The wings of the owl slide open like a fan, and she’s big enough that when she flaps, she can get a lot of pull. I stand and she is flapping against my face and gagging.
“Cough him up,” I say like a gangster, but nothing is coming out.
The wind bites my face and ears, and I have the owl now shoved down towards her nest, hoping that by gravity something will come out. The wing is cradling my face like a palm, reaching around my neck, quivering.
Finally, a body slips out of the owl onto the grass. It’s covered in gunk. It’s actually two bodies and for a moment I don’t know which lemming is Orleans, but they both look still.
I push the gasping owl away from the nest. She squawks about the “agreement, the agreement.”
I rub my eyes and begin wiping away the gunk to figure out who is who. I’ve seen small rodents mangled in traps before, traps that misfire, spring on a leg, clamp down on the body of a mouse and by morning the mouse hangs divided by the metal mesh. It’s bothered me before, but not like this.
One of them is barely moving and I pick up Orleans and I wrap him in my scarf and place him in my pocket, the only warm spot.
“We have to go back to the cabin,” I tell them and I don’t listen to their protests and I don’t check on the owl, even after I see her stumbling out of her nest in my peripheral vision.
The cabin is full of scientists and a seven foot tall polar bear. All of them see me come in and I go straight to the desk.
“Something happened,” I say. My lemmings jump up on the desk. The cabin is warmer than outside, but you can still see everyone’s breath. I think I see concern in Dr. Brulé’s eyes. He’s reacting to something I’m giving off, something on my face.
“One of the lemmings,” I tell them and unwrap Orleans and lay him on the table. He’s still. “Can I have the first aid kit?” I ask.
I’ve never patched up a rodent before — not a lemming, not a rat, not a mouse, not even the flying squirrels I studied in California. If they were injured, they died. If they were dead, we catalogued them. We put them in frozen bags until we were ready to take down notes. We thawed them a few days later with all the other dead animals and we wrote down how they died, where they died, how much they weighed. We sexed them, measured their molars to tell age, and we put them in a large black garbage bag because we had everything important we needed from them.
Dr. Brulé helps me. Dr. Kitashima stretches out the scarf like an operating blanket.
“We were interviewing a snowy owl and then she ate him. He was moving fifteen minutes ago,” I say to Brulé.
“He has some deep wounds,” Dr. Kitashima says. Some of the gunk we wipe away from him keeps returning from the open beak marks near his tail. There are two cuts on either side of his face too, and I can’t tell if the blood is coming from his neck or his cheek. Cheek would be a flesh wound, neck would not.
Luxor, who rests his arm on a cup of water, says, “We have the data. This is what happens.”
“Well,” I tell him, “I didn’t want to let it happen. I’m sorry.”
I pull off some bandages and I cut a tiny square to wrap around his hind end — almost like a diaper. I’m thinking that if I can stop the bleeding, he’ll be okay.
“Someone will have to go back and stay with the owl,” Luxor says. “If we don’t, she might get upset and that will ruin all our data so far. This might spark a revenge cycle and increase her numbers of lemmings eaten per day. Revenge factors are difficult to measure.”
Dr. Brulé gives me a look like he’s doing the best he can but it’s not going to work. Neither of us have seen Orleans move. He’s gone limp in my hands even as I raise his tail to wrap the bandage.
“If he’s dead now,” Bellagio says, “we can take him back as an offering to the owl, and maybe save the data.”
I snap. “I’m not interested in saving the data! God, he’s your colleague! You weren’t even the envoy to the owls. You were my envoy.” Dr. Kitashima can’t feel any pulse at all. He has sensitive fingers, worked with small seedlings and plants all day. I watched how tender he could be growing things. “This wasn’t going to happen,” I say to Dr. Kitashima because I don’t know who I’m supposed to say this to. How I’m to account for this.
