by Hal Johnson
Myron glowered at him, and spread in front of the fire his meager possessions. The cardboard tube he’d been carrying was sodden through the tape, and he went to open it, but suddenly Spenser kicked it out of his hands.
“Lene larbar, longeur baith lowsy in lisk and lonye!” Spenser shouted, his Scotch accent indecipherable.
“Are you insane?” Myron shouted back. “That’s a doomsday device!”
“Are ye insane to open such a thing? Dinna ye ever open that; there be wraiths in the wood.”
“What does that mean?”
“All right, all right,” Spenser said. “The moose I saw, he says they’re something in the forest, something big and terrifying he’s no seen here before.”
“Moose can talk?”
“Of course they cannae talk, but ye can tell. Ye can smell their fear. There’s something out there, and two shillings say it means ye nae guid.” No good, he meant. The word lion neither one mentioned, but the lion was out there, somewhere. Myron hoped that lions hated snow.
They dried the cardboard tube out as well as they could without opening it. It came out warped and stained. And then they traveled for two days straight, like fugitives. Afterward, the moose pretended nothing was different, but as he walked he moved his giant head, always, back and forth. At times he would stand stock-still and listen. Myron held his breath. The branchings of the sensitive antlers conducted sound very well, and a moose in full display has hearing far better than a human’s.
These were the days of fear. Every day Spenser combed the surrounding countryside for sinister tracks, but there were only the usual things: rabbits, deer, hikers. Once Myron caught a glimpse of a bald eagle gliding directly overhead, there in the dead of winter.
“I’ve never seen one of those before,” Myron said, in awe.
“We’ve got to get a bow,” Spenser said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously.
They bought one. Spenser wove Myron a kind of mask out of pliant branches, then stuck small deer antlers he’d dug up in it, and Myron made a sign out of garbage that read MOOSE RIDES: $5. They spent several days by the highway, and took a trip to town and spent all the money at a pawnshop on a children’s compound bow and several hunting arrows. They also got a decent meal and a sleeping bag that could roll up into a small pouch; which was the better purchase, as the eagle never returned. But Spenser taught Myron to shoot, and bade him keep the bow, and an arrow with a broad, jagged head, ever ready.
For there was danger in the forest. Previously, they had been spending a few days at one campsite, collecting enough food that they could march, or moose-ride, for a couple of days without stopping to forage; but now Spenser pushed them to move every day. Snow was all they drank. “It’ll get easier in the summer,” Spenser said. But Myron feared nothing now, and he was living a life of woodcraft and adventure and having a ball.
“Wait,” he said suddenly, “did they guess your riddle?”
“Did who guess my riddle?”
“The Unknown Men. Did they figure out the riddle you gave them?”
“They always figure out the riddles. They have a brazen head that answers all questions.”
“Okay. So what animal has a tail between its eyen?”
Spenser said, “It is a cat, when it licketh its arse.”
Myron laughed and laughed. If only, he thought, it hadn’t been so freezing cold. Also, they ran out of toothpaste.
Spenser’s hair had grown so long and wild that Myron taught him how to wrap it around his waist like a belt, after the fashion of old mountain men and explorers he’d read about. Book learning was good for something, at least.
One day, as Myron was untangling some fishing line, Spenser put a hand on his shoulder. Moments later, Myron felt a new prickling sensation. Spenser pulled him up by his shirt and dragged him over, through quite a few burrs and thorns, to a low fork in a dogwood tree. Peering between the two trunks, Myron saw, ambling among some pines, what looked like an enormous armadillo, ten feet long. Its gigantic shell taller than a man looked like a turtle’s, and armor plating covered its shaggy forehead and its tail, which was tipped with a spiked club like a morning star. Ponderously it moved, plowing deep furrows in the snow, and it browsed on pine needles.
“So that’s what the moose was worried about. But she’s harmless. She just doesn’t usually come this far north,” Spenser said.
“Does it know we’re here?” Myron asked.
“Of course, she just doesn’t care. She never talks to anyone.”
