Often, an image from fifteen years ago came into his mind—a murder of crows pinwheeling through a narrow slot canyon, red sandstone rising overhead, thin strip of sky, a midday darkness there, already spooky, even before the arrival of the crows, and then he’d noticed the bits of tendon and fur, gristle and bone, hanging from the crows’ claws, the remains of a rabbit—roadkill, probably—from a distant highway, or the remains left by some larger animal, a kill out in the vast desert of cactus and red rock where they were vacationing, and the eeriness of it, midday darkness, as though their walk through the canyon was a journey inside of death, through its red gates, and then the crows and the remains of the hare, the entrails, which seemed to confirm the very feeling he’d been having, a verisimilitude between the inner and the outer landscape, and as they walked through the canyon, the guide explaining something he couldn’t now remember, because he had been transfixed by the crows, whose characteristic caws reverberated in the slot canyon, sounding almost God-like, or like the call of death, and when they had turned a narrow corner, they’d come upon three of the crows feasting on the remains of the hare inside a small depression in the rock where water gathered, smelling sulfuric, the whole image like a bad omen of what was to come, so maybe it wasn’t strange that he brought this image to mind so often, even years later—on a walk today, he’d seen a crow hopping along the trail, its dark, velvety beak, shimmer of wings, and he’d begun wondering about the crows from that long ago day, wondered at the distance between the birds and himself, how strange and horrifying the sight had been to him, the gory mess of hare, but how, for the crows, it had just been another day among many, another day of carrying animal entrails across the sky and into the slot canyon, where it was safe to eat without interruptions, that instead of the crows being the odd ones, this very act he was now engaging in, reproducing fifteen years later, the spectacle of the crows, of the hare’s thigh bone hanging from their hooked claws, was the aberrant behavior, that he saw now that the crows never thought of that day which loomed so large in his memory, cavernous as blue sky, the slot canyon and smooth sandstone, for the crows, just another in a long succession of days—but then again, he remembered that crows were smart, that they could solve puzzles, could recognize and distinguish between human faces, even carry a grudge against a particular person, and he realized he didn’t know anything at all, it was a mystery what crows thought of—he thought, perhaps, before they died, the crows thought of that day in the canyon too, brought to mind his face, his hooked nose, the mole on his left cheek, how closely he’d watched them, made them unnatural, terrible in their need for food, how the crows might carry a grudge against him down into their feathery graves, a memory of his face, a memory of that day.