Her eyes were smiling.
She was waiting for my response.
The crows had stopped breathing. I felt Migisi’s talons extend, her head snap from side to side as she assessed their reaction, waiting to learn who she’d have to kill if they came after her girl. Dee waited, salamander still, for my response, hope lighting up her face. I didn’t dare move, not sure of what would happen next or what a murder of crows might do after the violence they’d just witnessed.
There wasn’t a chance for them to react. Dee was in action again. She checked to make sure her victim wouldn’t rise. Running fingers along the elongated tumor, she grasped it and shook it hard. And that’s when I realized that it wasn’t a tumor, but a malformed attempt at an antler. Dee studied the Changed One with animal instincts. She hovered over its hideous form, darting her head and taking in its abominable smell in quick sniffs. Then she whipped the phone charger from arthritic fingers and grasped it tightly like a snake. I opened my beak to yell, “No, Dee! Danger!” at her, but before I could, she’d flung the cord onto the snow. We watched, breathless as she sidled up to the nearest Sitka spruce and its blackened, crumbling trunk. Her fingers danced a beetle’s scutter across bone-dry bark, tenderly stroking the blackened bodies of moss. Dee placed her lips close to the brittle bryophytes.
Since I’d very first found Dee, her skin had always craved moss’s velvet caress. Moss was her particular passion, a cushion on which she often slept, the lining of her diapers when she was just an owlet, its fuzzy face always her first source of comfort when she was in a temper that would impress a bull elephant in the grips of musth. I waited for her eyes to well, for tears that did not come. Migisi’s head shot up. Suddenly, Dee was tearing at the bark with her fingers, ripping off great chunks of the tree’s skin. Moss flew. Splinters ricocheted. Panic bit me. Dee would never harm her trees, not even a dead one. I began to fear what the contact with this Changed One had done, whether something had happened when she saw the phone charger…
As broken bark took flight, something came into view. Inside the tree was a gleaming white. She worked quickly, dispatching tree skin and exposing what looked like ivory mucus, a pseudotransparent jelly. The crows nervously shifted their weight, silently unsettling the snow from branches. Dee grunted as she split off a skunk-sized slab of bark. She stepped back to give us a clearer view. All above her, a dead forest full of corvids leaned in to make sense of the senseless. The pale, gelatinous goop had a ghostly sheen to it. Its transparency revealed the form trapped inside and the thudding whomp of a heartbeat. Dee used the sharp claw of each fingernail to tear at the jelly. The more mucus she flung to the ground, the more we saw. Inside the jelly was a being whose skin had hardened, frostbite black. Its eyes were closed as if in a trance or state of dormancy. The beginnings of appendages protruded from its side and it was covered in a carpeting of fine, spiny hairs. A MoFo. A MoFo in the midst of an unprecedented transformation. There was no doubt in my mind, this creature and its kind were hollowing the trees. And though I was born from the chasm of an egg—a passport to the kingdom of nature—Dee had known before I had.
Dee slumped onto her knees, several feet from a neck she had fractured. She looked at me one last time, waiting. I gave her nothing, afraid of what the slightest sound might summon. She pressed a shell-like ear to the great trunk of the spruce and raised her fist to its dark bark. Then, the crow who raised her watching in horror, she smacked her knuckles against the wood. The tapping was rapid, a hollow echo sounding out. She thumped hard and I watched her knuckles glow pink and deepen into an angry scarlet.
Stop, Dee. Stop, I tried to tell her telepathically, hoping that our constant contact had afforded us that luxury. She persisted. I made motions to leap from Migisi’s back, hop to the branch, and stop her from harming herself. From summoning something. Migisi’s back muscles tightened—don’t move, they said. As Dee rapped her fist against the dead wood, she hummed her song of the hive, the nasal, buzzy song she sang the most. The crows shot each other frightened glances. They hopped on slaughtered branches, poised for flight.
And then, out of a chalky sky came a showering of airborne missiles, black and white with crimson streaks. The speckled bodies landed in the decaying arms of the tree, Dee kneeling below them. They appeared confused by who had summoned them, but sparks of excitement soon filled their glossy black eyes. There was a troupe of them—a gang, a descent—and they got to work quickly, drilling their beaks into the weakened wood of a sad spruce cemetery. The feathereds made fast work of the surrounding trees, boring quick holes in a buckshot pattern, exposing the horrible white within. The trees were all filled with encased MoFos.
