“It is a legend we sing.”
“If anything, I’m a crowtagonist. And I’ve never met a MoFo with a blowhole.” I was then struck by a memory of a fuming Tiffany S. from Tinder leaping out of the shower, steam rising from her head as she chased after me with a loofah scrubby because I’d feng shui-ed her MacBook keyboard by plucking out its letters. “I stand corrected.”
“We have been telling this story longer than the memories of ice mountains. What you are feeling is the pod’s excitement, hope’s swelling tide. My pod is part of something big, together. This is the power of Echo.”
“There are some interesting coincidences with your fairy tale, but I don’t believe in this shit. I’m telling you now, and I know you hear this—” I gestured my beak toward the tiny dorsal fin that poked through the surf, shiny and new. “Dee is a fledgling, not a debt.” I wondered if they could see right through me, where it was written all over my heart that I wouldn’t be handing over my nestling to anyone. My plans to nod my noggin, play along with whopping tales, and then hide her from every living cell on this big beautiful blue, I imagined, were as bright and bold as fresh graffiti.
I looked at Dee, who sang with a pod of killer whales. Once curved and sunken, her spine was now as straight as the dorsal fin she clutched. “You’ve brought her back, and for that I am more grateful than even you can hear. But that tale doesn’t even make sense…the Black Fins deliver the last MoFo to some carnivorous beast? For what! It’s not real. It’s just a story,” I said to her.
I felt her great black-and-white head bob up and down. She filled me with waves of frothy hope as she said, “Dear Crow, it is all just story.”
And then the Black Fins fell silent. The singing was severed. Colors and shapes vanished.
“What’s happening? What’s going on!” I spun, hunting the horizon.
Koooooooooooooosh. “Not far from here. Up ahead, we see this.” The matriarch made vining, vowely sounds that fanned and flapped like water nymphs, uniting to form a perfect image in the water ahead of us.
It was a recreational boat. A MoFo boat.
Chapter 10
Augustus
Spotted ratfish
Bering Sea
(Regrettably overhearing an appalling poem recited by a crow having some sort of existential crisis and a bad hair day)
Ode to a Mustache
I’m enamored with a mustache
With bristles like a broom
A thousand hairs all side by side
A facial flower in bloom
If I had a bushy mustache
I’d comb it with gusto
And wiggle it when thinking hard
I’d be Tom Selleck Crow!
A mustache is a masterpiece
Like the McDonald’s sign or Venus
All natural and organic
It’s less trouble than a penis
If I were a mustache
I like underpants!
I’d douse myself in honey
And ambush all the ants
If I were a walrus
And had my own mustache
I’d count my blessings every day and
And stash it in my cache!
I wish I had a mustache
That lip-presiding sovereign
That lower-nasal sheepskin rug
What the great fuck rhymes with sovereign?
Chapter 11
Penipuan
Myrmarachne jumping spider
Sabah Jungle, Borneo, Malaysia
Open all your eyes.
The air is thick with warm, wet clouds and mischief. Swirls of chemical story puff and plume, warnings from sticky-legged warriors.
The mandible of a mosquito slurps stolen scarlet.
Disembodied howls widen eyes. Leechy appetites abound.
Cicadas screech and blare, from their chests a doomed drumming, and gluey eggs throb with the ravenous impatience of the unborn.
Squeaks of asphyxiation tighten as vines strangle, plants cannibalize one another and exhale rot.
Jaws crunch down on brittle bodies, a crispy rhythm of conquest.
Crystal globes of rainwater burst and bully each emerald leaf.
Feel the magic and malice of mushrooms that tower and terrorize. In the jungle’s jaws, predator and prey can be so close as to rub skins.
Truth can take a life.
The jungle is a living thing with hot lungs, an eternal row of fangs. It spits out wings that beat transparent terror. There is no space for silence; every jungle inch is filled with a scream song. Fear fills the soggy minds of panicked quarry. The jungle does not sleep. It does not care about you, not a scritch. Our enemies, yours and mine, lurk. We are always a screech away from death.
And all around, like the churning boil of living soil, swarm the jungle’s most powerful army. The Red Soldiers. Militia of ants.
