He called to her in a rumble not unlike a Big Jim belch. She bellowed back. Without Aura, Dee had somehow summoned her beloved bees, who had called for the birds, who had summoned Alaska—Dee’s owls and the bears and Oomingmak. And I suddenly remembered all that time, surely weeks, we hid at the McMenamins sanctuary surrounded by a herd of elephants, the endless hours Dee spent among flowers, humming to the bees that flittered around her and danced across her skin. How I kept dropping stones into Scotch and worrying there was something wrong with her beautiful brain.
Dee had clicked her ruby-red mukluks and called home.
The bees must have taken to the air to spread word of the danger we were in, to get news to her Alaskan guardians. And these beautiful beasts—bird, bear, ox, and bee—must have made a journey of two full moons across tundra and wilderness, braving forests of terrible creatures with destruction in their DNA. An adventure story only they could tell. I’d worried about Dee regressing, but her humming had been cries for help as she tapped into the bee network—a backup for broken Aura. I remembered how the Anna’s hummingbird had helped Budiwati, Pressa, and me by distracting Changed Ones. “The bees sent me!” she had said. Clever, clever Dee had done it all in a language I’d never known. Just as she’d done with the wolves and ravens when we needed help. She had done it Dee’s way.
The future belongs to the backs of bees.
Oomingmak lifted his head and roared, and the Great Wall Of Musk Oxen strode forward, their multiton bodies crashing down on the earth below. The tigers bolted. The birds keened. The polar bears started a fearless lumber, driving the mass of Changed Ones backward. The Wasp Queen watched the mass of horned ruminants in motion, her posture changing.
In her mosaic of eyes she had seen the future, a brutal crushing under hooves built to break ice. Here was her greatest fear. Extinction.
“Go!” she cried in a sharp voice, the scratch of steel. And The Changed Ones started to back up, slowly at first, as if unsure, and then, when they saw the Ovipositor in a whirring winged evacuation, they too ran. Skittering back toward the Chateau’s entrance and beyond.
A prehistoric bird with the blood of a dinosaur burst onto the scene, pausing to toss back her electric-blue head and roar at the clouds. The feathers of her body shimmied like a saucy 1920s flapper. Budiwati was no longer a beast of burden, but an animal of autonomy. A MoFo named Walt Disney once said that “All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” Budiwati pursued The Changed Ones with the galloping gams of a velociraptor.
Dee ran us fearlessly between the snow-mountain bodies of polar bears, toward the great approaching line of oxen. Toward Oomingmak’s enormous nostrils, the bony plate, his fairground–teddy bear ears and eyes—great brown lakes shimmering with love for Dee, a thing that transcended words and worlds. Dee nimbly navigated hulking oxen bodies to swing us up onto Oomingmak’s great brown back. A place that felt like home.
The Changed Ones scrambled like illuminated cockroaches ahead. Our bone wall of horns drove them out. We, creatures with hearts free to fly, drove them out with the most powerful force on earth. Love.
And though I was weak and in pain and consumed by that old familiar smell of musty moss and burrito farts, I gave Oomingmak’s back a quick stab with my beak for old times’ sake. I couldn’t help myself.
I was pretty overjoyed to see that furry fuck.
Chapter 35
S.T.
Wandering in the woods, Juanita Bay Park wildlife habitat, Kirkland, Washington, USA
Dee! Look!” I called out. The sky was a quilted comforter of clouds. I’d found a perfect patch of chanterelles. Dee loved our mushroom foraging. Oomingmak had fallen asleep under a fir a ways back, snoring like a broken buzz saw, no doubt dreaming of his old girlfriend who sat rusting gently in an Alaskan forest. No one could accuse Oomingmak of infidelity. Dee ran her fingers over the mushrooms, releasing sweet, fruitful scents.
“No, Astee. Nat eat.” She was right, the chanterelles weren’t ready. Nature’s circadian rhythms danced inside of Dee. She read the natural world like a book with butterfly wings and beetle bums for pages. This little hybrid who had the admiration of bees and the moss monarch. Dee, the little MoFo who made me a better crow.
Kuupa swooped overhead and screeched in disapproval at my mushroom selection. At the same time, there was a blast of sound, like a musk ox farting in his sleep.
Overkill, I thought. Everyone’s a critic.