And what was happening hit me. These MoFos were in larval form, transitioning into fir tree’s sworn scissor-mandibled enemy, insects that could hungrily ravage thousand-year-old giants, devouring them from the inside out. The MoFos were becoming bark beetles. What had Ghubari called them? The Masticators. And by some miracle, Dee had known how to summon the enemy of an enemy.
The birds drilled into the gelatinous goo and started greedily consuming slimy larvae, a delicacy in the woodpecker world. More woodpeckers in a dizzying bedimming of black, white, and red arrived, answering the indefatigable percussion of the last MoFo on earth. They drilled her beats back to her. They fused themselves to fir tree corpses and filled belly and beak with imitation beetle.
And before any of us could catch our breath (except the tigers, Olan yawning loudly), another swarm arrived. A drone-like buzzing made our beaks vibrate as dark clouds swirled around us. We watched, incredulous, as insects of the order Hymenoptera descended on the trees, membrane-thin wings like mechanical things. We witnessed one of the most feared predators of the insect kingdom—virtually every insect on earth has a wasp species to haunt its exoskeleton—arrive en masse, humming an answer to Dee’s song. A sea of wasps squeezed their way into the exposed bark, seeming not to care about the presence of woodpeckers. Thousands of fertilized queens used their stingers, drilling and plunging their ovipositors into the changed bodies of MoFos. I gasped. What would happen next was one of nature’s darkest happenings. The wasps were going to lay their eggs. And their larvae were going to eat the MoFos. From the inside out.
Not only had Dee summoned the predators of bark beetles, but she’d somehow summoned the egg layers among the wasps. She’d called on queens. She had conjured wild magic before our eyes—a symphony of superparasitism.
A sound louder than the rumble and purr of wasps and the drill of specialized beaks cut through our skulls. We all knew this sound. Perhaps Migisi knew it best. A hawk’s scream, the aerial call, the cry before talons rip through skin. Only we knew it wasn’t a hawk. More calls sounded out. They were on the move. Dee shot up from her kneeling position. Scarlet teardrops dotted the snow below her knuckles. She lifted her arms, gesturing to her corvid crowd.
“Caw, caw, caw, caw, caw!” Dee mimicked the corvid alarm. And she didn’t need to repeat herself. Black bodies took heed and shot from deceased branches. Dee broke into a run underneath a winged blanket of black. The tigers erupted into a run to join her. Migisi and I leapt from the Sitka spruce, casting an eagle’s shadow on the nestling who ran like a startled caribou below. Kraai was suddenly by our side.
“The fledgling,” he said, and I flinched, waiting for his verdict. “She is our greatest hope.”
I exhaled. The violence that had gotten Dee exiled from her beloved community of owls had become an invitation to a murder of crows and an improvised sanctuary of animals. They’d watched her use cunning, patience, stealth. With a cat’s kill skills, she’d gone straight for its neck. And lastly, she’d done the unthinkable, this one who got lost in the wonder of sea stars, who lived to tickle salmonberry-stained fingers delicately in soil, craved the spongy stroke of moss on her skin, the kisses of rain and butterfly feet, this MoFo with a lifelong yearning to fly. She’d drawn on passion. She’d used what she learned from the natural world against her own species.
“What do you mean?” I asked him, feigning ignorance.
“She is so…wild. She’s a weapon.” Excitement trailed off him as we sped across a wintry sky. “And she’ll do what you tell her. She was waiting for your approval down there, waiting to see what you thought of what she’d done. Ghubari will be so thrilled to know about—”
“Ghubari will not know about this,” I cut him off, my voice shaking to hold back anger. “Kraai, you have done nothing but show me kindness. You are murder to me. But I will ask one more favor of you. Ghubari must never know about this, about what you saw her do down there. Dee is not a weapon or a tool or something to be offered up to The Changed Ones. She is mine.”
“Yours?” he asked, taken aback.
“She is my nestling. I’ll keep her safe. I’m The One Who Keeps.”
A kettle of hawks screamed in the distance. Another lie I told myself.
