The Council of Animals

by Nick McDonell

  “What? We haven’t—” began the dog, before a mole prodded him into silence.

  “None of the other animals want to talk with me,” said the boy.

  “They’re scared,” said the cat. “They don’t want to end up like that squirrel.”

  “I never hurt animals,” said Edgar. “But I do eat them, sometimes—”

  “It’s okay,” said the cat. “Animals eat animals. Even when we talk with each other.”

  “It’s true,” said the dog, “this is the way of the Animal Kingdoms.”

  The cat nodded. “But not all the animals agree. Some of them are angry at you.”

  “At me?”

  “At all the humans. Because humans caused The Calamity.”

  Edgar didn’t know what to say to that. He’d barely been born when The Calamity started.

  “And they’re coming, these animals. They want to eat all the people in this camp.”

  “They can’t do that!” said Edgar.

  “They will. Unless you help us.”

  “But what can I do?”

  “You can warn the other people, like your aunt. They have to run away. Get on the water, if they can, escape right now if humanity is to survive.”

  Edgar thought about this.

  “But won’t some other animals find us, even if we run?”

  “That’s why you have to separate,” concluded the cat. “They might catch some of you. But the rest could survive.”

  * * *

  Like many orphans, Edgar was good at reading people. He knew that if he told the grown-ups in the camp what the cat had said, even with the cat and dog at his side, no one would believe him. They’d find a reason not to. And, worse, they’d not like what he was saying, and they would banish him from the camp. And probably cook the cat and the dog.

  But Edgar had an idea.

  “What if…” Edgar asked the cat, “I talk to the other animals! The ones who want to eat us? I can tell them that we didn’t mean to cause The Calamity. Then they won’t want to come and eat us anymore, right? I’ll just tell them the truth!”

  “They won’t listen.” The cat shook her head. “It’s a nice idea, but the baboons—”

  “What, cat, you think these humans will listen?” interrupted the dog. “They caught you in a trap and want to turn you into a stew, and you want to parlay with them?”

  “What do you propose, dog? If we bring this boy back, he’ll be the first human they kill.”

  “But they’ll kill me anyway,” said Edgar, “if I can’t get the camp to run away, right?”

  To this, neither cat nor dog had an answer.

  “So I have to try,” said Edgar. “I have to talk to the baboons. Hey look at that!”

  The animals had been so engrossed in their argument that they hadn’t noticed a green and purple butterfly that had flown up out of their tunnel and was fluttering in the hut.

  “Time’s up, babies,” said the butterfly, in her husky drawl.

  “We have to go!” said the cat, hurrying to the edge of the tunnel. “That’s the timer! The tunnel is going to collapse. Moles!” She called down the tunnel. “Moles—”

  With a great SCHRUMPF and a cloud of dust, the tunnel collapsed.

  And before the animals could make sense of this new problem, they heard a screech.

  “Edgar, you ungrateful, disrespectful…” came his aunt’s voice from beyond the hut, “why aren’t you out here gathering mushrooms! I’ll thrash you for it!”

  The aunt appeared in the doorway, a heavy machete in hand. When her eyes fell upon the dog and cat, she slammed the door shut behind her, dropping the latch.

  There was nowhere to hide. The animals were trapped.

  Chapter 25

  History has not been kind to Edgar’s aunt. While it is true that she exhibited much of the ignorance and craving that brought humanity to The Calamity, it must be remembered also that she herself suffered. I am grateful to the enterprising raccoons who acquired the relevant records from the grounded yacht and donated them to our library, further clarifying her pre-village history. She was a member of the yacht’s crew—the pastry chef, assigned to single-bunk cabin D-12. It is clear from the manifest that several family members, including her siblings, were also employed on the vessel, and that they, we may presume, were lost in the storm which brought it aground. The responsibility for a small boy must have worn heavily indeed across her bony shoulders. In this light her cruelties are easier to understand. But, as the marabou storks advise: don’t let too much understanding lead to too much forgiveness.

