It is not always their fault, and they don’t always know it or see it that way. But they do behave badly. It stuns you sometimes, to find that this is happening, that it is going on again, but it is. And the people who behave badly in this way I call the crows. Sometimes it seems that they are landing on you somehow – on your arms, perhaps, or shoulders – and taking small pieces, bites, that other people mightn’t see but that leave wounds nonetheless. I know it is unfair to talk about crows in this way. I know that they are just birds, if you can use ‘just’ there at all, and that it is not the birds’ fault that they are the colour they are, or that we humans have this thing about that colour, that blackness, or about the sound they make. But we do have it, and they are that colour, they do make that sound, and they have come to have connotations. Their sound, especially, doesn’t help, nor does their habit, in sheep country, of waiting while a ewe is giving birth, to peck out the eyes of the newborn lambs.
