by Roman McClay
The forest was an ecosystem of sharing and warring both. He knew that -knew it in his genome- as he set himself up for the hunt.
He looked directly above to see if any overhangs of branches had snow in them that might fall on him as he waited, thinking of how the boughs might yield as the day warmed, as they thawed or were shook by birds or the wind or the rumble from the herd itself.
He relaxed his shoulders and leaned more into the tree, with his back; allowing it to hold his weight. He remembered being on belay in that fist summer in Colorado in 1999 and that little Irish guy had taught him how to climb and drill and handle dynamite.
“Trust your equipment,” Ian had said as they hung on their climbing ropes from the top of some unnamed canyon along some numbered -not named- country road, vivisecting some parcel of land that who knows who owned. It was wilderness; the four-man crew was the only sapient life within 10 square miles. There was nothing around except rocks and trees and their diesel generator and one track-drill, the men themselves, and their 80lb air-hammer drills and hoses.
These hammer-drills were tied to the compressor by 2” air lines with their mercurial Chicago fittings and air-whips that would be needed more than once to keep the de-coupled hose sections from flailing about like some 1st world disaster victim aping for the TV cameras. It looked like hydra when the lines came apart and all that air volume and pressure animated the thick lines .
There was so much air pressure traveling through those two-inch hoses that an untethered end would knock you out -or kill you- if it hit you in the head or chest. The whip would save your life , he thought.
He still put weight on his toes, inside those steel-toed Docs; straining his calves and hams as he pretended his toe-hold on the sheer face would do anything to hinder the terminal velocity he’d reach if that 9mm rope snapped or that Irish fucker’s Bowline slipped or failed. But, fear of falling will override your rational brain every time; it takes work to think it through. He eventually learned to relax and trust his equipment and give in to the idea that one had no choice: the equipment worked, or you died, there was no space in between. Hedging against disaster was the wrong attitude in life. One, he thought, had to accept this in the gut, not merely the head .
His LBE vest had tree-digs built in to it; he set them into the bark and meat of the tree. One could not hang from it, but much of a man’s weight could be distributed between his own legs and ass and the tree itself now. He did not want to sit in the snow for obvious reasons. He thus maintained a stance half-way between seated and fully erect.
He scanned the horizon from right to left, North to South. It was empty of anything but what nature provided and took away. He scanned farther down into the trees and the rolling topography; there were no roads or buildings or cell towers out here. At the 1 o’clock position a few birds -they looked like common corvids- puffed out of some lower pines like a plume of smoke; their black feathers and the atomized snow from their alight mixed into a grey rising nimbus. He stopped and turned on his audio-augment; calibrated for the low cadence of hooves; filtering out the high pitch cacophony of bird squawks and the shallow thud of their wings aloft.
His post genetic coder, and its tracking module, indicated there was a genuine herd of elk bulls and cows close to his 20; the endocrine analysis was uploaded from air-spores that his nanobots released in the four cardinal directions 10 minutes ago; his Recon-Device had released 80% of his bots to locate and monitor the herd he had been tracking for 44 days from the compound at first and now from out in the forest.
His software algorithm put it at 30-40 bulls and 80-100 cows depending on the mix of biomass; the bots had a 97% accuracy rate. The herd was east of him and lower in the valley.
He smiled reflexively and then smiled more broadly at this sign of his own glee, a reinforcing loop of positive affect. The herd was on the move and coming through their haunt and would be in front of him soon, he thought. He relaxed a bit more into his equipment. He breathed heavily in an exhale and now plumes of white CO2 & vapor jetted from his nose like a Chinese Dragon. His pulse ox was measured and adjusted by the PGC.
He thought of his erstwhile friend, and tattoo artist, and that man’s penchant for such dragon; he saw his Draco-visions clouded in a sepia of reclaimed wood and lacquer. He could toggle off his PGC and rely on his atavistic wits out here, but with this system off-line it allowed these discursive -and mildly unpleasant- ruminations on seemingly pointless connections like these memories. He had toggled off most of his coder’s functions now, just allowing for updates on the herd and confirmation of the salient bio-metrics of the specific cow he sought.
