Feral Creatures

by Kira Jane Buxton

  Dee was becoming an animal.

  Footnotes

  1I once saw a documentary in which an owl murdered a woman on a staircase and then framed her husband, to give you an inkling of owl ruthlessness.

  2Who knew the face of global warming would be a bunch of birds forgetting the notes of their love ballads and using Aura to send melodramatic messages to their exes?

  3Owls are fledgling thieves, so they are numero uno on the shitlist of corvids.

  4Wise words I learned from a funnyman MoFo named George Carlin, who was definitely part corvid.

  Chapter 3

  Escamoso

  Argentine black and white tegu

  Everglades, Florida, USA

  Ha ha! Taste them first.

  Lick them in. All of them.

  The tongue lashes out, whips the air in pink punishment. I taste the exhale of the steamy swamp, mud bubbling up—blub blub—hiding things that do not wish to feel the shiny squeak of my teeth. Leaves of sea grapes, waxy and fat as flattened frogs fear me. Old bald cypresses fear me, those great gray ghosts. Ha! Flatten deer moss and dog fennel with the savage scales of belly. Scales of mine are black, white, black, white—a devilish dance of bone and night. Jaw of mine is to crunch moonlight-pale eggs, their sunny yolk spilling down the savage scales. To savor little lizards and the ivory pebble of soggy rat skull.

  Swamp is alive. Breathing and belching. Cicada’s symphonic scream. Orb-spider scurries away in golden strings. Grasshoppers bare the fire colors, an inkling of the poisons inside them. Swamp is damp, dark, and full of bite. Here are the hunting grounds of the mosquito monarch.

  Clutch of eggs call to me with their sinewy, sanguine smell. Smells of red insides, of hot life. I’m coming for you. Wading through green water, pushing ripples aside with meaty tail. Next, bring them into me through rounded reptile eye. And so. Nest is filled with eggs. Ha! But the smell tells me a thing. These eggs are not the eggs of the alligator, swamp’s thick-skinned murk. These eggs belong to something else.

  Stop.

  Yes, I taste him.

  The air smacks of slippery scale. Turn and eyes can see the tarry glide of him, this great python of Burma. Longer than a felled tree, shiny as turtle bones.

  He wants the eggs. He is coming for the eggs, greasy and slick, rippling through the swampy blub blub, no legs just speed.

  Hssssssssssss. A warning. These are not his eggs, but he claims them. A colossal arrowhead lifts from the swampy soup, midnight eyes and darting tongue.

  Nope.

  Running, running, I retreat quickly, scampering to safety behind the frantic roots of a mangrove. He can have all the stupid eggs. Python coils and shows the eggs his pink mouth. He will have the eggs all to him. Bah.

  Stop.

  I taste he is not alone.

  Shuddering, low rumble, guttural and cruel, sends the green water into frightened ripples. This is not caiman. Not alligator. Long, wicked jaws are open, she shows python the teeth that will protect her eggs and stop its slither. And her sounds, a slow rolling thunder, the deep, deep roar, they keep coming. They silence the cicadas. This is Nile crocodile, new swamp sovereign from a faraway land. Now she is here in this swamp of mine.

  Python’s head raises from the pulpy green, coiling her long, long self, arrow head tree-still and ready. Her tongue flick flick flick quick quick. Nile crocodile drags her dark armor, passing her nest of eggs that call to be eaten. She lowers her stony thickness into the liquid green and now they are face-to-face. The swamp has stopped breathing.

  Python strikes, faster than huff of hurricane, teeth sinking into crocodile’s lip. Crocodile hisses, shaking hard. Python holds tight, needle teeth have got the grip. She thrashes, whipping up water, she clamps deathly jaws down on the muscly middle of python. They are locked, twisty muscle and hermetic hide. Behind the mangrove roots, I will wait until my chance. To come for my eggs.

  Thrashing, bite and fight, drifting away from the nest, from my eggs. Yes. I will have them. Now is my chance.

  A taste fills the air. Something else is here.

  I do not know its smell. This is a dark smell. This is a smell of a last breath, the tight smell of fear.

  It stands on hind legs, thick as cypress boles. I have not tasted or smelled or seen this with reptile eye. Scaled feet—gray and shedding—press into mud, long of toe and claw. A twitch of behemoth claw is the only movement.

