Inviting the Ravens

If it is true that this is your brother, then we must not send hunters into the forest to slaughter it. We must send the poets, the musicians, the storytellers to court it from its lair. It needs to be with us. It needs to come home. We need to make a home for the serpent.
The Lindworm, as told by Martin Shaw

When the weasel started taking chickens, I patched the holes in the coop with hardware cloth and moved the birds to the short grass of the south pasture. In the middle of the cropped field, the exposed sky between the tall grass of the ditch and the birds proved a better barrier than chicken netting. The uncomfortable feeling of sky on back and the silent talons that glide towards fur barred the weasel's bloody work. But it left the chickens under the same open sky.

I didn't believe a raven would kill a chicken until I saw it happen. When I had seen ravens in the run before, I thought they had landed with vultures, taking a ready meal, leaving the hard work to more capable predators. One morning as I returned to house from feeding the flock, I heard a panicked cry, and turned to a see a raven, the one with a feather missing from its left wing, on top of a brown hen, pinning it against the bicycle wheels of the chicken tractor, black beak searching beneath the neck feathers for jugular and wind pipe. I chased the raven, coming to the hen, stunned, stilled, unmoving as I lifted it from between the spokes. In delayed fright, the hen flapped from my hands, hopping through the small square door of the coop with a shocked croon.

That afternoon I pulled a taught net over the chicken run to prevent the open sky that kept the weasel out from also consuming my flock. But ravens are clever, persistent, and watchful. A few days later, after I had moved the birds down the pasture, I left a gap in the netting at one end of the run. This was just large enough to let a raven through, and later that day I found the one with a missing feather and its mate standing atop the gutted, empty body of a hen.

It was spring, the season of fledglings. I guessed the raven pair had a young one in their nest. They were hungry. The chickens were easy food for the parents. The net solved only half the problem. The ravens needed something in exchange.

I spent two afternoons crafting a miniature cruck frame, built from blades of book-matched fir. I milled the posts and rafters from a good board left in the slash pile. I scribed the posts to the crucks and married the posts after a cut on the band saw. Then I mounted the plates to the posts and laid the rafters between the plates and ridge beam raised by the meeting cruck blades. I used old split cedar, rived into two foot long shake that had been left in a pile, and forgotten sometime in the early days of the homestead. They fit the tiny roof perfectly. I overlapped two layers of the shake, and finished the roof with a slender cedar ridge plank.

I cut a fence post to waist height at the far end of the west pasture, near where Faulk Creek bends around the beehives. Then I secured the cruck frame to the top of the post. This was a good place for me and the ravens both, being a short walk from the cottage, near the heart of the property, and yet at a boundary where the west pasture terminates at the creek and young spruce form a buffer between it, the bridge, and the north pasture. Along this line I had often seen ravens flying south out of Weyerhauser land into the pasture. This was a good place to offer an exchange.

We exchanged obligations. My obligtion became scraps, guts, mice, and lambs tails, left in the tiny cruck frame. And his became to watch the chickens, not as predator, but as neighbor, and perhaps overtime as a protector and ally. Today we hold eachother with uneasy curiosity. I hear the fledgling's bark. He follows parents along the west fence line, landing in horsetail. One bird picks a mouse from the mower path. They stay at a distnace, watching the chickens from the tall grass. Gift by gift, we begin to recast each other in our obligations.