“She must be very lonely,” Myron said. He watched until with excruciating slowness the enormous bulk trailed out of sight.
That beast, last of an extinct species, was a relic of the past. But around the campfire, started with their soda-can mirror or, on cloudy days, with a book of matches from a convenience store, Spenser’s stories moved closer to the current age and finally entered what he called the Time of Troubles. He circled around the issue for a while before finally plunging into it. All times were times of troubles, after all, but at some point in the seventeenth century, “our people” (immortal lycanthropes, he meant) began to realize how things worked. At best the squirrel may have known for thousands of years that a fox and a beaver passed beneath his trees that were different from other foxes and beavers, and the squirrel may even have known that they were, like him, capable of assuming human form, but it was not until now that immortal lycanthropes pieced together that there was one of us for each species of animal (the idea that animals had species, as scientists use the word today, was still nascent); that we could only be killed by another of our kind; that the presence of another could be perceived from twenty or thirty yards; that only the beasts, as opposed to the birds or the cold and slimy things, were represented. No marsupials, either, and no egg-layers, like the platypus or the spiny echidna. All this we were finally piecing together.
The result was panic. Creatures who for millennia thought they were unique discovered they were only slightly unique; creatures who for millennia thought they knew all five or six similarly special beings now learned there were untold thousands more out there. An orgy of bloodletting followed. The tiger killed the tapir, the onager, the lynx and the leopard, the porcupine, the sloth bear, several monkeys, no one knows how many mice and shrews and hares and hedgehogs, and, in a fight that lasted three days on and off, the Indian elephant. Then he began to travel and killed the badger, the Javan rhinoceros, the wolf, the gnu, the quagga, the snow leopard, the spectacled bear, the impala, the chamois, the raccoon dog, the genet, the eland, the orangutan, and a dozen others, many of which Myron had never heard of. And then he crossed over to the Americas. The porcupine and the badger were dead, but there were still New World porcupines and badgers, many New World monkeys, and strange species that had never known something like a tiger had even existed. The puma went down fighting, and the pronghorn went down running. The two-toed sloth just went down.
But the tiger was not alone by any means. Everyone began to kill whomever he could, for fear that he would himself die. The chipmunk attacked the wildcat’s eyes, and the mandrill tore to pieces six kinds of baboon, the chimpanzee, and a pangolin. A general massacre came down upon the bats, strange, liminal birdlike beings hated by all, and the bats were too busy fighting among themselves to realize what was happening (though there were too many kinds of bats, far too many, to make a dent in). The aardvark used her claw-hooves on small or slow creatures until the hyrax bit off her tongue, and, unable to eat, she keeled over from weakness and the jerboa finished her off. But the hyrax had died, too. They were rotten years all around. Everyone who did not become clinically paranoid died. You were either always afraid or you were a goner.
But, after the easy marks and the innocent perished, the survivors, who were tough, or canny, or small, or elusive, eventually settled down. But some, their blood fired by the years of slaughter, turned their attention outward. Those were the days of action, although most of the actions were vain and futile, of course.
The flying squirrel murdered Friedrich Nietzsche in the madhouse. The babirusa somehow contrived to set off the volcanic explosion of Krakatoa. The gorilla assassinated Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas, and her friend the Barbary ape conspired, tried, and failed to assassinate Napoleon III; was sentenced to death; would not die; and so he was sent to Devil’s Island, from which he predictably escaped, for no such island can long hold a Barbary ape. “I knew him well,” Spenser said. “He went on and fought in the Civil War, for the Union, under the name Charles DeRudio, and later survived the battle of Little Big Horn, too, always running rashly and some would say nobly into danger, to no result. He was killed by the wolverine.”
“But you know Gloria?” Myron asked.
“Who?”
“The gorilla.”
“Oh, sure, sure. She came to Scotland in the reign of good King James the Fourth, actually, which is where I met her. She only spoke French, I remember. Not long after that, the French king forced James to invade England, and he died, with the flower of Scottish gentility, near Flodden Field; and Scotland never recovered.”
