The Awareness

by Gene Stone

  “Ridiculous.” The word came out like water from a knotted hose, a reluctant spurt.

  And then it happened. Nancy saw them first. Humans. They were hiding in the rows of tall cottonwoods.

  The shots came quickly. An ambush.

  “Run!” Nancy said this as soon as she saw the first human point a gun. The animals scattered. Water splashed. Hooves dotted the soft mud of the shore. Four new humans appeared in the brush. More shots. Errant shots. These humans weren’t marksmen. They ducked after each shot, as if the animals might shoot back at them.

  As Nancy ran, her anger festered. The humans ruin everything, she thought. Her anger fired through her synapses faster than any bullet.

  Her parents were near. She could feel them.

  The peccary was near, too. All at once, she felt the ghost of every circus animal, every caged creature, every tusk ripped from the flesh, moving through her.

  “Joe,” Nancy yelled.

  “Meet me back behind that rock. I have a plan.”

  Joe sprinted behind the tall rock, which stood about one hundred yards east of the small lake. Nancy was out of breath when she reached the safety of the rock’s shadow.

  “What do we do?” asked Joe.

  Nancy took a few deep breaths.

  “We trap them. We don’t kill them. We trap them.”

  “Why?”

  “I need answers. I need to understand before I kill.”

  “Nancy...”

  “Please. Get the others to join you. These humans aren’t trainers. They’re scared. I can smell their fear. They want us dead but they don’t know how to kill properly. Sneak behind them. Trap them, Joe. Where’s the monkey?”

  But before Joe could trap the humans he had to get the animals to join the cause. Fortunately, they were eager to make amends on behalf of the baboon, who had been shot as he ran from the water. He had screamed, but his scream was lost to the fervor of the moment. Faking a limp and bathing in the attention, he then sprinted to where the sheep were hiding in the tall prairie grass.

  Nancy had been correct. These humans were frightened. They had used their bullets. By the time a few of the more stealthy animals snuck up behind them, the humans had no choice but to wave their sunburned arms to the sky in surrender. One of the humans indicated to the others not to speak.

  “Why?” Nancy asked. “Why not speak to us?”

  The humans wouldn’t respond. The sheep took the guns in their mouths and flung them into the lake. The monkey made a makeshift cord out of branches and tied up the humans, five in total, as best he could.

  Nancy approached the baboon, leaned down, and waited for him to crawl up on top of her. She then walked determinedly towards the captives, the baboon sitting proudly on her back.

  Nancy circled them, the way her mother had circled the dead body of her father.

  The baboon, wincing in pain as if the wind affected his wound, glared down at them.

  Two of the humans were adults. One started to weep. Nancy let her trunk feel the tears. The human recoiled at her touch.

  “You won’t speak, but you’ll cry?” Nancy asked. “You know nothing of pain.”

  She wrapped her trunk around the youngest of the humans, pulling gently at her straw-like hair. This little human, with her straw head, was like all little humans who had cheered her in the tent, who had held the hands of the older humans or who had thrown peanuts, heckling her, too afraid to touch, or too bold, punching her when the older humans weren’t looking.

  The humans do everything for these little long-haired ones, Nancy thought. Even now the oldest humans, one male, one female, tensed up as her trunk wrapped around their progeny like an asp around a Nile reed.

  Nancy put the little human down and turned her attention to the older ones. The one with the hair on his face, coarse and dark and flecked with grey, was the antithesis of the young female. He puffed his chest out, but his watering eyes gave him away.

  I should step on him, Nancy thought. I should step on him and then watch the other humans cry, the way I cried when their kind killed my father.

  The older female swatted away a fly. Nancy bent down and held her eyes a few inches from the female’s lined face. This female human had burdens that the male did not. Nancy feared the look the female gave her, cold and steely. The male would attack, he would shoot his gun. But the female would plan. She would be patient.

  Nancy went to one of the younger males, but she kept her stare on the old female. The young man tried to emulate his father by puffing out his chest.

