The Raven Quest

Some ideas are much better in theory than in practice!

- Tom Godin

As kids growing up in Sapawe, a sawmill town of 200 people in northwestern Ontario, my brother Randy (or Rand as I called him) and I were constantly roaming the forests and gravel roads around town in search of new outdoor adventures. The following is one such story from our childhood.

On the Hunt

One spring, when I was ten and Rand, 11, we decided that our lives would be greatly enriched if we could keep a young raven as a pet. We hatched this idea after we read a book we’d borrowed from the bookmobile extolling the intelligence of the crow family. A raven, a member of the crow family, would certainly be a superior pet indeed. A young bird made the best pet, the book said. This being late April, a time when young ravens were almost fully fledged, it would be the perfect time of year to capture our unwitting pet. And we knew just where to find a nest full of ravens. A few miles north of town on a logging road appropriately named the North Road, there was an abandoned open-pit mine. The mine itself was a giant gaping hole that had been blasted into the top of a ridge. It was on the vertical rock face of this pit that a pair of ravens nested each year. The time of year was right, the raven nest had been located, now all we would have to do was find a way to coax a young raven out if its inaccessible nest and into our waiting arms.