Corvidae (Part V)

In the conclusion of the season two finale, the assembled survivors of the plague-devastated land come at last to the end of their long road.

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Some say that history repeats itself. And yet recorded history as we know it had a beginning, and must also have an end. Nothing that is born lives forever, no species can forever escape its inevitable extinction, and every new catastrophe contains the potential of being the last.

And yet, so far, as devastating as they have been, Earth’s biosphere has recovered from five mass extinctions. We can only hope that it will weather the current sixth one, and that our species, a cause of so much unnecessary death and destruction, will not ultimately number among its many, many victims. And perhaps, in some small way, we can even try to do better than those who have come before us, to build upon their triumphs and surpass their shortcomings.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Thirty: Corvidae, Part Five.

NARRATOR

Sasha Red Crow sits in her weathered Dodge Ram, which is kept running solely by elbow grease and her sheer tenacity, perhaps even by an occasional prayer. She takes a sip from her thermos, savoring the bitterness of the undiluted strong coffee, knowing that it is an indulgence with a definite shelf life and yet unable to relinquish it before she must.

So much has been lost, and she is not willing to part with anything more than is absolutely necessary.

Her cousin, Lloyd Sings Under, steps out from the stand of juniper where his own pickup, still bearing the insignia of the tribal police, lies hidden. Sasha has never had much use for police, either on or off of the reservation, but for her cousin, she makes an exception.

Waving at her, Lloyd walks over, then leans in to speak over the wind as Sasha rolls down her window. He points to the quiet highway of Route Two, the major east-to-west roadway on the reservation, and says that whatever is coming, it will likely come along this route.

Sasha nods, remembering his visit the evening prior, remembering his intimations of a growing bad feeling under his heart. He said it was probably nothing, but still he asked her to join them the next morning as he and the other protectors waited and watched, in case she was needed.

And, reluctantly, she agreed.

Now she sits, wondering if she made a mistake, if her few remaining colleagues in the hospital are overwhelmed without her, as they so often are now even with all hands present. But she says none of this, patiently waiting for Lloyd to come to his point in the gradual way that he has of doing so.

They will come on foot, he says, like they always do, but will still follow the roads. They always follow the roads.

Sasha almost wants to laugh at that, at these white men pretending at primal potency but who nevertheless cannot find their way reliably over open country, away from manmade markings. But as grotesque and ludicrous as they may be, the ones who call themselves the Alphas have done real harm, and the laughter that rises in her heart dies just as quickly.

Lloyd continues, saying that he and the other protectors should be able to handle them, since the Alphas use mostly handheld weapons, maybe the occasional hunting bow, as opposed to the rifles that the protectors carry and with which they are skilled, many of them relying upon hunting to fill their freezers for every winter.

And yet, though he does not say it again, Sasha can see that Lloyd is still troubled by the intuition of some impending menace. She can see it in the way he looks up silently at the sun, as though offering a wordless prayer, and in the way his eyes keep straying back toward the road when he speaks. And she doesn’t know if it is mere suggestion, or something else, but she is beginning to share in his apprehensive feeling.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The men, naked aside from their ragged cloaks of poorly tanned animal skins – pelts of deer, elk, wolves, and even cattle – cross the road, machetes and knives and hatchets glinting in their hands. Their leader, who deerskin is crowned with an antlered skull sewn crudely into the rough hood, steps behind the blinded man still kneeling and screaming upon the cracked pavement. The kneeling man seems to sense the presence at his back, falls forward upon his hands and begins to crawl pitifully away.

Blood is the price of transgression, the antlered man bawls, and death is the wages of weakness.

Then he seizes the blinded man’s hair and cruelly wrenches his head back with one hand, drives down his machete in a vicious arc with the other. The blade bites deeply into the eyeless man’s neck, and blood streams hot and red over his chest and pools upon the pavement as he slowly, gurglingly, sags forward.

