I hoped, in the manner one does when facing several thousand pounds of marine mammal, that the walrus had come on good terms. Fortunately for me, I had the advantage of unparalleled stealth, camouflaging myself completely out of sight until I knew his intentions.
“Come out here, Crow,” came a voice of thunder. I reluctantly poked my head around the boulder, which was letting off a gentle vibration as if to encourage me. “Yes, yes. There you are.” He took me in with protuberant eyes, pale and searching in their center. The eyes swiveled and looked precariously like they might, at any moment, plop out and BASE jump to the driftwood below.
“You called?” I asked, attempting to mask my jittery voice as a rousing vibrato. He responded with a magnificent series of lung-shuddering coughs. Three seagulls that skimmed the sky above us responded in a choking call—huoh huoh huoh—a show of respect. I really, really liked this guy.
“I am Onida, The One Searched For.”
I met Onida at the ravaged Seattle Aquarium many years ago. Onida was a very giant giant Pacific octopus. An omniscient one at that; she told me that humankind had denied the Law Of Life. That their abuse of the natural world would result in their extinction. She said that The One Who Hollows as well must return. Animals believe that Onida takes on many forms, that she is a sort of spiritual embodiment of Nature herself. I don’t know what I believe anymore. The only thing I believe in with certainty is Cheetotarianism.
“But you can’t be Onida. I’ve met Onida. Onida is or was a very large oracular octopus.”
“Form is as fluid as the ocean. I am Onida and I am many things. I am oracle of the ocean. I am the wisdom of water. Everyone has a journey, Crow. More than just the one,” boomed the enormous walrus.
This made as much sense to me as a moose with a hat rack, but I didn’t want to appear impolite. “Wow. Well, I like this new look on you. Why did you call for me?”
“You keep the last human child.”
My beak dropped. I tried to recover quickly. “What? Pfffft. Don’t be ridiculous.”
The walrus made a rhythmic clucking with the back of his throat, that magnificent mustache rising and falling like the arms of an orchestral conductor. “You cannot hide the girl any longer.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I live here in the delightful armpit of Alaska by choice, just chillin’ with my owl homies—”
“You no longer have the protection of the Taloned Shadows. You know the child has a calling. Crow, you can no longer stay hidden by the lip of Echo.”
“Listen, Sir or maybe Madam, you must be confused. I’m just here, enjoying the buggy summers and numbingly frigid winters. I’m a crow who has lost his flight and can barely take care of himself, let alone a…pppffft! And you know perfectly well, there are no more MoFos, they have all died ou—”
The walrus cut me off. His massive tusks cut the air as his head thrust skyward. He let out a quaking growl that ruffled even the seagrass. I crouched, lowering my head in respect. One flipper flick and I’d be swimming with the seafood.
“Enough,” said the walrus in his tuba baritone. “Come.” He thrust his blubbery body forward, worming heftily over the driftwood and onto the sand. I hopped to his side, marveling at the hulking beast that blotted out the whole sky. He flung his rippling body across the shoreline, me leaping along next to him, the blundering journey of a flightless crow and the biggest walrus I’d ever seen. We must have been quite a sight.
“Your human is the last. You have done well, your part. She had no chance without you. And now it is time.”
“Time? Time for what? We’re not going anywhere.”
“Your human has her part to play. You can no longer ignore what is happening outside of your tiny den.”
“What’s happening was and is happening anyway, without her. Before she was even hatched. It’s not her fault and it has nothing to do with her.”
“It has everything to do with her. Her species is destroying our worlds. You must show her who and what she is.”
“She knows what she is. We’re not going anywhere.” The farther we shuffled along the beach and away from my heartbroken nestling, over the foreclosed residences of crabs, slate-colored stones, and the various salt-blanched casualties of Echo, the more I felt my heart muscle pull into tight cramps.
“Do you not care about what is happening? Are you content to be a bystander? You have been listening to the horrors on Aura, but you choose to ignore them, keeping your world small and safe. A tide pool.”