  * * *

  “Aunt,” said Edgar, “I was just going to get the mushrooms.”

  “Don’t try to distract me, Edgar. Do you think I’m stupid? You never obey me! No one ever obeys me! You let the cat out of the bag! And what is this mangy old dog you’ve found? I hope you don’t think we’re keeping pets! We’re going to have cat-dog stew!”

  And she let out a horrible laugh.

  “Mayday!” whispered the dog.

  The cat was looking at the latch, and the door, and the little hole at the top of the hut where the smoke got out, trying to devise an escape.

  “Aunt,” said Edgar, “these animals are special. I don’t think we should—”

  But before he could finish, his aunt slapped him hard across his face. The crack! of it filled the little hut.

  Edgar’s eyes watered but he didn’t cry.

  “If your parents could see you disobeying me like this, they’d be ashamed. Now grab that cat so it’s not in the way while I deal with the dog,” said the witch, raising her machete.

  “Wait,” cried Edgar, “wait, tell the cat and dog to do something! They’ll do it.”

  “They’ll be in my stew is what they’ll do,” said the witch. “Now out of the way!”

  “Just tell them, tell them anything, Aunt, and they’ll do it, you’ll see. Tell them to … jump on the trunk!”

  And in grak, Edgar told the cat and dog to jump on the trunk.

  The cat, putting her trust in the boy, did so immediately.

  The dog, for whom it was a more difficult leap, did so on the second attempt.

  “What trickery is this, Edgar?”

  “What do you want them to do, do you want them to … stand up on their hind legs?”

  And Edgar told the cat and dog to do so, and they did. It wasn’t a comfortable pose for either of them.

  “Or … do you want them to bow?”

  And Edgar asked the dog and cat to bow, and they did, there on top of the trunk.

  “Or sing?”

  The dog and cat looked at each other and then sang out together the only song they knew they would know in common. It is one of the few human songs translated into grak, and beloved:

  Allons, enfants de la Patrie

  Le jour de gloire est arrivé.

  Contre nous de la tyrannie

  L’étendard sanglant est levé.

  Entendez-vous dans les campagnes

  Mugir ces féroces soldats?

  Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras,

  Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes.

  Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!

  Marchons, marchons!

  It was yowling, but yowling with feeling, and even melody.

  Edgar’s aunt gawped.

  She lowered her machete, just a bit.

  “I understand them,” explained Edgar. “And they—”

  “CHARGE!” barked the dog.

  And he did.

  Chapter 26

  The dog went straight for the latch. The cat followed as best she could with her injury. Edgar’s aunt swung her machete but missed. The dog, leaping, unhooked the latch and crashed the door open. Together he and the cat zipped through the aunt’s legs and escaped.

  “You little fool,” they heard her yelling, “you let them get away!”

  Edgar, though, didn’t stay either. He ran past his aunt, out the door and into the sunshine after the cat a
nd the dog.

  “Wait!” he cried. “Wait for me!”

  The cat and the dog stopped a little ways beyond the camp as the boy sprinted to catch up with them. His aunt chased behind, sack in one hand, machete in the other.

  “You ungrateful, dirty child!” she yelled after Edgar. “Come back here this instant! How dare you disobey me!”

  She stopped at the edge of the camp, bent over, panting. She wasn’t an old lady, but she wasn’t so young anymore, and the pre-Calamity pandemic had scarred her lungs. She’d never be able to catch Edgar and the animals and she knew it.

  Edgar watched her wheezing.

  “Auntie, these animals want to help us!”

  “After everything I’ve done for you, this is how you treat me! You want to help them! Why them and not me? Those filthy, filthy animals.”

  The dog stood beside the boy. Edgar looked down, tears in his eyes.

  “She took care of me,” he said.

  “She’s not taking care of you now,” said the dog.

  “And in fact,” added the cat, “we’re not filthy. We’re very clean. Listen—if you want to help your aunt, you’ve got to come with us.”