Kuupa was hunting too, checking in with her owlet throughout the day with her one omniscient eye. I thought of red-backed fucking voles for the first time in a long while and suddenly lost the will to live. The silver ring on Kuupa’s taloned foot glinted above me, rippling my skin into crow bumps. One day I’d ask Kuupa about that ring, about what a MoFo had done for her a long time ago when she was an owlet. The thing, small and seedlike, that unlocked Kuupa’s heart for a MoFo nestling. About the small act of kindness that caused a ripple effect in concentric circles through time and saved the last MoFo on earth.
Another story for another time.
Dee and I focused on the golds and gloomy grays of mushrooms. Later, we would forage for fish and rodents to bring to Migisi and her three brand-new eaglets. You’d be so impressed by the nest Migisi built. My god, it was a monstrous masterpiece, a mansion in the sky. It weighed about the same as Big Jim’s Ford F-150. Dee had insisted we climb up and watch the eaglets hatch. I thought it would all be a bit intense for me, this birthing business, but it was miraculous. Dee coaxed the little slimy eaglets from their crisp shells with gentle piccolo notes. I became woozy and passed out for part of it, but I did bring Migisi a congratulatory fish head so as not to appear impolite. Her eaglets were cute little fuckers. Migisi was pleased as pudding.
“They look like tiny silver clouds with fuck-you faces!” I told her.
I watched Dee inspect mushrooms. She took what she needed and not a mushroom more. All things gossamer in the web of reciprocity.
My ribs were still delicate, so I did a lot of hobble-hopping around and pretending to know what I was doing—business as usual, really. Not totally beguiled by mushroom exploration, I slipped into a daydream of a bungalow over turquoise Bora Bora waters and then a recent memory of the musk oxen and polar bears driving out The Changed Ones. We’d claimed our territory back, sending The Changed Ones scattering. There hadn’t been a trace of them since. They had just vanished. There were worries about their evolving, coming back in greater numbers—worries as tangible as thorns—but we’d bought ourselves time. Tomorrow was a gift horse’s glistening teeth. Against every odd, we’d lived to see another sunrise. I watched Dee, absorbed by the simple pleasures of the soil, thinking, What an extraordinary luxury to cast a shadow.
I remembered that soon after The Changed Ones had gone, Pressa had forced me to rest. I had woken up to The Hook’s moonflower-white wings.
“They’re calling for you,” he said.
“Who?” I asked.
“Hoo!” he responded, in owl.
“No…oh, fuck,” I said. What the hell. I deserved a lie-in! The early bird might catch the worm, but he also snatches the many adverse symptoms of sleep deprivation. Kuupa swooped down in front of me, incinerating me with the burn from her one great eye.
“I’m coming!” I said, leaping into action. Curiosity—my old nemesis—gnawed away at me and I agreed to talk to the polar bears.
The celebration of Ice Bears was standing in an intimidating mass that looked like the Alps. I gingerly hopped along the ground until Dee scooped me up, walking tall and proud toward a mountain range of white bears. Thankfully I don’t wear pants, for I surely would have shit in them.
An old female bear spoke first. “I am The Huntress Of The Floe. We, Seal’s Dread, are so grateful that what we heard was true,” she said with a voice as sharp as cracked ice.
“And we’re grateful for your help with driving out The Changed Ones,” I told her from Dee’s smooth fingers. “But, w
hy have you stayed here? Why did you leave Alaska?”
The bear sniffed at the air with a stupendous nose like a moist lump of coal. “The Ice Kingdom melts. The ice always melts now.”
I nodded. Their home was warming, turning to a water world. Echo would expand and The Ice Bears had no choice but to pad south.
“But that’s not why we came,” she said. “We are here because of The One Who Keeps.”
“Aha!” I puffed up with pride. “That’s me!”
“No,” she said. She turned her gargantuan white body to make room for another. A polar bear twice as big as The Huntress Of The Floe lumbered to the front of the bear clan. I felt Dee’s knees buckle at the sight of him.
“This is my son,” she said, her sounds filled with a glacial loneliness. I pictured a landscape of ice, sharp peaks, and sparkling surfaces. I pictured refracted rainbows, a hollow longing, a polar bear’s endless searching. “This is Tornassuk. He is The One Who Keeps.”
Oh no, I thought. She’s confused, maybe unstable. There was quite enough identity theft going on around here. I’d set her straight.