“I, I don’t understand why—”
“Just do it for me, Kraai! Perhaps if you had your own nestling, you’d understand.”
“I have around eighteen of my own—”
“Dammit, Kraai! Please!”
Kraai looked at the MoFo below, bounding across a white world. In bird’s-eye view, a hooded heroine lunged alongside three enormous tigers. They growled. She roared back. Midrun, she stooped to snatch up a rusted golf club which she used to bait them. Dee raised her head to the sky, hood flopping back from her flushed face. Migisi wheeled above her. The last MoFo raised her arms like outstretched wings, a look of jubilance lighting her from the inside. She smiled, waiting for my approval, for me to tell her she’d done good. I wouldn’t. I hated what she’d done. This was not how I’d raised her. She was not a wild and violent thing.
“Astee!” Dee yelled. “Astee!” Nonsense. Gibberish.
From my high spot in the sky, I gave her nothing but a glare of disappointment. I looked away.
“Faster, Migisi!” I yelled, urging her to keep up with the murder. Mukluk and tiger paws pounded frosty ground. One upright MoFo, proud on fast legs, and a trio of Panthera tigris, capricious beasts of stripe and stature. They painted a white world in animal tracks. Behind us, something terrible was gathering like sinister clouds. Sharp screeches were multiplying, as if breeding in the air.
“S.T.,” Kraai said, “it’s one thing for me not to say anything, but I can’t guarantee the entire murder won’t scream about finding French fries.” A corvid expression, and he was right—crows are not known for their subtlety. “I’ll do as you ask, for you, friend. But I don’t know how you’re going to avoid involving her. I know you can hear them. You know what’s coming.”
When you’ve told yourself one lie, it’s a slippery piece of bologna. It’s a gateway to fabricating a whole new sparkling reality, one you’d prefer. One in which no one you love can get hurt. But I could hear them. The hawks were not hawks, but imitations of raptors. They were Changed Ones who’d no doubt been dormant. Now, their screeching conquered the airwaves, their strained calls to one another rattled around my skull, and I had to face the truth. The Changed One Dee had killed now lay motionless in the snow. But before the bones in her neck cracked, she had screamed the scream a species had been waiting for all this time. She had let them know. Of course she had. It was the driving force of evolution, of every living thing on earth, wasn’t it? Survival. They had been looking for their final chance at living, at reproducing. They had been looking for the last.
Haunting hawk screams battled one another. Closer and closer. A crescendo of chaos.
“S.T.,” Kraai said, “you must prepare. They’ve been awakened. They know she’s here.” Migisi let out a cirrus-high screech of fury.
The great hunt had begun.
Chapter 20
Nubbins the donkey
Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park, Scotland
Aye, there’s nothing like the wee hours of the mornin’. Rise like the grass, don’t be an ass—it’s a wee motto of mine.
Routine, discipline, regimen, vigilance.
This is how, when many of our cloven kin have perished, I—Nubbins, donkey of the Strathpeffer wilds—am a survival expert. They laughed at me back in the day, so they did. Called me stupid. Paranoid. A numpty. An utter tube. But back on our beautiful wee farm, in the great green fields, back when the luxuries of ear scritches and poop scooping were aplenty, I was preparing. I was rolling around in shite as a stealth tactic—to hide the smell of my hide. I stockpiled a sugar cube survivalist stash. I ate sweetie wrappers to build up an iron constitution, elite training for my donkey body. I apprenticed with the foxes as they used earth’s magnetic field to hunt, learning to (mostly) distinguish between inner guidance and gas. I mimicked their nocturnal territorial screams, which resulted in an inconvenient stint at the vet’s and a time-wasting head scan. I practiced hunger strikes and melee attacks on our feeding trough to the bafflement of my human.
I knew my time to shine had come the day our human didn’t come to the field. She always came for us, whatever the weather, and we’ve got a lot of that in Scotland. My survivalist senses kicked off.
I rallied the troops. Hamish the Hebridean sheep. Gregor the goose. Esme the Scots Dumpy hen. Bone Grinder the barn cat. And my battle buddy, Angus the Highland cow.