His former friend was dead now; killed in a stupid and unsatisfying manner; by some other foe. Blax didn’t know the details and did not want to know. He had dishonored Blax, called him a thief and then slept with Blax’s woman behind his back. It was the most horrible thing one could do to an arch-alpha male like him, and one from his Caledonian, and Southern lineage. But, Blax had eschewed revenge until it was too late to achieve it; as the universe had settle the score, half in defense & half in contempt, the insult of taking care of a man’s own job for him, he thought .
Maybe the cosmos understood this and maybe not, but the death of a rival was not the satisfying part, one needed to handle it himself. It’s why southern men, men from the south of this America, did not call the cops to settle these matters, preferring, demanding of themselves and of others, that they handle it themselves, extra-judiciously; with honor.
He didn’t try to mine the memory any further for clues or answers, he just let it flitter away like the atoms of the man himself as he died those two years ago. The earth, the rock, the soil of this idea had been turned many times before; and he was tired of thinking of these low and ignoble people; and his own failure to extirpate them himself.
His hand tattoos peaked out from under his BDU jacket, black and stippled like graffito stenciling; he flexed his left hand over his hunting bow, mating the hand deeper into and feeling more of the density of the carbon fiber weapon. It -the weapon- and the air, were cold -around minus two degrees Celsius- but he left his hands ungloved; his right one sat on his thigh and waited like a well-trained and stoic dog.
The bots, nano-computers that emitted light usually to produce holograms, had been retrofitted in his garage laboratory to bind together and use a pass-through function and thus turn that light into forced-air heat. The bots swaddled his hands and kept it almost as warm as a glove; the bots would fly away as soon as he moved like birds alighting from a bough that swayed in the wind.
For those few seconds when he needed that haptic response that only a bare hand can give, the brace of the cold air would rush in -as he drew the compound bow and carbon arrow- but the epinephrine dump, if he left that augment on, would compensate and he would feel no temperature change at all. His hand would operate almost perfectly in concert with his eyes and mind like millions of predators over millions of generations in millions of places from the fecund to the austere on this earth. He thus anticipated what was now just minutes away.
His reconnaissance-bots would follow the galloping herd and send back numbers updates, proximity and direction and speed monitoring and even locate and flash-tag the weakest and most vulnerable members of the herd, of the Elk-People’s tribe. These outriggers, the version Isaiah had built for him nearly a year ago to be added to his PGC’s hub, had been programmed to invigilate the vitals, locate any onco-genes or expression, measure and alert any deficiency in organ function and/or pregnancy through vapor emissions and scat & urine samples.
The ORs, as they were called, or Remis , as Blax incessantly referred to them as, could glean as much essential health-data -with 99% accuracy of diagnosis- on each animal from shadowing the herd for 60 seconds as your hometown doctor could have acquired and reviewed -with a mere 66% accuracy- using a battery of tests and a baker’s dozen of his specialist colleagues over a long weekend.
The doctor as a phenomenon wa
s going to evaporate alongside the truck driver of today and machinist a generation before, he thought.
The ORs electronically tagged a doe, and two cows, and sent that information back to his PGC which would make these three elk appear slightly luminous to him once he laid his eyes on them. This was electronic tagging, the bots made the targets glow in a green halo and become redolent as if charging through the aurora-borealis and thus coated from the sky’s distortions of particles and waves.
His PGC sorted some of the raw data and ranked the three along an actuarial table and chose a 4-year-old cow that had a lethal gene matrix that would only prevent the still-born death of any young fetus if it -the allele in question- was attached to the meiosis recombinant sex-cell of the fertilized egg. It was a deadman’s hand of the genomic world; the, if I don’t make it then none of us do, gene, the gene that if people knew existed they’d maybe not be so certain that nature is benevolent nor that man was the first evil creature in the garden.
