Feral Creatures

by Kira Jane Buxton

  Allow me one more complaint about Oomingmak: When he got to a certain number of winters old, he became exceedingly horny, crying out these weird musky tears and frequently taking out his sexual frustrations on the abandoned ATV. It was quite unsettling. Such an undignified state of affairs for a sleek EVS E-Force electric quad. Dee didn’t seem to mind, which speaks to her kind nature and excellent upbringing.

  Having Oomingmak around meant I had less alone time with Dee, something I resented greatly. So, to vent my frustration, I pulled his tail and found inventive ways to hop on his back and peck at his idiot mustache-shaped horns. I know it was immature, but it was also very amusing.

  So, there we were—me, Dee in the midst of a meltdown, and the great odiferous oaf. Shit, it had been a long time since she rescued that potbellied dingleberry. On the day in question, Dee’s meltdown mimicked the coastal storms that struck our bay with increasing intensity. It had started as a nice day. Dee sat atop Oomingmak, as she often did, cruising through the abandoned town in a hunt for additions to her magnificent feather collection and new places to paint. She was running out of good spots to decorate with her portraits of me, the evergreen, and the eight-pointed star, and occasionally of idiot Oomingmak. We had stopped for lunch—fish for Dee and me, green shit for Oomingmak. Dee had seen them up ahead from Oomingmak’s broad back. I had been trying to cure my hangover by amusing myself, stabbing Oomingmak in his backside, hopping to avoid the swishes of his tail as he tried to overthrow me. A round of robins suddenly burst into view, flapping erratically over Oomingmak’s dump truck physique.

  “The One Who Keeps! The One Who Keeps!” cried Turdus migratorius. They were twittering and giggling to themselves. The Migrating Turds had drunk like fish and were pissed as newts. Tee many fermented berroos.

  “You’re drunk! Swizzled! Out of your tree!” I said, not wanting Dee to see this spectacle.

  One of the Turds burped and plopped to the ground. This caused the others to vibrate with laughter.

  “Go away; we’re trying to have a peaceful lunch!” I scolded them, and they left due east as the Silly String flies. I apologized to Dee on their behalf. Some birds just can’t hold their liquor.

  Then I felt Dee tense. She stood upright, gingerly, arms out to balance, on top of Oomingmak, squinting to translate the shape of a herd of caribou who had neared the bay. A tiny gasp. She slipped silently from Oomingmak, that cloven clodhopper. Oomingmak and I sensed what would happen with heavy hearts as she tiptoed across a blanket of crunchy leaves and the buzzy world below her feet. She hid her body by crouching low to the ground.

  “She is sad,” Oomingmak said in his rich, barbecued baritone.

  “Well done, Einstein,” I said.

  “Oomingmak will do anything to better her. Dee looking for more family. Dee looking for more friends.”

  “Good god, Oomingmak, is it the lichen? Seriously, can you step away to fart? Jesus.”

  “We have to always happy her.”

  “I’m doing my best, dude. You, however, should reexamine your diet.”

  “I like lichen.”

  “I’m not sure it likes you.”

  “She is sad too much,” he said.

  I sighed and repositioned my wings. “You’re not wrong there, Oomingmak.”

  “I love her,” he said, and I knew he meant it, and not in the way that he loved his ATV. I darted my head side to side to take him in, the innocence in his watery, soy sauce eyes, eyes that reflected my troubled nestling. I looked at the horns he never used to harm, the inordinate number of flies that ascended from his copper swirls of fur in drunken curlicues. His irrepressible heart that was no doubt the size of a Heineken keg. What we knew would happen then happened. One of the caribou sensed Dee and the herd took off, running like dappled gray clouds on lanky, liquid legs. We watched her body language change as frustration filled her. She was fed up with being cooped up in the periphery of Toksook, of being squawked and shrieked at, fed up with the word “Danger!” and of being constantly supervised. She didn’t get to be an animal, but she got to feel caged.