  “Cliff, stay quiet. Don’t move. They can sense fear,” the female said.

  “How nice to have a mother to warn you,” Nancy said to Joe and the others. “I wonder if they can smell this.”

  Nancy tightened her trunk and pushed the young male, who fell backward into the second young male, both falling to the ground.

  The baboon laughed. Nancy remembered when the humans laughed at her as she pranced around the circus’ stage.

  The two humans tried to get up, but they only slipped in the mud.

  This time the baboon and the horses laughed.

  The two humans tried to regain their balance yet again. This time they succeeded, but Nancy pushed them until they were again writhing in the mud.

  The baboon laughed again. Joe laughed. The giraffe smiled.

  Then Nancy pushed over the biggest human. All the animals laughed. Nancy joined them. It felt good to laugh. It felt better to laugh at the humans.

  “How many times had you laughed at us as we circled around the tents?” Nancy asked.

  The animals took turns pushing the humans down. The laughter was contagious. It grew louder. And soon it was more than just laughter, it was a release, a reclamation of honor and power.

  Finally, they used their laughter up. They were quiet. Nancy felt that this would be the time to kill the humans. That’s what the peccary and his group would have done. She lowered herself so that the baboon could slide off of her prodigious back.

  “You should do it,” Nancy said as the baboon stepped off of her, still too wracked with pain to speak.

  “I don’t think I can,” he said feebly, finally, and climbed back onto Nancy.

  She stood up, her mind fogged. The blackbird cawed from above.

  The animals looked skyward.

  The blackbird cawed again, circled, then dove for the ground, fluttering as she approached, landing softly a few feet from Nancy. The bird cocked her head then bounced a few steps.

  The bird’s language wasn’t clear. Her caws flew out like shrapnel, explosive, incomprehensible. Nancy guessed that the bird hadn’t accepted the awareness—or wasn’t offered it.

  “You can join us, friend. We could use you, flying high, telling us who’s coming,” Nancy said. But the bird just cawed.

  Nancy wondered. Mammals killed birds. Humans killed birds. Sometimes humans took care of birds. Mammals didn’t. But humans killed birds in ways that mammals never would. There was no simple allegiance for the birds, so perhaps no choice had been made.

  The blackbird stared at Nancy. She flapped her wings, but didn’t take flight. A flock of monarch butterflies fluttered past. The blackbird opened her beak, snapped one up. She cawed, took a few small leaps, and flew away.

  A dragonfly landed on Nancy’s back. She flipped her tail up and knocked it away.

  She thought of war, the sides one must take, the carnage, the loss, the wounds, the recklessness of it all. Who deserved to die? An insect? A butterfly? A bird? Her father, for nothing more than his ivory? The little human who was now clutching the loose, sweat-stained dress of her mother?

  Nancy looked up at the bird, a black dot against the piercing blue. If only she could join her—she didn’t know who deserved death and who life. And even so Nancy knew too much—too much of death, of loss, of war; she needed some relief.

  “Just kill them and move on,” the baboon said.

  Nancy had an idea. “No,” she said, firmly.
“Not death. Something else.”

  The others didn’t argue. But they didn’t act either. They kept still. It was hot, they wanted to take a nap. While the baboon watched the humans, Joe and Nancy waded into the small lake.

  “I keep thinking of why,” Nancy said.

  “Why?”

  “Why.”

  She sprayed the water playfully at Joe, who wasn’t as comfortable as Nancy in the muddy liquid.

  “Why. Why do the humans do what they do?”

  “Because they can?”

  “I used to think that, before I was aware, before I could analyze my thoughts, or question them. But now I think it was something else. I think they control us, and even hurt us, to make themselves feel better about themselves.”

  Joe was watching silver guppies flit through the shallow water.

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Nothing makes sense until it does. Humans captured us and made us dance to their tunes. They had a reason. Isn’t there always a reason?”

  Joe stared at her.

  “Are you okay, Nancy?”

