My Mother and Grandmother used to tell me when I was very young that my Grandfather, on my Fathers side, was a full-blooded American Indian. I have no remembrance of him myself. Later, as I was growing up, I’d ask Grandmother about him. She’d find ways to avoid giving any substantive answers. This was so with the rest of his family as well. My Mom told me that Grandfather had been an alcoholic who had left Grandmother to raise their children on her own. Nonetheless, I was profoundly impacted by being told that my Father was half and I was consequently, a quarter American Indian.

          When, as a kid playing cowboys and Indians, I was always an Indian. As a teenager I always wore tennis shoes so that I could “walk quietly, like an Indian.” In school I “learned” about the abhorrent treatment of “my people”.

          It was three days until Christmas and as a six year old, I was about to experience several significant life events. My Mother and I were returning home from a walk to visit Santa. We had left my Father at the house. When we tried the front door it was locked. His car was still out front so, we were sure he was home. We went to the back door and it was also locked. We knocked and knocked but there was no answer. We tried looking in the windows, both front and back, but we couldn’t see him. The side windows were too high for Mother to see in so she held me up and I looked in. Much to my surprise, there he was, sitting in his favorite chair looking out the window. His gaze went right through me and I shuddered as if chilled. His “arrow of vision” flew to my darkest depths. I realized much later that he had gifted me that day with the spirit of Crozen and at the same time left me to my future without him. He died two days later, on Christmas Eve, of a brain tumor.

          My Mother remarried. My Step-dad moved us from Missouri to the mountains in northern California. What a great place for a young brave like me! Deer, bear, mountain lions, and other wildlife were plentiful. Steelhead, trout and salmon ran the clear rushing streams. Ranches with horses and cattle were to be found in the valleys and up small canyons. They ranged in the high meadows where snow fed lakes swirling with rainbow trout lay like jewels among the peaks. Mountainsides were dotted with mines. Marks of a crazy search for gold variegated the landscape where excreted piles of dredgings rock tailings trailed the rivers edge and hills were left with the red eroded scars of the hydraulics.

          It wasn’t long before I was a silent hunter, always in the woods, armed with a BB gun. Imagination saw it as bow and arrows. At first small birds were the prey, sparrows, chickadees and such. One of my greatest early challenges was the wily nest robbing bluejay. Much later I learned that he was a corvid in the family of crows and ravens. When I turned eleven my step-dad surprised me with a .22 rifle. Small game like gray squirrels and rabbits fell to my eye.

          Then on a day like many before, while creeping along the wooded banks of a dredge pond, I spotted a ground squirrel. Not edible as was his cousin the gray, he was especially ill favored because of the many burrows that threatened to break the leg of that skittish painted mare my folks had given me early that summer.

          As I sighted in on him, he stood on his hind legs and looked right at me, much as my Father had those many years past. When I was learning to shoot, I had always imagined Fathers ”arrow of vision” piercing the bulls eye of the target. It was a very effective aid; I had become quite a marksman. Several surprising things happened as the front sight settled on the back and the squirrel’s head filled my field of view. First, he was transformed in my minds eye into a large coyote like dog whose tail zigzagged a lightening bolt then, his darkening eyes shot an arrow of vision to mine. Our two arrows met, merged and struck their targets, both his eye and my own. After being mesmerized for what seemed forever, I blinked. The dog was gone, but left behind was an impossibly huge crow. As I witnessed in the stunned silence of the woods he flew away trailing a lightening bolt zigzag tail. From that day and for several following years, my quest was to see “Crowdog” again.

          After more and more attempts at stalking crows, trying to see that one special creature, whether real or spirit, I finally determined that if smartest man in the world had feathers, they’d be black and he a crow Finally, after much fruitless wandering, I found a place where they frequently gathered. It was a meadow surrounded by forest. A small stream ran through it with a pebbled beach near its center. There were often as many as thirty crows in and around that haven. I call it a haven because, although crows are ever vigilant, they seemed more at peace in that meadow than any place I had ever seen them. The flock, as I had mistakenly called them at the time (a group of crows is actually called a “murder”), usually flew off before I could get close enough to see more than a few stragglers silently slipping through the trees.

          I learned to hide myself in the evening at the edge of the meadow, under one thickly overhanging fir tree. I built up a small screen of rocks and waited. Moving for no distraction or discomfort, not skeeters, spiders, snakes or muscle cramps, I would be rewarded with opportunities to observe the ”Wild Bunch”, as I thought of them.

          The other side of the haven was about forty yards away, the creek about twenty. Ten or fifteen yards were about as close as I got to see them. Once or twice I saw some at half that distance. One day a few of them were playing keep away with what looked like a small white stick. In the tussle it dropped within ten feet of where I lay hidden. One landed and picked it up and while a couple of the others dive-bombed him, he waddled toward me. He got close enough for me to see that it was a small bone of some kind before he flew into aerial combat with the others. After a while the bone was dropped like a bomb on another of the Bunch that had been dozing like a hen on eggs near the beach. It ignored the insult and as the sun was fast fading, they too began to fade off into the surrounding forest. Just as I was about to move off myself I heard a loud “Caw-Caw!!” from very near above me and heard the whoosh of wings as one left its perch in my fir tree. Just as it blinked out of sight I thought I saw that trailing zigzag tail.

          I went back again and again to the haven and enjoyed observing the antics of the Wild Bunch. My hopes of ever seeing Crowdog again began to wane. The haven became my haven. A place I would go to escape the alcoholism and domestic violence of my family. Although I went to the meadow many times, I never entered into it. It felt like sacred ground. I wouldn’t even drink upstream in the creek. I didn’t want to profane the water that flowed through it. Early on I quit taking my .22 with me, although my original intent was to “get” a crow.

          One day when I had been laying under the tree for some time, I fell asleep. This had happened a few times before and it always seemed especially invigorating. I stirred from a deep sleep, eyes wide and awake. On the pebbled beach sat Crowdog. Every time I blinked he changed from that large black coyote like dog to an enormous crow, both with a zigzag tail. Through out these transformations he looked exactly in my eyes. Our arrows of vision were one. I was totally transfixed and didn’t realize he was gone until I saw that the haven was in deep darkness. The stars were twinkle bright, the air piney and fresh. I went back to sleep were I lay knowing that the only difference between him and me was from whose eyes I chose to see.

          Our relationship grew into the future where he introduced me to the shamanic visioner Zacharia Crozen, spiritual leader of the People of the Dark Dance who do penance in the future for the ecocidal atrocities they perpetrate in these days.

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