Feral Creatures

by Kira Jane Buxton

  And when my eyes flashed back on the polar bear, she had her great black lips sealed around Dee’s tiny skull. Her bone-crushing jaw cocooned my hatchling’s egg-shaped head. Between tooth and fleshy tongue, I saw glimpses of a cave seals don’t come back from. Ocher fangs were inches from clamping down, and when that happened, there would be nothing left. The world would be scooped out. Emptied. Forever hollow.

  “She is my cub!” I screeched, rocks dragging across my throat. “I am The One Who Keeps! I will kill you if you harm her; there is no earthly law that will stop me!”

  The polar bear flinched, seeming to recognize something. My heart thundered out an SOS call. The She Bear slowly ran her lips across Dee’s face. Dee grimaced from the musty stench, the cold and slimy trail of a tongue. She made no sounds. Five snowy owls—Dee’s defenders—burst onto the scene. They beat their wings in fury outside the cabin’s traitor of a window.

  Glass-breaking screeches sent my skull into spasms. These were not just the screams of our snowy owls. Up in the trees, all around us, was a dappled mosaic of ferocious eyes—yellow and orange—blinking in horror.

  There were flammulated owls, with their adorable oversize pupils and Pixar-rendered cuteness (don’t be fooled; they’ll fuck you up). Northern saw-whet owls, their rain boot–yellow eyes hosting a centrifugal blast of facial feathers. Short-eared owls, intricately speckled, and long-eared owls with ear tufts like a Viking warrior’s horns. Great gray owls in their dapper charcoal suits, faces a hypnosis of misty moons. Northern pygmy owls, little crackle-and-pop predator puffs. Burrowing owls, the elusive Mr. Beans of the owl kingdom, frowning quizzically. There were even great horned owls, who are known to snack on other owls, earning them the nickname tiger owl. These sky hunters, many nocturnal and nomadic, had come to this unfamiliar land from faraway places under a bidding. A potent parliament of owls.

  Here to defend the last MoFo on earth.

  The owls held their breath, waiting for a signal. Kuupa, largest of the snowy owls, turned her head—a satellite dish tuned to pick up the murmur of a millipede—and lasered the polar bear with golden wrath.

  “Go, Seal’s Dread! Go! Goooooo!” screeched the parliament.

  The female polar bear held her ground, sniffing at Dee voraciously. She let out a wet huff. Her growl detonated like a bandolier of grenades—

  “There is nothing more dangerous than the Fire Hunter you keep.”

  “Fuck off!” I said, with some emphasis, puffing my feathers to show her how intimidating I am even though I weigh the same as four sticks of butter.

  “The last Skinner cub. She will be the death of you, Crow. You keep a monster in your nest.”

  Kuupa struck like the Discovery Channel’s F-111 Aardvark swing-wing bomber. Her militant talons snatched at wicked white fur, at Grecian column legs. The other snowy owls joined in the mobbing. The polar bear pulled her head from the window, lifting to swipe at the owls. Deterred only by the sheer number of raptors, she lowered, taking a last lazy paw swipe at Kuupa.

  The behemoth white bear left in a slow, commanding lumber, Queen Of The Ice Fields. And with her she took our sense of security. Our confidence trailed behind her in clawed tatters. That day, a polar bear stole my hope of returning to Seattle.

  My hope of going home.

  The snowy owls flew in through the rickety old window that would never be left unguarded again. I hopped gently onto my nestling, dabbing at her with yarrow leaves and smoothing her arms with my beak, inspecting her for damage.

  “You’re okay, my nestling; everything’s okay,” I told her, breathlessly. “I’m here.” Every feather of my inky body trembled with terror. Never had I so much to lose. Here I was, a crow with a disability—a broken wing that wouldn’t let me ride the sky—and lofty ideas, making every mistake possible, endangering this tiny, fragile being. I was the uniformed guard, strained and sweating under an African sun as I stood watch over the very last rhino in existence.

