by Gene Stone
PRAISE FOR THE AWARENESS
“Every once in a while a piece of fiction comes along that can change the way we think about the world. The Awareness is one of those transformational novels—it’s a wonderfully written book that tells an entertaining and suspenseful story, but even more, it would be almost impossible to read this book and not come away with a new and heightened understanding of the human-animal relationship.”
Bruce Friedrich, Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives at Farm Sanctuary, Member of the advisory board of the Christian Vegetarian Association
“The Awareness is an amazing book—partly because it’s such an extraordinarily gripping story, but also because I can think of no other recent novel that explores the minds of animals with such sympathy and compassion. I would recommend this book to everyone I know—and hope they recommend it to everyone they know as well.”
Nathan Runkle, Founder and Executive
Director of Mercy for Animals
“Every now and again I sit back and wonder what it would be like if other animals could really fight back against the egregious violence to which we subject them in a wide variety of venues ranging from research laboratories and classrooms to zoos, circuses, rodeos, factory farms, and in their own homes in ours and in the wild. This thought experiment takes life in The Awareness and reflects their points of view, and it’s clear they do not like what routinely and thoughtlessly happens to themselves, their families, and their friends. By changing the playing field Gene Stone and Jon Doyle force us to reflect how we wantonly and selfishly abuse other animals and the price we would pay if they could truly fight back. This challenging book also asks us to reflect on the well-supported fact that we need other animals as much as they need us. It should help us rewild our hearts, expand our compassion footprint, and stop the reprehensible treatment that we mindlessly dole out.”
Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado,
is the co-founder, with Jane Goodall, of Ethologists
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the author
of The Emotional Lives of Animals, Wild Justice: The
Moral Lives of Animals, and The Animal Manifesto
“What a wild ride this book is! The writing is so beautiful and it was a doorway into animal consciousness. This novel stirs up every dark fear that what we do does indeed come back to us. Stone and Doyle may have just written the next iteration of Planet of the Apes...”
Kathy Freston, bestselling author of
The Veganist and The Lean
“The Awareness develops a powerful theme first orchestrated by Arthur Machen in his book The Terror, and tells of a time when animals become self-aware and rise up against the tyranny imposed on them by humans in virtually all areas of animal use. Although I have been a strong and relatively successful animal advocate for 40 years, and as such well aware of the injustices and thoughtless atrocities we impose upon our fellow creatures, this book touched me very deeply, and opened wounds in my soul I thought healed, or at least scarred over enough to protect me from acute pain.
“Told from the perspectives of numerous animals we humans interact with—a dog, a pig, a bear, an elephant and others—we are inexorably drawn into the hurt, resentment, anger and bewilderment which these innocents experience with the coming of ‘awareness.’ It is particularly the latter that hurts me as a conscientious reader, the fact that there is so rarely an answer to the question ‘why?’; ‘why am I being beaten, confined, starved, deprived of companionship and love, forced to do unnatural things, mutilated surgically, and the rest of the countless abuses I suffer silently?’
“And there is no answer.
“This a book all those who care—and all those who don’t care—about animals must read.”
Bernard E. Rollin, professor of philosophy, animal sciences, and biomedical sciences at Colorado State University and author of Animal Rights and Human Morality, The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain and Scientific Change, Farm Animal Welfare, and Science and Ethics.
The Awareness
Gene Stone and Jon Doyle
Copyright © 2014 by Gene Stone & Jon Doyle
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, without written consent of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted to the author online at www.genestone.com/ contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Stone Press, Inc., 200 W 15th St, New York, New York 10011
Library of Congress Catalogue in Publishing Data
Stone, Gene & Doyle, Jon
The Awareness / Stone, Gene & Doyle, Jon
ISBN-13: 9780615944647
ISBN-10: 0615944647
1. Domestic animals—Fiction. 2. Vegan Cooking. 3. Animal protection. Animal welfare. Animal rights.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014930043
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
The Stone Press
New York, New York
Contents
I. Bear Elephant Dog Pig
II. Dog Bear Pig Elephant
III. Pig Elephant Bear Dog
IV. Elephant Pig Dog Bear
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
A chimpanzee in a laboratory in an eastern city notices the silver latch. He jingles it. He reaches around and jingles the silver lock, too. It’s loose. Then he tears the lock off and opens the stainless-steel cage. The men in white lab coats look up from their clipboards, surprised when they see the animal running toward them.
The impalas and the cheetahs lead their assault like an amber armada. Running swiftly, they tear into tourists on safari and locals selling goat meat at the market. The impalas ram into the humans with their graceful, streaked heads. The cheetahs finish off the wounded.
A herd of bison from somewhere on a high plain charges a small general store in the Dakotas.
Water buffalo gore Vietnamese day workers in the peaking heat of a low-country rice paddy.
Three lions with biblical manes, escapees from a zoo, stalk the streets of Rome.
