Framed poster
Some walls don't change for years, and this framed raven poster is made for one of them. It's the framed version of the portrait of Hrafn, a rural mail carrier in an Icelandic fjord and a character from my Animal Kinhood series, where the animals have a trade, clothes and a hometown.
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.
The office stopped giving him route lists a long time ago. Hrafn knows the number, the color of the door and the surname of every house in the village and every farm in the valley, and he finds out someone has moved three weeks before word gets round at the shop. He also remembers, in detail, the neighbor who shut the door in his face when he was eighteen. Nobody's ever asked him for that second list.
The mailboxes in the valley freeze shut from the inside; the metal seals itself after a night of rain and wind. Hrafn made himself an iron hook out of a rod and a blowtorch, and it came out ugly and bent, but it opens half the valley on the first try. It's lived in the right-hand pocket of his coat for years. He doesn't lend it out. The remembering isn't just a habit of his, either: in food-exchange experiments, ravens remember for weeks which individual kept the deal and which one didn't.
