This Time for Love

This Time for Love

“You should’ve had a whole life, little guy,” I murmured, nudging him with my boot toe, my mouth folded into a frown. “So sorry this happened to you. It’s a tough life out here.”

That’s what I said to him the morning I first scooped him off the ground, sure he was dead.

I saw his parents wheeling in the cold spring sky, black wings spread wide, their tails wedge-shaped, marking them as ravens. They were upset about something, crying their angst into the wind. I glanced around. Most likely a red-tailed hawk, looking to rob a nest. I walk this way every morning, aware that the ravens are nesting nearby. We were neighbors of a sort.

Sure enough, the ravens spotted the sneaky hawk hiding in the scrub, and they went after him, diving hard. I watched the three of them tear off across the desert away from the rising sun. Their battle cries still ringing in my ears.

I stepped over the drooping, rusted barbed-wire fence between my property, where I was slowly building my little cabin, and the seasonal neighbors' land. They came up once a year, stayed a week, and left. Their over-roof on the trailer was the only high place for miles, the only possible nest site. I just wanted a peek.

I found the nest on the trailer's roof. Pen feathers bristled inside, the nestlings packed tight, and unwisely calling out, having heard my approach. Nest material was scattered on the ground below, evidence of the battle.

When I turned to leave, that’s when I saw him.

A little fledgling on the ground, in the debris, motionless, probably dead.

I still tell him this part whenever he wants to hear it, even though he already knows it by heart.

I turned my head to look at him, “Yeah,” I said quietly now, the way I always do when telling him this story. “You were probably one second from death. Frozen through.”

“Obviously, the runt,” I added, crooking my brow, seeing if I could get a rise.

His beady brown eyes stared at me, unperturbed.

“I just wanted to examine a baby raven,” I admitted. “Okay, maybe I should have put you back, but I didn’t know you were alive. Not until later. By then, I was down the road, back at my place.”

I had tucked him in my coat pocket, finished my walk, and had a second cup of coffee.

Inside, I laid a newspaper down on the table and lifted the limp baby out of my pocket.

“That’s when you blinked at me,” I tell him. “You lay there like you’d already died and then just blinked at me, blue eyes dry and at half-mast.” He ruffled his feathers and gave a soft grunt. I smoothed the rich black feathers on his head and scratched his short feathers at his beak. His favorite place.

I had named him Merlin after the wizard. He had to have been a bit magical to survive.

That’s how our unlikely friendship went on for more than three years. I had no trouble looking into the eyes of animals, but people were another story. It was a twenty-mile drive to town, and once I bought my supplies, I escaped those curious stares as fast as I could. I don’t blame them. Not much happens in a small town, and anything new is worth a conversation.

Ravens were held with the same kind of curiosity. During our time outside, we’d often have them fly over, calling down to him. Merlin would look up at them scant-eyed, make a few grunting noises back, but never moved to join them.

That always eased my heart. Maybe too much.

I found myself relying on the comfort of him being there. Each time he stayed, I became confident that this was how it would always be, team Merlin and me.

He taught me what ravens were like, and I taught him about the world. Merlin was never caged, free to come and go, but he preferred to be wherever I was. He had a mischievous streak, quick to snatch up anything I set down: money, car keys, and nuts and bolts of whatever I was fixing at the time. I spent hours trying to coax back stolen belongings or searching for his latest stash.

Like me, he wasn’t partial to visitors. He’d fly up to the rooftop and give them his best raven lecture, full of heat and indignation. Often, he would chase UPS and FedEx trucks a long way down the dirt road, reminding me so much of a dog that I’d stare after him with my lopsided smile. Not inclined to lecture him about manners, I let it go.

When the weather turned freezing, he would perch on my shoulder and tuck himself beneath my own raven black hair. The only difference is that mine was curled. He carried on conversations in the intriguing, varied sounds that mostly only ravens can make, and in turn, I told them the things I thought he should know.

Somewhere along the line, those baby-blue eyes of his had deepened into a golden brown. When he stared into my own with such a mix of wisdom and bird-knowing, I wasn’t sure who was teaching who. Every evening, when he flew back through the cracked-open window, my whole body relaxed. I never admitted how much I depended on the sound of those wings.

It was a snowy day when everything shifted.

I was watching him slide down my roof on a piece of hard plastic he had found, literally tobogganing to the bottom, then dragging the plastic back up, and doing it all over again, when another raven fell low from the sky. Lower, and lower still. It landed right at the peak of the roof.

My heart stopped.

I don’t think I took a breath.

I’m pretty sure Merlin started the conversation, and since he still hadn’t taught me the raven-speak, I had to guess. He was blustering but not really meaning it. I stood helplessly down below. At least the strange bird wasn’t attacking him; it just seemed interested in whatever he was doing.

Some silent signal passed between them. Suddenly, they both burst from the roof in a flutter of wings, carrying their discussion to the sky. I watched below, hands limp at my sides, Useless as a fence post in a windstorm.

Merlin seemed to chase, but then it switched, and she seemed to chase. I drew a stuttered breath, thinking, Okay…It’s not an attack. My mind labeled her a she, without question, slightly smaller, beautiful, the sun glinting off her black feathers. Feisty too. I had to give her that, as she led him on a merry chase through the gray-blue morning sky.

When she veered away, soaring farther and farther off, Merlin turned, came back, and landed on my shoulder. As his labored breaths slowed, I swear I almost saw him smiling. There was something about the look in his eye, too.

My body felt heavy as my world shifted.

Merlin was particularly restless that night, and I felt a dread and a knowing at the same time. By bedtime, Merlin had taken up his usual place on the extra pad that sat on a wide bar chair by the bed. He was restless, picking through his stolen treasures, the ones I let him keep, dropping some on the floor, flinging sticks, generally being a nuisance. My chest felt tight, my nostrils pinched too narrow to breathe, and every time I looked at him, I had to glance away.

By morning, Merlin had done something he hadn’t done since he was a squab. Sometime in the chill of the night, he had come over to sleep on my pillow, curled against me, tangled up in my hair. I caught his subtle scent of desert sage and sunshine.

His bright eyes took in my face as he softly crooned, “krroo krru,” which made everything in me twist even harder.

Of course, she was outside waiting. It couldn’t have happened any other way. How long she had been there, neither of us knew. Part of me wanted to sling snowballs and holler. But the other part understood the pull of love.

Merlin fluttered to the top of the snowy roof and walked to the peak where she perched. He paused, turning to look back at me.

He made a small, uncertain grunt, the same sound he made the first month he lived with me, when he was still figuring out who I was.

“It’s alright, buddy,” I whispered through a tight throat. “Go on, see what she has to say.”

Merlin lifted off first, and then she lifted off after him. They circled my small cabin a couple of times before they headed off toward the rising sun.

I squeezed my eyes tight, a slight sound escaped me, but I whispered, “What a way to go, little guy.”

This time for love.