It took six misty mornings to convince Angus to leave our field once I discovered the electric fence was off. Angus, a spoiled show cow, had been used to fancy shows and cameras and pedi-pedis. Bovine models aren’t much for adventure. That and he’d finally scored with Margaret, our human’s other Highland cow. The affair was fast and furious—and quite gross, actually. Angus was totally exhausted; he’s pretty used to having it all done for him through artificial insemination. That jammy wee sod.
But eventually, I shepherded the troops out into the wild world (minus Margaret the Highland cow and Shelly the Shetland pony, whose faith is firm in the belief that the world ends at the bottom of the hill and that we would all plummet over the edge like plums off a wee tree). They were wrong about that. We wandered for a long time, encountering some collies, a few sheep, and some Ayrshire cows (a huge time suck as Angus fancies himself a wee Casanova—for the record, I hate having to listen to cow sex, but it’s marginally better than Angus’s poems).
Then we ran into humans. They were poorly—I suspected swine flu or mad cow disease, which is something I can’t mention around Angus; he’s a jessie, such a big girl’s blouse. I cannae convince him to get with the program and roll in his own shite. Angus is just too vain—he finds mud offensive and I have a hard time tearing his ginger arse from admiring himself in puddles, so I do. The humans we encountered were incredibly aggressive—especially when they saw Angus who’s a big ginger target, and they’d come flying for him and I’d have to kick ’em in their noggin or exact a melee attack. Despite having been born with two massive weapons attached to his heed, Angus was no help. He’s a cowardly custard, and unfortunately, a pacifist cow.
Sometimes you look back on your life and realize you were in training all along, and everything was preparing you for this moment. I looked back to when I was a wee donkey getting whipped within an inch of my life while ferrying fat-arse tourists across the beach. Every day my hooves bled, and my back felt like breaking. I got beaten for stealing the chocolate Flake out of a fatty tourist’s ice cream cone—I was doing her a wee service; she was the size of a barn! And then I took a wee nibble out of a young tourist who stuck his finger up my nose and that was the last of it. Wee Nubbins got the death penalty, headed for the glue factory. In the nick of time, our human rescued me, brought me to our beautiful farm in the countryside, and gave me homegrown apples. She put soothing creams on my knee scars and fetlocks and put me in a field to keep her prize Highland cow, Angus, from getting melancholy. Angus was prone to loneliness and afraid of other bulls. I saw it as a very noble job.
As we traveled over the years, I saw a lot fewer humans than in the beach tourist days. I don’t know if they died or fled.
Once in a while, we’d see one emerge from a nuclear shelter like a pale wee mole, but they never lasted long, and I couldnae trust them with Angus—he’s essentially a mobile Big Mac. No, I had to channel my fatso beach tourist anger and scare them away.
The Brave Beastie Bunch weren’t to last long. Bone Grinder the barn cat was excommunicated the second time he attempted to eat Esme the hen. We lost Gregor the goose in a storm. Hamish ran off with a flock of sheep looking to start a utopian commune in Cornwall. Esme the wee hen eventually went a bit off her heed, clucking a load of nonsense. She died of natural causes. We’ll miss the old lass.
We traveled great distances—the landscape is increasingly quiet, which is tough for Angus who loves a bit of gossip, but there’s loads of grass everywhere now, which is a nice perk. Deer and foxes have taken over. I once smelled a wolf and redirected us by telling Angus I thought I’d heard the band of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines who perform at the Royal Highland Show. I’ve followed the sun, gone the opposite way, up, down, back, forth, around, and I keep getting stuck in front of ocean. I’m actually beginning to think we might live on an island. I wouldnae tell Angus that—he’s a wee bit claustrophobic. We’ve been to Brighton three times and I have to creatively pretend it’s a new town each time to ease his mind.
If I’m honest, I don’t totally believe our human’s still alive. I just don’t think she would have given up on us. I’d never tell Angus that. I’ve said I know with great certainty that she’s out there, that she just got lost on her way back from Sainsbury’s. It’s only a wee fib, like when I told him hamburgers were made of squashed daisies. Hope seems more important than the truth, and I have a job I’ve been sworn to do. Och, he’s a wee naff, Angus, but he’s my wee naff, and he must never get sad or lonely. Such a massive great oaf, but one wee word and he’ll crumble like a chocolate Flake.
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