  Ookpik and Bristle perched at each side of Dee’s bed, their talons scarring the cardboard. Wik nestled on the chubby, neglected stove. Kuupa fluttered her peppery wings—a sound like the flogging of old dresses—atop the table, sending cobwebs into a winged waltz. For the first time, I noticed a small silver band spiraling her leg. The hundred smoldering eyes of a great owl guardianship sequined the trees outside the cabin, and I knew then that it was Kuupa who had summoned them. Kuupa kept her razor gaze on little Dee as Ookpik, Bristle, and The Hook fussed over the last MoFo. But now, Kuupa saw Dee in a whole new way, because the bear had taken one of her golden eyes—a potential death sentence for an owl. She did not complain as Little Wik tended to it. I realized then where Kuupa truly perched, how much tiny Dee had invaded and conquered, burrowing into the hearts of the owls. Dee was not only a nestling but an owlet.

  Would a guardianship of owls be enough? I was haunted by the bear’s scowl—the raw liver-blue loathing that ran an Arctic chill through my plumage. I thought of what the polar bear had growled…

  “She will be the death of you, Crow. You keep a monster in your nest.” Because while the last of the MoFos was my miracle, a priceless present to which I had pledged my plumage, to many others she was an unspeakable horror. She was the last of the most violent species to ever walk this earth. Creatures of the natural world called humans Hollows because of their dead-eyed destructiveness. Death in bald flesh. What had the bear called her? A Skinner. A Fire Hunter. The creator of the most feared entity in the animal kingdom, that silver slug—the bullet. They saw her as an incubating killer. Now just a small, beady-eyed pet-store snake, one day she would grow into a murderous predator, taking lives and stealing skins. I often thought of something I’d read by the MoFo T.S. Eliot—“We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.” If only I could tell every being on earth that I was reanimated with purpose because of Dee. If only they knew what I knew, if I could show them the crackling genius of MoFos, the kindness, the creativity. Humankind.

  Human. Kind.

  On grocery store excursions, I never actually laid eyes on the mythical milk of human kindness, but never doubted the existence of at least some version of it—perhaps the Lactaid of human civility? If only creatures of the natural world knew about good MoFos like Elizabeth the First, Chance the Rapper, and Ellen the Generous. But how could I show them? There were no more left. Aura confirmed it almost daily, along with other darker happenings that I couldn’t allow to dilute my focus on the last MoFo on earth.

  And I had more to worry about than what was lurking in the molasses mantle of an Alaskan night…

  “The Hook,” I asked the great owl, his plumage a brighter white than new printing paper, “what were we discussing a few suns ago? Tell me again.”

  “Your molting is very bad, so you asked what I thought of the moss toupee you were wearing, and then you asked if I thought your legs looked too skinn—”

  “Oh, what? No, not that, the other thing. About the geese.”

  “The geese no longer make their great migration; they stay here and feast off the seagrasses.”

  “And the shoreline? What did you tell me?” I said, regretting being so dismissive of him days ago. I had been pretending to listen but actually reading a book I pillaged from the Nightmute library about potty training your young MoFo called Poop! There It Is! It felt sensible to get a jump on that shit.

  The Hook’s face was round and inquisitive. He moved with the confidence of a glacier. “The ocean’s angry, coming for us, eating up the distance from the cliffs. We see it all with our watchful eyes. The insect hoards rise. They are destroying the trees and so the ebony forest is spreading. This is the change we see with our watchful eyes.”

  “Do you know why this is happening?” I asked, afraid of his answer.

  The Hook rotated his head 180 degrees. Owls do that shit willy-nilly, but it brought back unsettling memories. “We do. It is the Sun. We can no longer read the big beautiful blue like we used to, bec
ause the Sun is nearing. She drinks the lakes. She gives life and she claims it. There is no greater power than Her.”

  “I understand.” And I did. I understood everything. My nestling sat, ocean eyed, learning the peppered patterns that speckled her owls while sucking on heartbreakingly beautiful fingers. It was a betrayal to tell The Hook nothing of a warming world and its cause, but the risk was too great. I would stop at nothing to protect my nestling, and so I would not share that the oily footprints of MoFos were still changing the shape of the soil beneath us. That the symptoms were starving bears and ebony forests.

