Purple Flat Top by Jack Nisbet

Author:Jack Nisbet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press

A few weeks after disturbing the ravens' night roost, I was at the grange filling my pickup with gas when a black Chevy Nova backed toward me, offering a clear view of its reversed rear springs and fat tires. One of Lynn Walker's boys, almost hidden beneath an oversized cowboy hat, leaned out the driver's window.

“Hiya, Buzzy,” I said. “How you been?”

“Not so bad. Hey, you know that white crow you see at the dump all the time?”

“Yeah,” I answered slowly. “What about it?”

“You ever worry that somebody might shoot it or something?”

“I've thought about it, yeah.”

“Well, you don't have to worry anymore. I think that bird's lying in the ditch up by our place. Somebody must've plugged it.”

I made Buzzy pinpoint the location on the stretch of county road near Lynn's farm. I stopped pumping with the tank half full, paid inside, and zoomed back up the hill.

My pickup chugged around the S-turn past the dump, which was hidden in a pall of smoke and morning fog. I kept turning my head left and right, searching for whiteness. Beyond our driveway I slowed to a crawl. When a sparrow jumped out of a bare rosebush, I almost put the truck in the ditch.

There was no sign of a carcass along Lynn's cut field of barley, but on the next wide turn I caught a flash of white below a big pine. I skidded to a halt and leaped clear of the cab, then slowly approached the tree. It was a bird for certain, but the feathers didn't look quite right. They were short and ragged, not made for flying. With one touch, the identity of the corpse became clear: a decapitated white chicken had bounced out of someone's truck on the way to the dump.

After the chicken incident I began to wonder if the white raven might be getting a little too well known around town, but the bird remained a part of the regular raven flock right through the cold months. Whoever was first down the road in the morning usually got to watch it fly away from the trash, and with the coming of spring I began to wonder where the bird might breed and what its young would look like. Had it already happened without my knowing it, a nest full of naked piebald offspring stuffed into some hidden pocket of the quartzite cliffs? In any case, the dump's closure would put the white one on its summer schedule in a hurry. Once that last dead calf below the road bank was consumed, the tenants would begin to take their leave.

When the raven flock returns next fall, they'll find knapweed and sweet yellow clover, and new cottonwood sprouts where the gravel coating is thin. I can imagine there will be a few messy piles of illegal trash, but they won't add up to enough sustenance for scavenger birds to winter here, and my habit of sneaking around at dawn to watch their movements must end. The

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