Someplace to Be Flying Read Online Free PDF

underfoot. You could look up and call their names, and there they’d be looking back down at you, two pieces of magic perched high up in a forever tree, black feathers shining, dark eyes watching, heads cocked, listening.
    Some people say Raven was older, and wiser, too, but the crow girls were kinder. Any mischief they got into never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. Knew all the questions and most of the answers, always did. Never had rules, never told you what to do, but they would teach you how to find your own answers, if you asked nicely enough.
    Now no one remembers them. Not that way.
    I think maybe we started to forget when we stopped looking up. Instead of remembering there was a world of sky up there above our heads, we’d sit on the ground and look at our feet. We’d get together around the trunk of some old tree and tell stories, consider how it was that the world began, try to make sense of how we got here and why - same as people do now, except we did it first, because we were here first. Back then, we were the people. Animal people. Same as you, but feathered and furred and scaled. Those stories you tell each other, you got them from us, all of them. First World, the Garden, the Ocean of Blood, the Mother’s Womb.
    Everybody would take a turn, make up how they thought it was. Except for Raven and the crow girls. They didn’t have to speak. They didn’t have to make up stories. Because they knew. They were there, right from the beginning when the medicine lands came up out of the long ago and this world began.
    Only the corbæ remember that first story. But Raven and the crow girls never needed to tell it and no one ever really listens to me. Problem is, I didn’t always remember it. It took me a long time, trying on different sets of words the way some of us try on skins, until I finally got past guessing and into remembering. I guess I ended up like that little boy crying wolf, told so many stories that when I finally got hold of the real ones, no one was ready to listen to me anymore.
    No, that’s not true. People listen. They just don’t believe.

5.
    Didn’t he go on, Moth thought as they sat around listening to another of Jack’s stories later that night. But this was a good one. Moth had heard it before. All about how you didn’t fall from grace, but into it.
    Jack continued the tale:
    “Cody, he’s looking around. Trying to get the corbæ to understand, but they’re not listening. Those crows don’t listen to much except for what they’ve got to say themselves.
    ” ‘See,’ Cody, he tries again, ‘If you’re going to be pure and good, you can’t be sexy. You can’t be creative. You can’t think for yourself. You want to get along with the big boss, you’ve got to be an obedient little sheep.’
    “Raven, he laughs. ‘You think we don’t know that?’ he says.
    ” ‘Maybe some of you still do,’ Cody says right back. ‘But most of you forgot.’ “
    Moth nodded. Cody and the crowfolk never got along in Jack’s stories. Canid and corbæ, they were like oil and water. Sometimes Jack told a story from one viewpoint, sometimes from the other, but it always came back to how most of the time they agreed, they just didn’t know it, which didn’t make them all that different from ordinary folks. ‘Course there was one thing hardly anybody agreed on: Everybody thought sex and knowledge was what got folks booted out of paradise, but like so much else, the churchmen got it wrong. People didn’t find the potential for paradise until they left the garden and started thinking for themselves. Screwed up more often than they didn’t, but hell, everybody made mistakes. Another word for that was “experience.” The only reason any of them were here tonight was because of some mistake or other.
    Take Benny; he never could hold down a life. Man had a serious gambling jones, would bet on a traffic light if he could find the percentage in it. One day he lost the big one-had the