Wakening the Crow by Stephen Gregory

valley, Long Eaton had an unusually big and lovely park. Very flat, no particular features, but expanses of open fields and stands of mature trees, acres of space for runners and dog-lovers and cyclists... and for strollers like me, and Chloe pottering along beside me, the most beautiful of skies, over avenues of poplar and beech and the puthering cooling-towers of Willington power station. No, not exotic or romantic, only the suburbs of a satellite-town in the East Midlands, but somehow, even on the rawest of raw days in January, a place of unusual and ineffable loveliness.
    So I said all this to Chloe. I said to her, ‘Hey, not bad, Chloe... pretty good,’ as we paused at the entrance of the park and took in the cold, bare emptiness of it. The sky was blue: not a cliché, but an expression of purity, perfection. The distant towers were exhaling enormous white clouds of steam. There was a flock of lapwings on the rugby pitch, a shimmer of green. And was that a golden plover, gleaming among them? ‘Not bad, eh Chloe? For a funny little town no-one’s ever heard of? What do you think? Come on, let’s go to the pond and have a nice hot drink and a sandwich and see who wants any of our crusty left-overs...’
    The coots did, unassumingly handsome birds, urbane, smug, with their plump grey bodies and elegant legs and their striking white helmets. The swan did, surging towards us, so testy, so irritable. ‘Hey, Mr. Swan, why are you hissing and flouncing like that, when you’re ten times as big as everyone else and so gorgeous and you know you’re going get the biggest bits of bread just because you’re so big and gorgeous? Hey, just chill...’ And the mallard, the ducks demure and dumpy, like medieval wenches cowed by the presence of their lordship, the gleaming, iridescent drake.
    Chill. For these birds, the chill in the air was death, which might be postponed by swallowing a few mouthfuls of bread. We sat on a bench by the pond. Chloe tossed her crusts into the air and watched them spatter on the surface of the water, or she held on tight and waited for the bravest of the ducks to nibble her fingers and sometimes the swan come snaking and hissing and snap with its big yellow beak. She windmilled her arm and hurled the remains of a sandwich high into the air, and a gull would come... it would make such a daring and brilliant pass that all the air would sparkle around the little girl’s golden-blonde head.
    And then. And then it all went very quiet.
    I hardly noticed how it happened, but we realised that all our friends at the pond, the coot and the duck and the debonair gulls and even the bilious swan, had drifted away. Or rather, they had withdrawn from us. A few pieces of bread floated on the water. It seemed strange that, on such a bitter day, with another long dark afternoon and a freezing night only hours away, the birds would ignore the food which could save their lives and see them survive until tomorrow. A persistent sparrow pecked at the crumbs around our feet, its dun feathers fluffed up to retain a bit of warmth in its scrawny body. But then it fluttered away.
    Chloe looked up and around her. I followed her gaze. No hawk, no bully-boy black-back. We looked behind us to see if someone else, a man and his dog, had wandered by. There was no-one.
    Under our bench. A wriggle and a writhing flutter.
    A crow, but nothing like the swaggering crows I’d seen in the field. A raggedy thing. It was only a second, or two. Chloe squealed and lifted her feet off the ground. I found myself doing the same. A crow, which had skulked under the bench to snatch at the pickings, flapped away and was gone, almost before we’d known it was there. We saw it row into the air and grapple itself clumsily, like some kind of half-formed prehistoric bird, into the branches of a nearby willow.
    There were other crows in the same tree. But they were completely still. Although the tree shook and its branches rattled with the impact of the