The Awareness

by Gene Stone

  “We know what we know,” was the only thing 323 could think to say.

  “How can you gain awareness and still not understand?” The ferret sat down on the ledge. “The truth is, humans can do things to us, to each other, that we can’t fathom.”

  “What type of things?”

  “Things,” he repeated. “It’s why I won’t ever leave the farm. Never. I won’t join.”

  “Join? Join what?”

  “The revolution. The mammals are attacking. It’s why we’re the only ones here. The cats and the dogs, they joined in. They chased the humans, and the humans fought back, and things got bad, and the humans fled. The animals who were left went after them. Or maybe they joined the revolution elsewhere.”

  Something about the word “revolution” congealed into the mind of 323.

  “Everyone else is fighting,” the ferret said.

  “Take us to the fight.”

  “You don’t even understand who and what you’d be fighting against.”

  “Then show us.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You won’t win. We won’t win. I don’t like playing for losers. Winners win, losers lose.”

  The ferret drank. He danced around the ledge with a ghost of a partner, tripping over his front feet, catching himself. “Da-da-da, de-de-de,” he sang. “Dum-de-dum-dum da.” He swung his narrow hips out and back and out and back, a miniature hula.

  “Please,” 323 said. “We want to understand.”

  But he no longer seemed interested in the pigs. “Da-da-da, de-de-de...”

  “Sir, we need your help,” 323 insisted.

  The ferret looked at 323 and smiled. And winked. And stopped his dancing.

  “A smile and a wink will get you far in life. Remember that.” He drained his thimble, then tossed it behind him into the darkness. “I shouldn’t do this for you.” He leaned out over the ledge, pretending to fall. The pigs gasped. But he pulled himself up just in time.

  The ferret disappeared once again into the darkness of the barn. As he did, the pig who had fallen ill returned from the lake with the pigs who had escorted her there. Her color had returned.

  323 smiled at her. She tried winking too. “You’re okay?” she asked.

  “I feel amazing. The mud. We should all go into it and bask. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt.”

  323 wondered what the other pigs were doing, the ones who were out there, still searching. Were they too far away to have heard the cries? What had they discovered? The truth about humans? Some semblance of the truth? The revolution?

  The ferret appeared at the opening of the barnyard door. Standing just a few feet tall on the ground, he seemed too small for his big words. And there was something unsettling in his countenance, something 323 felt she’d need to keep a close eye on.

  “Follow me,” he commanded. The pigs did as they were told.

  He led them down a dirt path that wound behind the barn, past the lake and into the first rows of cypress and ironwood trees, their shade offering a much-needed respite from the overbearing heat.

  The ferret talked to himself as he led. At first in a whisper, then louder and louder. “But they don’t want you, do they? No, no. They don’t want anything to do with you. A weasel. Fangs. I’ll never forget...”

  “Excuse me?” 323 asked, interrupting the ferret’s monologue.

  “What?”

  “Are you feeling well?”

  The ferret looked around at the group of pigs. His eyes narrowed. A bit of liquid formed in the corner of each iris.

  “I don’t want to be doing this. I want to be back up in my corner of the barn.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to join the battle. Because I don’t care who wins.”

  The ferret almost tripped over his own legs, and then stopped his walking. Shade from the cypress fell upon them. He stood center stage yet again. The pigs waited for him.

  “When I was a pup, the boy of the house found me. He was young and so was I. His mother was afraid of my kind, so the boy kept me in the barn. He fed me. He gave me cow’s milk, which I disliked but drank anyway. We were friends. But I was wild, or wild enough, and the boy wanted to test that wildness. He would squeeze me hard, grab my tail, put small traces of something noxious in my food. Then he slowly began to know who I was, and what I liked. He stopped testing me. We played together, we grew up together. I spent the day looking forward to his arrival, I was unhappy when he left. Then the boy grew up. He stopped coming to the barn, except when he had a chore. I was invisible to him suddenly. It made me angry. For a while, that anger helped me survive. It gave me a purpose. For a while, that anger was all I needed.”

