2I library-learned that this was Yup’ik for be helpful to one another.
Chapter 6
S.T.
Toksook Bay, Alaska, USA
The Black Tide was swallowing Dee whole. I tried to throw her a life jacket by reading her stories, the very thing that had kept us both alive all these virulent years. One afternoon, as the day hunters, Ookpik, Bristle, Wik, and The Hook, set out for food and I made a case for anything other than fucking red-backed kebobs or guacavole, Dee lay on the floor of the cabin. Kuupa seemed reluctant to leave, scanning Dee with that sharp, lonely eye before finally submitting to the sky as if it pained her. Dee now wore the parka and the mukluks but never a smile. Fatigue floated off her in lazy blue waves. She had lost interest in food and the sounds from her throat. So, I got busy with my stories, recalling her very favorite.
“When I first laid my eyes on you is when I vowed to teach you everything I could about how to survive the sharp edges of where we now live. And my big journey, the one I slowly tell you as a bedtime story—along with The Hobbit because that’s a goddamned classic—is how I know what I’ve told you is true. About how Mother Nature is not kind, but she is balanced. Every single one of us, from amoeba to blue whale to the tenacious bloom that dares to dream of tomorrow, has their own destiny-fulfilling journey as long as their minds and hearts are open. And we are all connected by a web that looks gossamer and silvery but is stronger than a chain-link fence. And though she is tough, she is always conspiring for your success, encouraging you to evolve. You can even hear her if you listen carefully.”
She wasn’t listening with her spine like she normally did. Even the mention of her Uncle Dennis no longer lit her up. It was as if her eyes were suddenly shuttered by windows, glassy and cruel. I gave her matted hair a quick preening and ran my beak gently along her cheeks. Her Uncle Dennis, bloodhound and my very best friend, had taught me that not all heroes wear Spandex and shoot out eyeball lightning; some chew the couch and drink out of the toilet. He was sunshine with saggy skin, heaven in a hound’s body. Dennis was the reason I’d survived losing Big Jim, or survived at all for that matter. When Big Jim’s eyeball fell out, Dennis and I had to leave our little Ravenna nest, taking on a crumbling world together. Dennis taught me how to open my heart and nose to all the glorious creatures that call it home. He made Big Jim a better MoFo and me a better crow. Dennis died running toward a stationary UPS truck surrounded by sick MoFos. In the end, it had been the siren song of old habits that meant I’d never preen his fawn fur or comfort him during wild doggy dreams again. I didn’t think I’d forgive myself or survive losing him, didn’t think I’d ever stop thinking that it should have been me. But with every breath and head bob and beat of my little black heart, I was reminded of how fiercely Dennis loved and was loved, and I tried to live up to that as best I could, vowing to live a life big enough for both of us. Dennis would have cherished Dee more than his own life, and maybe it took his tragedy for her to be here. When Big Jim first got sick, I almost lost Dennis to The Black Tide. I wouldn’t let its currents drag him away from me. And I would never let it come for Dee.
I had to head to the library to keep feeding little Dee’s soul and find a paperback heroine to lift her spirits. Once we’d thoroughly exhausted every book in Toksook, Migisi and I had to make a half-hour flight to Nightmute, where a library sat counting dust particles and dreaming of readers. We’d done this flight many, many times over the years—above a blinding ivory landscape and the muted green meadows and marshes of the subarctic tundra, land of lichen. We soared over the fiery crimson takeover of dwarf birch, over mooses (Meese? Moosees? Dammit, from here on let’s just call them gangly Canadian coatracks) and lemmings and black spruces. Even through the worsening storms that plagued us, whose waves pounded us like the fists of impatient gods. We fought winds that could cut glass and hordes of insects that polluted the air in thick, buzzy clouds. Oomingmak, that gassy fopdoodle, stayed with Dee and therefore never entered the library, so it was the Ritz-Carlton compared to the other dilapidated buildings we knew. It was a palace of musk and dust, a mushroomy museum of words, and holy Hot Pockets, did I love those trips. It was here that I worked very, very hard to evolve my reading ability for Dee’s education. I discovered poetry. I fell in love with the MoFo prophet Emily Dickinson, who wrote about birds and knew a thing or two about us.