“How dare you! There has been nothing small and safe about our lives here! Every minute there are a million threats against my nestling!”
“You have ignored the calls of your friends.” This stung like a hornet’s barb to the heart. Nothing hurts more than the truth. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
I couldn’t. I looked out at the shimmering ocean, at pewter clouds convening for an answer. There wasn’t one. I had been hearing about the exacerbation of horror on Aura. For years, it had just been escalation from strangers—the buzzings of the furred, feathered, and flowered—crying out in a worsening world. But lately, I’d been getting messages from my dear old friends—the Seattle murder, Kraai, even Ghubari. The Changed Ones were growing stronger in ways they said I couldn’t comprehend. Lives had been lost. They were asking for my help. But to help a friend meant to put my nestling in certain jeopardy. That just hadn’t been an option.
It was Shit Turd’s choice.
I pressed the great walrus: “Well, what then? We’re supposed to run around playing hero against an enemy we don’t know?”
“She is one of them.”
“She is NOT ONE OF THEM!”
“She has a part to play in all of this. It is known.”
“No, this is not some fucking stupid 1980s fantasy movie. This is my life. She is a baby.”
“It is time.”
“Time for what? What is it that you expect my nestling to do? She doesn’t accept herself as MoFo! The only thing in this world that she wants is to sprout wings and grow roots and disappear into the soil and sea. She hates what she is and doesn’t even know the half of it! You can mouth off about prophecies and Changed Ones and ‘it’s fucking time’ like some sort of Gandalf motherfucker all you want, but I’m telling you right here and right now, you’ll have to kill me before you can even lay your bloodshot, bulging eyes on her!” The silence rang after my yelling. My chest and head feathers were puffed, rising and falling rapidly as I stood in front of the gargantuan walrus holding my heart in my beak.
The walrus made a thudding whomp-whomp-whomp sound from the back of his throat that pulsed in blubbery ripples. A sharp belching sound and salty fish spray enveloped me. I ruffled my feathers, shaking off sushi sauce.
“She is the most important being on earth,” I told him.
He lowered his mighty tusks and pushed at pebbles that freckled the sand. “She is no more important than a stone. No more vital than bacteria.” He paused for emphasis. “Or a virus.”
I really, really disliked this guy.
“Listen to me. Do you get this? If she leaves here, she will die.”
“Yes,” he said with whiskery contemplation. “She will.” If I could have punched his jelly ass, I would have, made him wobble all over like pudding in the spin cycle of a washing machine lodged in the ass crack of the San Andreas Fault. He continued, that bolshie, lard-faced sea nut.
“I am not asking you. You are The One Who Keeps. You already know it is time. You are fighting yourself.” The truth truly is a swung scythe. “It is time for her to start her swim.”1
“What swim? What is it that you think she can do in a world she’s never seen? And where is she supposed to go? If we leave here and head inland, we must survive the rest of the delightful Alaskan perils. And then what? Huh? She knows how to survive here; we had protection here. She doesn’t have the tools for anywhere else. She has nothing but a body she doesn’t believe in.”
“You are not list
ening. Listen to Aura. Listen to Web and Echo. Listen without agenda, with every cell of your body.”
I hated everything suddenly. Hated the stupid gravelly voiced seagrass, and the pathetic pebbles, and even the ancient washed-up survivalist diaper that made it here despite all these years at sea like some Tom Hanks motherfucker. Bargain. “Look, let me raise her until she’s fully grown at least. You wouldn’t send a pup or a fledgling into what’s out…into this mess. She’s only probably about thirteen, maybe fourteen. Please, I’m begging you to be reasonable and try to understand what we’ve already been through. She is prepared for nothing.” I thought of my nestling, dappled with bruises and the stridulate steps of insects. My Dee, as radiant as the sun and just as lonely.
