This is why I’d taken up drinking.
Feeding her to keep her healthy became a full-time gig. Some endangered provisions were found—tins and tubs of corn, beans, beetroots, peanut butter, and, mercifully, a stash of baby formula. Alas, no fucking Cheetos®. Ookpik and Bristle punctured the cans with their scythe-like talons. I rationed these into tiny portions, hydrating the formula with fresh water and smearing it into her little pink mouth. The owls were rudely insistent on bringing her their kills, and after a soap opera–inspired tantrum, I acquiesced, but under the condition that all kills be cooked. In flagrant detail, I recounted the time Big Jim ate a fuzzy Kentucky Fried Chicken thigh from the back of the refrigerator and ended up doing a three-day impersonation of Old Faithful. No, my nestling would not have raw, headless food. She would eat properly, like a MoFo. One day, with fork, knife, and napkin. She would grow up to have manners and cross her legs and say “good afternoon” and apologize when someone bumps into her, like the BBC America MoFos with the exotic birds’ nests on their heads.
I found a stash of matches and lit the chubby stove, which spluttered to life, grateful to be reanimated with purpose. The owls—master stealth hunters—brought her fish and squirrels (no doubt caught in various positions of the Kama Sutra, those venereal nincompoops), rabbits, and fucking headless red-backed voles.
Me, every day: What’s for dinner?
The owls: Thank the sea and stars! We’ve found some red-backed voles!
Me: *smacks head onto table*
Holy Hostess snacks, I’d trade my one good wing to never see another nidorous, lumpy red-backed vole without its stupid noggin again. In case you’re wondering, red-backed voles taste like the exact marriage of discounted Albertsons chicken and losing the will to live.
I became a bit of a helicopter parent. A sort of persnickety, flightless UH-60 Black Hawk who hovered and droned on about decent education and things being better in my day, like functioning toilets and Taco Tuesday. Dee imprinted on us birds, studying us with retentive eyes. There were gorgeous days like the one when Dee first laughed—a sunny hiccuping of notes that turned flower faces and roused the cricket choirs. Woven into her cloud-climbing giggles was hope for a better world. The snowy owls and I flapped our wings, dancing our delight at all her delicious firsts. She bobbed her head in unison, clever girl—a brilliant mimic.
Soon, Dee started to crawl, and I spent my waking hours guiding her with encouragement or gentle pokes with my beak. I used the fine upbringing I’d received from Big Jim, the training I’d given my Dennis, luring her with treats and treasures—beak blobs of peanut butter or a shiny spoon. I rewarded the good and ignored the bad, which was very difficult when she was jamming her face into the stove or attempting to lodge a fishbone into the sky by way of her left nostril. At the end of those kinds of days, I allowed myself a little of the treasure I’d found sequestered in another Toksook cabin cabinet—my Gaelic giggle juice, Scotch. I fashioned a tiny tool out of paper clip wire and a tea bag, dipping the tea bag into the Scotch bottle’s amber neck to sip up its sweet offerings. Come springtime it was easier; I was enabled by the American robins (whom the MoFos had honored with the genus and species name Turdus migratorius). The Migrating Turds showed me how and when to eat fermented salmonberries to get shit-faced. According to my library studies, frosts and thawing (which allows in yeast and speeds up fermentation) were happening more frequently thanks to a warming climate. Booze berries galore!2 Kuupa seemed disapproving, evinced by how she repeatedly used an upside-down sweetgrass basket as my miniature drunk tank, but jeez—it wasn’t like I was going to fly under the influence like the Migrating Turds did. I was a grown-ass crow. If, on my negligible Shit Turd time, I wanted to drunkenly attempt to fly again by launching myself off shelves or express myself through a supersonic reciting of Bon Jovi lyrics, then by Fritos, I would. Big Jim would have definitely high-foured me for it.
Dee started to walk. And thank our lucky gulars we had an enormous parliament of owls to help. The snowy owls became experts at ushering her around by fanning their great wingspans, and believe me, even with one eye, Kuupa had total mastery of that parental “Don’t make me turn this head around” look. Seriously, she could go full Exorcist, rotating her head 270 degrees. The other owls, flammulated to great horned, took their nomadic wanderings in shifts, many raising their own families on Toksook Bay, which became littered with large nests and planet-eyed balls of fluff, much to the chagrin of the red-backed vole population.
