DD 11/10/04 FROM "THE JUDGEMENT OF THE BIRDS" BY LOREN EISELEY

From "The Judgement of the Birds," in the collection The Immense
Journey, by Loren Eiseley
I have said that I saw a judgement upon life, and that it was not
passed by men. Those who stare at birds in cages or who test minds by
their closeness to our own may not care for it. It comes from far away
out of my past, in a place of pouring waters and green leaves. I shall
never see and episode like it again if I live to be a hundred, nor do I
think that one man in a million has ever seen it, because man is an
intruder into such silences. The light must be right, and the intruder
must remain unseen. No man sets up such an experiment. What he sees,
he sees by chance.
You may put it that I had come over a mountain, that I had slogged
through fern and pine needles for half a long day, and that on the edge
of a little glade with one long, crooked branch extending across it, I
had sat down to rest with my back against a stump. Through accident I
was concealed from the glade, although I could see into it perfectly.
The sun was warm there, and the murmurs of forest life blurred softly
away into my sleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some commotion and
outcry in the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines in
such a way that the glade was lit like some vast cathedral. I could see
the dust motes of wood pollen in the long shaft of light, and there on
the extended branch sat a raven with a red and squirming nestling in his
beak.
The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestling's
parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek
black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on
the dead branch for a moment and sat still. Up to that point the little
tragedy had followed the usual pattern. But suddenly, out of all that
area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the
glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the
anguished outcries of the tiny parents.
No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some
instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade
filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as
though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible
ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.
And he, the murderer, the back bird at the heart of life, sat on there,
glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed,
untouchable.
The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgement. It was the
judgement of life against death. I will never again see it so
forcefully presented. I will never again hear it in notes so tragically
prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence.
There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted
hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another
took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to
another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being
slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many
throats together joyously as birds are known to sing. They sang because
life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding
shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for
they were the singers of life, and not of death.