  “All you needed to do what?”

  The ferret looked at 323, then shifted his gaze to the ground. “I don’t know anymore.”

  The ferret looked so lost and small. 323 felt sorry for him. But then he rubbed his paws together, smiled broadly, and forced out a string of words: “What I’m going to show you is so much worse than a boy ignoring a pet. Excuse my long-windedness.”

  The ferret turned away and continued walking through the trees. The pigs scavenged for food as they followed him, finding some among the small shrubs and greenery that thrived on the mild forest floor.

  But 323 didn’t care about food now. She felt herself splintering. The pen, the noises, the need to feed, the sun, all of that felt so distant.

  “Does anyone have a drink?” the ferret asked, knowing full well the answer. “And don’t say water. Water is for animals.”

  No one responded.

  How could they? No, they couldn’t speak now that they saw, each one at nearly the same moment, why the ferret had brought them to this space in the buzzing trees.

  The cicadas were humming, the toads were groaning, and that sun was beating down with a heavy hammer on the bones. Bones. They were everywhere. It was hard for the pigs to grasp. The scent of burned flesh permeated the air with a searing sickening stickiness. They saw body parts. Thrown together like dandelion fodder. Some here, some there. They saw a graveyard. Of pigs. Hundreds of pigs. The dead pigs’ ears trailing their tags, each marked with three numbers. The pigs walked cautiously among the pigs who’d lost breath. The shock of it, the shock of seeing versions of themselves strewn about this hidden backwoods cemetery stole their ability to speak, stole their ability to do anything other than walk, step-by-step, and stare.

  “Humans did this?” The words creaked out of 323 like a minor chord. She waited for a response, for another speech.

  The ferret simply nodded.

  “And if you go fight them, they will do this to each one of you.”

  323 slumped to the ground, unable to cope. “Humans.” She could go no further, no other word would follow. She could only think about the bones in front of her, the torn ears, the bloody hooves, the faceless snouts. Then she let go. She let go, and for the second time in a day, she allowed the darkness to overwhelm her.

  Elephant

  First, they had to escape the trailer—and before the trainers arrived at the camp. “We’re rats in a cage,” Nancy said.

  “What does that mean?” Joe asked.

  “It means we’re stuck. We’re doomed if we can’t find a way out of here.”

  “Even rats get a slogan. Being a goat is so overwhelmingly thankless,” Joe said, adding a bleat for emphasis.

  “It’s not a positive slogan, Joe. The trainers will know about the revolution. If they get here before we get out, we’ll be killed.”

  Nancy could see the group of humans lounging outside the trailer. A few had gotten up to unload the tent poles, the machinery that would make the nylon rise until it was a fake sky over a fake town of real animals doing fake things.

  In the dusky distance the trainers were coming closer.

  “They should have fed us by now,” Joe said. “I know we have more important matters to deal with. But I’m starving.” He sniffed around the trailer floor for some hint of hay.


  “Nothing,” he whined, then bleated, then looked embarrassed.

  “Do that again,” Nancy said.

  “What?”

  “Bleat. Then kick. Make noise.”

  “Why?”

  “Hal has a soft spot for us,” Nancy said and then she stopped. She had something of a soft spot for him, too. But she had learned from her first days under the tent that there is nothing more dangerous than a soft spot. “He always has,” she continued. “He won’t want us to go hungry.”

  “Then why don’t you do it?”

  “Because a raging elephant means something different than a whining goat.”

  “It means a stun gun, doesn’t it?” Joe asked.

  “This is one instance where being you is better than being me.”

  Joe composed himself. He bleated to the heavens. He launched himself into the trailer’s grated sides. Nancy kept her focus on Hal, but kept throwing Joe furtive glances. He was going at it full force, playing the part of the starving animal with wild aplomb.

  Outside, most of the men ignored Joe’s histrionics. But not Bill and not Hal.

  “Hal, let’s at least feed these guys. We can save the trainers time. Save all of us time. Get set up before midnight,” Bill said.

