Singers of Life
By Loren Eiseley
from "The Judgment of the Birds," in The Immense Journey
. . . 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 glad 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 an enormous 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
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 glad 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 black 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 judgment. It was the judgment
of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented.
I will never hear it again 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, anther 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 joyously together 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.