An Antiquated Tree
Is cherished of the Crow
Because that Junior Foliage is disrespectful now
To venerable Birds
Whose Corporation Coat
Would decorate Oblivion’s
Remotest Consulate
Oblivion—the end of MoFos! She had seen it coming! She also knew to capitalize Crow because we are obscenely handsome and important.
Mostly, I discovered that poet MoFos knew a lot about the natural world, though some, like William Wordsworth, made it all sound a bit too romantic and had clearly never stuck a boob into a carpenter ant nest. Dee once did this, and she’d tell you that there’s nothing romantic about it. I discovered beautiful things, like when Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Earth laughs in flowers,” which was stunning but erroneous—everyone knows the earth laughs in blobfish and Chinese cresteds!
Perhaps the most exciting thing I read about was dinosaurs. I obsessed, reading about dracorex, kronosaurus, quetzalcoatlus, troodon formosus, and my favorite, velociraptor—and discovered that birds evolved from them!
I discovered that I’m a fucking dinosaur.
I was always careful to put books back where I found them—mostly; alphabetizing is challenging as crap—each trip affording us one reasonably sized book that wouldn’t be too hard on Migisi, which meant Infinite Jest would have to wait until we had a better system. This day, I was full of ferrets because I’d found a true treasure. I’d chosen a book about a young MoFo girl who was in love with the ocean and found a magical pearl that, when placed on her tongue, allowed her to breathe underwater so she could visit the world she’d always dreamed of. The girl was made of guts and fire, and I knew Dee would love it. I was also busy thinking about how we were going to stay hidden from fish-face Onida, feeling inspired by the ingenious underground shelter Dee’s family had made. I was giddy all the way back to Toksook, clutching the paperback in my foot, crouched low on Migisi’s beautiful black back. Herds of caribou snaked in single file below like an ant army. I was worried about Dee, but I was always worried about Dee, and I knew I could fix her sadness—I’d done it before.
Emily Dickinson foretold it.
As we started our descent from the high clouds and the little cluster of buildings that looked like cheap plastic board game pieces, I felt Migisi tighten. She dove, lifting her mighty wings, splaying her talons, pushing her cotton-white head forward. The wind-force was too much, and I dropped Dee’s precious book. I screeched for her to stop.
“Migisi, slow down! The book!” I squawked over the roaring wind, feathers on end. “It’s about a MoFo girl who becomes a fucking water warrior and takes on a sequestered colony of misogynistic mermen!”
She ignored me. As far as eagles go, Migisi is pretty fucking intense. I frequently encouraged her to join my spiritual journey (Scotch), but Migisi was too full of mercury and lightning and parental obligation. Butts, I thought to myself and then said aloud for emphasis. We weren’t going back for the book.
A bleeding watercolor of Bohemian waxwings shot past us.
“Wrong way!” they cried.
Snake-necked cormorants followed them. “This way! This way! Go!”
Below, the fleeing of a marten family caught my eye, their bodies like flung Slinkies.
Migisi was a spitfire; I could barely hold on as we dropped low and swooped through the village, nearing the cabin. No Oomingmak. No Dee. Migisi lifted again with a cry, shooting us—a feathered arrow—toward a sinister tendril of black smoke. Smoke that curled from the convenience store. Everything from this point happened in slow motion. It happened without permission.
; Dee stood outside the convenience store, hulking ox Oomingmak by her side. Her eyes mirrored the orange blaze that licked the wooden walls of the convenience store. Dee gasped, and I saw her mind—that clever, clever mind—as it whirled, cranial wires connecting and sparking electric blue as she remembered what I’d shown her about putting out a fire. She pivoted and dashed away from the convenience store, her brilliant mind steps ahead of her, already snatching up her water bucket and filling it from the fresh waterfall from which she drank.
“No! No time!” I yelled to her. She stopped in her tracks and spun at a sharp crack. The fire, its blazing appetite evolving, bit off a panel from the side of the convenience store, hijacking it as it fell. The flaming wood plank made a quick bridge for the flames, which now sucked hungrily on the base of the great white spruce that dwarfed the convenience store. Dee’s tree. Our trees, our protectors, who stretched their magnificent limbs to bear the brunt of storms’ cruel winds. Our viridescent love affair. A home to her owls. A strange sundry forest of trees that were not indigenous to Toksook, but were somehow here, braving frigid conditions as if they were watching over us. Migisi shrieked, a warning to everything that lived in that tree. Most had already run. For some, mite and moss and mouse and even creatures too quick for an eye, it was too late.