A black-and-white orca swims in circles around a Plexiglass pool in the light-blue haze of a Southern California theme park. The bodies of two trainers float like broken dolls near the corner.
Five llamas attack a group of young students reading Borges in the high altitudes of Lima.
All over the world, mammals attack. They are remembering. They are thinking. They are planning. They are becoming aware. It doesn’t come to each the same way, with quite the same echoes, with quite the same soft or hard edges. But it comes to all in one way or another.
The revolution is at hand.
I
BEAR
T H E B E A R sat in the shallows of a river. He wanted salmon. He always wanted salmon. One of the fleshy silver fish jumped out of the water, as if on demand, and the bear caught it deftly. He devoured it. A little residual carnage remained on his paw, but he’d fed and it was time for him to sleep.
The bear–brown, thick, and healthy–lived in the northern Rockies, surrounded by white peaks and severe blue skies. The trees towered over the cold river and the snowy peaks towered over the trees.
A hawk circled overhead, screeching. The bear didn’t notice. He didn’t care much for hawks.
Somewhere, not too far away, a gunshot penetrated the frigid air.
The bear froze. The sound was familiar, but he couldn’t remember why. He knew the name for it because the names for everything were flooding into his head, and he knew he didn’t like it. Something about it was
wrong. His mind clouded, and he shook his head, hard, as though to dispel the fog, the haze.
A hare raced out from the evergreen thicket. The bear could think of nothing else now.
The hare bounded over the rocks, the drifts, with skill and grace. The bear chased him without grace but with skill and tenacity. The two animals drew a maze in the snow, and crossed a river whose bubbling, cold waters ran fast. Each leapt over a fallen tree branch.
The bear won. He captured the hare.
Another shot, from somewhere in the woods, behind the bear.
The hare was trembling in the bear’s paws. His eyes were open but the time for seeing was over. He waited.
Nothing. The bear held the small animal carefully. He smelled the salmon on his own claws, he smelled the hare’s fear. He picked at the hare, he studied him. Soft belly. Big ears. Warm fur.
I had a mother, the bear thought.
He didn’t remember ever having a thought before. He didn’t remember remembering. He’d just been.
The hare blinked. He was about to be killed and suddenly, he seemed to understand. Death. Not just the end of running. But death.
The hare trembled in the bear’s claw. The bear looked at his prey but didn’t eat.
The bear was remembering his youth. He was raised in a den, not far from where he was now, that had a stale scent, slightly damp, mildewed. He had an older brother. His mother was magnificent–large, dark, warm. She gave him food when he couldn’t find it himself. He remembered reaching up, trying to steal the salmon from her paws after she’d caught it and brought it to him and his brother, who’d waited at the river’s edge, playing in the shallows.
She lowered the fish to him and let him tear into it as if he’d caught it. She let him think he was the mightiest hunter. That day, and all days at the beginning, she was patient with him, teaching him the rituals of the chase. He followed her every movement, crouching low to sneak up on the berry patch or the beehive or wherever she wanted him to practice. He would try his best to emulate her, ears up, nose sniffing for the right scent. But his legs were not agile enough to crouch as she did. He’d fall over and roll down hills when he was supposed to be stalking. This amused more than angered her. When he came bounding back up the hill, ready to try again, she’d nuzzle him close and he loved the feel of her fur against his, like the feel of that first summer wind blowing in off the river or the den at night when he was tired and knew it was safe to sleep.
“She taught me everything I know,” he said to the hare.
The hare’s eyes were now closed.
A gust of wind came from the south and the hare’s ears doubled over, one of them hiding an eye.
The bear studied the creature, shivering but not moving. He used his free paw to lift the hare’s ears off that large, bulbous eye, which was darting frantically from side to side.
“I want to find my mother,” he said. He wanted to find his mother. Again he remembered his mother’s fur, the smell of the trout on the brittle ends of her paws, the way the sun shone bright and high upon both of them in the spring. He wanted to find that simple day that had long since passed. More than just finding his mother, he wanted to find himself with his mother. He wanted to be little again, rolling down hills, preparing to be what he was going to become.
The bear sat down. He knew that day could never be found, as sure as so many suns had set. The bear wasn’t prepared to feel the weight of time. He could feel it passing, moment by moment, and he wanted to make it stop.
The hare had calmed down, his body shifted slightly. He watched the odd behavior of the bear with keen interest. “And I want to live,” he said boldly.
The bear found his legs again and stood up. He let the hare go.
The hare paused at the bear’s feet, unsure of himself. Then he bolted away.
A cold drizzle began to fall, east to west, not west to east. This had never happened up in this part of the world.
The hare, before reaching the woods, turned and looked at the bear.
“Thank you.”
The bear nodded.
Then the hare was gone.
The brown bear, six feet tall, four feet broad, sat down on a log near the river. He put his paw to his mouth. He licked it. It tasted good.
