By trane [Watch this Diary] in trane's Diary
Mon Nov 12, 2007 at 09:45:50 PM EDT
From "The Immense Journey", by Loren Eiseley, pages 125-127:
You may put it that I had come over a mountain, that I had slogged
through fern and pine needles for half a long day, and that on the edge
of a little glade with one long, crooked branch extending across it, I
had sat down to rest with my back against a stump. Through accident I
was concealed from the glade, although I could see into it perfectly.
The sun was warm there, and the murmurs of forest life blurred softly
away into my sleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some commotion and
outcry in the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines
in such a way that the glade was lit like some vast cathedral. I could
see the dust motes of wood pollen in the long shaft of light, and there
on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming
nestling in his beak.
The sound
that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestling's parents, who
flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black monster
was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch
a moment and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy had
followed the usual pattern. But suddenly, out of all that area of
woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade
fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished
outcries of the tiny parents.
No one
dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive
common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with
their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point
their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had
violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.
And he, the
murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening
in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.
The sighing
died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life
against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I
will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the
midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in that clearing,
the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And
finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then
another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at
first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till
suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together
as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and
sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven.
In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers
of life, and not of death.
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