Both doctors stop for a moment, helping me find my composure, not condemning me for my outburst. I respect that. Then Dr. Brulé takes out a syringe with a dose of stimulant in it, I’m sure. He injects this into the lemming, and we wait.
My sister had a hamster when we were little. It had escaped and ended up in the inner workings of the dryer. We found it when the smell from the dryer turned sour. She cried for days. I was stoic. I offered to buy her another hamster, a generous offer, I thought. She wouldn’t speak to me, ran off to her room. I didn’t understand why she was so upset. Later she almost went into veterinary work; I went into biology. She owns two cats and a dog, a budgie, and several fish. I have no pets.
Orleans does not recover. “He was only in there for a few minutes,” I say.
Dr. Brulé moves around to my side of the desk. “Owls have a narrow throat, Kate. He was probably crushed, at least suffocated in that amount of time. It’s possible that there’s a lot of internal damage. I don’t know.”
I look up at the ceiling. It’s a high ceiling, made for bears to walk around in comfortably. The one here now just watches. He fills up the room in my mind, like a supernatural being — if I believed in them. Talking animals have that supernatural quality, the kind that makes me think I am living in a fairy tale. I’m sure the bear doesn’t understand the sanctity of life. I don’t think I understand that anymore.
If animals talk, then they can’t just be eaten as food anymore. They aren’t part of a food chain anymore than humans are. If everything talks — where do you draw the line on feeling for them as individuals? God, I was slipping into subjectivity. They warn young graduate students about getting attached to the animals in the lab.
Don’t name them. Don’t pet them.
Don’t ever let yourself get interviewed by them, either.
Luxor writes in his notebook. Bellagio and Mirage walk over to the body. Bellagio picks up the scarf ends and starts to drag the body off the desk. Inevitably it will fall on the floor with a heavy thump. It’s all senseless. This whole place is senseless.
Mirage stops her. “Wait,” she says, and she goes over to the body and looks down at the face. She sniffs his face, and then backs up and looks at his ink-stained body. She traces her hands across the stains as if she is reading the last marks. He’s become a notebook himself, I think. She says, in the quietest voice — I can barely hear it at all, “He had very good penmanship.”
I want to scream, but Dr. Kitashima says instead, “How long did you work with Orleans?”
Mirage looks up at him slowly. “We catalogued data and research in the libraries for a season. He had good penmanship there too.”
Luxor says, “He was brave.”
“He was efficient,” Bellagio says. “And he drew nice pictures.”
Mirage stands up and walks over to the inkwell. A small notebook rests against it. It’s obviously Orleans’s. It has blood on it. “We have his notes,” she says. She begins reading.
“Snowy Owls eat two lemmings per day. She doesn’t predict that she will be increasing or decreasing that amount. I believe, of course, that she’s lying.”
No one speaks. Mirage looks at all of us, her small eyes, all pupil and dark, stare at each one of us in a glance. She closes the notebook, and sets it against the inkwell, carefully, as if the weight of it will tip the inkwell over.
Luxor looks grave, and when he speaks, his voice seems loud. “I concur. I believe she’s lying too.”
I just notice that her fur is turning to its winter coat, not all in one place, not like a white patch, but as if every tenth h
air has changed to white. A subtle change, a gradual one. I look over at Orleans, now eternally brown, except for the ink scratches, and a black, ink-stained front claw.
“It’s a shame,” Mirage says.
“Yes,” Luxor agrees. “Kate should have let the owl finish. Now the data is skewed.”
“No,” Mirage says, “It’s a shame anyway.”
She walks back to him. “She was lying. You both knew that. Why do we trust data from lying subjects?”
“We’ve always known they lied. That’s what makes it accurate.”
She looks at me. “No,” she says, “that makes it a waste of time.”
She steps down off the table onto a stack of books until she is on the floor, and Bellagio and finally Luxor follow her, down to the floor and out a small hole in the wall. Like a little procession, they leave. I think, there you go, Ms. Future Scientist, lead them away from this. She makes me want to smile, but I can’t.