What is it like to live among a giant parliament of owls? It’s fairly epic. I enjoyed being the only crow alive who had a window into the world of these magnificent birds.3 I enjoyed their speckled majesty, their almost supernatural sense for danger. The only reason we were able to fend off bears, wolverines, coyotes, and every other one of Alaska’s festering fart bags was because of the owls. I will be forever grateful. But if you will indulge me a small complaint? They have these long moments of utter silence—imagine hanging out with chronic meditators. They just sit there and blink and move their heads like robots, and it’s very uncomfortable for a bird like me who is used to a lot of bubbly corvid chatter. I think it’s because they hear everything and so they’re busy taking it all in. Seriously, owls can hear a microbe farting ten feet below a snow dump in the chaos of Web. Also—my apologies if you’re eating—they swallow those stupid red-backed voles, toads, lizards, fish, or whatever whole and then yarf up hideous little pellets, like nightmarish parcels of undigestible fur and entire preserved critter skeletons. Honestly, with these abominations strewn all over the place, Toksook was starting to look like Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, so I told the parliament that they had to dispose of their fucking pellets far away from the cabin because it was unsanitary for Dee and was putting me off my earthworms. Typical roommate stuff, I guess.
Then the owls got down and dirty with procreating. This was awkward for me. You can’t unsee owl sex—all that biting and gyrating that you have to close your eyes and sing the chorus of “Uptown Funk” to get through. All of them except Kuupa. The great snowy owl never partnered or laid eggs. She had just one owlet whose name was Dee. So, the varied night hunters boned and worked together to fight off predators, to hunt for fish and firewood. They found medicinal plants, and they followed my insistence of finding every last electronic MoFo item in Toksook Bay and hiding them under the floorboards of the Toksook Bay health clinic, covering the boards with clothes and plastic bags. I had never been clearer about anything, even the fucking skeleton pellets; if there was only one rule left on this big beautiful blue, it was that Dee would never go near any MoFo devices. Was I sure that the virus came through the screens? I’m a crow, not an epidemiologist. Viruses, by their nature, are sneaky fuckers. Had I seen a MoFo physically change because of a screen? No. But I’d seen sick MoFos and Changed Ones tirelessly, violently hunting for screens, and that made technology the most dangerous element on earth. Dee would never go anywhere. She would stay right here with me. I was The One Who Keeps.
Sometimes I just stared at this sweet, sweet little MoFo, with her hornet’s nest of hair, sticky fingers, and electric energy, and I just couldn’t believe she was here. She was so gentle, holding me as if I were the Fabergé flower, her nose pressing into my plumage. Dee couldn’t sleep unless her crow was close. Yours truly became hopelessly tenderhearted, weeping at sunsets and making up bad poetry about my best friend Dennis like a sentimental dildo. Oh, but Dee’s walking! My chest burst to watch her lift herself in perfect bipedal fashion. I was so proud, so admiring of her gait, even if she initially resembled a gibbon on drugs. Under the ceaseless watch of feathereds, her walking got stronger. Dee got stronger.
Her education became my main objective—I was obsessed. I lamented that I could never send her to a proper school, that she wouldn’t make MoFo friends, or eat gelatinous prefrozen mystery blobs of cafeteria food. MoFos were pack animals, and Dee wouldn’t hold a hand or have a prom or a girlfriend or a boyfriend or driving
lessons or…don’t worry, I never let myself dwell for long, because I’m a fucking optimist and that’s what spirituous salmonberries are for. I had the most important job on earth, and I wasn’t going to mess it up. I told Dee stories (especially effective when she couldn’t walk; a captive audience is best) about her magnificent kind and her slobbery, heroic Uncle Dennis. In Aura, there is nothing more important than story; it is how we learn and grow and heal. So, I told her about Big Jim—about the time we had a Beecher’s cheese curd, Cheeto®, and Pabst Blue Ribbon picnic at the Skagit Valley Tulip festival; and the time he ran naked under the Space Needle, flashing his figs on King 5 News; and about how his heart was the size of the moon. I collected the books I could find, reading to her, everything from The Snail and the Whale to The Pop-up Book of Phobias and Everything I Know about Women I Learned from My Tractor. I worked on teaching her MoFo language incessantly, using my best Big Jim voice to sound out the names of things.