Myron wasn’t sure if he believed this, that Gloria had gone to Scotland in the sixteenth century or that she had been an assassin in Spain in the nineteenth. He wasn’t sure in general what to believe. It didn’t help that whatever his subject, Spenser returned to the basic idea that no matter what monumental deeds of bravery or chivalry he witnessed, these only affected things in the short term, and the short term was precisely what should not affect him, or Myron, at all. Even the improvements—like when the Scottish kings, at long last, stopped burning witches—were cosmetic, unimportant when compared to the ways in which life, and all people, kept getting worse. The vast forests of Europe had been mowed down to make room for idiots in plaid pants and sandals, and now the vast forests of America were going, too, to make room for idiots in Bermuda shorts and Nikes. Year after year people became weaker and stupider and more inured to mediocrity. All under the direction of obscure and sinister secret societies. Sometimes their motivation was naked lust for power; sometimes it was ineffable; sometimes it seemed like a personal vendetta against Spenser, and when he got to that point, the moose started to sound like a loon.
And one afternoon, while Myron was setting snares, the moose came back from foraging. His head was bleeding, and he had no antlers. He turned back into a human and washed his bloody forehead off before dressing.
“Are you all right?” Myron asked.
“A headache, nothing more. It should’ve happened months ago, but I’m frequently off schedule.”
“But you’ll be better now,” Myron suggested.
“Sure, sure.”
“I mean, this must be a load off your mind.”
Spenser didn’t suss out the pun for a few eyeblinks, and when he did he threw a snowball at Myron. Rebounding, the snowball struck the snare Myron had just set, and a sapling springing to attention shot a flurry of snow back at Spenser, covering him head to toe. Myron laughed so hard, he almost wet himself.
“Fy, skolderit skyn, thou art bot skyre and skrumple!” Spenser roared, but he was joking, now, too. They both fell down and laughed. Myron was looking forward to warmer weather, but that was all, he realized, he was looking forward to. They were alone in the wide woods, and there was nothing to fear. For the first time in years, in all the years he could remember, he was satisfied.
(Later that day:) Spring comes like a miracle, and the repetition of the miracle has still not cheapened it. There exist many sentimental descriptions of the first bluebird of the spring, or of a crocus, blooming up through the melting snow. Myron, for his part, had pried up and half overturned a hollow log and saw underneath a dark snake, its distended jaw half swallowing a frog. The frog’s legs were still kicking. Meanwhile, from the frog’s back end, its cloaca to be precise, a long, pale strand of spaghetti was twisting and writhing. It took Myron a moment to realize what was happening. The strand was a parasitic worm, and, as its host was being devoured, it was desperately trying to escape digestion by inching its way into the open air.
“That is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen,” Myron said.
Spenser came and looked over his shoulder. “You know what that means,” he said.
Myron was temporarily terrified that the scene was a revolting allegory he would have to determine the meaning of. But instead, Spenser said, “They’re not hibernating. It means spring has come.”
It was not at that moment, it was the next morning, or possibly the morning after that it happened. Myron had broken camp and packed everything they had—the bedding, extra clothes, the doomsday device, the archery equipment, and sundries like fishhooks and the soda-can mirror—into duffle bags, and he stood there, next to the moose, unsure of where to put them. Always before he had hung them on the antlers. The moose was pacing, impatient to leave. He swung his great head toward Myron.
Myron said, “I just don’t know where to put—”
And then there was a crashing in the forest. Something burst through a bush, sending up an enormous spray of snow, and dimly through that spray Myron could see the figure of a bear, brown and enormous, bringing a paw down on Spenser’s neck. Spenser went over with a great crash, taking a midsize tree down with him. Instantly he sprang to his feet again, and Myron could see the raw red wound where the paw had struck. He leapt forward, butting the bear with his head, but the wounds, where his antlers had been, just tore open. In the haze of another great spray of snow, the bear knocked him down again.