The walrus pursed his lips. That wondrous mustache collapsed on itself to release a perfect clarion whistle that cut through Alaskan air. The seagrass shimmied and waved in response. The rocks thought complex things. Distant highbush cranberry shrubs shivered their splayed leaves. The diamond-scattered surface of the water burst with a pearly school of fish. Other fish and kelp and crustaceans kissed the waterline, sending ripples into pirouettes. Like so much of the natural world, it was both beautiful and deadly. It was a water dance, enchanting to the eye, but also a message, the walrus’s way to spread word through Echo.
I had already made up my mind, and this made things more complicated. Those of the salt kingdom would now know about the last MoFo on earth, where she was, and how to flush her from her den. She would not survive leaving Toksook Bay as such a young fledgling, and so I wasn’t going to let her go. I was going to do what is done in the natural world when there is a bigger threat. I was going to build a deeper den. Shame lapped at my shores as I thought of this and of how I’d been silent to the SOS messages of my friends. I’d ignored the Seahawks-green buffalo treehopper, the achemon sphinx moth, convergent lady beetle, differential grasshopper, dogbane leaf beetle, naiad of a dragonhunter, brown marmorated stink bug, and all the others with their pleas from afar. My family in Seattle. My home. The walrus had known I hadn’t been honest with even myself about the round of robins who’d shown up before Dee tried to sneak up on the caribou. They hadn’t been drunk (that time). They’d been sober and sincere, and they’d come to tell me my family was calling for me. For help. And if there’s one thing I’d learned right then and there about the truth, it’s that you can bury it as deeply and assiduously as possible. You can even do it with a heart filled with flame. But one day, that truth will germinate and grow and writhe its winding way up through black soil, driven by a ravenous yearning for the light. It will come back glowing green. It will sprout pertinacious shoots, clambering toward consciousness. Rising with all the power of the sun.
This was instantly corroborated by Migisi. She called out in the panicked shrieks of an abused woodwind. My eyes shot to the sky, where I could see her swooping in tight loops below the clouds, directly above our tiny little village. Migisi was sounding out the alarm. Without a glance back at the walrus, I took off like a McLaren F1, earthbound, zooming over the sand as fast as my little twig legs could muster. I tore up and over the seagrass—barely registering their protests of my exit, “Onida, Onida”—past the shipping containers, and up the dirt roads of Toksook. I was fast, but not as fast as the trailers of upcoming attractions that flickered through my mind.
Dee approaching the Toksook health clinic.
Dee finding one floorboard’s edge slightly raised, a temptation too great to resist.
Dee curling her fingers to pull up the floorboard and finding a large rug filled with every electronic item in Toksook Bay that we hadn’t dropped into the ocean.
Dee leaning over, picking up a long-dormant laptop, and pressing down on its power button…
I used Migisi’s looping flight as my compass and finally found myself under those tormented sky circles, rained upon by terrible, tight warning notes. Oomingmak was standing, hooves wide, an idle Mack truck, waiting. He gestured to me with his great horns. I found myself in front of the convenience store, a place we’d ransacked over the years to feed our Dee. She herself had destroyed some of its treasures, plucking out the rusty keys of its old-fashioned cash register, stripping its wooden walls for fire fuel, and riding Oomingmak inside it, which had a disastrous effect on the china plates. I’m sure there was a MoFo expression about that, but I can’t remember it.
I hopped gingerly across dried manure courtesy of Oomingmak, a carpet of glass, food wrappers, and hollow cans of corn. Shelves hung loose on the walls, and in general, it had a post-riot quality to it. Migisi shot in through the open door and landed on the edge of the scarred wood counter. Long ago, a MoFo had used a knife to carve Ikayurtarluten yullgutevnun into its body.2 Migisi’s eyes, cruel sunbeams, landed on something I had buried a long, long time ago. I’d buried it by concealing a latch. I’d buried it so deeply that only Migisi and I knew about it, aware of its presence because of the contents of a letter we dropped into Kangirlvar Bay many years ago.