If that gene did not get passed on, in meiosis , that cow would never become a mother and no offspring would become creature in this world. But if it did combine, then the implicit threat was passed on to the next generation, and this was how evil was passed and passed and passed , he thought.
Millions of genes could be called selfish, but no gene was as selfish as this one. In biological circles this was given the sobriquet of the Medea Gene ; and it was that deadly to children for the exact same ruthless rationale as that Greek Goddess on the shore; the soft and black sand, the divide of the land, the spot he often dreamed of at the edge of the sea.
It works via a maternally expressed toxin and can only be countered -or countermanded- by the zygotically-expressed antidote; this allele makes it into the recombination of the future offspring during blastocyst formation or that offspring is terminated by the mother’s innate toxins that the Medea gene manufactures in its black little guts. Just like the terrorist, he thought again, with the button in his hand that if he lets go of -not if he presses- but the button if he lets go of, the bomb goes off and kills everyone within sight. All wicked things man does has an earlier correlate in nature; no depraved or malicious acts thought of by man were not first prefigured by nature herself.
Nothing new under this threshing sun , Blax thought and felt the cold run a thin thread through him as he increased his metabolic function and body temp by .33 degrees.
We all get on the bus, into the airplane and off to Bora Bora with the bank’s cash safely and soundly, or none of us do , he thought and monitored the movement of the herd as it circuitously made its way to his perch.
He received an OR update that put the bull count at 31 and the cows at 93 with two juvenile females. They were moving at 37 kilometers per hour following a vector that would put them in the top of the ridgeline in six minutes; and they’d pass about five meters to his west along a wide trial and short-grass clearing that was covered in new and untrammeled snow. He could now hear their movements and see the undulating sea of brownbacks dipping and heaving like a vernal, muddy, stream carving through the white landscape of the season’s heavy snowpack. They had received 12 feet of snow already to date here in San Isabel Forest between 7,600 and 8,600 feet.
The elk’s water vapor rose from their backs and snouts and it made him breathe heavy and fast as his nerves began to protrude into his awareness; his respiration mirroring theirs unconsciously as he let the bots track them and he centered himself.
His PGC sent a signal, not unlike an itch or desire, to regulate his vitals down with a beta-blocker and uptake inhibitor for epinephrine , but he turned his PG coder off and over-rode the order that was designed to level off this frisson . This left him with only his visual, haptic and auditory augmentation on; his OR marker and communication app would stay on as well and he could now see -from that distance- the marked cow rise and fall in the fluid racing of the herd like white sails in a heavy and dark sea.
He waited, closed his eyes and thought back to the ocean of Fort Piece, Florida and the storms that set the perimeter on that dark Atlantic all summer. He remembered the music that played in his ears as the thick bolts struck the water and the cold drops fell to his skin as he sat on the empty beach. All the lights were off in their beach house and theirs was the only edifice within six clicks as they were located on a small nature preserve on the beach, east of the intercoastal waterway. It was 1999 a mere 20-odd years ago, but it might as well have been 2,000 strange years ago, he first felt and then thought -articulated- to himself .
As he had sat on that beach a few meters from the anarchic Atlantic in his eyes, the crescendo of Ӕnima in his ears, mapping directly onto the storm in tone and tenor and revivifying his body and soul as it was still atavistic and young and unencumbered by technology, he was as of yet unliberated by his knowledge that was scattered like atoms and sand but that he had yet to pick-up or to glean.
Inside that memory he remembered having a previous memory. In that place on the beach in Florida, he was transported back to two years previous -to 1997- and a small venue in Cincinnati, Ohio in which that same band had played live for him and maybe 999 others; they were not popular enough to command larger venues yet. He had a broken rib at the time and was as high as European taxes on codeine and Wild Turkey as that crowd had undulated and heaved like the Florida ocean before him then, and like the elk 20 years in the future would and it all collapsed like a wave in one memory from three points across three regions, three elevations and three times as the maw of the singer in this band enjoined the Buckeye swarm to learn to fucking swim .
