’ll send ya up to that school in the woods with the rest of the savages!” No one ever got sent there, though. On accoun’a we go to temple and all.”

“It haint cause of temple,” blue sweater said. “It’s cause they’re a different, y’know, species and all. Like animals, just a step above animals but not like your cats and dogs and stuff. They’re people, but not really. Not all the way.” They sat quietly for a minute. Blue sweater broke the silence. “So what’s he then? Is he people or a savage?”

Pink sweater rolled her eyes, exasperated. “Well he go to this school, don’t ‘e? I claim that’s a pretty peopley thing ta do, like.”

Taka sat quietly, as did the bodies around him. The occasional vacant stare made its way in his direction, saying “you know they’re talking about you, right?” He thought about the stories. He had heard them as well, mostly when his Nanny was talking to other old people, and whenever they caught him listening they gave him a look like he ought not to be. Stories about how kids from way back when had just up and disappeared in the night. About the start of school age her neighbour, a little girl, had been so excited to start at school. They had grown up and played and everything had been right as rain. Little girl even went out and traded her few belongings to get herself a new dress for the first day. But the first day of school came and she was nowhere to be seen. Not on the walk to, not on the walk from. Not the next day or the one after. And when she’d asked her mama about it, mama just said she went to a different school. Taka had once asked her if she ever went to one of those schools, the ones up in the woods where some kids go and never come back. She had just stared out the window, over at the vacant lot across the way, and shook her head. Taka was never sure if that meant “no”.

The Seer knows your heart and your intentions.

The bell rang. Everyone jumped up at once, and the current pulled him out the door.

The ride home was quiet. Forty minutes of silence, save for the odd fit of giggling from one of the juniors at the front. For whatever reason none of the usual group of four or five were at the back of the bus that day. There was the odd straggler that rounded out the five, but the core four were the same; three girls and a boy, all of which Taka had known since his first day of kindergarten. They were a year ahead of him and it was somewhat against protocol at school itself, but on that long trek through the woods it was acceptable to let the rules slide a little. Today, all bets were off. Bag and coat in one seat, sprawled out in another, feet up on the one across from him. Forty minutes and not a single fuck in sight.

There were days when the ride was for decompression, other days when it was for reflection, and some when it was for scheduling and prioritization. What were they low on, what did they need? When was what assignment due? Was mom up to date on medication? Did Shallah have enough supplies to hold the house together? He had read a few science fiction novels about deep-space and time travel. On this occasion, that is where his mind went. The forty-minute trip was actually back through time, across galaxies and dimensions. He was going back to his home world where they were settling the vast wilderness, and only the strength of his character would determine whether or not they survived against the vicious aliens that threatened their existence. It was, to Taka, a romantic view. It gave reality a nice, warm glow behind it.

The bus passed over one of the flats. In many places the road ran parallel to the ocean, with only a bit of dirt and the flats between them. They were the same as home; big, wet plains with crab grass, white weed and sink holes, but they did offer a view of the water and the world beyond it. This far up the bay there were seldom any boats. The water was too shallow, the shore was too near, and the fish were too few and far between. This far up they were past the mouth of the harbour and halfway to the river, not so far that the gulls wouldn’t travel for a good meal, and not so far that his grandfather wouldn’t occasionally take a night trip down to one of the islands where the good lobsters hid.

Taka stared and floated for those few moments before they were back in the trees. He stared at the land across the harbour and wondered about the houses. How long had they been there? When did people first set there? Were they The Old People or the Settlers? He knew his family had been on that land for hundreds of years. But for himself, he wondered how many years he would have left there. How many more years had whatever forces that be ordained for him to ride that same road, day after day, month after month, year after year? What of the big, wide world at the mouth of the harbour? When would he spread his wings like the big black bird that swooped down over the gulls?