CHAPTER FIVE: {THE MOUNTAIN}
Crow was exhausted when she reached the foot of the mountain. There was an eerie quiet here, no chirping or chattering, no leaves rustling in the wind. Crow couldn’t see any animals and hardly any plants, though some wild roses bloomed through the rubble of rocks that led up to tall cliffs and walls of stone. The mountain was so big Crow couldn’t see all of it at once, but felt its mass. Surrounded by many vast, flat faces of the mountain, she wondered how to begin a conversation.
It seemed foolish to her now, the idea that she could just go talk to the mountain and ask some questions. She’d talked to birds and mice and flowers before, she’d talked to insects and stray wisps of cloud and had long conversations with lichen, but she’d never tried to talk to anything this big before. She considered the stones right in front of her—it was funny how they seemed to be looking straight through her but she couldn’t see inside of them. In fact, everywhere she looked, the stones seemed to be looking at her but also blocking her from seeing something. She imagined something bright and flickering deep inside the mountain. An intelligence, but one very different from her own.
The very strangeness of her situation put her in a bad mood. She missed her trees and her family, her nest and her neighbors. She very much wanted to go home. And as she puffed herself up into a grumpy snarl of bird, she had the distinct impression she was being laughed at. She turned her head this way and that, but still saw no one. She heard the laughter again. It sounded like the trickling of water in hidden fissures and caverns. It looked like the tossing heads of the roses in the light wind. Crow puffed herself up bigger and started hopping up and down in anger. The laughter got louder. And as she turned around instinctively, she caught sight of her own shadow, hopping up and down with feathers bristling and no enemy in sight. Despite herself, she too started to laugh.
As she relaxed, she could hear the faint voices of the roses, and she realized they were also laughing, but gently. Their voices were part of what she had heard, but not all of it. “Shhh, friend crow,” they were crooning now. “You don’t need to be afraid.”
Crow considered this. “But it’s so strange here.”
The roses laughed again. This time their laughter felt affectionate, but Crow still didn’t see what was funny. Finally, one stopped laughing and spoke up, “You’re very strange here!” Crow remembered how funny her shadow had looked. She admitted they had a point. If she were a flower living on the mountain, a crow from the forest might seem strange to her. Even though, she said quietly to herself, forests and crows are far more ordinary than vast mountains and roses that liked to grow out of rocks.
Seeing no one else to whom to deliver her speech, Crow pulled herself up to her full height and formally bowed her head to the roses. “Mighty mountain!” she cawed. “I have come to ask you an important question, to try to prevent a war! I need to know the meaning of a terrible dream. I need to know if my forest is in danger!”
There was a pregnant pause as the roses and Crow and the slight breeze all waited. A few roses turned their faces back and forth. Finally the forthright rose that had spoken first asked Crow, “Oh, are you here to talk to the mountain? You’d better come inside.” Just then a few rocks tumbled down and exposed an opening in the larger stones at the base of the mountain. The gap between the stones was just large enough for Crow to enter, but she hesitated. The darkness inside was entire.
The roses encouraged her: “You don’t need to be afraid.” For the first time she noticed their powerful roots, twining around the rocks and holding them fast. “If I go in,” she asked, “Can you promise me I’ll come back out?”
“You’ll come back out again!” they promised. So Crow gathered her courage and began to walk towards the opening. Just as she entered the dark fissure she heard them say, “But who you’ll be when you come out again we can’t say.”