Ravens

During the winter of 1988, not long after I moved to Kodiak, the police scanner went off in the newsroom, broadcasting a report of a dead body in an abandoned house. One of the other reporters went out to investigate and returned a little while later chuckling to herself.
“It was a raven,” she announced.
“A dead raven?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “The raven wasn’t dead, it was on the roof.”
The blank look on my face betrayed my confusion, so before I could respond, Nell explained that an old woman who lived near the house had noticed a raven perched on the roof. And as she explained to the police, “everyone knows a raven on the roof means someone has died there, or will soon.”
There was no body in the house and we laughed about it then, but sometime later that year a grader scraped a skull out of the road near that house. It turned out to be very old, and was thought to come from a Russian-era cemetery, long forgotten but marked on old maps. Probably a coincidence, but the old lady’s story still crossed my mind.
I hadn’t thought of the incident until the other night when I was walking out to the shed on an unusually quiet evening. No road noise, no lawnmowers thrumming in the distance, even the sled dogs lounged on their boxes staring at me in eerie silence.
By chance, I glanced up into the treetops and saw six or seven ravens in the branches above the shed. They were dark blotches against a darkening sky, so I’d be lying if I said I could see their black eyes following me, but it sure felt like it. I instinctively glanced at the roof of the house and felt oddly relieved that no black bird was perched there.
Back inside, I mentioned the ravens to my wife and she said she had noticed them also, and found them disconcerting. My 9-year-old daughter overheard us and piped in, “Yeah, I saw them too,” she said. “They’re freaking me out.” That about summed it up for all of us.
When I went to bed that night I had a hard time falling to sleep, I kept thinking about the old lady’s superstition, and listening for the sound of bird feet scrabbling on the roof tiles.