Dee snatched up a battered blue tarp and hurtled toward the fire in desperation, flinging it forward. The fire devoured it, belching its gratitude in orange ember fireflies. Oomingmak bellowed and stamped his feet. Dee did as she was told and backed up, her own eyes on fire with shock and disbelief.
“Don’t touch. Never touch,” she said, barely audible above the crackle and roar. Her fingers barely concealed two pieces of flint. Flint we’d used for cabin fires, to cause the hot silver skins of fish to spit so that we could shut our stomachs up for five minutes. The silvery flint in her hands shook violently. And then I knew what she’d done. She had set the convenience store on fire to end the suffering of the MoFos inside. There was nothing natural about their stagnation. Sea stars sing often of this natural law in their briny voices: the doomed and sickly, take them and quickly. This ambiguous rotting, this here but not here was alien to Dee. Don’t touch; never touch was what I’d told her every time we lit a fire. Nausea ambushed me. Dee had told me what she intended to do, and I had misinterpreted it, hadn’t given her credit for her complexity of thought. I hadn’t wanted to show her the wild nature of flames; I wanted her to know the MoFo-curated, cottony version, the safer show. I had overprotected her.
I hadn’t seen the forest for the trees. I had been so focused on the everyday that I hadn’t considered what the worsening storms were yelling at us with their violent insistence or what it meant to live in an ebony forest. What it meant was that the trees were now tinder, brittle, and beckoning. The fire could not have asked for a more hospitable host, and now it leapt from blackened trunk to blackened trunk, roaring in delight. You’ve never seen a faster fire.
And the trees. My god, the trees. They hummed from their heartwood—the center of their beautiful trunks—a chorale invocation of love and thanks. They shivered their silvery leaves, sipped the final sweet sap through their phloem veins, and took their last breaths. Exhales that gifted us life. They groaned and creaked and sang from their souls. They waved their branches in celebration of the living. Had they known this was coming? Trees seem to know everything and nothing all at once. They did not complain or place blame but focused on their singing, sending each other pulsing messages through their complex neural networks, to the great fungal highway below, together until the very end. Dee watched with furrowed forehead as the fire—a predator with no match—swallowed our protectors, still hungry for more. Her beautiful forest now blazed black and orange, as if stalked by a smoldering tiger. Paper birch, balsam poplar, spruce, and aspen stood tall and beautiful, pride radiating from every branch. The fire choked them, lighting up their bodies and blistering their skins.
And the trees remembered everything.
Migisi screeched.
“No! Not that way!” I told her.
Running inland meant running into the mouth of a tiger. Several trees, fighting against ferocious orange flames, pointed their limbs in the same direction.
“This way!” I yelled. Migisi fell from the sky, closing in on me. I snatched the dark feathers of her back with shaking feet. Dee threw herself onto Oomingmak’s thick back, clawing at his fur. We thundered across the dirt and split hazy sky, heading for the shoreline. Dee’s throat filled and was seized by a coughing fit. She slid off Oomingmak and rolled onto wet sand, hacking and retching. Ash fell like smoked snow. Black smoke billowed into the sky, suffocating the clouds. I scanned the beach, looking for a savior.
“Here!” I squawked. “Pull!” Migisi dropped me next to a stubborn little fishing boat. Dee stumbled to the boat, her back to the bay, and started to tug at the fat vessel’s lip. She roared and growled and screeched and barked and hung her weight back to release the boat from its sandy shackles. It would not budge.
“Harder, Dee! Harder!” I yelled.
If the ocean couldn’t steal it from the shore, how would our little nestling? I called out for the owls, for Onida, even to the trees who had given us their everything, to end this living nightmare. Dee pulled, slate sweat pouring down her face, black tears striping her cheeks. With a sharp yank, she fell backward onto the sand. I hopped up and down, cheering for her to keep trying, because I didn’t have a better plan, because we were surrounded by fire and smoke and Dee’s lungs were filling, her gasps getting weak and raspy. My vision began to blur.
