Youth t-shirt
Of the eleven who finished school with him, three are still in the fjord: this youth raven t-shirt features one of the three. Hrafn delivers the mail across a valley in eastern Iceland and is from my Animal Kinhood series, where the animals dress and live like people.
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.
Young ravens gather in noisy flocks wherever there's something to be had, and in Icelandic that has a great name: hrafnaþing, «parliament of ravens». Hrafn's crew was eleven strong and broke up on its own, the way they do in small towns: one heads down to Reykjavik, another crosses to Norway, another stays because a job came up. His brother Ari was one of the first to leave and calls at Christmas. Hrafn stayed, and he's never once told it as a decision.
His sister Elín is sixteen and takes the bus to high school on the other side of the mountain pass, on the days the road is open. The game is always the same: she points at any house in the valley and he gives the surname before even looking. He never misses. They both laugh, her because she finds it funny and him because he doesn't see what's strange about knowing the houses of the valley you live in.