  “So you’re taking the Kid’s side, huh?” Hal half-smiled.

  Joe kept it up, bleating like a praying revivalist.

  “Come on, Hal. Have a heart. That little guy in there hasn’t eaten since Omaha.”

  Hal looked at his watch.

  He’s gonna bend, thought Nancy.

  “I reckon the trainers will be here any minute anyhow. Fine. Go ahead. Get them fed. What the hell. Get them all fed.”

  Joe and Nancy turned to each other.

  “How can they not sense what is so close?” Joe asked.

  “They don’t have the ability to sense. They believe only what they see,” Nancy said.

  The men scattered to feed the animals. Nancy watched, her trunk hanging loose and easy in front of her. She understood patience in a way no human did.

  “Alrighty, Bill. Go bring me the feed,” Hal said. He was standing just outside the door to their trailer. Nancy and Joe glanced at each other as Hal fumbled with the lock.

  He unlocked Joe’s pen first and began bailing in some fresh hay that Bill had brought in from one of the other trucks. Meanwhile, Bill unlocked Nancy’s pen.

  He began saying the words that humans say to reassure animals, the words they say when they want to be reassured themselves. Nancy confused humans. Her size made them wary; her docile nature made them comfortable; her size made them wary again; her enormous eyes made them comfortable; the strange, strong appendage made them wary, and so forth. The words, cooing and soft, used to work on her. They worked on that soft spot. They made her feel loved, and they made the humans who murmured them feel safe. Not today. The words meant nothing compared with the action of the bull hook and the isolation of never-ending destinations and the prison of the trailer.

  Bill tossed hay, pellets, and acacia-leaf mulch into her feeding trough, checked her water, and then looked Nancy right in the eye. He looked back at her and smiled. He noticed nothing different in her because he didn’t have to. She was just another item for him to check off his list. He wouldn’t last one hour in the wild, Nancy thought.

  She lurched forward and pinned him against the metal grates. She could feel the rough denim and sweat-soaked cotton of his clothes; inside them his bones seemed to melt more than break. Her 9,000 pounds against his 175. She crushed the life out of him. In seconds, he was nothing but skin and marrow. The blood didn’t even have time to leave his body.

  In the next pen, Joe rammed hard into Hal’s body. Hal flew backward, but he was stronger than he looked; those old sinews still had some fight in them. “Damn you,” Hal tried to wrestle Joe to the ground, too busy to see what had happened to Bill.

  Nancy let the lifeless body lie crumpled on the floor. She turned toward Hal and Joe, who were wrestling and sweating, pulling and tugging, and she swung her trunk hard against Hal’s back. She couldn’t fit into Joe’s small pen, but the damage had been done. Hal writhed in pain in the corner. Joe began kicking up his hind legs, like an angry ass and, with kick after relentless kick, pummeled Hal until the old human quit fighting.

  “Let’s find the others,” Nancy said. She felt odd: She had pangs of guilt about the dead humans. But she shook them off as she might a swarm of flies. She had asked for none of this. “We might need to help them escape.”

  Nancy stepped into the dusk, a free elephant for the first time since infancy. She let this independence sink in for a moment, and then she surveyed the scene.

  She and Joe were the only animals who were free. The others hadn’t yet been fed. Humans were jangling keys in front of their respective trailers. The other animals were busy making so much of a racket they drowned out the noises from the pen.

  “Let’s get them,” Joe said.

  “No. Wait. Let them free the others first. Patience.”

  Nancy and Joe backed slowly into the shadows of their trailer. Nancy could smell the rust of death on Bill. Nancy let her body rest against the metal of the trailer. She closed her eyes.

  On the voyage from home she had been put to sleep, but upon waking she found herself in a strange land. Gone were the wide open spaces and the plains and the warm air. Strange people watched her with an odd reverence. They watched her stumble down the docks and made appreciative noises. They loaded her up in her first trailer and put a blanket over her. They drove her to some remote place and put her in a large pen.

