From Chapter 17: Intelligence

On May 5, 1989, the ice was still on the lake, and I was becoming a little exasperated. What’s more, big blocks of ice had piled up in front of the cabin, preventing me from taking out my dogsled. I was tired of being shut in.

When a break in the grey sky revealed a wide band of blue, and sunshine streamed to the ground, the call to assembly sounded in me. I dragged the canoe all the way to Lac Culotte, which was half-melted. When the ice gave way beneath me, all I had to do was jump into the boat and paddle over to the next ice bridge. A few small waves, pushed by an easterly wind, sang against the hull. It was pretty… until the storm came up. Of course, I had neither a coat nor a slicker with me. I returned home in the rain, jumping from one block of ice to the next. Luckily no one saw me: I must have looked crazy.

Something moved o¤ to my right. Wiping the rain from my eyes, I recognized a herring gull eating something on the ice in front of the cabin. Suddenly a raven jumped on it. It was an unambiguous attack: the gull backed up, the raven advanced. The prey was bigger than I had first thought. The raven took several steps and tried to lift the fish, a whitefish weighing at least a kilogram.

Because fishing was not allowed in winter, I hadn’t eaten fresh fish in months. I yelled, “Raven!” and raced madly over the checkerboard surface of ice and water. I was nearly at the fish when a misstep drenched me to the bone, and I realized that it was all in vain—I’d be eating another meal of lentils and bean sprouts that evening. Before we could get there, the raven and I, the gull had almost finished its meal. The fish’s head was gone, and its entrails were spread over the ice. I figured that my lentils wouldn’t be so bad after all. For a moment I considered gathering the entrails and giving them to my dogs but decided not to. Somewhere not far away Mrs. Raven would be incubating her young in the rain, and her male had been searching all day for some food for all of them.

I went inside, put a log in the wood stove, and settled comfortably behind my telescope to watch the return of Father Raven. And that is how I chanced to see the most extraordinary thing…

It was raining hard enough to make the ice quiver. Big drops of rain were bouncing off the ice near the fish, now being torn apart by the raven. The bird was standing on one foot while holding the whitefish with the other, pecking with all his might with his sharp beak. This went on for a good five minutes. I found it strange that the bird pecked repeatedly at the same spot on the fish, never stopping to eat even a tiny morsel. But he finally cut the fish into two equal pieces. Then, placing one foot on each piece and using his beak to pull at the strip of skin still connecting the pieces, the bird managed to tear the fish apart.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Night was falling, and it would soon be dark. There was little doubt that if the raven left his prey on the ice it would be gone by morning. However, that fish was just too big for the raven to lift. And with the rain still falling heavily, the bird’s feathers were beginning to stick to its skin… Father Raven had to find a solution, and quickly. And he did: tear his prey in two and make two trips.

The bird shook himself, preened and smoothed his feathers, then went to work. Taking the smallest portion of fish in his beak, he hid it in a crack in the ice. This piece was so well camouflaged that I could no longer see it, even using the strongest setting on my telescope, despite the fact that a short time earlier I had clearly seen the scales of the fish flying right and left as the raven worked. The bird had hidden this piece for the time it would take to fly to the nest! He quickly swallowed the tidbits of flesh lying about, went over to the heaviest piece, picked it up, and propelled himself into the air with his feet. He was gone for two minutes, then reappeared, picked up the second piece, and flew off again.

I fell into an armchair, amazed by what I had seen, then scrambled over to my Larousse dictionary: I, in…, int… There, on page 529, “intelligence”:
1. The ability to understand, to reason.
2. The ability to adapt to a situation, to make choices based on circumstances.

I had to conclude that this raven had just succeeded in doing all of that.