In the overturned SUV, Esmee begins to scream. Beside her, Leah drifts up from the well of blackness which had swallowed her for a time, looks over to see what is happening. Held painfully upside down by her seat belt and looking through the distortion of the partially shattered window, her brain jarred and her nerves abuzz, it takes her a moment to process the sight beyond. But when her eyes settle on the antlered man, it is as though that one nightmarish visual cue snaps everything back into place, and she tries to look around for the rifle she held before the crash. Even that small movement makes the nerves in her head and neck scream, and she hisses and winces at the sudden pain.

Her eyes closed as she tries to steady her mind, Leah asks Esmee if she can see the rifle, and the little girl says smally that it’s on the roof below them. Then Leah asks her if she thinks she can move, if she can reach it, and Esmee says uncertainly that she thinks so. Trying to sound calm, Leah asks her to please do it if she can, if she is not hurt, and begins to try and extract herself from the seatbelt. It is jammed by the pressure of her full weight, though, and she begins to panic before she remembers the folding knife in her pocket, fumbles for it and summons up fresh waves of agony.

It feels like electric bolts are shooting through her nervous system, through her spine and arms, as she unfolds the knife and saws at the seatbelt. A soft ripping sound comes, and then she is free, falling awkwardly to the dented rooftop below but miraculously not injuring herself with the extended blade in her hand. Again her body revolts at the sudden impact, but she pushes the pain away and looks at Esmee, who sits beside her, holding the Savage Model 110.

Leah forces a smile at the girl, tells her she has done well, then gingerly extracts the rifle from Esmee’s small and shaking hands.

Outside, the men in skins have not come any closer. The antlered one shouts that, if they are strong, they will have to find their own way out – and that then they will make a place for them, if they are worthy.

The window on the other side has either shattered completely or was already rolled all the way down before the crash – Leah cannot remember which, and does not care. She wriggles toward it, places the rifle carefully outside, then crawls through it as well as she is able. Something scrapes and tears at her midriff, and she is certainly it has drawn blood, but she pulls herself through regardless, rises to a crouch, and takes the rifle once more into her hands.

If there are any women, the skull-crowned man cries now, they will have a place among his men, an honored place. They require women, he says, women are their future.

All the same, Leah thinks. All of these people, these marauders and murderers and self-proclaimed holy men, they are all the same, all wolfish on the inside.

As silently as she can, she works the bolt action of the rifle, chambering the first of the four .308 rounds and hoping that the crash hasn’t damaged the weapon in some way she cannot see.

Then she moves around the vehicle and toward the men. Suddenly, she feels light, weightless even, and all of the pain fades away. She wonders momentarily if that is a good sign or a terrible one, and decides that at the moment it is a blessing regardless, that she can wait until after the current danger is past to worry about anything beyond that.

Rising, she directs her gun at the foremost of the men, the one wearing the deer skull. His eyes widen, but then he begins to laugh through his matted brown beard, and tells her to put it away. When she does not, he smiles coldly and tells her that at most, she can maybe drop one or two of them, but that then she will be out of time and out of luck.

Her eyes dart between the men, only now registering how gaunt and unwell they all look, their skin pale and scratched and laced with sores. Some seem to have rubbed something into their wounds, greyish dirt or perhaps ash, and the question as to whether it is a primitive attempt at treatment or an attempt at tattooing flits through her mind before she returns her full attention to the one that seems to be their leader.

She pointedly switches off the safety mechanism and peers down the iron sights at him. Again, he laughs, and tells her that this is needless, that she will be honored among his men, that she will have many to love and protect her, to provide for her. They are real men, he says, the kind that can satisfy a woman in all the ways that matter.

He takes a bold step toward her, and another, and she squeezes the trigger. The antlered man jumps strangely as the shot shatters the prairie quiet, staggers a few steps to the side, and then falls, heavily and awkwardly, to the blacktop.

The men loosely assembled behind him stare at their leader where he has fallen, or at Leah, shock plain on their faces, as though this outcome were inconceivable to them. She quickly ejects the spent casing, puts a fresh cartridge into the chamber. Before she has even levelled the rifle anew, the skin-cloaked men are fleeing back across the road, all except the injured one.

