A Hard Nut to Crack

Part One · Green Husks

Nell was a crow, and she was absolutely famished. It was her first autumn, and all summer long there had been beetles in the grass and bread at the picnic tables and soft fruit that split open on the ground. Now the mornings were cold and white, and the enormous walnut tree beside the mill pond had started to drop its nuts. THUMP! One landed on the grass. THUMP! Another bounced off the mill roof like somebody knocking at the door.

Every crow for a mile recognized that particular sound. By the second morning there were thirty crows in the walnut tree, shoving and squawking and swooping down to grab whatever they possibly could. Nell got one on her third attempt. It was much heavier than it looked, and she carried it to the top of the mill wall and smacked it as hard as she possibly could, which was not very hard yet. The green husk came off in long slimy strips, and underneath was a round brown nut with a seam around its middle.

She hit the seam, and nothing happened, so she hit it again and again, until her whole head rang like a bell, and the nut did not have so much as a scratch on it. Her brother Finn landed beside her with a nut of his own and gave it a tremendous whack. The nut squirted out from under his foot, shot straight up, and bonked him on the head. "Ow," said Finn. "It did that on purpose."

There was food inside, and neither of them could get at it. The other crows were not doing any better at all. They dropped their nuts from the lowest branches, and the nuts bounced once and lay in the grass, whole and extraordinarily smug. A few of the older birds buried theirs somewhere in the field for later, which is what crows always do. Nell did not want later. She wanted lunch, and she wanted it right now, while the frost was still white.

That was when she noticed Gus, the oldest crow in the pines, who was so ridiculously ancient that the feathers on his head had gone thin and gray. He walked along every branch as if he had won it in a card game. He did not hammer or bury. He simply picked a walnut out of the grass, flew off low across the pond, and disappeared. Nell went back to hitting her seam, and nothing continued to happen.

A little while later, a shadow slid across the wall. Gus landed on the roof of the mill shop with the very same walnut in his beak, and the walnut was completely open. He ate it in small, tidy, extremely dignified bites, without looking at anybody. Thirty crows stopped hammering and stared at him with their mouths open. Gus burped, quite politely, and then he went back for another one.

Part Two · The Old Crow's Trick

Nell watched him do exactly the same thing three more times that day, and she began to feel suspicious. Every time, he flew off over the pond with a whole nut and came back with an open one. Every time, he ate it alone on the shop roof while the crowd below him hammered and accomplished nothing at all. Nobody followed him. Crows are curious about almost everything, but they are also very proud, and no crow wanted to look as if she needed to be shown. Nell was too hungry to be proud.

On the fourth trip she took off right behind him. Gus flew low across the pond, so low that his wingtips left tiny rings in the water, and Nell kept her beak shut and her heart going fast. She expected him to head for the field or the pines. Instead he flew to the old mill and landed on the top of its tall stone chimney, which was taller than any tree around it. Nell landed on the roof below and pretended to be very interested in some moss.

Gus shuffled carefully to the edge, tilted his head, and stared down at the ground with one eye, and then he opened his beak and let go. The walnut fell for a long second, turning over and over, and it hit the paved yard below with a CRACK that Nell felt in her own beak. The yard was where the mill wagons had parked a hundred years ago, and it was made of flat gray stones that nothing could bounce on.

Gus dropped off the chimney like a leaf and landed beside the nut, which lay in two neat halves, and he ate the first half on the spot and carried the second one back to the roof. So that was the trick! Height and stone, working together. Nell sat very still beside her moss and turned the idea over the way she had turned over the walnut. It was so simple that it made her a little bit cross. Only one crow had ever put hard and high together.

She flew back to the walnut tree, found the biggest walnut in the grass, and dragged it up to a branch that stuck out over the lawn, because the lawn was the closest. Then she let go. The nut hit the grass with a soft little plop and rolled under a bench. Nell hurried down and checked it from both sides. It was perfectly fine, and it was still shut tight, so she tried a higher branch, and then the highest branch of all. Plop. Plop.

The lawn caught every nut like a hand catching an egg. "Maybe the nut is just stubborn," said Finn, who had come to watch. Nell gave him a look that could have curdled a bucket of milk. Up on the shop roof, Gus turned his thin gray head to one side. He did not call out, and he did not come down. But he did not fly away either, and Nell, who was learning to read old crows, decided to take that as a yes.

Part Three · The Stone Yard

The following morning she went straight to the chimney. It was much higher than she remembered, and the wind pushed hard at her feathers. Far below, the yard looked small and hard and gray, exactly as a yard ought to look. A woman came out of the shop, swept the stones with a broom, and went back inside. Nell waited until the door had shut. Then she shuffled to the edge, tilted her head, and let the walnut go.

CRACK! It was a lovely, satisfying sound, and she felt so proud of it that she just sat there for a moment. That was her mistake. Something black and white shot past her like an arrow. A magpie had been sitting on the gutter, right where Nell had not thought to look, and it reached the stones first. It snatched the bigger half and zoomed off over the wall, leaving Nell a piece about the size of a pea. She ate it anyway. It was the most delicious pea-sized thing she had ever tasted.

The second nut went exactly the same way, and so did the third one, because every time the crack rang out across the yard, somebody else got there first. Once it was the magpie. Once it was a big crow from the far pines, who had been watching Gus too, and who was not too proud to copy a girl half his size. Nell sat on the chimney with her fourth walnut and thought hard. Height. Stone. And what else?

She had been waiting at the top to hear the crack, and suddenly she understood that this was the problem. Gus never waited. She remembered it now: he let go and dropped in the same movement, as if he and the nut were falling together. That meant trusting the stone to do its work. It meant diving with your eyes on the nut and not on the gutter, which is hard when you have a magpie on your mind. Nell stood on the edge for a very long time.

The wind pushed harder, and the lady with the broom did not come back. Nell took a deep breath, let go, and went. The nut and the crow fell side by side, and the crack came up to meet her instead of chasing her down. Her feet hit the stones before the two halves had finished spinning, and she planted one foot on each. The magpie started to drop off the gutter, took one look at her, and thought better of the whole idea.

From the chimney came a single dry, rusty call. It was the most Gus had said to anybody all autumn. Nell did not answer, because she was far too busy, and inside a walnut it turned out to be pale and sweet, and it tasted faintly of the tree. She ate one half in the yard and carried the other up to the shop roof, because that was how it was done. She felt like the cleverest crow in the world, and also a bit like a crow who needed a nap.

From the roof she could see thirty crows still hammering at their seams. She could see Finn on the wall below the chimney, with his head tilted and one eye turned upward, exactly the way she had once looked at Gus. Nell finished her half. Then she fetched a fresh walnut, flew to the top of the chimney, and took her time about letting it go, so that he could see. Finn climbed up beside her, and then so did the big crow, and then so did a dozen more.

Soon the whole stone yard was going CRACK, CRACK, CRACK, like a very small and very noisy war. The door of the shop banged open. The woman with the broom stood there with her mouth hanging open and a walnut shell on her hat. She looked up at the chimney, where nineteen crows sat in a row, politely waiting their turn. "Oh, you are joking," she said. On the roof, Gus ate his lunch and did not look at anybody, and Nell could have sworn he smiled.