I take a paper towel and wrap Orleans in it, but I don’t put it anywhere. I just sit at the desk for awhile. Dr. Brulé makes tea for everyone. Dr. Kitashima opens a notebook and writes something I’ll never read. The scratching sound of his pen makes my eyes blur and I look up and see the great white mass of the polar bear looking down at me. I get shocked every time, thinking they will eat us. Can I really trust them when they look like this?
He just stares for a few moments like I imagine God would stare — a god with big teeth, and black gums, who makes me feel small and insignificant, a god that stares incomprehensibly, maybe unable to think of anything to say, any excuse to give for such a mixed-up world. Here the whole natural drama plays itself out like it always has, except now I’m privy to all the voices, all the personalities, all the individualities of each player, each animal or bird that is stalked, chased and killed. I get the privilege of talking with them over tea before it all happens. I get to see their beautiful sketches of snowy owls. That’s either all wrong, or the way it should have been all along. I don’t know which is better.
The bear leans over the desk and fills my vision now with his face, and blows his breath through his nose at me, a puff of smoke. Bears believe you can read a person’s thoughts in their breath — the breath that we see coming out of our mouths in the winter. Those are thoughts and feelings unexpressed, they think.
I sigh back as an answer to him, and my breath sneaks out as a flat line of smoke. He looks at it, closes his eyes and moves away. I hope I said something right.
It’s October now and Luxor, Bellagio and Mirage have been back to their community of lemmings, not far from our cabin. They have handed back their research. Not only the research on which predator would be the most destructive, the most costly to the community, but also about the recommendations they have based on the evaluation and gap analysis they conducted on their own research methods. Honourably, they have completed the mission of any scientist — human or lemming. They have concluded research and it’s up to the community to make decisions. Having returned, they stay in our cabin now.
“We would have sacrificed ourselves anyway,” Luxor shrugs.
“This way we get to learn more about research,” Bellagio says. They are all almost completely in their winter coats now. They line the railing on the cabin deck and we all look out onto the snow-swept plains, erased in the half-light of early winter, until they are blue, merging with the frozen sea.
Mirage turns to me and asks the question I have been thinking about now for months, “What do you do, though, Kate, when you don’t have a community to give your research to? We have no purpose for our research anymore. We can learn. But what does it do?”
I have a cup of coffee in my hand. I don’t know where the coffee comes from. Somewhere south of here. The bears trade for it. It’s not the same as coffee from home — it’s more bitter, a bit spicier, a darker flavour. But it’s hot and it’s good and it’s my coffee now.
“You do it for yourself,” I tell them.
She nods, hums a little and then they chitter for a few moments. And then, soft as twilight, the darkness sweeps over us, silent, like a bird with black wings.
Principles of Animal Eugenetics
by Yves Meynard
Kelly stood on the platform and watched the train pull out, gaining speed; a slow arrow of tarnished metal shot from a tired bow. Above his head, the sky was a luminous grey: rags of clouds moved swiftly in front of a featureless haze.
The platform was of varnished red bricks; on the sides of the pit in which moved the trains, the earth had remained raw, and was now stained thoroughly by years of exhaust and grease. The tracks glimmered as if someone had been oiling them, polishing them, inch by inch, lovingly, with a chamois cloth. Kelly could almost imagine the little man — it would have to be a man, and he would have to be little — walking crabwise along the tracks. He would hold an ivory coloured cloth high up in one hand, bringing it down swiftly to buff a narrow section of the rails, then returning it to its absurdly high position, waiting for the next defect to be spotted, to pounce upon it and erase it from the perfection of the track.
There was no one else on the platform. As an envoy from Centrality, Kelly had naturally been alone in his compartment aboard the train; in his wagon, he’d had a glimpse of an old man and a young woman travelling with her baby daughter, but otherwise it was empty. The train had come to a stop at this station; Kelly had gone out of his compartment, which was next to the exit, and climbed down without encountering anyone.
