Crows

Crows are recurring scavengers in the mountain world of the novel, moving between ordinary human waste and sudden death. Their appearances trace a shift from incidental recipients of discarded food to witnesses of ecological violence and, at the story’s close, imagined discoverers of Bruno’s missing body.

Food at the Threshold

When the narrator pushes away a meal at Bruno’s mountain house, Bruno takes the plate outside and throws its contents to the Crows and foxes. The food is characterized as unsuitable for the narrator’s delicate stomach but available to creatures less selective. This brief gesture places the Crows at the boundary of domestic life: what a person cannot eat becomes sustenance for animals beyond the door.

Scavengers After the Avalanche

After an avalanche tears through the gorge of Grenon and smashes the frozen surface of the Lake at the foot of Grenon, the Crows circle over the debris and alight among dirty snow and broken ice. Their presence leads the narrator and Bruno to inspect the scene. There they find the Crows sharing the carrion of small trout, thrown from the dark water where the fish had been hibernating. The lake’s half-meter-thick surface ice has shattered, and the fish lie exposed on snow while the water beneath begins to freeze again.

The narrator, who finds the spectacle of the Crows squabbling over a trout insufferable, scatters them with a couple of steps and a kick. The gesture interrupts their feeding but does not restore the lake or the dead fish: only pink mush remains on the snow. The Crows are not simply background to the scene; their feeding makes the avalanche’s consequences visible, while the narrator’s intervention briefly asserts a human claim over the remains.

The Uncertain Search for Bruno

Months later, after Lara reports that Bruno is missing from Barma, the narrator reflects that rescuers will find him with the first thaw. If he has died, the narrator predicts, he will emerge in a gorge in midsummer, and the Crows will be the first to find him. This anticipated discovery echoes their presence among the avalanche’s dead fish: in both scenes, they are associated with what the mountain has exposed and with the limits of human knowledge. Their final appearance is prospective rather than witnessed, leaving Bruno’s fate unresolved while placing the Crows at the imagined end of the search.