the judgment of the birds

“…I once saw this happen to a crow. This crow lives near my house, and…his world begins at about at the limit of my eyesight.
On the particular morning when this episode occurred, the whole countryside was buried in one of the thickest fogs in years. The ceiling was absolutely zero. All planes were grounded, and even a pedestrian could hardly see his outstretched hand before him.
I was groping across a field in the general direction of the railroad station, following a dimly outlined path. Suddenly out of the fog, at about the level of my eyes, and so closely that I flinched, there flashed a pair of immense black wings and a huge beak. The whole bird rushed over my head with a frantic cawing outcry of such hideous terror as I have never heard in a crow’s voice before, and never expect to hear again.
…All afternoon that great awkward cry rang in my head. Merely being lost in a fog seemed scarcely to account for it…The borders of our worlds had shifted. It was the fog that had done it…He had been lost all right, but it was more than that. He had thought he was high up, and when he encountered me looming gigantically through he fog, he had perceived a ghastly and, to the crow mind, unnatural sight. He had seen a man walking on air, desecrating the very heart of the crow kingdom, a harbinger of the most profound evil a crow could conceive of—air-walking man.”

-Loren Eiseley
The Immense Journey