Headline A MURDEROUS TALE

Subhead UNSETTLING EXPERIENCE INSPIRES ALASKA WRITER FOR PUSHCART PRIZE

Run Date 10/28/1999

Day Thursday

Page D1

Section Lifestyles

Edition Final Length

Photo By Mike Venso Special To The Daily News

Story Byline By Sandi Gerjevic Daily News Reporter

One thing that chilled Daniel Henry, that has stayed with him all these years, was the solitary cawing of the first crow that arrived at southeast's False Island that bloody week, the summer of 1981. He remembers how the lone cry, a beacon, reminded him of the incessant beep of heavy machinery backing up. By morning the next day, he writes, ''a squadron of a hundred crows'' blew past, the envoy to a raucous gathering that would soon fill every branch of the old-growth forest that brimmed the former Peril Strait logging camp. Imagine it. Tens of thousands of crows assembled in the mossy forest, 40 miles north of Sitka. Henry and a handful of conservation workers could only shiver and wonder -- to what end? TX: The Hitchcockian scene of crows and woods grows darker in Henry's nonfiction story ''A Murder of Crows,'' one of this year's winners of the Pushcart Prize, a New York-based award that gives a prestigious nod to the work of the nation's small, independent presses and their writers. Henry's story first appeared in ''Northern Lights,'' a literary review based in Missoula, Mont. The 24th annual Pushcart anthology, to be published this month, will include ''A Murder of Crows'' along with the essays, poems and short stories of other winners. Henry is in good company. Previous Pushcart winners include Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Carver, John Irving, Grace Paley and John Updike. Henry, 43, an English teacher and debate coach at Haines High School since 1988, works as a writer in his spare time. He grew up in Oregon. Both his parents were naturalists, and his earliest memories are of wild places. In 1971, the family drove up the Alaskan Highway to tour Alaska. ''I was 16, and I said, 'This is it,' '' Henry said. After earning a master's degree in rhetoric and communication at the University of Oregon, Henry came north in 1979. He went to work for the U.S. Forest Service at a youth conservation corps camp, 28 miles north of Juneau. He thought about settling in Juneau or Sitka but chose Haines after walking into a bar there in June 1982, where he observed people hitting other people over the head with chairs. ''And I thought, 'This is the place for me,' '' he said. At the time, Haines was embroiled in controversy over a mill closure, a bald eagle preserve and management of a state forest. For the young man interested in debate and land use, it was the perfect fishbowl. He married, bought property and built a home on the roadless side of Mud Bay, hauling supplies across the water by canoe and skiff. He and his wife, Jeanne, have a 2-year-old son, Charlie. Before working awhile for the local radio station, Henry did a stint on the Chilkat Valley News in Haines, the ''poor man's New York Times,'' said Ray Menaker, who founded the paper in 1966. ''He arrived with considerable verbosity,'' said Menaker of Henry, whose responsibilities included ''anything that was needed'' and whose salary was ''mighty little.'' When the paper's print shop burned, Henry and Menaker made weekly all-night runs to Whitehorse, where they had their paper printed at the Whitehorse Star. The two would arrive in time to eat breakfast and compose a couple of missing headlines. Freshly inked papers in hand, they'd race back to Haines to distribute them by late afternoon. Menaker recalls the trips fondly. ''So, we were up most of the night, driving and talking,'' he said, ''and got lots of philosophical discussion done in the 250 miles to Whitehorse.'' Henry's devotion to Haines never dwindled. He called himself a magnet for angst and tension in a town he acknowledged is easily polarized. He's served as moderator for dozens of town meetings. ''I like to see the different side of people, and I really appreciate human beings,'' Henry said. ''Haines is really at ground zero for a lot of debate. Democracy is alive and kicking there. ... I love Haines because I love irony.'' The author talked from a pay phone outside Pendleton, Ore. Currently on sabbatical and traveling in a 1989 Chevrolet half-ton truck/camper combo, he was on his way to meet with a governing officer of the Umatilla Indian Reservation for his latest project, an upcoming book, ''Burning Words: The Great Debate Over America's Last Frontiers.'' Partially set in Alaska, ''Burning Words'' began as Henry's college thesis on the rhetoric of American conservation. This will be his last research swing through the West. He's been thorough over the years, gathering more than 200 interviews and driving some 40,000 miles. ''I'm talking with all people on all sides of the coin,'' he said, ''trying to determine essentially what words, phrases, symbols and images are persuasive in American land debates.'' The book has taken him from a fiery meeting in Joseph, Ore., where environmentalists were hung in effigy, to an ''environmental Woodstock'' near Antietam National Battlefield in Maryland. The narrative, he said, includes the last interview Joe Vogler ever gave -- the founder of the Alaskan Independence Party was murdered in 1993. ''I guess the thing that has driven me is the debate is still burning up America,'' he said. ''And as far as I can see, there's nothing people can look at as a guide to language and strategy being used from all sides.'' Henry's plan is to hole up in a trailer at his parents' California home in November to finish the project. Eventually, he'll return to Haines High School, where he is hailed as a gifted teacher; so popular, in fact, that when he agreed to teach drama last year, a third of the schools 140 students signed up. Along with his ability to inspire students, Henry is a born writer, said Linda-Kay Wicks, a colleague at the school. While traveling by ferry with pupils to various events, he is often observed jotting notes in a journal. ''I think Dan is like a sponge that absorbs everything around him -- sound, sight, color, people, personalities,'' Wicks said. ''I think he has a sensitivity about his nature and his character that causes him to see things maybe others of us pass by. ... It's like he eats his environment. He just consumes it and revels in everything.'' For born writers, quite often a story comes along that begs to be written, like ''The Murder of Crows.'' Henry said he'd all but forgotten the False Island crows until thumbing through old journal notes in the summer of 1997. He phoned a former co-worker to see if their memories jibed, then set about getting the story on paper, completing it in January of last year. Over the summer, he revisited the island to further check his memory of the bizarre event. In his story, Henry describes how the contingent of crows disturbed the camp for four days and then an ominous silence fell across the forest. Red-tailed hawks, eagles and camp jays gazed on, oddly quiet, as the tension rose. ''A raven,'' Henry wrote, ''softly chuckled.'' Then came what he can only describe as ''a hell-fight beyond our imagination.'' ''Bodies rain from the trees,'' he wrote. ''Dying birds hit the forest floor screaming like warriors startled by their final vulnerability.'' Camp workers watched in horror as the black birds slaughtered each other until around midnight when ''a feeble line of crows straggles out from the grove, crossing the Strait and away to other forests on other islands.'' To Henry, the event was a dark veil drawn back on nature -- a world we think we know but can never really. Looking back, he believes the carnage had something to do with territory or with the salmon run at the mouth of Clear Creek. The old-growth was a strip of trees left in a massive, barren clear-cut. Maybe the birds were fighting over squatting rights. ''I've thought about that a lot and looked at nature a little differently,'' Henry said. A raven expert he knows called the story implausible, but Henry stands by it. He viewed the experience as ''a humbling glimpse into the tireless life force that binds us beyond species, habitat, motivation or income. Epiphanies such as this one come in sudden, startling surprise packages; the shock of recognition lingers a lifetime.'' ''We just don't know everything about the way animals behave,'' Henry said. ''My personal opinion is that most Alaskans who've been around have amazing wildlife stories ... but not everybody is writing them down.'' Cutline Haines resident Daniel Henry, author of the Pushcart Price-winning ''A Murder of Crows,'' was traveling with his family last week in Idaho.