I want to find my mother, he thought again and again. The thought became more than a thought. It became an obsession, and it made him feel warm in a corporeal part of him he couldn’t define.
So he set out to traverse his complex land. Starting from the creek, he walked west, toward the orange-and-grey sun balancing just above the horizon. He grabbed a salmon because it jumped up and fell in his paw. He ripped its head off and ate it without thinking.
Further west, he came to a river. This river wasn’t babbling. It was roaring. The bear roared too, his whole body expanding. Not even the water could contain him. He crossed the river, fighting the current easily.
In the middle of the river, he dunked his head in the frigid liquid. Under water, he closed his eyes and let the coldness wash over him.
I also want to find my brother, he thought.
He waded out of the river, drenched but determined. As he shook off the water saturating his fur, he heard a loud noise. It stung so much he put his large paws up to his ears.
Humans.
He knew of them. He’d seen them. But only much further downstream.
He lifted his nose. They were close.
His instinct was to leave, not to care, but he remembered the gunshots he had heard earlier. Then another image flooded his memory, roaring in like the river when the ice melted, and it hurt. The image was from some time in the recent past. Not long ago he’d come across an aged elk, walking without precision, the fur under his large neck grey and matted. The elk wasn’t behaving like an elk, she was moving in jerks and pushes. She was dying.
The bear followed the elk. Soon, the elk tired and collapsed in a clearing. The bear walked up to the elk and heard her breathing rise and fall as her nose pressed against the dirt. It didn’t take long for a blanket of swollen flies to surround the wounds and the elk’s eyes went calmly still, and she died. The next morning, the bear passed by the clearing. The elk was no longer there. The forest had taken her away.
The bear sat by the edge of the river. He wanted to leave again he thought about his mother. He wanted to ask her questions. She’d taught him everything he thought he’d ever needed as a bear, but she never taught him how to understand. He wanted to understand the carcass of the elk. He was afraid of the image, of the calm, dead eyes and the movement of the flies as they descended upon the creature like wildfire on the pines that then fall, dried and brown, to the ground.
Upriver, two humans were snowmobiling. The sight was odd but the bear remembered seeing something like this before. The humans wore bright red jackets, ski caps, and goggles, and shouted at each other.
Above, the hawk was still circling. The hawk screamed and the scream echoed, so much so that the bear stared up at the sky, watching the bird watching him.
The roar of the snowmobile drowned out the hawk’s cries. The machine was throwing snow on all sides. The bear’s eyes narrowed. He felt his chest quiver but he wasn’t cold.
The engine noise neared. The bear crouched lower. But he didn’t attack, he let the humans glide past on their machines. After they were far away, he waded into the water. A shiny liquid lay on the snow. It reminded him of the lights that lit the sky in the heart of summer. Slick and filmy. He dipped his paw into the oily substance and tasted it. He knew he shouldn’t do this. But in the spirit of curiosity, of the strange newness that had enveloped him, he took a chance with a foreign substance.
Horrible. It lacked the sweetness of honey and the weight of salmon. It was too warm and burned his throat.
Ahead was a large sequoia. He walked to it uncertainly, his gait ungainly and awkward. Then he vomited. He looked at his mess, cocking his head. This had never happened before. He took note that there were limits to his
new powers. Once the poison was out of him, he stood up on his hind legs and raised his long arms into the air. He took in the air, a deep breath, and he felt good.
He decided he was going to find his den. Not his current den—that was back east of the river. His old den, the one that always had the scent of dampness and where he lived with his mother and older brother. He walked a long way, but he didn’t tire. He walked and walked. Finally, walking up a steep hill, sensing familiar objects, he felt he must be close.
He heard something growl in the thicket.
He stopped. He’d made a mistake. He’d crossed into the territory of another bear. He had never done that before either.
The other animal, glossy and black, tore out of the thicket. Bigger and stronger, he rose on his haunches. His roar echoed against the valley’s walls.
The bear’s first instinct was to fight back, but his second was to run.
He’d couldn’t recall having had a second thought.
The black bear charged, and the bear raised up, ready to take that charge. His claws were poised. These new thoughts meant nothing in the face of another bear’s claws. The black bear bore into him, pushing him down, knocking the wind out of him. The bear lay on his back, and the black bear slashed at his body. Oddly, he didn’t draw blood.
“I’m sorry,” the bear said.
The larger bear stopped. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you here?”
“This is where I grew up.”
The black bear rested on his haunches. Neither animal smelled hostility. They breathed easily.
The black bear sniffed. “There’s something odd on you, something I haven’t smelled before.”
“It’s salmon. Of course you’ve smelled it before.”
“It smells different.”
“I may have had some trout, too.”
“Something else.”
“I touched the snow after the humans ran their machines over it. It looked interesting. I tasted it.”
“You should not do that. You are young.”