  “Dee!” I bellowed. “How many times do we have to go over this? You are not an animal! It’s dangerous to be around caribou! You are a MoFo and you need to start acting like it!” It was at precisely this moment that Dee’s temper stuck out its thumb and hitched an Uber to a galaxy far, far away.3 Dee ran all the way back into the village, me and Oomingmak lumbering after her. She was already on the ATV when we caught up to her, which was fine because she sometimes sat on the ATV. But today she flipped the power switch, and the ATV, even to the surprise of itself, lit up and let out an electric hum. Oomingmak snorted in shock. And Dee, who had obviously been paying close attention as I’d demanded she plug in the solar charger while I described the ATV’s function to her, knew to disengage the parking brake and twist the throttle. The next thing we knew, she was tearing across the village, jamming her fists to blare its horn, the only vehicle on earth in motion. She swerved past the little shop, the post office and what remained of its windows. She careened over shrubs and an illegal mountain of owl pellets. Then she got in between the spruce trees and I started to panic, Oomingmak unable to keep up with her fingers and their choke hold on a handlebar throttle. Migisi chittered at me from above and I called back to her, urging her to stop Dee. Oomingmak’s back shuddered with ripples, presumably more shock; I’m not sure he realized his girlfriend had this sort of mobility. The last sound Dee made before the crash was a laugh, that golden laugh, and then, with a sharp crack, the ATV struck the solid trunk of a balsam poplar.

  Then there was silence.

  Migisi was piping out sharp notes of dread as she dropped onto the dented hood of the ATV, calling for Dee to answer. And Dee did, in a thin moan, wiping a hand across her forehead that was painted the red of a nagoonberry.

  “Fuck,” said Dee. I gasped. I have no idea where she learned that sort of language. She stumbled from the ATV and crouched by the balsam poplar, caressing the bark gently with her fingers, that terrible frown crowding her face. She was horrified at what had happened, horrified that she had caused harm to one of her beloved trees. But she hadn’t yet realized all of it. Oomingmak and I had, so we prepared ourselves. I hopped down from his back. Oomingmak trotted quickly to the ATV. Shrieks of horror filled the forest, but one scream in particular cut through our skulls and through the sky and through time itself. A short-eared owl plunged to the grass and landed. Her nest, a bowl-shaped masterpiece she’d carved from the ground herself, lovingly lining it with downy feathers and the grasses of her choice, was flattened, tattooed by the tires of the ATV. Her chicks no longer called for her. She lifted her beautiful facial disk, a porcelain dish of shock and grief, toward Dee, who was just now realizing what she had done. The trees, now filled with all of Dee’s guardians, shook with the weight of birds and a malignant heft of sadness. Kuupa appeared, alighting on a branch and catching up on the scene with glowing saffron eyes. A great horned owl cut a cold stare at the silver ring around her leg. Kuupa looked down at it and seemed to shrink.

  I was haunted by the shuddering, long-ago voice of a starving polar bear: “You keep a monster in your nest.”

  There has never been a more terrible sound than the sound of a grieving mother. That sound stole the breath from the obsidian forest.

  Oomingmak put his hulking mass in front of Dee with a thud of his mighty hooves. He let out a deep warning, a thundering rumble that sounded so much like the growl of three tigers I once met a lifetime ago. Migisi snatched up Dee’s outstretched arm and spread her wings, backing him up. I hopped in front of all of them, readying myself for talons I’d seen rip apart rodents year after year. After a cry from the great horned owl who had never fully accepted our Dee, the owls, every one—from burrowing to great gray to long-eared—lifted into the sky, leaving the branches to mourn them. We would nevermore be akutaq, the Yup’ik word for “mixed up together.” Dee fought her way past Oomingmak and huddled over the nest, humming
to the chicks, showing them the rhythm inside her, begging them to beat their hearts. Her tears rained gently down on their tiny bodies. Sad tears taste so different from other types of tears. Just ask the butterflies.

  This was the day that Dee lost her guardians—all but the snowy owls, a musk ox, a bald eagle, and me. And this was the day Dee came to hate herself with a perilous passion. The Black Tide crashed in around her, beckoning her to its fuliginous waters where it could wrap its demonic kelp around her ankles and drown her. Kuupa and I looked at one another, acknowledging the unspoken. We were doomed.

  I sat with Dee for hours, drinking up her tears.

  And it was right there, in a grieving forest empty of guardians, near a nest that ended in tragedy, that I got an urgent summoning. Horsetail stems rippled first, quivering in anticipation. Ostrich ferns were next to spasm in long sways. Then, to the shock of every living organism in that ever-blackening forest, although it hadn’t happened for so many, many years, the trees pointed their magnificent branches and called for me.