I am not what I appear to be. I play a game of life or death. Shhh. I have changed my body and my mind. I am a morphing trickster, insect imitator. I lift my front legs up to make a Red Soldier’s antennae. My eyes have dark patches, a thrilling illusion of an ant’s orbs. My body sprouts reflective hairs—what a clever copy—a fantasy of a shiny, segmented body! I must believe I can carry a great stone alone, that I have the two stomachs of a formidable Red Soldier. I do not whisper about my silks.
Shhh. It is a spider’s secret.
The stakes? You cannot think about the stakes, about what will happen if a Red Soldier smells your clever disguise, if that Red Soldier calls in chemicals, summoning the power of a million strong. Don’t think about the jungle’s crushing jaws, the combined muscle and colony mind of the most powerful army on earth. You must not think about how your body will be pulled apart in the segments you have mimicked. And you must never, never allow yourself to think of the greatest threat—their indomitable Queen. You cannot think of these things. In the jungle, there is no space for fear.
A Red Soldier is coming. Two, no, no, three approach. Shhh. One is up close, next to me, his armor shining like sap. I think ant thoughts. I wave my antennae, make busy business, never-stop-moving because I am a soldier of the Red Army.
For a blink, I am alone. A solitary Red Soldier bustles forth. Recognition glistens in his black eye. He feels me, false pheromones, the truth of me. I strike with the will of war, piercing his body with my hollow fangs and releasing slick venom. Quick as wings, I whip my silks, wrapping the body of a great red warrior and launching us from leaf, and we drop down, down, down on a long secret silver line to where I feast on the body of my fellow soldier, face first.
Eat and avoid being eaten.
In the jungle, you can be predator, or you can be prey.
Or you can be both.
Shhh. I am not a spider. I am an ant.
Chapter 12
S.T.
The Backs of Killer Whales, the Bering Sea
Killer whales can swim at a good clip. My thighs were two walnuts in a nutcracker’s vise performing a never-ending squat as a ferocity of fins split the sea. There was something sublimely whimsical about being in the company of whales. I hadn’t felt so warm and frothy in years, worry wicked away with the surf. It was indescribably badass. As I stood on the brave back of a whale that had known a century of MoFos, I felt compelled to express my gratitude but not sound sappy. An S.T. original joke was in order.
I leaned forward and projected. “You make us feel that any fin is possible.” She responded with a reverse rain of tight teal loops, which I took to mean polite laughter. Hey, I can’t please everyone; I’m not a Cheeto®. The matriarch was focused, her mind in the future. I wondered if all this good killer whale karma was how I’d convinced myself that nothing bad had happened to Migisi. I had to trust that my formidable friend was alright. Breathing was not possible otherwise.
A glorious ballet of silky sounds shimmied around us, until very abruptly, they didn’t. The whales were so silent, my feathers stood on end. To be this massive and many and to cast a liquid
disappearing spell—this, I realized, was why they were so dangerous. This is how a seal never knows what hit it.
We streamed soundlessly through the frigid waters, everything taking on a ghostly eeriness, until it was up ahead of us, bobbing gently against the horizon.
The boat.
It was beautiful. Tooth white and shiny. Her name was Bering Mind, evinced by swirling gold letters that danced across her side.1 My pulse spiked as we closed in. And then it was really, really real; we were right in front of this luxurious vessel that had anchored here, and I could barely breathe, adrenaline sizzling like sounds the orcas had ceased making. Even their breathing was now quiet, controlled exhales through blowholes. They spyhopped, lifting magnificent black-and-white heads above the waterline, letting their eyes tell the story of the bobbing boat. Dee had not seen anything like this, her eyes scanning its ergonomic elegance, the polished lines of design and a bottomless bank account. This was not a tired relict of Toksook. Dee was used to the patchwork of the practical.
And then a sound. Not from killer whale, or crow, or the last MoFo who sat quietly clutching the tallest dorsal fin. A sharp squeak came from the boat. A sound like the protest of a sneaker against a shiny surface.
Someone was on the boat.