Oomingmak let out a growl that drowned out the fire’s din.
“Move!” I yelled to Dee. She scampered aside. Oomingmak ran at the boat, driving his great horns against its side. He fused the bony base where his horns met in the middle of his head like a bad hair part to the boat’s side and pushed. He bellowed and drove ice-breaking hooves deeper into the sand. The boat’s side started to rise. The waves crashed, Dee roared, Oomingmak brayed, and the boat lifted from the sand, collapsing upside down but free from its prison. Oomingmak had never been more dedicated to anything, pressing his enormous horns to the boat once more to ram it right side up. It teetered and wobbled. And then he pushed that boat, head down, massive bulk driving our barnacled angel into the beckoning spume.
“In!” I yelled at Dee, and she did as she was told, curled over and coughing up the blackened bodies of trees into her hands. I jumped on top of the oars locked in place in the little boat’s belly. Our boat fought the shoreline waves. Frigid water splashed the soot off our skin and feathers. Dee grappled to learn how to row, oars flailing, at first fighting the current and then using her muscles to pull the oars back and into the water, gliding salvation. Migisi screeched and spun above. Dee rowed and rowed, pushing us away from an entity that now terrified her. She turned to face that fire and shook, features ablaze with an angry orange. She had believed that fire was, as it had been for most of her life, under her control. A pot dweller. A creature that lived under stone. She had not known it to be a beast with its own ideas and appetites. Our imprinted nestling sat watching her whole world burn. A world that had fit into the palm of her hand.
A world she had just crushed flat.
Black tears dove from her cheeks. The darkening sky burned an eerie tangerine, highlighted by the bay’s black water. Dee—disgraced empress of owls—watched her trees die, knowing that the worlds within, below, and above them would suffer the same fate. She called out for The Hook, for Ookpik, Bristle, Little Wik, and her beloved Kuupa in the sharp shrieks of an owl. It had all happened so fast. They had not made it to the shoreline. And then a deep bellowing. Wet snorts sounded out. A pair of horns were black against an orange sky. Eyewhites flashed, and icy cries of panic sounded out. Oomingmak, too big for the boat, stood on the shore, the fire behind him.
“Oomingmak!” screamed Dee, hysterical.
She did not dive into the water. My gutsy nestling had lost the vo
ltage and confidence that had once sent her, without hesitation, into the frosty waters of this very bay to save the musk ox she loved so dearly. She no longer believed in herself. She believed the seals and voles and rabbits.
Her fire had taken everything from her. And now all that was left was ash, regret, and a tiny boat manned by avian and hominid, floating out at the moon’s mercy. Floating toward dangers I was afraid to give a single thought to, dangers I could no longer keep my nestling hidden from.
A series of explosions ripped across Toksook, fire balling upward. Black smoke bloomed.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
The yellow fuel tank cemetery.
Dee now understood she was a violent creature, born of the most violent beings on earth. Destruction is in the marrow of a MoFo.
She bellowed back at Oomingmak, a primal scream of undying love.
Oomingmak lifted his great horns and called to his Dee. The fire laughed, dancing nimbly behind him.
Night spilled its unforgiving ink.
The moon mourned in orange.
Oomingmak could not swim.
Chapter 7
Wahroonga Quidong
Baby humpback dolphin
Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia
Welcome. I want to show you my world of water. My squeals make the sound shape of fizzy foam as I show you to Echo.
Fin and Flippers always move because the tide currents say so. They are full of thoughts and power push; they go this way and that way like our whipping tails when we stun a fish—bap! Riding them is runny joy. I am always happy—whirring, chirping in the sparkling shapes of a splash—I am whole in a big blue place that is always talking.
Echo, our house of hearing.
Reverberating ring. Ripply ting. Hollow boom and rumble.
It is full of shimmering scales and surprise! stings and warm waves that birth rolling shapes of soft delight. Here is kelp, swish and sway, and, Oh! there, deep down on the yellow bed, is a little red shell with claws, moving sideways slowly so I don’t hear, but I do! Its sound is spiny, it makes the shape of skittery bustle, skit skit snip. I dive to nudge the smooth shell with my nose and then—whoosh—I’m gone, up and up, riding currents that move in eels of cold and warm and warm and cold.
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