The Crow God

At the west end of Stone Gate Town stood an old locust tree, so thick three men could not span it; half its heart was hollow, yet its branches still held a dense shade. At its crown perched an old crow, grey-black, with a notch missing from the left wing. The townsfolk called it Old Wu, and some, with respect, the Crow God.

The bird was odd. Common crows scatter, cawing, at the sight of men; this one would not. All day it squatted on the highest branch, its eyes like black beans sweeping the town, as if counting something. Stranger still: whenever trouble was near — a fire, a theft, a dike broken by flood — it would caw the night before, hoarse and urgent, unlike its usual lazy drawl.

The watchman, Old Qin, was the first to read its temper. Past sixty, alone in the world, he walked the night rounds and came to keep the crow company. He said three caws were a reminder, a ceaseless hoarse din an alarm; if it circled a roof cawing, that house should beware. At first none believed, until one summer the hemp stalks stacked behind Li's oil mill caught fire; half an hour before the flames, the crow tore at the roof with a heart-rending caw. Old Qin heard, seized his bronze gong, and beat it; neighbors came with water, and though half a wing burned, no great disaster followed. From then the town believed the bird.

After Old Qin died, his distant nephew Young Qin took the rounds. Young, and a skeptic, he first pelted the crow with stones, cursing its noise. The crow took no offense, only moved to a farther branch and cawed as it must.

That winter a heavy snow sealed the mountain road. The silk and silver of the rich Zhao house had long been marked by a band of roving thieves outside the hills. The chief, reckoning on an unguarded snowy night, led his men toward the pass. As chance had it, that night the crow broke into a fierce, drumming caw before Old Qin's old window. Young Qin, roused from sleep, remembered his uncle's words and grew cold; he dressed, went door to door waking the able men, and hid them along the pass at the town's mouth.

Near the second watch, black shapes indeed crept from the snow, ankle-deep, feeling toward the town. The ambush rose as one; gong, shouts, and staves mixed in a tumult. The thieves, taken unawares, were mostly seized; the rest, stiff with cold, surrendered. The Zhao household was spared, and the town kept a peaceful year.

When spring thaw came, someone found a few grey-black crow feathers beneath the old locust, soaked in snowmelt, and no sign of the bird. Young Qin went to look; in the hollow he found only a broken twig, scored as if by claws — something it had scratched before leaving. The town sighed, saying the crow was a spirit the old man had kept in life, and when he went, it went with him.

Later they set a small stone at the foot of the locust, not tall, with no name, only a crow carved by the mason — wing notched, squatting, its round eye on the town. Each Clear and Bright, someone would leave, as if by chance, a handful of rice or half a cake before it.

The Chronicler remarks: men say the crow reports only ill fortune, never good — yet they mistake; what it caws is not doom but "wake, trouble comes." Old Qin understood, and saved a town; Young Qin at first did not, but in the end he did. Between fortune and ruin often lies only the difference of one cry, and whether we will wake to it.