First Crow, First Raven, First Human, the stories…First Campfire The sound of the humans teeth chattering on the ground below irritated Raven, and he couldn’t sleep…
Tan Me Hide and Teach Me to Sew …well before the first human took a bite of the first apple from the Tree of Knowledge
The Still Driven to drink from the Garden of Eden….
Let Them Eat Corn …..humans grew smarter and smarter, while Crow and Raven grew wiser and wiser…
The following tale is the third in the series of tongue-in-beak stories I made up concerning the ancient relationship our species has had with the corvids-a group of birds whose most familiar members are crows, ravens and magpies. It seems as if Crow and Raven taught our species everything we know…
Driven to drink from the Garden of Eden“What in the bloody hell are they doing down there, Cousin?” Crow asked.
The two birds grasped a branch in a tree which overlooked a group of hominids who were dancing and carrying on, singing off-key, laughing at the most inane jokes, staggering around saying stupid things and falling down. “Are they ill?” Crow wondered. “Do they need first aid?”
Fist fights broke out here and there, but always ended with a group hug, “I love you, Man,” they said to each other over and over again, tears running down their faces.
Then the puking started.
“They are ill,” Crow said. “Upchucking like that.”
“Them’re drunk,” Raven drawled. “Got into the hooch a couple hours ago.”
Crow stared at his cousin, “Drunk? Hooch? Where’d they get it?”
When Raven did not answer, Crow narrowed his eyes. “Oh, don’t tell me! Seriously? Are you an idiot? I can’t believe you sometimes.” He shook his head and pecked at the branch upon which they perched.
“What? Don’t look at me, Cousin.” Raven said blandly, “You’re the one that taught them about fermentation.”
“I taught them how to make sauerkraut, that’s all I did,” Crow was really irritated. “It was for digestive purposes. They were getting tummy aches from too much vegetable matter in the gut. A little lactic acid fermentation and poof! Tummy ache gone. No one gets drunk on sauerkraut. They hadn’t even progressed to bread yet. So, I ask you again, where did they get the booze?”
Amid the bacchanalia below, a group of females began a seductive dance, shaking their hips and smiling alluringly at the males. Catcalls and whistles erupted from the males while the old folks kept time by banging the bleached bones of a Big Hairy Beast together. Soon males danced with females and after awhile, the dance couples stole off into the darkness.
“So they have a good time, occasionally.” Raven avoided answering the question. He was sick of Crow’s negativity.
“They’re just blowing off a little steam. What’s the matter with that? A little partying never hurt anyone. Their lives are hard—you say that all the time. Their infant mortality rate is at least double ours, even in the best of times. They suffer a lot; I hear that all the time from you too, ad nauseum, Cousin. Give them a break! It’ll wear off.” Raven looked at Crow, who stared back in speechless rage.
“You would grudge them a moment of silly forgetfulness?” Raven continued. “I just thought a moment or two away from their otherwise miserable pathetic lives would really improve their morale. Why are you getting all bent out of shape?”
“You thought!” Crow stared at Raven in utter disbelief. “Please save me, save us all from your thoughts! You know what booze does to humans? It makes them forgetful and stupid. And mean. For cripes sake, the last thing we want is a bunch of mean, stupid humans on our hands. You know they only just barely made it through the Stone Age, finally. They have weapons. And now thanks to you, they have booze. Stupidity, booze, and weapons. Great combination. Let the carnage begin!” Crow was apoplectic, spraying spittle as he spoke and losing a few feathers that floated lazily to the ground.
“And who taught them to make weapons? Hmmm?” Raven said, enjoying the argument. “Are you not responsible for unintended consequences of that fiasco?”
“I taught them to hunt food!” Crow said defensively. “I was helping them even the odds, remember? Remember when they first showed up naked? How cold and hungry and absolutely forsaken they were? Remember, they’d just gotten kicked out of the Garden of Eden.”
“I’ve only heard rumors,” Raven said darkly. “What’d they do? Maim a unicorn?”
“Well, no,” Crow said. “There was this snake, see, and he gave the female an apple, and when she and the male ate the apple, suddenly she was sore ashamed of their lack of fur or feathers, and they both covered up their stinky parts with leaves. That’s how we found them, remember? Shivering naked in the cold.”
“I remember,” Raven said. “And, not to drive this unintended consequences thing into the ground, after you taught them to sew, she develops this enormous sense of fashion and wants to wear new and expensive clothes all the time. Nice job, Cousin! They’ve blamed a snake!” He chuckled heartily. “Well done!
A sudden silence wafted up from the ground. Crow and Raven looked down upon a pile of bodies. Crow looked at Raven. “Well done,” he said sarcastically. “Well done, Cousin.”
“Whatever.” Raven yawned. “They built a still on their own, without your unsolicited expert advice. Or mine. You know how good they are with their hands.”
