For anyone else, it would have been an evil omen

I used to have to walk down to the main road to catch the bus when I was in high school. In order to get a seat on the front steps of the house we waited in front of, I used to leave the house about a half-hour early. One fall morning as I walked down the hill to the main road, I happened to look behind me. There was a raven walking behind me, following me down the hill. I stopped, and it stopped; I started walking, and it started walking, too. It followed me all the way down the hill, and then as I turned the corner onto the main road, the raven flew on top of a parked car in someone's driveway.

Since it had followed me, I figured that it must be the tame raven that lived across the main road. I reached up a hand to pet it, but I scared it and it started to fly away. The problem was, it tried to fly over my right shoulder, and it got its claws tangled in my hair. When I got to school, I saw that I had three bloody claw-marks on the right side of my neck from where the raven had scratched me as it flew away. My homeroom teacher told me that if it had happened to her, she would have turned around and gone home! She was one of those people who believed that crows and ravens were bad omens. It didn't bother me, because I had always loved crows and ravens.

What's really interesting about this incident is what happened to my neck much later: I had three intra-jugular catheters in my neck for dialysis. After the removal of my second IJ, I told my doctor that I was due for one more, because I had gotten three scratches from the raven. He thought I was being superstitious-- I was doing fine, there wouldn't be any need for a third IJ! He was remarkably silent a year later when I went to his office to get that third IJ pulled! But then, since I've been his patient, he's seen me through a lot of weird happenings that no-one can explain. All of the IJs were placed in the spot the raven had scratched in 1980. Actually, I had been lucky that the raven's scratches had stopped bleeding by themselves; they were all directly over my jugular vein.

Some people might wonder if I should get another totem animal; totems aren't supposed to go around mangling their people! But Raven and Crow are messengers, and I think that the raven was trying to let me know that my future would hold a lot of pain, but that I would heal from it. And that has come true .