How Dee had found the hidden door may always remain a mystery to us, but no one else could have drawn back the concealing layers of hanging muskrat-fur jackets, the red oak spirit bear mask, and the ancient Yup’ik parka made of seal guts. No one else could have used a hatchet or an ax to wound the secret door, using bewitching hands and the power of a MoFo bicep to hack the wood around the latch until the door gave, convulsing open to release smells long buried.
Dee stood a few feet away from us, the ax limp at her side. I couldn’t see her face, but I could see her shoulders, tight as drumskins. She had one hand clasped over her mouth because of shock, smell, both. I could see her slight squat, a readying to run. I heard sounds that for many years only came in nightmares, alive but not. A song of sickness burned our insides. Four small steps lowered into the secret room, a makeshift bunker. There were, I think, maybe twelve of them. Twelve MoFos. The only thing I have ever been sure of about this sickness is that it has its own rules. These MoFos had deteriorated but were still in this world. They were blotchy, pale, riddled with worming blue veins from years without sunlight. Their muscles had atrophied. They stirred more than moved, the milky-blue orbs where eyes once were searching endlessly. Oh, how they’d changed since I’d concealed the locked latch of this door all those years ago, Migisi’s magnified eyes on me. They had degenerated and shrunk, grub white and writhing in the darkness. And they had evolved to survive without sun in the manner of creatures who live under stone (and the Irish). A few had more legs than I remembered, adapting uniquely to live in a tight, isolated dark space, a lightless underground landscape. We were all evolving. They were nameless and unnatural. They were once Yup’ik and now they were Changed Ones. And they were Dee’s family.
Dee did not make a sound as she took in this unspeakable horror, mirrors from a fun house of night terrors. They were deteriorated but still recognizable to her as her own. Rotted clothing. MoFo shapes. Something lurking in the eyes. Dee shot from the room like a startled caribou, slamming the broken door in her wake. They could not follow. But we could. She jumped onto Oomingmak who ran at her will, away from her past and the horrid reflection of who she was supposed to be, who she might have been. She had heard my stories of The Changed Ones, but they had always been just that—stories. A balm for the soul. Medicine for her broken bones and heart. And here was hard evidence that the monster under the bed was real. She must have been connecting dots, her word-processor mind spinning and sparking. She threw herself off Oomingmak when they neared our cabin. Dee ran inside. Migisi and I followed. The snowy owls fluttered in and perched, flat faces swiveling to catch up with what had happened.
For the first time in her whole life, I couldn’t read Dee. She seemed so very distant, as though throttled by the undertow of big black waves. Of course she’d found our secret. She was an incredibly intelligent creature in a tiny terrarium. She had felt her way across every inch of Toksook. She silently reached for the old pair of mukluks that had waited for her by the sto
ve all these years. They fit her. She took a sealskin jacket, forcing her arms through its sleeves. This, for me, was a triumph gilded with thorns. She picked up a book I kept in the cabin—Yup’ik, Our Stories—a book she had hurled at the cabin walls more times than I care to remember and let her eyes land on old pictures of the people in her village. I watched her eyelashes tickle her skin like millipedes. I yearned to tell her how sorry I was for keeping a secret from her, for destroying the letter from her mother, a woman who had known that hope is the thing with feathers, who’d known her own fate, and who had been brave enough to leave her child outside a darkened shelter whilst calling on her ancestors and the softly swaying limbs of the trees for help. To give her tiny infant the chance the rest of humanity would not have.
Trauma settles in cells. It is a hand-me-down, a corporeal heirloom. A tear slipped down the cheek of my nestling, whose calloused skin could not protect her eggshell heart. She trailed a divine pointer finger along a page.
“Don’t touch. Never touch,” she said, and I wasn’t sure what she meant.
But I would soon find out.
Footnotes
1This is a tricky translation. What he said did indeed mean “swim,” but in Echo, it references more of an imperative migration or a life journey.
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