The Morning Without Korv

YY woke up early, the way you wake up early when something is wrong but you don't yet know what.

He lay in his nest with his eyes closed. He listened.

The woods were not silent. A finch was making the small busy noise a finch makes when it is sorting itself out for the day. Something further off was moving through leaf litter. The brook was still saying *shhh.*

All of those sounds were normal.

The sound that was missing was the one *over* them.

Korv's first-call.

For as long as YY had been a squirrel — and longer, longer than anyone he had asked could remember — Korv's first-call had come down off the upper ridge like a small dark anchor dropped over the morning. *Korv-korv.* Then a longer one. Then the day started.

The day was happening anyway. The first-call was not.

YY opened his eyes.

He sat up. He listened a long time. He kept thinking it was just *late.* He kept thinking, any second now, *korv-korv.* Then a longer one.

Nothing.

"Huh," YY said, very quietly, to the inside of his treehouse.

He came down the trunk slow.

He did not go to the warm patch. He did not go to the brook eddy. He did not go to the rocky shoulder. He went up the slope.

He had never gone up the slope this early in the morning. The slope was steeper than it looked from below. The dead pine on the upper ridge stood the way it always stood, gray-white and limbless except at the very top, where the roost was a dense nest of dark sticks and dark feathers.

The roost was empty.

YY's eyes followed the only line they could follow — *down* — and there at the base of the dead pine, on the bare patch under the lowest branch, was Korv.

Korv was on his side. His foot was still curled the way a crow's foot curls when it has been holding a branch.

YY went still.

He did the thing a small animal does when it finds a large animal that has stopped being a large animal: he sniffed once, carefully, from a distance. There was no fox-smell. No marten-smell. No fight-smell. Just feathers and morning and a quietness coming up off the body that was not the quietness of sleep.

Korv had been *old.* Older than the trees in the lower stretch, by some accounts.

The old crow had let go of the branch.

YY sat down on his haunches. He did not approach. He did not say anything. He had not known Korv well — no squirrel did, not the way other crows did — but he had oriented his morning by Korv's voice every dawn of his life, and the orientation was a kind of knowing.

On the lowest branch, swung gently in the breeze, was a single black primary feather.

It had caught when Korv had let go. It hung there now, the only thing on the dead pine that was still moving.

YY looked at it for a long time.

He did not climb up. He did not take it down. The feather was something Korv's people would come for, not something a squirrel should carry. There was a *shape* to whose grief got which thing, and YY had read enough of the woods to know he was not at the top of that list.

He came down the slope slow.

He did not forage on the way down. He did not go to the warm patch or the brook eddy or the rocky shoulder. He went home. He climbed his trunk. He stood for a moment at the kitchen ledge looking at the half-square of persimmon, and at the back shelf where the hickory kernel was still waiting.

He ate the persimmon on the ledge.

Then, after a while, he climbed up to the back shelf and ate the kernel.

He ate them slowly. He did not enjoy them. He did not *not* enjoy them. He ate them the way you eat the things you have on a day a thing has gone out of the world.

When he was done, he sat on the windowsill and looked up at the upper ridge, where the dead pine was just visible through the gap in the trees.

The sky over the dead pine had the same blue it always had.

The morning, tomorrow, was going to need a new shape.

YY did not know what shape yet.

That would be tomorrow's problem.