Tote bag
A raven tote bag with the portrait of Hrafn, a rural mail carrier in a fjord in eastern Iceland, from my Animal Kinhood series, where the animals dress and live like people. His face straight on, the amber eye and the work jacket, on a bag with handles.
Foto: Roger Worden / UnsplashCorvus corax
If the pass opens, I go up. If it doesn't, I go up tomorrow.
An extreme generalist: boreal forest, coast, steppe, mountain, Arctic tundra and desert across almost the whole northern hemisphere. In Iceland it is a year-round resident, even in midwinter, on sea cliffs, in fjords and around the edges of towns.
There's a thermos of coffee behind the third post past the bridge. A pair of dry gloves in the gap in the wall at the farm below. A wrench under a particular rock at kilometer six, a rock with nothing special about it that he'd pick out of a thousand. He's never called it foresight; it's just how he is. And if someone sees him leave something, he comes back another day and moves it, without quite knowing why.
His grandmother, amma Guðrún, lives two streets down and used to sing him, as a boy, the old song about the one who slept in the crack of the cliff — the song the houses of the east used to sing when bad weather set in. He learned it whole before he could read. He still hums it badly in the van without noticing, and if you ask him he says no, he doesn't sing, that's his grandmother's thing.