“Tree,” I’d tell her, as she ran her fingers along the flaky bark of an alder. “Birch. Poplar. Spruce.”
“Moon,” I’d tell her, as she lifted a filthy forefinger to the lunar sorceress who no longer had to battle the neon of cities. “MoFos left footprints up there, Dee. We all used to celebrate genius astronauts like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Lightyear.” MoFos, I told her, painted footprints all over the big beautiful blue and beyond.
“Danger!” I’d scream at her as she attempted to kiss a bald-faced hornet. “Dee,” I’d say, as she peered at her rippling reflection in the puddled aftermath of a rainstorm, and she’d shriek back at me in perfect owl. “No! Dee!” I’d squawk, and her single gossamer thread of patience would snap, and she’d jerk her head, birdlike, and squawk back, “Dee!” perfectly mimicking my strange, nasal tone. What a knife jab, a reminder that I couldn’t perfectly provide the variety of sounds she needed to learn her own language. Her MoFo words were clipped and parrotlike. My language was evolving, certainly, as so much was in this new world. I had noticed something strange about Dee from when she was very young, perhaps because she was the sun around which I circled. And I wasn’t going to give up until I’d fixed the problem. She didn’t like to repeat things all day long. I learned this the hard way when she stuffed me into an old bread bin so she could dance in the dirt and later hide from me in the cavity of a black spruce. The stories she truly enjoyed were the ones about her Uncle Dennis. By the forty thousandth time I’d told her about his heroic luring of monsters with an iPad, I’d have rather been entombed in a shrine of owl pellets than utter another word of it again, but I had to trust. With time, I knew she’d come around; I knew she’d be the most perfectly well-adjusted MoFo that ever lived.
So, please allow me, with excitement in every sparking cell of my body, to properly introduce my Dee, the last MoFo on earth. Many summers old now, she stood as tall as the nearby diamond-leaf willow. Age is relative, and I would guess she was around thirteen (not old for a MoFo, but geriatric as fuck for a banana slug). Her duckling’s down hair had grown into a mass of arguing inky tendrils, accented with leaves or an assortment of rude arthropods I’d be forced to assassinate. She sported a white snake of exposed scalp where the hair would never grow again—a pale haunting from the last time she would ever disobey Kuupa. Please admire her smooth skin, a skin that stole the sun’s rays in summer and returned them in winter, a skin mired in mud and the frantic footprints of insects. She was unlike the ladies of television with sleek hair and macaw-colored clothing. She wasn’t as frail or willowy as the MoFos in magazines and wobbling along runways. The only crow’s-feet she concerned herself with were mine, which she loved to inspect up close as I used the opportunity to work on her counting: “One, two, three, four toes!” Dee was speckled like the ink-spattered wings of her owls, brushed with bites and bruises and scars—tattoos of the brave. Her natural stance was a slight squat, charcoal feet clawing into the earth, quad muscles poised for a sprint. Her body was not a canvas to accessorize; it was too busy with the business of healing—fingers and toes bedeviled by dark shadows from a battle with frostbite, entangled roots of sunken scars across her chest, invisible jigsaws where her bones had fused themselves back together. Her body was busy scaling spruce, digging up the earth, and pounding barefoot across frigid waters. It ferreted, tracked, and burrowed. It growled and squeaked and chittered. Dee was a gorgeous atlas of falls and toothmarks and the crystallized peril of ice, earthy and unbridled. Like her skin, she had calloused and had long given up crying. I could barely keep clothes on her, and she wouldn’t touch a shoe, sniffing them suspiciously and hurling them into the nearest blackberry tangle, even when the owls brought her every size of sandal and mukluk from here to Nightmute. But my goodness, was she strong and blistered and beautiful in the way she tore into the stomachs of salmon, or how her bewitching fingers danced along the feathers of owls during our nightly preenings. And at this age, she was big enough to host a raptor, which she did routinely. With a perfect fluting of notes or a gentle Oooo Oooo Oooo followed by a scratchy krrrk krrrk krrrk, she strode like a queen through Toksook. On her arm, our beautiful eagle Migisi or The Hook and his shock of phantom-white feathers. And always, always her eternally devoted crow nearby.