The killer whales glided with the ribbony synchronicity of birds, some dipping without so much as a bloop below the waterline, others coasting to circle and spy on the boat. I tried to imagine the owner of Bering Mind—smart, I decided, to have escaped the mainland and started a life at sea, away from a change that couldn’t be outrun. Was the squeak from a one and only? Or were we looking at a flock?
A pack?
Then I had a thought that hadn’t occurred to me in over a decade of dreaming about how MoFos loved to meow gibberish at cats, or the particular joy of clapping,2 or how their emotional state was anchored to whatever song played in the car, or their collective lifelong fear of an imperceptible brute who lives under the bed with nothing but an insatiable ankle fetish. Such a glorious, dichotomous species—some strong enough to survive war, others keeling over at the mere whiff of a peanut. What if this was what I’d dreamed of all these years—another healthy MoFo, that Dee is not the last of her species—and they fall in love with Dee, because of course they will, and then they don’t realize who I am. What if they mistake me for a brainless bird, and they treat me like Tiffany S. from Tinder or the snooty customers at Walmart did? What if they take my nestling from me, warning me to leave with muzzle blasts from a shotgun?
My heart throbbed in my throat. The female killer whale who definitely had the hots for me disappeared under the boat. Two others followed. I strained to hear them emerge on the other side of Bering Mind as they made a 360-degree scan of the vessel. But there was no sound. They weren’t going to use their waves, not while they had stealth as an advantage. Dee’s chest rose up and down, up and down. Was she anxiously preparing to finally see her own species? Did she even know? I desperately wished I was on the male whale’s back with her.
Another squeak. Movement. The matriarch cleaved the waterline silently with a crow on her back. Someone had left the door into the cabin of Bering Mind open, swinging gently like a loose tooth. The doorway’s darkness, a gaping cave, offered nothing.
A scratching sounded out. Everyone—crow, MoFo, whale, and water—held their breath. Another scratching sound, then pronounced taps. The delicious footfalls of a biped? Toes swaddled in socks? What would I say to them? Shit, what was it? I’d only been practicing it for a decade, dancing around our cabin filled with enough whiskey to baptize an elephant seal. After every day of adventures and teaching Dee words, after I told her jokes and stories and watched her fall into sweet sleep.
“Hello,” I’d rehearse to a fat, dusty stove. “We’ve been looking for you. Thank god you’re alive.” And then I would balance on one foot, offering the other foot to shake because that is a polite way to say hello if you’re a MoFo meeting another MoFo and I have never been good at fist bumps. And then I would say, “You are not the last one. This is Dee.” A MoFo meeting another MoFo—the dream, utopia, paradise. But there was no more time to rehearse the introduction I’d wished for on every one of Dee’s molted eyelashes. Because the MoFo was emerging from the cabin.
Red. The color red. Not dark like the moody hue of blood, but a bold, bird’s-eye chili red. The red thing thrust from the darkness and pressed down on the shiny white floor of the boat, and I tried to figure out what this could be. A walking cane, I was sure of it. But then another red thing emerged, and then another, and when my mind caught up to my eyeballs, I realized these were legs. Once the red legs had purchase on the boat’s flooring, the body hoisted itself through the black door of Bering Mind. What we had been waiting for came into full view.
The body was enormous—hot tub sized and just as round. It was a topographical map of hard spines. Beak hanging open, I realized that the spines weren’t spines. They were fingers. The hardened fingers of a MoFo, jutting out of something not quite shell, not skin, but some sort of strange amalgamation. On a back leg—as long as our old sunken fishing boat—a piece of material was caught on one of the spiny fingers, fluttering in the ocean breeze like a surrender flag. A snag of denim. The creature had claws—two great orangey pincers. Nutcrackered in one was a black object. I squinted to read “Garmin echoMAP CHIRP” on its surface. Something that belonged inside Bering Mind that had pinged and beeped, mimicking the echolocation of the dolphin family. Now it was silent, its face smashed out.
An electronic device. A screen.
I retched, closing my throat to stop sound. I had never seen this creature, but ones like it had haunted my dreams every single night in Toksook and, before then, my every waking day.