Raven’s mockery bit into Crow’s flesh like buckshot. Paralyzed by his own anger, he nearly let go of the branch. “I had nothing to do with it,” Raven continued blandly. “Other than to answer a few questions, about the latent heat of evaporation, a little organic chemistry maybe. They didn’t get it, of course.” He picked a caterpillar off a leaf and noisily ate it. A loud explosion from the human camp below rocked their tree, nearly dislodging both birds.
“There she blows!” Raven cackled.
First Crow and First Raven had gained a vast storehouse of learned experience in the eons they flew the skies of Earth, well before the first human took a bite of the first apple from the Tree of Knowledge. In the beginning, Raven especially got a big kick out of tricking these silly gullible creatures. They believed anything he said.
“Look! Over yonder, on the horizon! It is the Great Spirit!” Raven would call out and point with one wing. When the humans looked away, Raven swooped down upon them and stole their food. Time after time.
Crow and Raven grew quite fat; they lacked nothing due in large part not to Raven’s trickery, but also because humans were so astonishing wasteful.
“They wouldn’t have to work so hard at hunting and gathering if they didn’t waste so much food.” Crow beaked an eyeball from the severed head of a Big Hairy Beast and swallowed it in one gulp. “They leave so much on the ground for us, which I for one am dreadfully grateful, but if they were more efficient, their food would go further, and they would not have to struggle so to get more.”
“Don’t let them hear you say that!” Raven said, shushing Crow with his wings. He never could leave well enough alone, could not resist wanting to be helpful to these pitiful creatures.
“You see Cousin, in a perfect world, the amount of time we Corvid should spend obtaining food needs to be inversely proportional to the time humans do. That is my famous Inverse Proportionality Rule governing work. Remember? Let’s say they work twice as hard as they have to, which translates into us doing half the work we have. Eh, Cousin?”
Crow’s beady black eyes glazed over, and Raven knew his cousin was only barely listening. But he also needed to remind Crow that his interference in human affairs nearly always backfired. “In other words, dear Cousin,” he said, shaking Crow out of his daydreams of rescue and assistance, “the more they hunt and gather, the less we have to. If they start slacking off, we’ll have to find our own food. No, Cousin. Their wastefulness is our largesse. Think about it. And shut up, please. For the good of us all.”
Crow had always tried to be helpful to the foolish humans. For instance, after they’d hunted and killed the Big Hairy Beast, he had suggested they skin it.
“Why?” the Chieftain asked. “The skin is no good to eat. Too much fur. It is tough and hard to swallow. Even the dogs won’t eat it.”
“No,” Crow said, shaking his head. “You must skin the Beast before you cook him so that you can use his fur to keep yourselves warm.”
The humans stared at Crow, slack-jawed. They hadn’t thought of that; the fire in the spit always burned most of the hair off. They ate the meat, and threw the burnt hide back into the fire.
Crow taught the humans how to carefully slice through the hide up the Big Hairy Beast’s big belly and down the underside of its limbs. The humans learned how to scrape the inside of the hide with a rock, and Crow taught them to boil down the Big Hairy Beast’s brain, which would produce the preservative that would keep the hide from rotting or falling apart.
“You want the biggest pieces of hide you can get,” Crow told them. “Stitching a lot of small pieces together would be very labor-intensive.
“Stitching?” the Chieftain asked, scratching his aching head. “What is stitching?”
“You make needles from his bones, and laces from strips of his hide,” Crow instructed the humans exhaustively and in a day or so, they had managed to not only make a few bone needles, but to thread them as well with long thin strips of Big Hairy Beast hide.
“Now,” Crow said, nodding as the humans finished poking a line of holes through the edges of the hide, “you can attach pieces of hide together, just make sure the holes line up.”
He picked up a threaded needle in his beak and jammed the pointy end into the holes through the two layers of hide. The humans broke into a surprised outcry when they saw him reach underneath the hide and pull the needle through. After poking the needle in one side and out the other a few more times, Crow stood back and said, “And that, my friends, is stitching.”
The humans were sore amazed, but were also clever and deft with their hands, and they stitched together every piece of hide they could find. Soon the whole tribe had fur cloaks, and Crow was very happy to see them all warm and toasty.
To show their gratitude to Crow for bringing the gift of sewing, the humans gave him the head of the very same Big Hairy Beast whose hide they all wore. Crow lugged the head back to the tree in short flights punctuated with a drop to the ground to rest a few moments; the head was heavy and made it hard to fly very far. He dropped the hunk at the bottom of the tree Raven, who didn’t care as much for the company of humans as did his Cousin.
“Cousin,”Raven said after they’d feasted on Beast head, “I have to thank you for the tanning lessons you gave them.”
“Why, thank you! It is good to see the poor things fending off the cold,” Crow said, ever hopeful that compassion had awakened in his cousin’s heart.
“Yes, well that too, I reckon,” Raven replied as he picked small bits of flesh from his feathers. “But the stench of burning Big Hairy Beast hair made me gag.”
And so the great partnership of humans and Corvus continued. As the years went by, Crow and Raven taught the naked and ignorant humans everything they needed to know to survive on Earth.
Mary C Simmons ... Art and Word 
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