  Stay still. Don’t move. I must not be seen. I become root of mangrove.

  The back is humped, the head—long jaw that rains a slow saliva—slit of pupil in red eye trained forward on a crocodile wrapped in a deadly Burmese constriction. It throws no sounds. Python and crocodile—in a vicious wet roll—do not know they are being watched.

  Enormous thing—not true lizard, not before seen—suffers a shiver along the weblike frills of its craned gray neck. And then it moves, a heavy zigzag, painful swagger until it reaches the water’s lip. Python knows now, summoned by the new smell, that dark, dark smell. Crocodile opens her jaw and python slips from her grip, cutting like a whipped ribbon through green water. Gone, gone, gone. The enormous thing slips into the water, winding toward She Crocodile. The crocodile roars, warning that death is near. A row of spines lifts on the long head of the enormous thing. The swamp shudders. It is over quickly. The enormous thing strikes faster than python of Burma, clamping down on the brain of the crocodile. She slumps, life leaving her eyes. The Nile crocodile is now a limp shell, captive in a strange jaw. The enormous thing—not one thing, not another—rotates its sharp slit of an eye to me. I am seen.

  Running, running, I am scurrying, gone, gone, gone.

  I will find another swamp of mine.

  Chapter 4

  S.T.

  Toksook Bay, Alaska, USA

  Dee’s tantrums were excruciating, as painful as when I flew beakfirst into glass over the Woodland Park Zoo and lost my sky privileges. I couldn’t stop them—physically, because I am approximately the size of her foot, and emotionally, because I knew exactly what was wrong. It was as if, in an act of utter cosmic shitbaggery, someone held up a mirror as my nestling ripped bricks from a wall until her hands bled, or shredded a yellowing gymnasium banner, her echoed roars bouncing off the walls in lieu of basketballs. She dismantled endangered sweetgrass baskets and launched a frying pan through the post office window, a cascade of endangered glittering glass sending tundra swans into a frenzied flitter. And the owls, well, they saw everything. Let’s just say Dee turned a few heads.

  You see, Dee was stuck between two worlds. She knew she wasn’t truly an animal, the fury of seals and voles and rabbits a stark reminder of her alien presence. My heart broke, watching this beautiful being smack at her rippling reflection in a tidal flat or stare longingly at a herring gull as he skimmed the sky, releasing clams to clatter onto rocks below, a fantasy of the flightless. And when she was feared by little brown bats, marmots, a porcupine, or a lemming, I saw the flare in her cheeks, felt the cruel stretch of heart tendons, the hollow pain of longing to belong. And I thought about how I was neither full crow nor full MoFo but a hybrid, and how it had taken most of my life to accept it.

  You see, Dee was in love with the natural world. She spent most of her hours outdoors, preferring the tickle of a breeze to the shelter of walls. She pressed the curling cartilage of her ears to the bark of paper birches, listening to their delicate drinking. The ocean’s water winked at her in silver glimmers as she wished upon every wave to sprout gills. She dove her delicious crescent moon nails into the earth, closing her eyes to feel those who toil in soil. She refused shoes because, in the manner of her beloved butterflies, she was tasting the ground with her feet. Dee was connected—perhaps more so than any MoFo that ever lived—tuning in to Aura, dunking her head in salt water to spy on fish and learn the bubbling nuances of Echo. But her comprehension wasn’t perfect. Her calls remained unanswered. It was a party invitation she never received, and though I was glad, since it was safer that she stayed hid
den, it was slowly strangling her. Imagine living in a body that didn’t live up to the expectations flaunted all around. What had happened to the little hatchling that reminded me of a delicate flower? She was a starving spirit. What I wouldn’t have given to be her, and what she wouldn’t have given to be me. Each time I saw her furrowed forehead, her fingers dragging the dirt, eyes on the horizon, a nest of brambles in her mind, I knew what I was dealing with.

  When you’re depressed, where do you want to go? Nowhere.

  Who do you feel like seeing? No one.

  Depression hurts in so many ways. Sadness, loss of interest, anxiety. Cymbalta can help.

  It was The Black Tide, that lapping sadness that came to drown the people I most loved—Big Jim, my Dennis, and now my Dee. But I would never let it have her. I got to work, telling her semieducational jokes that I didn’t totally understand, like:

  Me: What’s the difference between a cat and a complex sentence?

