A Hard Nut to Crack

Part One · Green Husks

Nell was a crow, and this was her first autumn. She had hatched in the spring in an untidy stick nest at the top of the tallest pine behind the old mill. Her brother Finn had hatched beside her, along with two others who had already departed to make their own way. All summer there had been plenty to eat: beetles in the grass, bread from the picnic tables, soft fruit that fell in the orchard and split open.

Now the mornings arrived cold and white. The grass was stiff with frost until nine. And the enormous walnut tree beside the mill pond had begun, finally, to let go of its nuts. The walnuts came down inside green husks the size of a hen's egg. They thumped onto the grass and rolled into the ditch and bounced off the roof of the mill shop with a sound like somebody knocking at a door. Every crow for a mile recognized that sound.

By the second morning there were thirty crows in the walnut tree, calling and shoving and dropping down to the grass to grab. Nell managed to get one on her third attempt. It was heavier than it looked. She carried it to the top of the mill wall, positioned it between her feet, and struck it as hard as she possibly could. The husk came away in strips, green outside and black and wet inside, and it stained her beak and her feet.

Underneath the husk was the nut itself, round and brown and hard as a pebble, with a seam running around its middle. Nell struck the seam, and nothing happened. She struck it again and again, until her head ached and the nut had not so much as a scratch on it. Finn landed beside her with a nut of his own and attempted the same thing. Eventually they stopped and looked at each other.

There was food inside, and neither of them could get at it. The other crows did not appear to be doing much better. They hammered and they pried. They dropped the nuts from the lowest branches onto the grass, where the nuts bounced once and lay there, whole and satisfied. A number of the older birds carried theirs away and buried them in the field for later, the way crows bury everything. Nell did not want to bury hers.

She wanted whatever was inside it, immediately, while the frost was still white and her stomach was still empty. She picked the nut up again and examined it with one eye, and then with the other. That was when she noticed Gus. He was the oldest crow in the pines, so ancient that the feathers on his head had gone thin and gray, and he moved as if every branch belonged to him personally.

He did not hammer, and he did not bury. He selected a walnut from the grass, flew off low over the mill pond with it, and disappeared. Nell returned to striking her seam. Some time later, a shadow crossed the wall. Gus landed on the roof of the mill shop with the identical walnut in his beak, and the walnut was open. He ate it in small, tidy bites, without once looking at anyone.

Part Two · The Old Crow's Trick

Nell watched Gus do it three more times that day. Each time he flew off over the pond with a whole nut and returned with an open one. Each time he ate it alone on the shop roof, slowly, while thirty crows hammered at their seams below him and accomplished nothing. Nobody followed him. Crows are curious about almost everything, but they are also proud, and nobody wanted to appear as if they needed to be shown. Nell was young enough not to care about that yet.

On the fourth journey, when the old crow lifted off the grass, she lifted off a moment behind him. Gus flew low across the pond, so low his wingtips almost touched the water, and Nell followed with her heart going fast. She expected him to go to the field, or to the pines. He went to the mill instead. The mill had a square stone chimney, taller than any tree around it, and he landed on the very top of it. Nell landed on the roof below and pretended to be interested in some moss.

Gus shuffled to the edge of the chimney, tilted his head, and studied the ground with one eye for a long time. Then he opened his beak and released the walnut. The nut fell for a long second, turning over. It struck the paved yard below the chimney with a crack that Nell felt in her own beak. The yard was where the mill wagons had stood a century ago, and it was made of flat gray stones fitted closely together, and nothing bounced on them.

Gus dropped off the chimney like a leaf and landed beside the nut, which lay in two halves with its pale interior showing. He ate the first half right there. Then he collected the second half and flew back to the shop roof with it. A crow does not eat all its luck in one place. So that was the trick. Nell sat on the mill roof beside the moss and turned it over the way she had turned over the walnut. Height and stone.

There was nothing clever about it whatsoever, which somehow made it more wonderful, not less. The entire village was full of hard things and high things, and nobody had put them together but Gus. She flew back to the walnut tree, selected the biggest nut she could discover in the grass, and carried it up to the top of the tree. She chose a branch that extended out over the lawn, because the lawn was closest. Then she let go. The nut hit the grass with a soft thud and rolled underneath a bench.

Nell went down and inspected it from both sides. It was fine. It was completely fine, and it was still shut. She carried it back up and attempted a higher branch, and then the highest one, and the lawn received the nut each time like a hand catching an egg. From the shop roof Gus observed her with his thin gray head on one side. He did not come down, and he did not call. But he did not fly away either, and Nell, who was learning to read old crows, took that as a kind of answer.

Part Three · The Stone Yard

The following morning she went directly to the chimney. It was higher than she had imagined, and the wind up there pushed at her feathers and made her hold on tightly. She had never been this high with a nut before. Far below, the paved yard looked small and hard and gray, exactly as a yard ought to look. A woman emerged from the shop door with a broom and swept the stones, as she did every morning, and went back inside. Nell waited until the door shut.

Then she shuffled to the edge the way Gus had, tilted her head, looked down with one eye, and let the walnut fall. It cracked. She heard it from the top of the chimney, a clean sharp sound like a stick breaking, and for a moment she could not move at all. Then she dropped, but something else dropped faster. A magpie that had been sitting on the gutter, where Nell had not thought to look, was down on the stones before she was halfway there.

It seized the bigger half and vanished over the wall in a flash of black and white. Nell landed beside the fragment it had left her, which was approximately the size of a pea. She ate it anyway. It was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted. The second nut went the same way, and so did the third. Each time the crack rang out across the yard, and each time something arrived there first. Once it was the magpie.

Once it was a large crow she did not recognize, who had been watching Gus too, and who was not too proud to follow a younger bird. Nell sat on the chimney with her fourth walnut and considered the problem carefully. The trick was not only height and stone. The trick was being first to the ground, and she had been wasting an entire second at the top, listening for the crack and feeling pleased with herself. Gus never waited to hear the crack.

She understood that now, remembering: he let go and dropped in the same movement, as if the nut and the crow were a single thing falling. That meant trusting the stone to do its work without checking. It meant descending into the yard with your eyes on the nut and not on the gutters, which was not easy for a bird with a magpie on her mind. Nell stood on the chimney edge for a long time with the walnut in her beak.

The wind pushed at her, and the woman with the broom had not reappeared. She let go, and she went. The nut and Nell reached the yard almost together. The crack came up to meet her instead of chasing her down, and her feet hit the stones before the two halves had finished spinning. She put one foot on each half. The magpie dropped off the gutter, took one look at her, and reconsidered.

From the chimney came a single short call, dry and rough, which was the most Gus had ever said to anybody that autumn. Nell did not answer, because she was occupied. The interior of a walnut, it turned out, was pale and sweet and tasted faintly of the tree it had come from. She ate one half in the yard and carried the other up to the shop roof, because that was how it was done.

From there she could see the walnut tree and the thirty crows still hammering at their seams. She could also see Finn. He was sitting on the mill wall below the chimney, with his head tilted and one eye turned upward toward the place where she had been standing. It was exactly the way she had looked at Gus. Nell finished her half. Then she selected a fresh walnut from the grass, flew to the top of the chimney, and took her time about releasing it, so that he could see.