The enormous male bear towered over Dee. He stared at the last MoFo and winced as if it pained him. Dee reached her hand out.
“Careful, Dee!” I said. But her hand, fingers splayed like a peacock fan, hovered steady. The enormous bear took a hard sniff. He pressed his moist nose to her palm.
“Uh, sorry guys, you’re mistaken,” I told the bears. “My name is Shit Turd and I’m an American crow. I am The One Who Keeps.”
Tornassuk spoke. His voice was booming, rattling like ice in a globe-sized glass. “And so, we have the same name. We have come a long way. The owls knew to follow the summoning of the bees. We know she called them. She is your cub?” he asked, staring hard at Dee. Dee was shiny-eyed, mesmerized by his mountainous presence.
“She is Dee,” I said. “She belongs to no one.”
The great bear nodded his blocky head. “I too am the keeper of a Skinner cub,” he said. My heart froze. His mother, the great white bear, let out a low rumble, urging him to tell the whole truth. He continued. “When the storms worsened and the seas became angry, The Ice Bears moved into the land. We saw what had happened to the Skinners. Some of us perished.”
Another bear behind them bellowed in bleak pain. It clung to us all like cold wet clothes. Grief.
“We found a small Skinner cub. I knew because I saw it written in the ice lights—I was The One Who Keeps—and I took in the little cub, a tiny furless boy, and I cared for him.”
“We, The Hunters Of The Floe, Seal’s Dread, knew to listen to Onida. We protected him as if he were an ice cub,” said his mother.
Tornassuk took over. “He was growing fast. We fed him the sweetest slips of our meals. We taught him the way of The Ice Bears…” He stopped, his sad eyes scanning the length of Dee’s arms.
His mother continued. “Our cub ventured out on his own to fish. He was old enough then—his muscles and skin had thickened. He could handle the ice. But there was another out in the ice fields. An alone. A wild-eyed bear who had not recovered from the days of starvation, a bear with murder on her mind. A Seal Slayer who hated the Skinners for everything they’d done to her. And she took him from us. Left us with nothing of him, barely even bones. We believed he was the Last Of The Skinner Cubs, gone.” The bears went quiet. Their sorrow hit me like an icy front.
There had been another MoFo. There had been a boy out there in the tundra. How far away had he been from the owls, Migisi, and me in Toksook? What if I had known? What could I have done to save him?
“Many years ago, I almost lost my son, Tornassuk. We know the pain of loss,” said The Huntress Of The Floe.
“What happened to the bear who…did this?” I asked, remembering the musty lichen smell of her, how she’d clamped her jaw on Dee’s tiny skull. Only now I knew that there had been more than frigid hunger at play—she’d been out for vengeance. I thought of why she’d stopped, backing away from Dee. How I’d screamed that she was my cub. Had she lost her cubs at the hands of the MoFos? Had she heard me in the softest part of her heart? I’d never know. But I suddenly felt colder than I’d ever felt.
“I brought her a seal’s end,” said Tornassuk, The One Who Keeps. He said this without hate. He said it as it is done in the animal kingdom, a necessity to survive. I imagined bright scarlet snow. “When the owls told us of the other Skinner cub, that she was the true last and that she was in grave danger, we came. We did it for our sea bear, for the cub we lost,” said Tornassuk, The One Who Keeps. “And we did it because the Beasts must be stopped. When A Kind becomes too great in number, the whole of nature conspires to swipe it back to balance. To freeze the flow. We must do this to survive.”
I thought of the wolves and ravens working together. Genghis and his Orange. Me and Dee. Dee and three tigers. My friendship with an entire parliament of owls. Me and penguins for shit sakes. Trees with a million differences in the golden spray of their leaves in sylvan alliance. Big Jim and Nargatha. Survival didn’t have to be stolen adaptations and horror—it could be friendships. He was right. We were stronger akutaq. Unlikely alliances were the very cornerstone of survival.