  I was thinking about this—and about how I owed a bunch of caribou a fucking epic apology—when I felt a burning sensation. Someone was watching me with a gaze with more flame than Crunchy XXTRA FLAMIN’ HOT® Cheetos®. I whipped my head through the window, pulse spiking. The eyes were a haunted shade of yellow. They belonged to a bald eagle, a magnificent beauty with a wingspan that kissed the horizon and a head as white as the tundra. Migisi’s dedication to the tiny MoFo remained as mysterious as her past. Whether danger flowed through her pinions like mountain winds or she saw her own destiny tied to us as clear as a migration map, I was eternally grateful. Migisi and I shared a barbed look we both understood. I didn’t speak so they didn’t hear—mosquito, skimmer dragonfly, sphinx moth, aphid, blue dasher, locust, mantis, even the leaves—they were all listening. And we couldn’t have them listening. Migisi and I stayed silent, but the polar bear had confirmed what we already knew, a knowing of birds from the blue-footed booby to the Japanese quail; eggs must always stay hidden. In that moment, by a single look, we decided to keep our Fabergé flower here in Toksook Bay, away from the roaring appetites of the world outside. Where we had protection with binocular vision and heads that rotated 270 degrees. As much as I wanted to take Dee home to Seattle, staying put was the only chance she had at survival. Because, just as with the final Cheeto® of the bag, everything is more desirable when it’s the last.

  I am The One Who Keeps.2 It is known.

  Migisi had been searching since we got to Toksook Bay, just as I’d asked. And now, I knew by her stare—a look that could debone a herring from the peak of Denali—she’d found something. In her talons, stippled with ruby blotches of blood, unmistakable even from the most ambitious branch of a white spruce, was a piece of paper. I could see that the paper had MoFo writing on it, the heart song of a literate crow. Soon the sun would sink, Migisi and I would retreat into the spruce’s shaggy canopy, and I’d set my eager eyes on that paper. When, under the cover of night’s licorice wings, the snowy owls—day hunters—closed their watchful eyes.

  I’d been wrong about things before—penguins in particular—but I could never have predicted what would happen to our little murder. I was wrong about keeping secrets, I was wrong about alliances, and I was fundamentally wrong about my little nestling, Dee.

  I should have never compared her to a flower.

  Footnotes

  1This is a reference to a MoFo movie. Watching television and movies is how I became a MoFo expert. Star Wars was a space opera about an incestuous brother and sister who used telekinesis and the help of a green gremlin to get vengeance on their angry asthmatic father and blow up both his balls. I loved it. Two wings up!

  2Creatures of the natural world call me The One Who Keeps because I’m the one who keeps the last human and hope alive. “The One” can sometimes be plural; for example, wolves are all called The One Who Conquers. Crows call me Blackwing. I have some other less desirable nicknames like The Legless Half-Breed Made Of Tumbleweeds (I think this was butchered by the avian rumor mill). Earthworms just call me Dickface.

  Chapter 2

  S.T.

  Toksook Bay, Alaska, USA

  Somewhere back in the days of healthy MoFos, days distinguished by a chorus of cars and redolent pork belly fumes coughed from the lungs of a food truck, I heard a MoFo compare raising a child to gardening. I guess raising a child is a bit like gardening, if your garden is prone to explosive diarrhea and screaming like an orgy of bagpipes and malfunctioning farm equipment. Don’t get me wrong, Dee was the most scintillatingly brilliant thing that had ever happened to me, but I had a formidable parliament of owls1 assisting me with every midnight meltdown or fistful of blackberry slop lobbed at me, and I often felt like I was stuck in the crow’s nest of the Titanic.

  After the incident with the starving polar bear, the snowy owls and I decided to keep the last MoFo on earth as secret as a stonefish. Migisi was panicked about the bear disclosing the whereabouts of our nestling, but there is an adage of the tundra and the taiga—starving bear won’t share. The polar bear wouldn’t whisper of a failed hunt. Predator’s pride. The owls hung dusty strips of dried baleen over the window, a shield from prying eyes. We had the cover of our beloved trees—spruce, birch, aspen—a strange, small forest in Toksook I couldn’t account for because these trees don’t grow in the tundra. But I have to tell you, paranoia swooped in. Migisi and I were hiding the contents of the letter she’d found, not just from the little being I loved most in the world, but also from the stately owls who gave of themselves so completely. I was terrified to ask them why, for fear they’d change their minds, unfurl those great speckled wings, and soar to greener Pampers. The prophet Emily Dickinson once said, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” I was a bird with hope laced through every barbule of every feather, but I couldn’t protect the last MoFo on my own.

