Being neighbors with crows 03

Their feathers are still dark and lustrous, but after looking at them for a long time, I don't think they are very ugly, and their cries are still hoarse and vulgar, after getting used to hearing them, I don't find them particularly noisy and harsh. Sometimes, when the sun was setting, I sat on a stone bench in the courtyard, thinking about my relatives in Shanghai, and I was already sad at dusk, when the bleak call of the crows in the linden tree came from the twilight, listening to it, my tears flowed out unconsciously, and my grievances that I was forced to send down to the border countryside got some kind of catharsis, and my helpless loneliness seemed to get some solace, so my mood became slightly calmer.

One evening, six months later, the sky was covered with dark clouds, and lightning was swimming in the clouds like a small green snake. But at this moment, I saw a large flock of crows circling the linden canopy in the air, cawing impatiently. It was almost dark, and crows are not owls. Their eyes are blurred in the dark, so they could not see. I disappeared from my sight.

I was puzzled by the unusual behavior of the crows, but I did not take it very seriously. After a long day's work in the field, I fell into bed and soon fell asleep, but in the middle of the night, I was suddenly awakened from my sleep by the rapid cry of a crow. The first time I heard such a peculiar sound, it was as if each note had been rubbed with chili peppers, refined with fire, quenched with acid, spicy, hot, and hard, and it sounded like a horrible feeling. The lightning had changed from a small green snake to a big green dragon, swimming in the darkness of the sky. I used my horse lamp to shine a light on the wire under the eaves where I was drying my clothes, and there was a crow perched on it, drenched in wetness. Although the towering feathers on its head had been flattened by the rain and its hat had become a duck tongue, I recognized it immediately as King Crow's high hat. In the middle of the night, and with such bad weather, it was no doubt risking nine lives to fly here. What is it doing here? Could it be that it got lost in the dark and wanted to take shelter in this room? I left the door open and waved at it, but it did not want to enter the room, perhaps it was injured and wanted to beg me to bandage it, I thought, I went over to grab it, but it fluttered and flew to another clothesline, although the movement was not as light and agile as usual, but it did not appear to be injured. I stood under the eaves, wondering what was going on, the high hat jumped from the clothesline to the ground, half-open wings, open big mouth, at me croaking up, this cry and different from the previous, no tail, cut off the dragging cavity, a sentence immediately after a sentence, no pause, no interval, straight screaming body trembling, screaming body on the ground, and still keep screaming. I am really worried that if it continues to scream like this, a mouthful of blood will spurt out of its black cavity and it will die. I dare not stay alone on the thatched roof, take down the hat and straw coat hanging under the eaves, I want to go to the village chief's house to borrow a night.

When I locked the door and stepped onto the muddy path leading to the village head's house, the crow king high hat stopped calling and flapped its wings with difficulty, flying into the blanket of rain, swallowed up by the ink-like night.

I just climbed the village chief's bamboo building, suddenly, an orange-red ball of lightning rolled down from the sky, impartial, and fell on the linden tree in front of my door, the huge canopy is like a huge mouth that swallowed a huge fireball, silence for a few seconds, the linden tree roots flared up a blue fire, a loud bang, the several thick old linden trees danced like a giant, danced a dazzling The old linden tree danced like a giant, danced a dazzling waltz, fell, the huge crown like a hammer on my thatched house ......

From then on, I never saw the tall hat and its flock of crows, perhaps they had moved to a new home far away.

Some years later, I read these two sentences in a book about foreign folklore proverbs, wise as an old crow, brave as a crow, it seems that there is indeed a great difference between Eastern and Western cultures, in our eyes ugly and with some kind of fierce crows, in some peoples, but the personification of wisdom and bravery.

I also read in a zoological journal that crows are the fastest evolving species of crows, from the anatomy found that crows are wrapped in a layer of gelatinous material similar to the human cerebral cortex, while other crows do not have this layer of gelatinous material, so crows are more intelligent than other crows, crows not only have well-organized, hierarchical social groups but also emit more than forty different calls to communicate with each other. They also make more than 40 different calls to communicate with each other.

I still miss my unpleasant crow neighbors.