He was having a memory within a memory and seeing the future from back then now. The PG coders often release small amounts of endogenous psychotropics to increase visual acuity or pattern analysis, or to allow the right hemisphere of the brain to communicate to his left hemisphere in real time; without the normal delay of dreams. The frisson of meaning, of ontological or psychedelic experiences attended such things; and it helped the man -the modern shaman- see what the ancients saw millennia ago. Science and technology were approaching the wisdom of the ancients it seemed.
At the concert he would move freely and with bravura as he could feel not the sharpness of the pain of his fractured ribcage, and he let himself be swallowed whole by the organism that the crowd-waves had produced. As Stalin put it, quantity has a quality all its own . The sonorous voice, the deluge leaving all with no choice, and the storms off in the distance, all of it gave fractal measure to here and now; as he heard the herd, saw the wave and had already survived the slow moving storm, this time in snow, not rain, this time at elevation not down at the sea, this time powerful and ancient, not callow and modern and right now, beginning his vector all alone -as man innately is- from his birth.
He then thought of lichen and how they’re actually two organisms, a portmanteau of a fungus and a green algae that have mated up and seem to be in a kind of middle status of two appearing as one; yet not differentiated enough to qualify as one species just yet. It was a phase change in biology, not merely chemistry, and it was awe-inspiring to anyone with any sense at all.
Our own cells, he thought, contain mitochondria which at some point around 1.618-billion years ago joined up with singular-cellular bodies that now make up all animals; our entire corpus is a large collection of disparate organisms from genetic material and mitochondria all working together to form a cohesive and emergent whole : the human . This type of incessant and dialectic rumination on the constituent parts and an emergent whole was like an idiopathic twitch in him. He thought of how without mitochondria no single cell would have the requisite energy to grow into anything more complex than a bacteria. Mitochondria had the energy necessary, he thought again for what seemed the billionth time, for all complex life. And it remains in each of our cells to this day.
The city as metaphor isn’t exactly a metaphor, it’s exactly what the human body is. Each of us is a metropolis of individual cells with the energy to make shit happen that feeds
back to feed each neuron, each man himself. The body is built to feed the cells that build the body, and the city is the same. All life is an ouroboros asp and with the same Task: build. And that means, both build and destroy.
He would break a thing, any thing , down into bits to see how it worked; and then he’d reassemble it to see if it still worked .
He did it with carburetors and mental constructs like economies, and he did it with his own avatars. Men are systems oriented, by design, he thought, and women are relationship biased for the same reason. Men take shit apart, and women mend them. Each is necessary for life on this planet and anyone who declares one mode superior to the other is cleaved and rent and deformed. These people, well, they speak with only one side of their brain.
The herd was less than 120 seconds away and their once sonorous rumble was now beginning to take on the ominous din of a storm itself. He could feel the concussive blasts in the air and through the ground as the numina and soil was being displaced by such large and powerful force majeure of the beasts in concert with each other; a whole greater than the mere sum of its parts: the herd . He stayed in his perched position and could see clearly as the elk wound up the slightly elevated plain. He stayed on his heels and flexed his toes a bit; raised his head slightly and breathed heavily though his flaring nose; lips pursed into a grimace under his black & grey beard.
He saw his cow about three quarters aft and to starboard of the herd; she looked radiant and coated in a coruscating, carnal -coronal- glow that seemed to frame and sequester each muscle, each facial feature from the black eyes to her brown chin. She was the eye on the face of this gestalt beast, the herd, less than 100 meters from him now. Eye contact was made as the herd blurred in his narrowing depth-of-field view. Like the tiger sees only the one it hunts, and the herd does -and must- disappear; he saw her redolent, singular, and all his.