The monster—not crab, not MoFo—made spidery, mechanical movements, lifting itself to crawl up the side of the boat in a deliberation of squeaks and scratches. It rested there, gigantic legs outspread to suction itself. It had not shattered Bering Mind’s side windows. What a cruel deception, cyanide-covered candy. A cruel reminder that these things didn’t play by any rules. What did they play for? Destruction. To win. I couldn’t give this creature a name. But the eyes, I knew. They swiveled, searching like security cameras. They were bloodshot, rimmed in red, not the eyes of a crustacean. Round irises, swelling pupils, the murky shadow of memory behind them. They were MoFo. Did the eyes see? Did they know that below the boat, killer whales marauded like toothed ghosts? Did they see the black fins, two tree-trunk lengths away from its hardening red body? Did they know the last MoFo stood nearby on wetsuit-slick skin, her feet frozen white, speckled with salt sores? Did it recognize that it was a hollow husk of the little girl who watched it?
A bristled toothbrush of an antenna on the creature’s MoFo-like lips lifted up and down. Armor. Antennae. Claws. A carapace. This desperate thief had stolen the adaptations of an oceanic crab.
I dared to take my eyes off this unnatural thing to focus on Dee. She was standing now, fingers foam white from squeezing the great dorsal fin.
We had to get out of here. Fast. I patted my foot onto the matriarch whale’s head. She started an inaudible glide at the sea’s surface. I turned to focus on Dee again, to make sure that the biggest dorsal fin was also commencing a soundless exit. He was. Dee wore a frown, eyes flicking across the boat, along the bastardized body of the gargantuan creature. Everything burned bright and new into her retinas. I felt an iota of relief that she would lump this all together—strange white floating object, different from the one in Toksook; strange large crab, different from the ones in Toksook. She would never know what this Changed One once was. What would that do to her?
“Human.” The word flew from Dee’s mouth without physical shape or color and could not be returned. My eyes shot to the Changed One. The thing’s monstrous body twitched. Its eyes swirled on their stalks. The bristly toothbrush lifted, the horrible, rotting lips parted far too wide. And the hideous decapod let out a scream. Skull-shaking, the sound of st
eam erupting from the body of a boiling lobster. The orcas vocalized in response. The crab made a breakneck scamper down the side of Bering Mind. It hurled its enormous shell into the ocean.
“Go!” I yelled to the male whale, Dee coiled at the base of his fin with her hands cupped to her ears, eyes squeezed shut. Killer whales burst from the deep, conjuring great waves that tossed and rocked Bering Mind. The crab’s legs and claws flapped frantically underwater, propelling it toward us at terrifying speed just under the waterline.
“Quick, go!” I screamed to the whales, but the Changed One was too fast, a few feet from where I perched, thrashing those hideous, finger-covered limbs, screaming loud enough to serrate a skull. Three whales intervened, pinging screeching sounds off this monster’s horrible carapace. One killer whale rammed him with her body, holding him back for a moment. He swung the larger of his claws and pinched at her. She ducked, disappearing below. Another whale shot up from the dark deep, snatching an orangey back leg, severing it from its host with a dull crunch. The leg continued to thrash and twitch in between her teeth as she carried it away. Another whale breached, leaping out of the water and slamming down on the spiny red thing. The red creature skittered below the water, shrieking in arrows of pulsing bursts. And it became clear to me then, though already known to the whales.
It was echolocating.
The matriarch and I had shot away from the thrashing limbs, but the large whale, Dee on top, now had a horror with dark red appetites in his face.
“Dee!” I yelled. She dove into the water. The Changed One thrust forward its larger pincer—now devoid of an electronic device—the very best defense of a crab. It grabbed the beautiful black skin of the large orca, clamped the claw shut, and yanked. Dee let out a primal roar. The orca released a sea of sound as the skin of his side was ripped open by the Changed One. The killer whale then snatched the claw that had caused his blood to paint the ocean in moody hues, ripping it from the Changed One’s body. The orca pod was stunned, realizing this did not deter the creature. It was already scudding its way to the little girl thrashing at waves to escape.
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