Skaife calls attention to the birds’ beautiful contradictions. In sunlight their dark feathers shine with the iridescence of oil on water. They can be friendly, curious, even loving. In the wild they’ll take turns sliding down snowbanks and make toys out of sticks. At the Tower they play games of KerPlunk, pulling the straws free from the tube to retrieve a dead mouse as their prize. Yet, as that special raven edition of KerPlunk suggests, they’re also birds of gothic darkness and gore, the birds that followed Viking raiders in quest of fresh corpses and that feasted on executed bodies hung from roadside gibbets. You might visit Skaife’s charges in the Tower and watch, entranced, as they gently preen each other’s nape feathers, murmuring in their soft raven idiolect—but you might also see them gang up to ambush a pigeon and eat it alive.

Though ravens brought messages to humans in Assyrian, Mayan, and ancient Japanese mythologies, and were the emissaries of the gods Apollo and Odin, they are complex beings with their own minds and their own desires, a fact that can be hard for us to get our heads around. In his book-length study Mind of the Raven, Heinrich tells the story of a Colorado woman working outside her cabin who was disturbed by an incessantly calling raven that flew low over her to land on rocks nearby. The bird’s behavior was so unusual that she began to wonder whether it was trying to tell her something. Scanning her surroundings, she saw a cougar some 20 feet away, crouched and ready to spring. Of course she assumed that the raven was warning her of the danger. But Heinrich posits that the raven was likely communicating with the predator, leading it toward easy prey. We so readily put ourselves at the center of the tales we tell. Ravens help remind us that sometimes we’re merely walk-ons in someone else’s story.

Skaife is a man familiar with his own contradictions. He joined the British army in 1982, after his teenage tearaway years, to become a machine gunner and then a drum major in the infantry. Only after many years’ service did he apply to be a yeoman warder at the Tower. The ravenmaster at the time needed a new assistant; he sent Skaife into a small enclosure with two birds in it, instructing him not to show any sign of fear. He watched approvingly as one raven flew down and perched by Skaife, dipping its head and calling. The bird had accepted his presence. Skaife acquired a new job, in addition to his yeoman-warder duties.

Thus began an obsession so all-encompassing that the stories he tells about his old life in the army somehow always blend into what he is telling us about ravens. He is well aware that he’s making the ravens into an image of himself and vice versa—but also that his playful parallel is apt. Ravens, like soldiers, are heavily armed, clever, and tactically proficient, and they thrive on routine. They possess an idiosyncratic sense of humor, grabbing and pulling at the tails of predators (eagles, say, or wolves) to annoy and distract them. They display a certain bloody-mindedness, and forge intensely strong bonds with one another.