Dee wasn’t afraid of blood or darkness or death or fangs. In fact, the only problem with my perfect nestling was that she wasn’t afraid of anything. But the Alaskan wilderness was afraid of her. Seals hated her, with stories bubbling through Echo about culling and clubbing, red spills on snow. They bobbed above the bay’s biting swell and barked colorful insults. Rather understandably, red-backed voles—the rodent equivalent of butt plugs—despised her. Certain insects sent warnings through the fungal network about the creature preened by birds, singing creaky tunes about those who had been crushed by the cruel beaks of her defenders. Fish scattered when she neared. Earthworms all but held up “end of the world” signs at her. Rabbits brought her clumsy sounds into their long ears, sniffing the syrupy scent of her stride from far, far away. Even our extended owl parliament became uncertain of her occasional outbursts and blustering tantrums. It would start with a scowl, a squall blustering inside her, until she bared her teeth and screamed.
“What?” I’d ask her, in desperation. “Tell me! Tell me so I can make it better!” But she was already beating the abandoned ATV or striking a shovel into a brick building with metallic chimes after the latest attempt at shoeing her. She broke things—MoFo relics—in the dexterous crush of her fingers. A tree, the soil, or a plant would never receive her wrath, but her aggression caused a rustle in the leaves. Messages spread on the bejeweled backs of beetles. Dee teetered on a seesaw of delicate and dangerous, an unsettling puzzle no one could solve. And she was regressing. Dee was able to speak MoFo in clipped sentences, but she no longer wanted to practice words. I watched her press her head to the mud or sit motionless in a tree, lips moving as if she were talking to an imaginary friend, and I worried. And every night, her staring competition with the moon. She couldn’t sleep until she’d checked its spectral glow. She made up odd rules about things—walk under these trees; touch this, not this. I couldn’t stop her from sniffing lichen, tracing the scars of bark, or from following dragonflies on long, winding, and sometimes very dangerous walks. Was there something different about her beautiful brain? The owls watched silently, though I could sense a disturbance among them, subtle as the eye roll of a Brookesia micra chameleon as she gives her very last shit.
So, here we were, Professor Shit Turd and the empress of owls, who had led us to the shoreline on an ambling walk, where she stopped to inspect shells. She trailed her fingers along the foam, cupping her palms to magically form a chalice and douse salty spray onto the fat mats of her hair. I had taught her to collect and cache things, and she had a growing assembly of shells that made her cheeks lift. I projected loudly, competing with the Bering Sea and her wandering mind.
“She sells seashells on the seashore!” I said to her emphatically.
She ignored me, curled in
a perfect comma over a suicidal red sea cucumber who was loudly lamenting his terrible, terrible life choices. Dee carefully scooped salt water over him and hummed gently.
“Dee, don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things!”4
She dove her fingers into the soft, wet sand and smiled at its gentle suction, elated at the hermit crab that scuttled over her plum skin and on to finish the interior decoration of his fine home. She slipped her finger into her mouth, tasting sand. She wasn’t listening to my excellent lessons. She was in the mind of a crab, listening to the beckoning of the beach in front of the broken village of Toksook Bay.
“Dee! Again! The seashells that she sells are seashells, I’m sure!” I rapped my beak on a flatheaded rock in frustration.
Dee spun, baring her teeth at me with a low, shuddering growl.
“Words! Speak!” I said to her, but I’d already lost her to a gull’s crescendoing cackle, and she lifted her head to laugh back in his throaty language, a shared joke that broke me. My heart was sucked out with the tide. My worst nightmare was crystallizing in front of me.
I was failing. Dee was disappearing into the wilderness.
The Very Last of an extinct species didn’t care for my stories or the eminence of her full-flavored history. She was tuning her ears, straining to find the stories of Aura, the song of sand and soil. She knew the hidden secrets of owls and to steer clear of the stomach assassins of the Alaskan wilderness—death camas, skunk cabbage, arrow grass, cow parsnip, queen’s cup, snakeberry, devil’s club—but she could give a red-backed vole’s ass about their names. She knew these devils as the wild knows them—by sight, smell, by a minuscule murmur of her muscles, a silent stir in the intestines, with eyes that shine in the dark. Proper nouns, pictures of MoFos, and the pages of books did not light her up inside. A species devolving. I was terrified. I was losing her.
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