  Dee: “. . .”

  Me: A cat has claws at the end of its paws and a complex sentence has a pause at the end of its clause!

  Dee: “. . .”

  I kept her occupied with explorations around Toksook. I brought her books about the Yup’ik, her people, who told beautiful stories, often through dances and drumming. The dances were stories of animals and birds, whom they believed had spirits, that when those animals died, their spirits inhabited other animals. I imagined Dee’s grandmother, her aunt, and cousins licking their fingers while eating akutaq—an ice cream–like blend of sugar, shortening (or traditionally, whipped caribou fat), and whitefish, with a sprinkling of raisins, blackberries, or salmonberries. I learned that the Yup’ik word akutaq meant “mixing up together.” I celebrated ThanksChristmasHallowHanuKwanzaa with her each year—an homage to Big Jim’s favorite time of year—and I’d bring her gifts of books, empty take-out cartons, or clothes for her to hurl in the bay as she laughed maniacally. Joy was an imperative element, absolutely necessary for staving off waves of dark thoughts. The Black Tide could kiss my tiny black ass.

  Not all nature disapproved of Dee. Many insects adored her in their buzzy, wriggly way. Spiders loved her and she loved them back, watching them throw silks and manifest silvery structures for hours. She befriended a black widow spider she called Ra Ra—a friendship I forbade until I was certain it was truly safe—and she sometimes spent hours catching flies for her arachnid ally, who skimmed across her skin and studied the contours of her face with eight shining eyes. I worried that they’d formed some sort of secret club together, but that was absurd—they had no true way to communicate, the silk spinner and the hominid. Butterflies lit up her very veins by landing on her skin to savor her salt. Bees loved her deeply, dancing in swarming synchronicity around her body. They taught her how to hum. I’d watch, mesmerized, as she gingerly dipped her arm into the sticky palpitating mass of a natural nest, the bees forming her second skin. And the queen bee—a young queen of the free bees—sang to Dee, a serenading like the gentle berceuse of a kazoo, an unparalleled honor, really. I believe the hive thrummed inside her, and it was these connections to the natural world that kept her afloat. She’d lick their honey off her forearms, the sky’s dusky powdering of pink illuminating her sly smile. And then of course, there was Oomingmak.

  Fucking Oomingmak. We heard him before we saw him. Distress calls haunted thick fog. It was afternoon but pretending to be early morning, cold as a refrigerated can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Dee had been painting, a favorite pastime for which she used a rock to squeeze the pigments from wildflowers, mixing them with salt water to create various hues. She was putting the final touches on a painting she replicated frequently in different styles and wildflower pigments, inspired by a mural outside of her place of birth—a mural that was part of the great adventures Dennis and I had in our Seattle days. She had finished the evergreen tree and now used her fingers to add more detail to the crow, looking back at me for inspiration. I lifted my melon1 to the sky, jerking my head around to model for her. I strutted, spread my wings, bobbed, and paraded like a deranged peacock. She laughed at me—a laughter that floated up, up, up on golden wings—and poked at me playfully, branding me with a streak of electric-blue forget-me-not hue.

  “Waaaaaaaa!” came the desperate cry. Dee shot up into a low crouch like a mountain lion with a black belt in Northern Shaolin kung fu and a tragic past. I was peeved about the interruption because we were having a really nice moment. The horrible wails started up again—“Waaaaaaaaa!”—and Dee took off, bare feet thundering across patchy grass.

  “Dee!” I called after her.

  “Danger!” she yelled back.

  “Wait for me! Fuck!” I squawked. Dee doubled back, snatching me in her hands and bolting with me tucked into her armpit. We galloped to the shoreline, where the conundrum unveiled itself through wisps of fog. A lonely sheet of ice bobbed in the bay before us, its captor calling in breathy clouds for its life.

  “Baby!” Dee shrieked, pointing. And that’s when she launched herself toward the white-capped surf.