Steadying herself, Leah takes a few cautious steps closer to the man she shot, keeping enough distance between them to be sure she can shoot again before he can make any threatening movement. Looking at him, she can see that her hurried shot hit lower than she intended, penetrating his upper abdomen instead of his chest. The entry wound, she thinks, looks impossibly small and neat, with hardly even a trickle of blood emanating from its rounded edge, but from its placement she guesses the bullet likely punctured his stomach, if nothing else. He lies there as though utterly stunned and disoriented, staring at the sky without making a sound, and only rubbing his bare torso with his hands as though searching blindly for the injury. And it is only now that Leah sees, despite the bloodlessness of the entry wound, there is a spreading pool of dark blood on the asphalt beneath him.

A momentary sense of pity pulses through her, and revulsion at the ruin she has wrought on this man’s body, but then her sight sweeps across the space toward where the brutally blinded and murdered man lies upon the road, and she imagines briefly Esmee’s body lying beside him, thinks that these men might have done still worse things to the little girl.

Why? she asks of the shot man, and when no answer is forthcoming, she shouts the question down at him again. His bleary gaze focuses on her for a second, and he says that all master predators defend their territory, take what they want and destroy what they please.

But even as he finishes speaking, a raven descends upon him, and then a crow, and then a second raven. And within moments, his body is obscured by dark-feathered little bodies, and he begins to scream weakly and mutedly beneath them as the glossy black beaks plunge down and up and down again. Leah wonders at how they have all chosen to fall upon the living man, but do not touch the dead man but a few paces away, who would be a much easier meal.

For a moment, she considers ending the screaming man’s misery, but ammunition is precious. Instead, she thumbs the safety back on and turns away from him, back toward the BMW and the others within whose fates are currently unknown to her.

But as she steps toward it, her vision swims, and she sees the ground rush up suddenly to meet her before everything goes dim and silent.

(Eerie music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

Her dreams, or visions, are haunted by the men wearing skins, but in these they all are topped by skulls, and they are not mere headpieces, but their faces. Each skull is a distorted mockery of a different animal: bear and cougar, wolf and buffalo, bobcat and coyote, but all of them grotesquely and inappropriately antlered or horned, and all of them will redly blazing eyes that weep oily, bubbling black blood.

And behind their wild, inhuman cackling, from trees and hilltops that are more shadowy suggestion than fully-formed image, there is the perpetual croaking of ravens and crows, the calls of blue jays and the chatter of magpies.

When she wakes at last, she finds Barrett and Asher sitting beside her, Esmee asleep on Barrett’s lap. Asher wears an eyepatch and has a jagged, sutured cut running down across his cheek, and Barrett’s face is bruised and covered with many smaller cuts, but they look otherwise healthy, and smile when they see her conscious.

About time you woke up, Asher chuckles softly.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It is many days before Leah is able to walk more than a few steps on her own, weak from dehydration and from what proved to be a fairly severe concussion. During that time, Esmee visits her constantly, always asking if she needs anything, always eager to hold Leah’s hand or give her a very gentle hug. Leah tries to hide her tears during these embraces, thinking as she does what fear her unconsciousness must have caused the girl who has lost so much, and feeling so grateful to be awake again.

Missy and Gemma come to visit her too, Gemma wearing a splint on her right arm and Missy walking on crutches that look like they may be secondhand. And again, Leah is thankful, wondering that they are all alive and well after all that has happened to them.

And most of all, she wonders at Doctor Red Crow, who has shown them such kindness and generosity, even in this world so warped by hardship and by the unshackling of humanity’s worst impulses, in this world that has taken and taken and taken.

But no, Leah realizes one night, as she lies drifting into sleep, that is not quite right. The world both takes and gives, it is only people who can take without giving back, who can choose to live by destroying everything around them.

And her last thought before settling into gentler dreams is that she is grateful that she has fallen into the care of one who gives, who nurtures and preserves.

(Tranquil music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Leah wakes to the summer sunlight streaming in through the window, warming her face. She has slept late into the morning again, something for which she always feels vaguely guilty, and yet which Sasha insists her body likely needs. Healing, Sasha is fond of saying, is not a thing that can or should be rushed.