  At first, she was happy. She was fed. She didn’t have to look for water. There were two other elephants with her and the three of them formed a makeshift family. When they weren’t in their pen, they were taken for exercise out in the woods, an odd environment, cold. They had taken away her blanket. With the pressing coldness, she wanted to go home, but couldn’t remember where home was. She saw a watering hole. She felt the hot sun. And then she remembered her mother. She started crying. No one seemed to care—not even the other elephants. She wondered if they had already cried as much as they could, if crying had lost its meaning for them.

  Soon she had her first trainer. The trainer picked Nancy and another elephant called Edgar, who became her friend. The trainer was a woman called Theresa with a fountain of long black hair. She liked to pet Nancy, which Nancy enjoyed. But Theresa wanted Nancy to do things. To take steps this way or that way. And when Nancy, still a child, still newly orphaned, still far away from all she knew, did not move the way she was supposed to move, something stunned her. It tore into her skin with such voracity that Nancy lifted her trunk and shrieked in pain. The bull hook was stuck into Nancy’s skin more often than not over the next few months. After Nancy had had too much of the bull hook, Theresa would work on Edgar. The two elephants would take turns learning to do what Theresa wanted them to learn. In moments together, Edgar would rub against Nancy, skin to skin, bonding over the pain of the bull hook and the inanity of the behaviors that Theresa commanded they enact.

  When Nancy moved left as Theresa had asked, she was fed and pet. Soon, it seemed the simple choice: Do what Theresa says and be spared the bull hook, be cared for and loved. Why did Theresa give her orders; why did Theresa let the hook hurt her? Nancy had no idea. Neither did Edgar. When Theresa left them alone, the two elephants would stand as close together as was possible, as if the slings and arrows they felt could be alleviated by the other’s presence. They snorted and huffed and intertwined their trunks, trying to extinguish the pain. It was only a temporary salve, but Nancy grew fond of Edgar and he grew fond of Nancy.

  Then, as the days went forward, Nancy began to get better at the game. She began moving left when asked and right when asked and bending down when asked, despite how much it hurt, despite the fact that she would never have done any of those things back at the watering hole, lapping up liquid next to the crocodiles and snakes.

&nb
sp; At night, she was chained to the wall, in a space barely big enough for her to stand. She couldn’t move, could hardly breath, and sleep came to her only in desperate spurts. She could hear her friend, Edgar, in the stall next to her, also paralyzed at night by the doings of the day. Edgar, who wasn’t good at playing the game, who was stubborn and didn’t want to bend down or move to the left, had more bouts with the bull hook than Nancy. They would whisper noises to each other that made them feel less alone.

  One morning, Nancy found Edgar was gone. He wasn’t there anymore. She knew he wasn’t ever coming back.

  Later there were other trainers. Some beat her, some pet her, some pet her less, and soon she could stand on her back legs, give children rides, wear the things the humans liked to drape on her. Through it all she was chained and bull hooked, and through it all those trainers were behind her, pushing her, forcing her, then acting like they loved her. Their false praise was what made her most angry now that she understood. They had never loved her.

  “Nancy,” Joe said.

  Nancy snapped back to the present. It was early evening in north Texas. She had just killed a man. The revolution was starting.

  “The lion.”

  And the lion it was.

  Both Joe and Nancy felt immense pride as the lion roared.

  Two giraffes ran out of a trailer and tore through the tent tops that the humans had started to put in place, stretching their long necks as if they were reaching for high mimosa leaves in the Serengeti. Meanwhile, the lion had torn through three workers.

  He roared again.

  From the dusty road beyond, the black cars of the trainers appeared and then skidded to a stop.

  The baboons came racing from their trailer holding the innards of two workers.

  “The other animals are free,” Nancy said to Joe.

  As the zebras and horses bucked, bowling over men who ran wildly for cover, Nancy saw what she wanted. Fifty yards from the caravan of trailers and semis, and directly south of the half-risen tents, the black cars had stopped. The doors opened and the trainers emerged. They had loaded guns. Yes: It was those trainers, the chain makers, the bull-hook swingers.