We were already fully plumed, ferocious and bawling, when at dawn one day, the parents brought home two human eyes, over which we furiously fought Sublime delicacy, forever engraved in my taste, and for which the quest will not cease all my life long, as you will soon see. Equally engraved forever in my memory, the cries of distress from our parents, when, one day, humans approached the trunk of our tree and began to climb, the voices louder and louder, with the laughs and encouragements, and the cracking noise of the branches that were broken.
They were three, one of them had a large stick to chase our parents who tried to peck at them. The humans took all seven of us, they strangled my brothers, for tonight's supper. As for me, they gave me to Griet, the woman, the spell-caster. And she is the one who raised me, who fed me hour after hour, and she is the one who taught me to fly. She used to laugh, with her toothless mouth, when I was returning to her, when I began to perch on her shoulder, cawing, and we used to sleep side by side, in the cave, deep in the thick woods, beside that white sow she was so fond of.
Sometimes during the full moon, the wolves came to the clearing, and Griet seated among them. Sometimes she sang, they accompanied her with their howls, with their wails. It was beautiful. Then, one day, the wolves were present at dawn, and Griet left with them. I stayed on her shoulder, for a while, very excited by I know not what fever, because other ravens had joined us. There were quickly swarming legions in the sky, their vibrant cries answering each other, as far as the horizon. You do not know such scenes, my friends, but I knew well that these were cries of joy, cries of hope, cries of lust, and that all my brothers were giving thanks to the Supreme Being. Griet had started to trot with the wolves, and the more we advanced, the more numerous they became, to the point that, on top of a hill, we saw them packed together, one against the other, in an immense roar, punctuated with boisterous howls.
I took wing, and I reached the top of the hill well before Griet, as she had pain finding her way among the wolves. And there I saw the men, engaged in killing each other with savage clamours which were enhanced by the shrill calls of war horns. They fought in pairs, the hatchet high, dodging, falling, screaming, striking and threatening each other ; some of them held the other by the neck, each one trying to strangle his foe, or vociferating while torturing the fallen body held down on the earth. Sometimes I could see two fighting one who was not long to fall to the ground, his head immediately cut off, then stripped of his axe, his leather cap, his belt. With force were raised their clubs, the arrows were flying, the slings snapped, the spears fell violently.
On the ground, on each corpse, there were two, sometimes three wolves, with five or six ravens, busy tearing away the flesh. Not far away, all the satiated wolves were licking themselves or stood with their tongues hanging out, still panting from the feast, and the raven people did not stop cawing above their heads, on the heavily loaded branches. Griet entered the battle spear in hand, blindly striking right and left. Her arrival started screams of terror, and the fighters of both sides did not delay in running far away. The wolves slaughtered the disabled warriors, and I knew again the supreme voluptuousness granted by man when he is deprived of his still warm eyes.
It was a carnage among many others, Griet leading her pack of wolves and her three hundred ravens from one village to another, through hills and moors. And the terrified men venerated her, for I have seen one day, in a fortified village well sheltered on an island of the river, a huge head roughly carved in wood, where one could easily find her features smeared with soot, her crossing eyes popping out of their sockets and ready to spring, and the abyss of her mouth as if to cry or as if to devour. By mockery, or for exorcizing adversity, the forehead of the idol was garnished with a fringe of ravens hanging by their feet, and the brows were the tails of two wolves. When I tried to tell Griet, by cawing, that men had made of her that large wooden resemblance, she gave ear to me, but I do not believe she understood me.
One day I saw a white raven flying high in the sky, and the Ancients told me that he was unique in the world, that he was the raven of one of the gods who rule the septentrion, in the countries of snows and eternal ice. And that this god sends his two ravens everyday to advise him of the course of the world, and that they come back each evening to his shoulder to tell him what they have seen. These two ravens are very different : my brothers ravens taught me that the white raven that I was seeing, as white as silver, wore the name of Hugin, he is the one who thinks, whereas the other, who is as black as we are here and uses the name of Mugin, knows everything that happens on earth and at sea, since the Supreme Being created the earth.
If Griet, my mistress, had known these two ravens, she would have foreseen the arrival of the swift vessels that appeared one day, suddenly swarming on our shores. When they had deposited their oars, the warriors from the Ocean leaped to land and set fire to the villages, spilling blood everywhere. We did not care for them, as we gathered from time to time the offspring of human dissensions, till the day when a troop of warriors undertook to hunt the wolves. Action that led them into their loss. For the following day, from dawn, Griet was ahead of her wolves, on the shore where the pirates used to go back every evening, and attacked by surprise the warriors as they were asleep.
That was a famous slaughter, one of the great moments of my existence, and one of the last also. A hundred or so pirates who had encamped on the shore were quickly turned into hash, when many others sprang out from their ships, and they were as waves bursting on the coast. But our wolves leaped to their throats, while we ravens assailed their eyes, and Griet speared the others.
Before long there was no one left alive on the sand, and, when the last rattles were silenced, Griet went down to the water, to see if one was not left hidden. In fact, a tall redhead appeared suddenly, and shot his dart. Griet dodged the blow. It was I who received the weapon in full chest, and I collapsed against Griet's neck, whereas the wolves sprang on the redhead, threw him to the ground - they devoured him alive. For two days, Griet held me close. I could see her anguish. When the worms began to swarm in my wound, I had not even the strength to grab them with the tip of my beak.
And so, as it is today the Day of the Dead, I will tell you my last moments. Griet was holding me against her breast, and she spoke to me in a low voice. - A man is waiting far away, on the other side of the ocean. He is lying, he is hidden in the hollow of the mountain. They stretched him, nude, covered with wounds. As death seized him, he was smiling. And that smile did not quit him. Then his beard grew. His beard slowly clothed his body, crawled on the ground in a thick carpet, it expanded on the flanks of the mountain, smothering the grass and the shrubs, uprooting the trees. I will go to that mountain covered by the red mane of the man out of time, because I am the one who can restore life to him, and I know he resembles you, Bran, my raven.
She set me on the ground, beside a large stone, and she aimed her spear towards the sky. The ravens came and perched on it : they were ten, then twenty, then one hundred ravens clinging to each other, cawing with eagerness. When the three hundred ravens had gathered in a black crawling mass, she shouted : "Good bye, Bran !". Holding firmly the end of her spear, I saw her as she jumped in one leap over the waves of the ocean, and my eyes were closed on the vision of this black cloud in the sky, on the vision of this cloud which was disappearing, which was growing smaller and smaller, and which was becoming a spot scarcely visible. And my eyes were closed forever... ... for the forever of that existence.
