ensnare karasu The young man set up snares around various parts of the marsh and the larger ponds as the letter had commanded him to. As payment for his service (and possibly as recompense for the rather harsh advance warning of finding one of his best bird-dogs mysteriously dead and laid as if sleeping at his doorstep) his unknown employer left him a small leather pouch containing roughly the dog's weight in a mixture of gold and silver coins It was not uncommon for people to ask him to procure live birds for them... as the cities expanded and built zoological parks to display live captures, he made enough money to put away a small fortune, having provided all manner of birds he caught by learning their habits and the weaknesses those habits produced a few scraps of rabbit would snare a hungry hawk, but he wouldn't provide asny of those unless or until he knew that there were no young to feed, in fact, it was easiest to catch the fledglings who let the joy of easy prey overtake their natural cautiousness hummingbirds and ravens were the trickiest catches for him, so much so that he eventually gave up ever trying to snare a hummingbird not for it's cleverness, but for it's fragility it grieved him that his attempted snares ruined thier delicate wings or that the seemingly mild toxins meant to tranquilize them shocked the delicate mechanics of their hearts into oblivion. he was no chemist, he'd be the first to admit and for all of his innate meanness that he showed to people around town, it brought tears of deep sadness to his eyes to know he had killed any of his flying jewels The ravens, on the other hand, challenged him. The men from the parks would ask him for enough ravens to practically start a murder of their own, but when he managed to catch a dozen in a great net he wove, and suspended from a good point in a dense clutch of trees near his house, he caged them for as long as he could bear to and went to catch more the rest of the murder avoided that stand of trees, suspecting another trap and leaving the bait of grubs and seeds and berries to every other hungry flyer in the marsh the more and better new traps he devised, the better the ravens became at avoiding them, his catches diminishing to two or three per try, and he hd seemingly made enemies of a number of them as well who had just avoided his traps and the possibility of an unplanned injury, he fashioned a hood and painted a pair of eyes on it that seemed to look up and back from the back of his head. if he didn't wear the hood, a small band of the older ones with whom he'd begun this game would swoop from the treetops, remaining silent until they were nearly on top of him and try topeck at his head and eyes everytime he went outside. but today the ravens were not his concern, today he and the ravens had a foe in common and he was not terribly concerned at this sudden ravenous, reckless plague of grackles that had come down from the north the letter, though odd, demanded he provide a hundred of the pests. he would have been happy to do it without the death of his favorite dog as an incentive. but he set his nets and snares and before three days were out he was packing them into the quickest smallest cages he could weave out of the switches in the grove and left them where letter had instructed him to they had come in such numbers that he had come hate the sound of their loud, incessant calling. He thought it funny considering how much he loved to hear the woods and the marsh alive with birdsong, even the cawing and the cackling of the ravens as they plotted against him pleased him the next morning, though there were no signs of wheel-tracks, foot or hoof prints on the trail, the entire collection of grackles was gone and for some reason, their blue black bretheren with the yellow-white eyes seemed to have left the land as well attached to a post by the trail was another satchel, within the satchel was another mound of coins, but underneath the coins were two sheets of coarse cloth and from each of these sheets of cloth the shapes of a dozen hearts had been cut The woods were silent until he heard a raven cackle from a nearby tree, seemingly appeased by his having rid them of the grackles 030117 ... egger . 031222 what's it to you? who go blather from