  “Yes. I want to learn, Joe. What good is awareness if we don’t use it? Let’s do to them what they did to us. Let’s teach them to amuse us, to do our bidding, lift our spirits.”

  Joe swiped his hoof at the nimble guppies. The splash wetted his face. “I don’t get it.”

  “We’ve remembered. We’ve killed. It didn’t make us feel any better. We got angry. We lost touch with our instincts. I forgot the one thing I promised myself I never would. We struggled. Why?”

  “Because they took us?” Joe asked.

  “Because they took everything that was ours and they made it theirs. Now we make them ours. We teach them to bend and contort and blow bubbles out of their trunks.”

  “Humans don’t have trunks.”

  Nancy smiled. “No, sadly, they don’t.”

  “Will that be good to do? And to watch?”

  “We liked it when they all fell over. We all laughed and forgot how hungry and tired we were. There must be something to it. Something powerful. There must be.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Think. What would you like from the humans? What would make you smile? Ask this of the others. Once we’ve all agreed on what we want the humans to do, we begin training.”

  Nancy hadn’t noticed the other animals gathering around as she and Joe talked. But here they were. The horses and zebras, knee-deep in water. The giraffes, straining their necks to hear, the injured baboon standing tall and proud at the water’s edge. The sheep were listening as they slowly chewed grass.

  “Something about that seems fair,” the zebra said.

  “And we can still do whatever we want with them afterward,” the giraffe said.

  The other animals agreed. Nancy turned from Joe back toward the shore, toward the other animals, and she saw something new in her brethren. Purpose.

  The training began. Nancy thought of Edgar and their days behind the whip. She missed him. The awareness brought back more sad memories than she wanted, and she forced herself to abandon them for the task at hand.

  At first, the humans seemed relieved to be free of their bonds. They looked hopeful, perhaps expecting freedom. They still didn’t speak, though they did communicate through smiles and eyes that grew bigger. But freedom did not come, and they realized that they were trading one set of bonds for another.

  First they were taught to walk in a straight line, one after the other. They did somersaults on the ground. They ran in circles. They performed little dance steps. They jumped over each other, clumsily, and hit each other, and groaned. Joe and the baboon laughed. All the animals had met humans—acrobats, trapeze artists, gymnasts—whose bodies could do almost anything. They hadn’t realized that these were such special talents.

  Nancy made the humans climb on top of each other. They toppled over repeatedly until, after some practice, they perfected their pyramid. When they were all in place, the monkey ran up their legs and arms and placed a wreath of twigs and brush on the head of the highest human. Then he pushed her over, and the whole group of humans tumbled down. The animals roared with laughter. The monkey, who leapt onto a tree branch just as the collapse began, laughed hardest of all.

  When Nancy ordered the humans to try the pyramid again, the young female walked toward her, on the balls of her feet, as though she was scared of making too much noise. She had mud stains on her knees. But she was smiling.

  “That was fun,” she whispered. Nancy pushed the girl away with her trunk, and the girl jumped back, almost losing her balance.

  “Suzette, get back here!” the old female ordered. “I told you not to speak!”

  The girl called Suzette backed away. Her face was contorted—sad and twisted.

  “She looks like Babar,” the girl said to anyone who would hear. Nancy had no idea what this meant.

  Nancy, Joe, the monkey, and the baboon spent the next few hours training the humans to perform spins and turns and somersaults and handstands. The humans were quick studies. They didn’t enjoy pain, the threat of being thrashed by the twigs the monkey had tied together kept them obedient.

  When the humans seemed too tired, the animals let them rest and gave them water. They gave the humans oats to eat, but they didn’t seem interested.

  “They’ll eat,” said Nancy. “They’ll have to, eventually.”

  By nightfall, the humans were ready. Joe and the monkey had cleared a small plot of land away from the shore, where the ground was firm and dry. Nancy stood in the background, thinking of cotton candy and salted pretzels. Just before the ringmaster had called her out to one of the three rings, her trainer would whisper words of false encouragement in her ears, and she would listen, eager to please, willing to perform even as the sounds of the crowds heightened her fear of failure. She could envision the light—how many times had it nearly blinded her as it beamed down from the rafters?

