'A Kindness of Ravens' by Kim Steutermann Rogers

It started when the tide ebbed and ravens winged it for the Homer public library where Erin and townsfolk flocked in the parking lot, even in foul Alaska weather because Alaskans knew weather was like a cantankerous great aunt who had to be acknowledged but could also be ignored. At noon, everyone doled out food to the resident birds. But this time, the ravens didn’t stop at the library. They disappeared over the ridge, and Erin knew what that meant, dropping her French fries and climbing to the roof of the library even before the tsunami alarm rang.
 
The second time a raven saved her life, Erin was seventeen and foraging for morels in the Cascade Mountains when a whiteout swallowed the hiking trail. Erin knew the most important thing to do was stay positive, so she sang “Shake It Off,” the snow dense as blackout curtains, her words hitting a dull reverb, when she made out the shape of a raven with sapphire eyes in flight and followed the breadcrumbs of shiny pennies it dropped all the way back to her SUV.
 
Over the years, Erin’s lost track the number of ravens that have come to her rescue. Once in an alley outside a bar on Haight Street in San Francisco, a guy she’d throated tequila shots with started getting rough when a siren chirped, causing him to run, and Erin saw a one-legged raven perched on a window ledge. Was that a smirk creasing its beak?
 
The kindest thing a raven has ever done for her— standing on the Santa Monica pier having just hung up with her mother’s news about her father—is this: a raven sitting a foot away, preening and scratching. A raven just being a raven and allowing her into the moment.

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Kim Steutermann Rogers lives in Hawaii where she shadows scientists into rain forests, volcanic craters, and wetlands, but most days, she sits on her bum and attempts to churn out words appropriate to the science and place and people of it all—and tells herself she should exercise more. Kim’s science journalism has published in National Geographic, Audubon, and Smithsonian; and her prose, recently, in Five South, Fictive Dream, Lost Balloon, and Reckon Review. She was awarded residencies at Storyknife Writers Retreat in 2016 and 2021 and at Dorland Mountain Arts in 2022 and 2023.