  Footnotes

  1“Melon” is what MoFos sometimes called their heads, while also what they called a protuberant and impenetrable fruit they injected with vodka. They were a very complicated species; I hope you’re keeping a list.

  2Gular fluttering is just me flapping my throat muscles to keep cool or when I get anxious, but thank goodness that never happens, am I right?!

  3In the time of MoFos, an Uber ride was when a driving MoFo picked you up in his Prius while blasting a Cigarettes After Sex album, and you proceeded to get in a highly inebriated argument with him about whether crows are allowed in his back seat right before you barfed on it. Curiously, no money was ever exchanged.

  Chapter 5

  S.T.

  Toksook Bay, Alaska, USA

  When trees have personally summoned you, it’s ethereal, magical, and difficult to weasel your way out of, like quicksand, jury duty, or that head-sized hole in Big Jim’s fence.

  “I’m not going; I can’t leave her,” I told Kuupa.

  “Go,” she said. And then she nailed me with that look (“pissed cyclops”) and I started hopping because I value my life. I despised leaving Dee in her vulnerable state, broken and bent over the ground nest, but her inveterately pungent guardian Oomingmak was there. Kuupa, Wik, Ookpik, Bristle, and The Hook were there. Our beautiful Migisi was there on a low bough, her eagle eyes the magnifying glasses of the animal kingdom. And the bees had come to Dee in her despair, composing a beautiful boiling across her arms as if to protect her with another layer. I heard the kazoo chorus of the young queen bee, a humming to heal the heart. She sang about the house of honey and bee democracy. I was reminded of an expression I’d heard on Aura from time to time, uttered in reverence by golden tortoise beetle, dwarf dogwood, or reindeer moss: “The future belongs to the backs of bees.” I reluctantly yelled to Dee that I’d be back in two shakes of an epileptic snail as I left the ebony forest, scrambling across lonely dirt roads that snake and vine through Toksook, my skin bristling with excitement.

  I hopped past Toksook’s tired scattering of blue and yellow houses. I skittered past rusting yellow fuel tanks that sat missing their purpose like the discarded Legos of giants. Great white wind turbines spun lazily in front of the bay, totems of another time. Power lines, many now severed and dangling like old fishing wire, loomed above me. Some of their poles leaned precariously, giving them the drooping, heart-singed look of the last barfly. I hated power lines. To other feathereds, they are perching spots. But to me, they would always be the vessel of a virus that destroyed humanity. It made me shiver to think that once upon a time, as we perched birds watched MoFos flit and fuss like ants below, the very thing that would annihilate all but one of them was running along a wire right between our toes.

  The wind’s glassy calls of “Come, come…” filled me. I had chills and not just because the Alaskan coast is colder than a penguin’s revenge.

  “I’m coming!” I crawked. I followed the green salute of common wormwood and the shy persuasion of Labrador tea. Everything around me trembled with anticipation. As I approached the shoreline, a lone deflated basketball refused to be bullied by the bay breeze, sullenly squatting on the sand as if it had given up hope. The Yup’ik had loved basketball, a sport that Dee could never play due to its collaborative nature. She sometimes bounced basketballs against buildings (yours truly taught her how to keep them inflated with the pumps I found cached in the locker rooms), and after, I’d excitedly show her photographs of her people—perhaps some of them even her family members—dribbling on polished courts that argued with squeaking sneakers. Perhaps the ones smiling fiercely from the bleachers were her family. I know she wondered where they had all gone. I didn’t.

  An abandoned fishing boat that hadn’t been swallowed by the bay sat gloomily in front of the surf, pockmarked by mollusks, partially submerged in sand. I often felt that Toksook Bay missed its MoFos as much as I did.

  “Where are you?” I called out. “Also, who are you?” I had been lured to our vanishing shore, a sliver of what it had been when I first came here. The seagrass gave a brittle hiss as if from the tombstone teeth of an old whiskey sipper. Seagrasses can be gruff, as they’re salty survivors, but they usually mean well. I puttered along the sand, listening to every earthy clue as to who had called me away from my nestling at such a time. I followed the shoreline, nodding to a western sandpiper whose knitting-needle beak was plunged deep into the sand. Once she saw me, her speckled head shot up, beak suctioned from the hectic underworld of the beach, that wondrous womb of the worms.

  “It’s you!” she gasped.

  “Yes, I am me. Did you call for me?”

