The Sea Inside

intensely social, bound by life-pairs and the kind of wider ties associated with cognitive animals – such as ourselves. Clever, knowing, tricksy, sometimes it seems the entire family are conspiring to hide their intelligence from us, for fear of what might happen if we found out what they really knew.
    Despite their superior size, ravens are the most timid corvids, scared of a snapping twig, if not a passing cloud. They also deceive one another, pretending to bury food in one place, whilst surreptitiously taking it elsewhere. And unlike almost every other animal, they appear to possess the ability of ‘gaze-following’, taking note of where their peers are looking, and anticipating accordingly. Their ‘observational memories’ allow them to remember earlier crimes, assess the results of repeating them. In effect, they lie, like us; and like us, they also exhibit emotion – especially fear. They do well to remember who their enemies are, since they seem to have so few friends.
    One raven will distract an eagle whilst the other steps in behind and steals its prey. Nesting ravens steal eggs from seabirds to feed their own young. Sometimes the relationship is mutually beneficial. A raven’s call will summon wolves or foxes to a dead animal; the birds will then wait while the mammals pull apart the carcase, allowing them access to the meat. Such talents earned ravens the name wolf-birds; the Inuit would follow them too, led to their prey by the ravens’ ‘gong-like’ calls.
    Given such greedy behaviour, one might be forgiven for thinking that these birds must be the root of the word ‘ravenous’ – especially as they’ll eat anything from offal to dogshit. In fact – although the word derives from the Old French,
ravine
, and before that, from the Latin
rapere
, to seize or snatch – the same root gives us rapacious and rape, and thus raping, which can also mean the act of tearing prey, and might have been made for these birds – which actually derive their name from the Norse,
hrafn
. Ravens can kill seal pups, reindeer and lambs, first pecking out their victims’ eyes. They even stand accused of murdering one another. Such sombre crimes sustain their gothic air – yet in the past they were regarded not as harbingers of death and disaster but as companions or even begetters of creation itself; ceremonial birds, part of our rituals, as well as their own.
    I must have seen my first raven on a childhood visit to the Tower of London, where they stalk the lawns with clipped wings, kept captive to warn of danger. The Roman founders of London believed the birds augured violent death and foul weather; and as they bore the characteristics of Saturn, they were a sign of that planet’s ill-disposition: if the ravens left their nests, famine and calamity were sure to follow.
    To blame human fates on a bird is as bad as Ahab investing a whale with evil. But like the whale, the raven has ever laboured under an elusive profile, one which shifts as fitfully as the animal itself. It presides over Christian legend: it was the raven, rather than the dove, which was the first to leave the Ark, searching for land and food, flying ‘to and fro until the waters had dried up from the earth’; and far from signifying doom, ravens appear as servants to saints. Although the woebegone Job, a man never short of self-pity (‘even young children despise me’), complained, ‘Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for the lack of food?’, his cheerier fellow prophet Elias was visited by ravens which brought him bread and meat in the wilderness, as ordered by Jehovah: ‘You shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.’ As a result, the bird recurs in Renaissance art, as well as in the words of the metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan:

    Here
Jacob
dreames, and wrestles: there
    Elias
by a Raven is fed

    One saint who found such succour was Paul, the first Christian hermit. As a fifteen-year-old boy, Paul fled from persecution into the Egyptian wastes, only to be followed by so many others that the wasteland became a virtual city of penitents. The Desert Fathers, as they became known, displayed extravagant acts of abstinence and denial. They faced the same devil with whom Christ had wrestled when he fasted for forty days among the wild beasts, cared for by angels. These first monks lived ‘in a twilight between the real and the visionary’, as Walter