Leah stretches and rolls over to find that Esmee has at some point stolen into the room to sleep beside her. She smiles and chuckles softly to herself, feeling that familiar swell of affection for the beautiful girl whom she has come to think of as her own.

Lightly, she kisses Esmee’s forehead, and gently rises from the bed so as not to wake her. She makes her way out into the kitchen, where she finds that Sasha has already made a batch of strong coffee. Pouring herself a cup, Leah steps outside and looks at the dawning day.

Across the street, Asher and Barrett are helping the neighbors mend a leak in the roof. Barrett looks up and waves at her, as do some of the Blackfeet men, and she waves back warmly.

Then she looks out over the plain, where the grass is growing tall and green, and toward the distant blue rise of the mountains. Taking a sip of coffee, Leah thinks of how bright the sunlight falls, how tranquil the world seems, though she knows that somewhere out there, all of the horrors and hardships that lay on the long road behind her still maraud and ravage the innocent and the hapless. And maybe it has always been this way, she muses, and the masks of the world before the plague have simply been torn away, exposing the truths beneath, both the ugly and the beautiful.

A cedar waxwing alights on a fencepost in the yard, and begins to sing. Leah feels the gentle brush of Sasha’s fingers over her back, the press of her lips on Leah’s shoulder.

Good morning, Sasha whispers into her ear.

Leah smiles and returns the greeting, and they stand there and look, absorbing the sight together.

Leah remembers that first month after she more or less recovered from the accident, the feeling of being out of place, even unwelcome. She remembers telling Sasha that she was ready to move on, that she didn’t want to be a burden or outstay their welcome, and the look on Sasha’s face when she said that nothing needed to be decided then, that Leah only needed to focus on getting strong again and that time would make things clear.

She remembers too, that first walk Sasha took her on through the town, and the pile of ragged skins she showed her outside what was formerly the Blackfeet Law Enforcement Services office, proving to her at last beyond doubt that the Alphas were no more and would never again threaten anyone living.

She remembers later that night when they first kissed, sitting on Sasha’s steps where they stand now and looking up at the stars, so much brighter now without all of the light pollution that penetrated out even into the wild and lonely places. They listened to the sounds of the night beneath that quiet nocturnal splendor, so much clearer now that vehicles were few and far between, and fuel too scarce to be burnt without absolute need, now that the ever-present hum of electricity was stilled.

The waxwing takes flight, going on whatever unknown errands it must attend, and Leah turns to her rescuer and her lover and tells her that the world seems like it is healing, maybe, slowly.

Sasha laughs and says that maybe it is, but that healing is a slow thing, a holy thing, that can neither be measured nor hurried. There is a lot of pain here, she says, old pain and new, and that it will be the work of generations to heal such deep hurt, the work of generations to create new hopes and build upon those of everyone who came before.

This is the holiest of work, she says, the work that her grandmother and grandfather took up, which she continues in her own way, and which she hopes to someday pass along to another, perhaps even many others.

A raven calls from somewhere unseen on the eaves overhead.

Holy, holy, it agrees.

Esmee emerges from the door behind them, and when she turns to see the girl’s lovely, wide smile, Leah thinks: Yes, holy, holy indeed.

And she thinks too of what Esmee once said about the house where Leah grew up, just before they had to leave it.

And for the first time, the feeling of not belonging fades completely from her mind. The community around her, no longer impoverished and oppressed by the laws of dead governments and rapacious societies, no longer divided by the imaginary lines of nonexistent nations, resounds with the music of renewed life, and the prairie blesses it with its grass-sweetened breath, the sun with his life-giving touch.

And Leah says aloud, this is a good place.

Overhead, a magpie and a raven fly skyward, circling and intertwining one another’s path in a graceful aerial dance, silhouetted smally against the bright sun and the high cirrus clouds as they sing in a single voice far older than the hills below.

(Sounds of magpie song)

[Peaceful nature music]

[Sorrowful piano music continues]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and music by Lars Mollevand. I hope you’ve enjoyed the second season of the podcast, and the rather lengthy five-part finale. The show will be taking a hiatus until August 2024. But have no fear, we will meet again… in darker pastures.

[Sorrowful piano music continues]