  Edgar nodded, and the three of them turned to walk away.

  “Good riddance then! Go! One less mouth to feed! You’ll die out in that forest!”

  Edgar turned around angrily. “But I’m trying to save you!”

  “Oh,” said the aunt, her voice a hive of rotten honey. “You want to save me! And you save me by disobeying me and going off with these animals.”

  “Don’t listen to her, son,” said the dog, and put his head against Edgar’s leg. “Let’s go.”

  “Edgar,” she screamed, changing her tone again. “Please don’t leave me! Please!”

  Edgar took a deep breath and didn’t look back.

  They heard the aunt’s screaming for a long time as they walked off into the forest.

  Chapter 27

  “Don’t like the look of this,” said the dog, as he tramped beside Edgar and the cat among the mighty evergreens. Fallen needles were soft underpaw, and the light was clear where it cut through the trees, but it was a long walk to the grounded superyacht. And in the treetops: crows.

  “They’re watching us. They’ll tell the baboons that we’re with a human. They’ll flank us and tear us apart before the boy ever gets to make his case,” said the dog, grimly.

  The cat said nothing. She wished there was a more discreet way to make it back to the yacht, too. But what choice did they have? They had to walk, risk being surveilled by crows and attacked by baboons. The cat was tired and thirsty, and her hind leg ached where the snare had cut the flesh, but she put one paw ahead of the other. She didn’t let Edgar see how worried she was.

  * * *

  A ways into the forest, Edgar, the dog, and the cat came upon an ancient, scummy pond. Green water, midday light. A dark fish darted away as the dog knelt to drink. The cat noticed hungrily.

  A great brown toad, covered in warts, hopped up out of the mud, startling the dog.

  “Greetins,” he croaked. “Lovely day, innit?”

  “I’ve had better,” said the cat, licking her injured paw.

  “Well lemons lemonade frog juice slime, yeah? But me ’quatic bruvvers, like, they be havin’ a message re: the hairless chimp.”

  He flicked his tongue at Edgar.

  Edgar didn’t understand much of the toad’s heavily accented grak, but the cat—who had conversed with and eaten a number of toads in her time—understood perfectly. The toad, from across the pond, was relaying a question from some fish. Grak was spoken underwater, of course, but in different dialects and slangs. Amphibious creatures like toads often served as interlocutors between fish and dry land creatures. Likewise seabirds, snakes—any creature who could inhabit both worlds. There is a great tradition of literature that draws on these dual identities, these damp consciousnesses, the crustacean colonial novels and so on.

  This toad, however, did not strike the cat as much of a thinker.

  “I be catlike: can the geezer grock grak?”

  “He can,” said the cat. “Edgar, say hello to the toad. Tell him you can understand him.”

  “Hi,” said Edgar. “I can understand … some of what you’re saying, Mr. Toad.”

  “Right then,” said the dog. Having drunk his fill, he shook the slobber off his chops. “On mission. Let’s get this boy to the council zone.”

  “Oy! Me fishy message,” said the toad. “Message is: wait here. Hold yer horses, in a manner of speakin’.”

  “All due respect, toad,” said the cat, “we have somewhere to be. Why should we wait here? For what?”

  “Lookit, these fishes told me and I’m tellin’ you: wait. Right there by that tree.”

  The toad blinked his great round eyes. He flicked his tongue toward a massive willow tree at the pond’s edge.

  “Why?” said the cat. “Did they say anything else?”

  “Oh yeah, summit like … old pond, summit summit, splash.”

  “Sounds like a code,” said the cat.

  “’S what the fishes say,” said the toad. “I done me part.”

  And he leapt away.

  The sound of water.

  “Cat, best keep moving,” said the dog. “I don’t trust that toad.”

