The Whiskey Jack

On Tricksters, Teachers, and the Bird that Follows

24 May 2026 ~ 4 min read

There’s a story the Haida tell about how Raven stole the sun. A mean chief had hidden all the light of the world in a box, and the people lived in darkness. Raven — clever, hungry, willing to turn himself into anything to get what he wanted — found his way into the chief’s house, took the sun, and threw it into the sky so no one would have to live in the dark again.

I have a raven tattooed on my skin. I have had it for years. That story is why.

I teach for a living. I have spent most of my working life standing in front of rooms full of students, trying to put the sun somewhere they can reach it. I didn’t choose the raven because I wanted to be clever or cunning. I chose it because the raven’s mission is the teacher’s mission: steal the light out of the box the world keeps it in, and throw it where everyone can see.

When I started writing novels, I didn’t plan to put tricksters in them. They showed up anyway.

In The Year of Shadows, a raven lands on a Paris windowsill in the rain and speaks one word to a dying young poet: Nevermore. The raven is not the poet’s enemy. The raven is the teacher who won’t let him lie to himself. Edgar Allan Poe spends the rest of his life trying to understand what that bird said to him.

In The Cosmic Janitor Trilogy, the trickster wears Irish feathers. The Morrígan arrives as a carrion crow, a goddess of sovereignty and death, and she plays Seán O’Sullivan like a game board — not because she’s cruel but because she knows something he refuses to learn. Brendan shows up as her counterweight: the navigator-saint who sails into impossible waters because he trusts that the land is out there. Two Celtic tricksters, two teachers in disguise, one trilogy about a man who has to learn what both of them already know.

And in Three Moons, the trickster is a whiskey jack.

The gray jay — Perisoreus canadensis — is a real bird of the northern forests. It caches food in tree bark and comes back for it months later when the snow is deep. It’s friendly, curious, fearless around humans in a way that feels uncanny the first time you encounter one. And its other name, the one that tells you everything about how language lives in a place, is whiskey jack — a colonial English corruption of Wisakedjak, the Cree and Algonquin trickster figure the gray jay is named for.

The Indigenous peoples of what is now Canada and the northern United States have been telling stories about Wisakedjak for much longer than anyone has been calling the bird a whiskey jack. Those stories belong to them. I have not borrowed them, retold them, or put them in my novel. What I have done is let Colleen encounter the bird the way I have encountered it — in deep snow, in real forest, on my own winter journeys — and let the bird’s name carry its own history into the page. Because refusing to acknowledge that the bird’s English name is a colonial distortion of a Cree word would be its own kind of erasure.

The whiskey jack in Three Moons is not a Cree teacher. It is what it is to Colleen — a gray bird, a witness, a presence that finds her when she needs finding. But the novel knows what the reader may not: that the name carries older knowledge than Colleen has, and that the bird is a descendant of a trickster god whose stories continue to be told by the people who first told them.

Three novels. Three birds. One mission.

Tricksters don’t teach by explaining. They teach by showing up — persistently, inconveniently, often at the worst possible moment — and refusing to leave until you’ve learned what you needed to learn. Poe needed to hear nevermore. Seán needed to meet the goddess who would not let him lie to himself about grief. Colleen needed a bird in the snow to watch her walk toward a truth the rest of her defenses were refusing to see.

The sun comes out of the box. The light goes into the sky. The raven flies away.

And the teacher — the one with the tattoo, the one in front of the classroom, the one sitting at a desk writing novels — begins again.

~ Liam