The polar bears didn’t return to Alaska. The territory the musk oxen had afforded us was big enough for predators and prey under their aegis, all creatures furred, feathered, and scaled trying to survive. The Ice Bears liked being close to Dee; it helped with the glacial weight of losing a cub. They spoke to us about the dangers ravaging Echo. The Darwinian War. About a tide that was about to turn…
I shook off that old MoFo habit of memories to enjoy mushroom foraging with Dee. We’d wandered deeper into the trees, so that the sky soon became a viridescent patchwork of leaves. Without the threat of The Changed Ones, creatures had come out of hiding. The sky sang in blue, the grass grinned in green. Butterflies and dragonflies danced in a daydream. And then Dee made a sharp cheenk!—a robin’s alert chirp. I was on a rock in between the jutting phalluses of mushrooms. Dee was up ahead. Up among the glittering green of leaves, I saw that the trees were filled with squirrels. The squirrels were eerily still. I saw their shining eyes, their focused stares. And I started to worry.
Dee was a rabbit. Slight squat. A coiled spring. Staring up ahead at the trunk of a large western red cedar with focused feline eyes. I tracked her eyes again. And I saw him.
I blinked my eyes. I windshield-wiped with my nictitating membranes to be sure.
There, next to the trunk was a MoFo.
Standing on two legs with a straight spine. His hair was fawn brown, lodging to a single leaf. Sweat glistening on pale, mud-mottled skin that wasn’t green. Thick beard like a dense clump of dried moss. He had a classic male MoFo shape, the shape of a bartender or Michael Angelo’s David or Jon Bon Jovi! A grown male MoFo, maybe the age of Big Jim. Clear eyes, not a trace of red. A ripped shirt. Dirt-colored shorts exposed knobby knees like two shiny baseballs. A bite mark throbbed on his arm—two smiles and a blooming bruise—telltale tooth emblem of a raccoon. Pressa would later help stave off this infection. His left hand was balled nervously at his side. Thunderstruck, he stared at Dee as if he’d found the mythical thing of a fairy tale. He had.
So here it was. I’d never given up hope. When you’ve waited for something so long and it finally arrives, you can taste it, sweet as sap. I resurrected words I’d rehearsed every drunken night in Toksook Bay.
“Hello,” I said as I’d rehearsed to a chubby old stove so many, many times. “We’ve been looking for you. Thank god you’re alive.”
The MoFo stared at a silver-tongued crow, surely wondering if this was a trick of the forest, the misfirings of a lonely mind. I balanced on one foot, offering the other foot to shake, though a bit too far away, because that is a polite way to say hello if you’re a MoFo meeting another MoFo and I have never been good at fist bumps.
And then I said, “You are not the last one. This is Dee.”
A MoFo about to meet another M
oFo—the dream, utopia, paradise.
His eyes widened. He was understandably shocked to discover he wasn’t utterly alone as the singular biped on this planet. Here was a young female MoFo who moved like a wild animal. An especially handsome crow was talking to him and this was clearly disorientating. I hopped toward him.
Dee was in motion.
“Handshake, Dee!” I prompted, in case she’d forgotten her manners and my impeccable etiquette coaching. And then Dee was in front of the MoFo. There were two on this big beautiful blue! Imagine the last two rhinos on earth finding one another, no longer breaking under the burden of being the last. It was as if a curse had been lifted, an enchantment settling like cottonwood on all our skins. We all, even the lecherous lothario squirrels, I’m sure of it, felt a bright magic lighting up the future.
I would have screamed in joy but didn’t want to startle this male MoFo. First impressions were everything; Big Jim learned this the first and only time he met Sarah M. from Tinder as he shook her hand and simultaneously farted.
Squirrels salivated from the branches like Pavlov’s dogs, if they’d been plush-tailed perverts.
“Hello!” I said again. And Dee was in front of the MoFo and her hand was out, clever girl. He buckled, emotion getting the better of him. He dropped to baseball knees, weak with relief. Only as I neared, I saw that his stomach was smiling.
Dee kept aloof eyes on his entrails as they slipped to the ground. They made an Echo purple-blue sound, the sound of an eel flopping on land. His eyes turned to glass.
No. No, no, no.
I scanned in horror, searching for sense. Dee held a jagged shard of glass slick with blood.
What had she done? What had she done?
But I knew.
Dee had used the cold defense strategy of a cassowary.
She turned to me, already anticipating my shock. She watched my last pea weevil’s worth of patience pack its bags and hail an Uber.
“Astee, danger!” She lifted up the MoFo’s right hand, unclasping a switchblade from his death grip. She hopped over the pale body that posed so many questions, its stories slashed into extinction. Dee ripped open the MoFo’s bag, pouring out the contents.
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