Kelly picked up his heavy suitcase — the handle was slicked with his own sweat, grown cool and greasy — and made his way to the stationmaster’s office, passing along a gigantic poster of Sebastian Bloom. The poster was hardly new: it was flaking along the edges, and a corner of one sheet had peeled in the middle, opening a geometric gash in Bloom’s face.
There was a sign, thin white letters on a black background, which was overlaid with rust in one corner. “OFFICE.” The sign hung perpendicular to the wall, like a pub’s. Underneath it was a wooden door with a rectangular pane, obscured by a pale yellow fabric. To the right of the door, a window opened into the wall. There was a rotating drum beneath — for the stationmaster to pass something to the clients without having to risk bodily contact? The room beyond the window was dark, although a tall narrow rectangle of light to the left indicated that at least one room of the station was lit, and presumably occupied.
Kelly rapped on the window a few times, but there was no reaction. He went to the door and knocked, setting down the heavy suitcase with a huff. After another wasted minute, he tried the knob. It turned.
The room was very small; to the right, a doorway led to the window booth; there was a closed door in the far wall, leading deeper into the house. In the room itself Kelly could see no furniture, except a shelf set high on the wall, holding a row of unidentifiable knickknacks. The floor was bare wood, shiny from varnish. In Centrality such a floor would have been called delightfully rustic, but here it was simply, and starkly, crude and inelegant.
Kelly risked a call to the stationmaster, unwilling to enter the strange house. He heard a series of noises, and after a while the door opened, and out came a dark-haired man, wearing a Railroad Collective uniform, which was rumpled and buttoned crookedly down the front. The stationmaster passed a hand through his hair, disarranging it further despite his best efforts.
“Pardon me there, didn’t hear you, sir. Heard the 7:46 train going by, but it usually never stops … I’d forgotten you were coming. Straight from Centrality, heh?”
“Yes,” said Kelly. He waited, expecting the stationmaster to offer more in the way of an apology, but the man remained silent. Kelly noticed the stationmaster’s hair was thin, the scalp very pink underneath it. From the man’s flesh rose a smell reminiscent of cloves; for some reason Kelly found it disgusting.
“I haven’t been met in the way I expect
ed.”
“Really, Sir? Was there anything special you required? ‘Cause I wasn’t told.”
Kelly sighed, but strove to contain his impatience. The people who lived here, so far from the hubs of organization, were not like the city-dwellers he had dealt with all his life. He must exercise diplomacy; learn to accept laziness and inefficiency as normal modes of life.
“I guess I thought someone would greet me at the platform — but no matter. At any rate, I need to be conveyed to town.”
“Well, Sir, everybody here walks, you know. It isn’t far. Besides, the only car in town has been brokedown for two months now, and won’t run again for a while.”
Kelly started to sigh, then stopped himself.
“Well then, is there someone to carry my suitcase?”
“No one here but me, Sir. No one.”
“Well, couldn’t you…”
The stationmaster looked vastly astounded. “No, sir, I will say I can’t. My duties end at the instant of half past seven; and besides, it looks much too heavy for me. Could have one of the boys move it, in the morning, if you like.”
Kelly restrained his anger. Provincials held scrupulously to their schedule when it suited them. After all, they had the excuse that these were orders, issued from Centrality. As a representative of the government, he could expect nothing more than meticulous adherence to the rules. He might have tried to invoke some higher regulation — a moment’s reflection would bring to mind several such directives, useful to a man in his line of work — but he did not want to make an enemy of the stationmaster. This was something he could not afford at this early stage in the investigation. So he swallowed his humiliation and said, “Never mind. I’ll carry it myself. It’s not that heavy.”
“As you say, Sir.” To Kelly’s eyes, the stationmaster looked, not smug, but relieved — at what Kelly could not guess. He took the handle of the suitcase and with a subliminal grunt lifted it up.
Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction Page 3