  She gestured her black beak farther down the shoreline as I heard a bubbling sigh drift from the spume. There, sighed the spume, over there. It occurred to me then that my summoning hadn’t just come from Aura, but the underwater world of Echo too, setting off Roman candles in my chest. For the last lots of years it had been all about Dee, naturally, but for a moment, I felt a selfish jolt of importance.

  I was a corvid on a quest!

  “They’re calling for me,” I told the sandpiper with a puffed chest. “Not just Aura, but the aquatic cryptogram of Echo! No big deal!” I hopped faster. When my legs started to feel like spent matchsticks, I neared a patch of the bay that was hoarding mounds of salt-bleached driftwood. I caught the tail end of the underwater dawn chorus sung by fish every day. It sounds a lot like the horn section of the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra.

  And then everything went silent. Even the grizzled seagrass. The bay’s face gave away nothing with its gentle rolling.

  “Hello?” I said. A tiny pang strummed inside me, which then swelled into a terrible thought. What if I’d been summoned here as a distraction? What if someone wanted me away from Dee? I shook as if sand filled my feathers. I hopped on top of the enormous driftwood log pile and called out.

  “Who’s there?”

  Two pivoting eyeballs appeared between pale driftwood logs. And then swiftly disappeared.

  “Hey!” I said. “Hey, I’m here!”

  “You’re here,” said the crab. The eyeballs reappeared, swiveling in suspicion. His carapace was the purple of a dark bruise, his legs pumpkin orange. The crab lifted himself onto the driftwood. This took considerable effort because he insisted on waving his claws around to appear more threatening.

  “I am,” I said.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Did you call me?”

  “Call you what?”

  “Call me here?”

  The crab got irate. “I was called here!”

  “Are you pulling my leg?” I asked. The crab’s eyes widened in horror and I realized my impudence immediately. Pretty much every entity on earth is after a crab’s stems; they are understandably a little sensitive.

  “I’m sorry, it’s just that the seagrass summoned me—”

  “The seagrass summoned me!” He was now nervou
sly snipping at nothing with his claws, eyeballs akimbo, and I was beginning to lose my patience with this unstable crustacean.

  “Listen, Crab, I was definitely called for—I’m The One Who Keeps!”

  “Oooooh. Oh. Oh, this is embarrassing.” The crab blushed a deep orange. “I thought I was being called. Thought this was my big moment. Even brought this to celebrate!” The crab’s right claw disappeared in between the driftwood and emerged with a small silver fish. “I was under a trench when the calling started, and to be honest, my hearing’s quite shitty and sometimes I just get confused in general. I’m called The One Who Creeps.”

  “I see. Do you know who called for The One Who Keeps?”

  Again with the retinal gymnastics. “Wow, what a delight you are! Commenting on my body, rubbing in your cosmic importance! And you haven’t said even one nice thing about my fish…” He hoisted the expired fish above his head as if flaunting the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

  I stepped toward the crab to get a better look at his fish.

  “Whoa, steady! Back off, sand lance swindler!” He was now brandishing his right claw like a rum-addled Captain Jack Morgan. The Dungeness crab then launched from the driftwood with a small splash.

  I searched the beach. The bay breathed in and out, bristle worms pinpricked the sand with holes as the ocean sucked back its salt water. Whoever summoned me didn’t show themselves. I felt my stomach churn with the tide. Now I was sure of it; this had been a distraction. I started a deranged hop, wings splayed in a mad dash for the forest. I’m shit at counting, but I probably got in fifteen hops before I heard an aquatic explosion behind me. I ducked behind a boulder, certain my eyeballs were about to meet a ballistic missile submarine.

  It was not a submarine. The creature I saw was walking on its teeth. He stabbed his sword-long canines onto dead wood, using them to launch his gargantuan mass onto the ashen cemetery of driftwood. His movement was peristaltic but magical, blubbery form flopping in jellied inches. He was the color of roast beef. He shook his massive head, tusks cutting the air like Zeus’s chopsticks. And his whiskery mustache—if I remember my Nat Geo correctly, his mystacial vibrissae—had a life of its own, bristling and pricking its quills to suck up who I was and what I was about. That mustache—holy hot dogs—what a thing of beauty, as if a small imperious porcupine had been coronated as sovereign of this creature’s upper lip. I have since written shockingly bad poetry about this mustache. All these years I’d been daydreaming about the Taj Mahal, and here, the eighth wonder of the world had come to me.