  “Not with your clothes, Dee!” I jumped up and down and started shrieking for the owls—Kuupa, The Hook, Ookpik, Bristle, Wik, anyone—because when Dee set her mind to something, there was no stopping her, and this is just the same philosophy that hypothermia has. Dee whipped off the fur-lined parka I’d finally convinced her to wear, her featherless body swallowed by the bay. She screeched, her lungs gasping at its sucker-punch sting. She flicked her arms, kicked her legs, and thrashed through the salty assault. I jumped up and down screaming because I didn’t know what else to do. Dee was an incredible swimmer—part marlin, I’m sure of it—but the frigid Alaskan waters show no mercy, and even from the shoreline, I could see that Dee was turning blue. When she reached the ice floe, she did the unthinkable; her fingers grasped its saber edge, fingers that had already had a deadly dance with the black bite of frost. My gular fluttered in panic.2 She called to the baby. He inched away from her. She tried again, her voice rattling like an old carburetor as she sang the gentle hum of the hive, the one she used on her cherished owlet siblings. He inched closer. I turned from the ice floe at intuition’s sharp call and saw the snowy owls splitting the fog apart like ivory blades. They had blankets in their talons.

  “Hurry!” I screamed. “Faster!”

  Dee screamed with the effort of driving her arm up out of the water and snatching the thick fur of the tiny musk ox. She yanked, jittery body flailing and fishlike. He resisted, but his hooves had no purchase on the ice, and he slid, braying and wailing, into the glacial shock. I couldn’t breathe. Musk oxen are notoriously inept swimmers, and here was this hulking male calf, boulder-like, and I knew my Dee—I knew that she wouldn’t let go of the thick ruff of fur around his neck and that he was about to sink, dragging my beautiful nestling with him to the bottom. To where the bones of whales become castles for scuttlers and skitterers, for the armored dwellers of dark.

  “DEE! SHIT! LET HIM GO!” I screamed. Dee reversed so she faced the calf and started to kick with all her might, treading backward, dragging that forsaken bovine through the bay. She was slick skinned and salt soaked, swimming like a creature of Echo, the waterlogged calf bumping along in bursts until they reached the shore. She was her Uncle Dennis’s niece, stubborn and silly and brave, and I cursed bragging about his heroic swim in Martha Lake and being so utterly brilliant at storytelling. The owls fussed over Dee, who staggered out of the treacherous Kangirlvar Bay stiff, eyes rolling, her body seizing on her. I had already begun frantically assembling sticks; to hell with my rule about making fires so far from the cabin and the risk of whom a smoke signal might summon. Migisi fell from the sky with two pieces of flint and helped smother the two mammalian popsicles in blankets and the great wingspans of the ice owls.

  Oomingmak wasn’t in great shape right after the ordeal—neither was I, honestly, my nerves frayed like a cat owner’s couch. But he recovered and then he started to grow, and then he never really gave tha
t up. He ate clover and dandelions and sweetgrass, and basically became a Buick. Oomingmak—whom I named after the Inuktitut MoFo word for “bearded one” because Dee kiboshed “Sir Fartsalot”—was obsessed with Dee and discussed it a lot, which got very tedious, as I’m sure you can imagine. And you don’t need to know much more about him other than he was humongous and smelled like the Honey Bucket of a highly trafficked dog park. For a long time, she let him invade our cabin, against my very vocal protests, and he behaved, well, like a bull in a small cabin. He sealed his doom when he first crapped in there though, releasing a great steaming avalanche of hot dung. Oh boy, did the owls let him have it, eighty-sixing him for life. The problem with this is that his unreasonably thick and unkempt fur brought Dee a lot of comfort and meant that she could sleep outside, and so she often did, muddy limbs splayed over the enormous musk ox, her body nestled into him. And since she couldn’t sleep without yours truly nearby, I had to sleep out there in the frickin’ cold as well, sitting on top of Oomingmak’s unsightly gut bucket as the wind screamed in grief and Oomingmak snored like a hacksaw in the midst of castration. And I was the MoFo-est of crows, who wasn’t raised to deal with the prickly business of the outdoors and would have greatly appreciated a roof, a small heater, a Snuggie—Jimini Crowket!—even a goddamned sock to sleep on. Dee and I had opposing ideas about what constituted a creature comfort. But it made Dee happy, so it was what we did. And yours truly was sentenced to an eternity of the itches.

  There was some comfort in Oomingmak’s protection—he was, after all, a horned wrecking ball with legs—but he was still a prey animal, a lone one at that. And since we lived in the realm of the white wolf and Seal’s Dread, near the land of lynx and wolverines, we were helplessly dependent on the vigilance of trees filled with yellow eyes.