Rising slower now, on his knees, he spent a moment looking back at Myron. His eyes were the saddest things. He jerked his head and pointed with his nose, pointing away. He had to do it twice. As the bear struck again, Myron turned and ran. He dropped everything and bolted for where the trees were densest. The snow was still deep, and his legs moved slowly, as in a dream. He had never gotten boots, he was still in his old sneakers, with just rubber overshoes (ill-fitting, fished from a Dumpster) to protect against the snow; they worked all right when he was treading gingerly, but now scarcely three steps and snow was pouring into his sneakers over the top, and his feet became slippery and numb. Branches whipped against his face, and one caught him and cut him right above the eye. The trickle of blood was first hot and then icy cold in the wind as it ran down his cheek. Leaping over a log, Myron found that on the far side was a steep hill, which he proceeded to tumble down, head over heels. He skidded to a stop against some rocks at the bottom, and when he stood up, he found he was standing on an iced-over stream. His foot immediately broke through, and when he jerked it back, a jagged ice shard sliced through two socks and cut his ankle. The water from the frigid stream had collected in the rubber overshoe, and it was so hard to run in the sodden shoe. He tried to persuade himself that his best chance was to hide, but he knew that was not true; there was no way to hide a trail in the snow. He stood up and headed off again, again for the thick trees where something large would have trouble pushing through. The blood from the cut on his eyebrow had become diverted somehow and now spilled directly into his eye. He tried to wipe it away with one stiff and frozen hand. All the time he imagined he could hear a bear behind him, getting closer. And it was not his imagination, and the bear was there, and with one swipe it knocked him down.
VI. The Shape
“I fear me, Cuthbert, this is far from the spirit in which we a while ago agreed that men should go to the holy war.”
Cuthbert hung his head a little.
“Ay, Father Francis, men; but I am a boy,” he said, “and after all, boys are fond of adventure for adventure’s sake.”
G. A. Henty, Winning His Spurs
1.
Melodrama is my usual, if not necessarily my preferred, idiom, so you can imagine how difficult it was for me not to falsify the preceding events. How choice it would have been if, right before poor Spenser perished, he had finally found the cheese of his dreams! He reaches one hoof gingerly toward the wedge, which is emanating visible stink l
ines, and only then does he fall. His last words are poignant, and involve some kind of pun on Edam.
But absolute fidelity to facts, established through extensive interviews of the participants, especially young Myron in this instance, forbid my coloring of events with my usual palette. And so it is with no mendacious or even misleading rhetorical flourish that I draw back the curtain on a scene in which our hero awakens in a bed in a small round room, tastefully appointed. The red rays of the sunset stream through a small circular window. A low bookshelf squats beside the bed, like an incubus preparing to clamber into position. Entering the room are two women. One, moving as quickly and nervously as a chain smoker, is black and has the gangly limbs of a teenager; she stands well under five feet tall, and if she is wearing children’s clothing (striped shirt & purple overalls), perhaps this is why. The other is very pale, tall and slender, perhaps thirty, her blond hair cut short and her fashionable gray business skirt cut to the knee. I will go so far as to say that, in the magical and forgiving light of dusk, she is beautiful. Perhaps she looks familiar. It’s very cold; Myron’s neck is prickling, and this is what has awakened him.
“Well,” and it is the taller woman who speaks, as taller people always do, “how are we feeling today?” In the chill, her breath is faintly visible. She bends over above him, her movements slow and languid, and places the back of her hand on Myron’s forehead.
All the confusion of the moment is right then swept away by amazement that someone, anyone, is able to touch his face without flinching. And so Myron could only gape, dumbfounded as the woman explained that one of her employees had been some distance from here walking in the woods, collecting mistletoe, and had chanced to come across Myron, bloody and half frozen. As she spoke, silently the teenager, all four and a half feet of her, paced back and forth with a glass of water in each hand. Myron was tucked in tight, the heavy covers up to the chin, but his eyes darted back and forth between the two. He could see on the floor beyond her his bow, the cardboard tube, and a duffle bag that was not his. He could barely bring himself to ask the obvious question.