  I was grateful to Alaska’s arboraceous armpit and the shelter of our abandoned Toksook nest. Every time little Dee threw back her head and bellowed loud enough to knock Jupiter out of orbit, I leapt into action, tending to thirst, hunger, heat, cold, ennui. I was court jester, doctor, butler, and teething toy. Baby MoFos are like baby birds. They are altricial, hatching soft-skinned and helpless. MoFo hatchlings, however, lack the sense to be silent, screaming like hypochondriacal goats in labor (which is called “kidding,” I’m not even joking), no matter what predator might lurk nearby. Those skull-rattling, sweaty-pink cries of a wounded animal—we couldn’t afford their price. And her smell. That salty-sweet, velvet smell of a MoFo, known across this big beautiful blue. To some, that scent is the first flicker of terror. To others, it is a summoning. Like Cinnabon. And if she caused a fur-lined ear to erect or was breathed into the olfactory kingdom of a creature, word could, would, at any moment, spread on the gossamer filaments of a dandelion, or the casual prattle of a warbler, and what then? In order for Dee to survive, no one, not mite nor musk ox, could know that she was breathing.

  I’ll admit, I was sneaky. Perhaps it was the MoFo part of me. I’d admired Big Jim’s ingenuity when he’d use a voice-changing app on his foredoomed phone to call in sick, which worked even though he sounded like a blow-up doll perishing from a beak-poke wound to the chest. Perhaps it was the crow part of me that learned from watching my crow friend Kraai build decoy nests around the North Creek wetlands to prevent predators from finding where the hatchlings really were. Regardless, every now and then I tuned in to Aura and made an inquiry.

  What is Aura? Aura is nature’s communication network, a living symphony of sound, where birds and bees and mammals and trees share news about life and love and sometimes tweet about what they ate for breakfast. It’s accessible to any living being who is willing to open their minds and earholes, even MoFos, once, before we lost them to technology and their own magnificent minds. Below the lively loam realm, the network is called Web and bubbling under the world of water, they call it Echo.

  I’d tune in to Aura, mimicking the owls’ doglike bark to ask if there were any healthy MoFos sighted. I did this because I, Special Agent Turd, wanted to know if anyone had an inkling about our Fabergé flower. And because I’m an irrepressible optimist who still dreamed that somewhere out there was another MoFo. That Dee was not the last of her species.

  Once in a while, the owls would insist I take a small break. On my short walks, a creature of Aura would jump or flutter toward me. Once, a Seahawks-g
reen buffalo treehopper. An achemon sphinx moth startled me one night. A convergent lady beetle, a differential grasshopper, a dogbane leaf beetle, and a naiad of a dragonhunter—a scary brown larval beast about to burst through its exoskeleton Alien-style into a formidable dragonfly-hunting dragonfly. Once, it was, quite regrettably, a brown marmorated stink bug.

  “Oh, look, it’s The One Who Keeps!” they’d say. “You are a legend!”

  I appreciate sycophantic outbursts, but I’d have to shoo them away. Being an infamous legend and (handsome) hero has its perks, but it was too dangerous to enjoy idolatry and autographs. I could not afford anyone finding out about my nestling. I had the owls forward all Aura messengers looking for The One Who Keeps to one of my many fake addresses.

  We kept Dee inside the little cabin. I couldn’t fly and she couldn’t walk, so our world was tight as a fist. I traded sleep for running lists of the dangers she faced—Alaska’s icicle-sharp elements, the fauna, the flora, and the cherry on my cake of doom—illness. I scanned little Dee obsessively for signs of change. Red eyes. Craning neck. Little red dots. Anything that meant we might lose her to something I dare not speak aloud. I read a lot, mostly about dinosaurs, poetry, and dinosaur poetry (a niche genre), but also about the horrors of smallpox, dengue, Ebola, and the flus—Spanish and avian. The biggest threat to MoFos—as with birds—was not the perceptible but the microscopic. Invisible assassins. What if, much like a sand fly frozen in amber—a sand fly who had sucked the blood of a dinosaur and cocooned a terrible virus—there were still incubators of the virus out there? Inside an electronic orb of amber. Waiting for an on button. Waiting for Dee.