  The show began. Not under the light of harsh bulbs, but the light of the moon and the stars. The oohs and aahs of the impatient crowd had been replaced by the gentle hum of the animals, shifting and breathing as they nestled in the soft cattails and prairie grass. And Nancy, the giant elephant, was no longer kneeling down, lying prostrate before the humans, awaiting her orders.

  Instead, she was giving the orders. First, she had the humans pass around a ball of dried mud, using only their faces. After each pass, a mud stain would form on the foreheads, cheeks, and chins of the humans, which delighted the animals. Soon, Nancy couldn’t tell the females from the males. Next, Nancy made the humans form their pyramid. The oldest male and one of the younger males stood at the base. The youngest male and the oldest female clumsily climbed on their shoulders. After the crouching humans had gained balance, the youngest female did her best to scale their bodies. She failed. She fell, and the rest of the pyramid collapsed. The old female went to console the girl, but the monkey slapped her away.

  “How can they rule the planet?” the baboon asked.

  Some of the humans formed hoops and others jumped through them, and the young girl, much to the delight of the animals, fell yet again. But she kept trying. She kept trying and failing. Finally, she was too hurt to try anymore. The female adult ran to her, this time ignoring the stings from the monkey’s whip.

  The baboon yawned. The others were still watching. But now the laughter came out not in unison, but slowly, like blood from a tiny puncture in the skin.

  And when the humans used their heads and faces to volley the balls of mud, the laughter evaporated. The smaller humans had broken down. These humans were not talented. These were not the humans the animals had met at the circus. These slipped and fell. Their spirits broke quickly. Nancy looked at her friends. Some were sleeping. Some were bored. The baboon looked disgusted. She looked at the humans. They were shivering as night fell. The laughter had died.

  Of course this wasn’t working, Nancy thought. She needed fire or a trapeze artist. She needed clowns an
d men on stilts. Had she learned nothing in all her years in the circus? She needed to up the ante! She needed. Something.

  She turned around looking for some prop, some vision that might inspire new tricks. But what she saw was the glint of two sad eyes, watching the performance from next to the bushes.

  Nancy had forgotten about the tiger. But there he was. And in his searing eyes Nancy saw the pain she herself had felt when she had performed in the circus ring. That pain invaded her like a pestilence; it was as if she had replaced the humans in the clearing, as if they were watching her perform once more.

  Then she knew. She knew.

  There was nothing to learn here. Her plan hadn’t worked.

  She looked at the humans. She had never really looked at them before, not closely, not with pure curiosity or real interest. Now she saw their unhappiness. The fear and fury in the adults’ eyes. The fright in the young boys’. The girl, however...the girl looked right back at Nancy, right into her eyes, and all Nancy saw was innocence. The girl saw Nancy looking at her. She broke formation and ran to her, put her hands on Nancy’s trunk.

  “Hello, Elephant,” she said. “Are we doing everything right? Are you happy?”

  The adults were calling her back—“Suzette, Suzette!”—but Nancy held on with her trunk, felt the smallness of the girl’s being, the vulnerability. Nancy could kill her in a flash. She didn’t. She pulled her ears back. She lowered her trunk. She wanted to cry, but instead she said, “Go back to your mother and father.”

  Suzette did as she was told.

  Nancy rose and walked toward the humans. She nodded at the monkey, who unbound them.

  “You’re free to go,” she said.

  The human males tried to thank her but she hushed them with a swat of her trunk. The family didn’t press her; they escaped swiftly into the night. Nancy never saw them again.

  With the humans gone and the animals resting, Nancy was alone. Even Joe was sleeping. She wandered away from the makeshift circus toward nowhere. Maybe, she thought, she would emulate the humans and just disappear into the dark, cloudy night. She would migrate. She would find whatever it was she had lost.