Mug
The midday coffee lasts twenty minutes and is drunk standing up: that's what this raven mug is for, with the portrait of Hrafn, a postman in an Icelandic valley 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.
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 doesn't call it foresight. He leaves things along the route and knows months later exactly where each one is, and if someone sees him leave one, he comes back another day and moves it somewhere else.
Salka works shifts at the fjord fish farm's hatchery station. He leaves before dawn; she starts in the afternoon. They overlap at noon: twenty minutes eating standing up in the kitchen with the weather report on the radio, her still in her boots and him without taking off his coat. They've been doing this for four years. The hiding-spots thing, by the way, isn't unique to him: the common raven caches food in hundreds of different places and remembers where every one is.