  But the cat had already gone to investigate the willow tree. It was a perfectly ordinary tree with slender branches and cool green leaves, long and serrated. As they moved in the breeze, they made a soft sound. Bark sap shone in knots along the trunk. The cat laid a paw on a low root and took a deep breath. In the pre-Calamity pandemic, she had lived with a human physician. He did not have a family and so was in the habit, whenever he was at home, of speaking to the cat. Often, sitting at the window, he’d told the cat what a shame he thought the zoo was, how they ought not to keep animals locked up. And here at the pond’s edge the cat was seized by a powerful memory: how on one of the doctor’s days off, he had sat in the window seat of the apartment with her, scratching her behind the ears and looking at that zoo. “Did you know,” he’d asked her, “that aspirin is derived from salicylic acid, which is derived from salicin, which is a glucoside produced in willow bark? Willow trees gave us pain medication.”

  The cat remembered too how the doctor had been home less and less as the pandemic continued, and then one night he didn’t return home at all. When there was nothing left to eat in the apartment, the cat had squeezed out a window into a world of fires, flashing lights, and darkness. The Calamity was underway.

  It all seemed like such a long time ago. But it wasn’t.

  “Cat,” said Edgar, who had come to stand by the tree. “I have a question—”

  But before he could ask it, he and the cat felt a vibration beneath their feet and paws.

  Something was coming.

  Chapter 28

  “Do you hear that?” asked the cat.

  “Hear what?” said Edgar, for his hearing was less acute.

  With the vibration, a scratching. Just beneath their feet.

  “There,” said Edgar, “look!”

  In the shade of the willow, a patch of green grass sank away into a hole. The hole expanded, and dark brown dirt sprayed up into the air.

  The three moles somersaulted up out of the tunnel, landing with perfect stillness upon one of the willow’s roots.

  They bowed.

  “Outstanding!” said the dog.

  The moles pointed to their new access tunnel.

  “Can Edgar fit through there?” asked the cat.

  The moles nodded. Edgar looked warily into their dark hole.

  * * *

  The audacity of that boy! Some argue that all history is, at bottom, the history of Great Creatures. The leaders, the creators, these Great Creatures who plunge into unknown mole holes. They set the model and pattern for what the wider masses do—or try to do. Human thinkers in this line argue that everything we see accomplished in this world sprang from the min
d of some Great Creature, and so our history must concern itself with their lives in particular. The rat who traveled with Napoleon. The wallaby who taught Elvis how to sing. The lobsters who elevated Salvador Dalí’s conceptual practice. The raccoon who, quite disastrously, advised Calvin Coolidge. All the adders socializing with Cleopatra, and of course Mafdet, whom we discussed earlier. Yes, when I think of Edgar leaping down into the unknown, I am filled with pride! And for a moment inclined toward the extraordinary creature theory of history.

  But then I remember: Edgar was a child in a camp erected on account of a Calamity caused by millions, billions of other creatures. Every Great Creature lives and dies and marks their territory in a context! A true understanding of history is neither Biography nor Context alone. If I were to rename our discipline: Animal Contextography …

  But I digress.

  * * *

  The cat was impressed with how easily Edgar shimmied down the tunnel. It was rocky and dark, and he was surrounded by wild animals, but Edgar … was happy. He had begun asking a lot of questions: “Where are we going?” “Can all animals speak … grak?” “Why don’t you moles talk?” “I thought cats and dogs didn’t like each other?”

  The cat answered as best she could.

  A little ways along the dark tunnel, they came upon the train tracks they’d followed in, and resting upon them: a cart. The animals didn’t pay it much attention, but Edgar, who had heard of things mechanical from fellow humans, was entranced.

  “Wow!” he said. “Does this work? Can I drive it?!”

  He got in and pushed the ignition button.

  “Jump in!” said Edgar, and the animals climbed aboard the humming cart.

  Edgar, experimenting with the controls, pushed the throttle ahead and SCREEAFWOOSH!

  They zoomed down the tunnel.

  “Yahh!” shouted Edgar in joy.

  What had taken the animals hours on paw was taking mere minutes in the cart. The dark walls flew past, and tunnel wind ruffled their fur and Edgar’s hair.