Orphaned
Page 4
scattering on their spindly legs,
squawking.
Wrinkled is still gone.
Breath clutches Mother’s belly,
his head peeking around
so he can watch Snub.
His eyes are heavy lidded,
his hair still caked with ash and mud,
but he stays awake and focused on her.
Snub purses her lips and makes the sounds of
acha.
Breath’s eyes widen, and he purses his lips back.
He hasn’t yet figured out how to make sounds,
but Snub gets the feeling of
acha
from the way he looks at her.
He sucks on his little finger.
Snub follows this gully
because the gully follows the cliff
and the cliff is what blocks them
from home.
The jungle spreads shade
over the gully,
over the gorillas.
The trees here have not fallen,
and tower high above the ground,
casting welcome darkness.
Roaches scurry between ferns.
Now that they are among trees
Silverback pauses them,
sniffing at the hollows of trunks
and ripping away planks of rotten bark.
The gorillas yank free
meaty chunks of softened wood,
dripping in mites,
and chew them as they go.
A crashing sound brings Snub
looking back for danger,
but Brother blocks her view,
gaping and unaware.
Since Brother is too dim
to keep them safe,
Snub moves to the rear.
Crash.
Snub peers for danger,
but there is only swaying green,
swelling clouds ever consuming the pale sun.
Crash.
Now Snub whirls in time to see their pursuers.
These are the two magpies,
the same that she once threw a nut at,
making more noise than their size should allow.
They are hopping around each other,
trying to get at whatever magpies like to get at
between blades of grass.
When the gorilla family moves forward,
the magpies follow.
Snub stares and stares at them.
In this strange new world,
magpies are following gorillas.
Maybe they think gorillas
will show them the way back home.
In this strange new world,
Snub’s family is smaller by one
and bigger by two.
A night sky.
Snub is the only one awake,
her mind drifting from ash to heat
and drowned bodies.
Familiar pricks of light
poke through the black above,
same as they have always been.
The magpies sleep near,
right in the midst of Snub’s family.
One has its eyes closed, head tucked under a wing,
while the other watches Snub warily.
Snub stares back into its hard black eye,
curious about these magpies
but unable
to know what they know.
The mountain that has fallen between
Snub’s family and home
has no openings,
no canyons or passageways,
and though sunset is far off
they are all too tired to continue.
In times of
hoo,
Snub, like Brother, bedded
far from Silverback,
almost out of sight,
hands pinned between her thighs,
curious eyes turned to the world outside.
But today when Silverback makes his bedding-down sounds
in the middle of the gray, sun-starved afternoon,
lowers his body to its side in the singed yellow grass,
Brother plops down right beside him,
so he’s cradled within his strong arms.
Silverback tugs Teased’s trembling body closer,
so it, too, is within his reach.
Snub curls into the nook
at the backside of Silverback’s knees.
She tugs Mother’s body near,
wrapping arms and legs around it,
sensing that warmth is what shivering Mother
will need most to survive the early night.
Breath leaves Mother’s nipple and works his way
over her frail shuddering ribs,
nestling himself in the cave
between Mother’s back and Snub’s chin.
The ground rumbles like a belly.
The huddle of gorilla is sweaty,
and the close air between their bodies
is full of the rot of upturned earth,
trapped under the smoky air above.
It is the smell of
worry,
but mainly it is the smell of
relief.
Silverback’s back jerks,
yanking Snub from a deep sleep.
She fights to return to the dream world of old
hoo
but then she hears Silverback
crashing through the grass,
making his
wragh
and beating his chest.
Snub sits up, holds Breath tight to her,
Mother’s hand in hers.
They listen and watch.
The half-moon
lights the meadow’s edges,
but shows nothing of Silverback,
not even his gray-white hairs.
Wherever Silverback charges,
moongrass is carved out
and replaced by blackness.
Snub wonders what danger has set Silverback
to displaying like this.
Then:
yipping and yowling,
anxious and insistent.
Wild dogs.
The gorillas are being hunted.
Snub makes her own
wragh,
letting the dogs know,
wherever they are in the darkness,
that they have more than one gorilla to fight.
All the same, Snub thinks of
Teased and Mother and Breath,
easy meals for wild dogs,
and fear for them makes her go quiet.
She kicks out at Brother,
and the strong young gorilla
snorts and gets to his feet.
When Snub makes another
wragh,
Brother makes his own
wragh,
though since it’s Brother
he probably hasn’t figured out why.
The yips near and retreat,
become whines and worried barks.
Silverback is keeping himself
between the dogs and his family.
wragh!
He roars and a dog’s yips
become a growling, slavering sound,
followed by a sharp gnashing of tooth striking tooth.
A grunt from Silverback.
A wet thud.
The whining stops.
Rustle.
A creature approaches, and Snub hopes it is
Brother or Silverback.
Not a dog.
Silverback makes one more
pap pap,
very near, and then his back is against Snub’s.
Brother makes his own quieter
pap pap,
then settles in, too.
Snub somehow falls asleep,
but her dreams do not return to the old good feeling.
The future has come to be more important
than the past,
and the future does not bring
many fee
lings of
hoo.
The magpies are rooting through the soil,
so used to Snub that one dances between her fingers
as it tries to get at a worm
pinned beneath Snub’s hand.
The other is on top of Silverback’s dozing body,
tucking an injured claw close to its underbelly
as it searches for ticks.
Lying on her side, head pillowed on her bicep,
Snub watches the wounded magpie watch her.
It tilts its head one way and then another,
like it is trying to communicate something.
Snub makes a quiet hoot back.
I see you.
The hoot has startled the magpies.
They fly in the direction of home.
Snub traces their path through the morning sky
and sees that the rockfall has an opening.
There is a canyon there
leading toward home
and that lick of blue sky.
The wounded magpie lands,
looks back at Snub
before hopping toward the canyon.
It looks back again.
I see you.
Again, Snub leads.
She is not at the front of the group,
but she stands beside Silverback,
holding a leaf between her lips,
staring into the canyon
for so long that Silverback cannot help
but understand what she thinks they should do.
A flash of black and white,
sharp against the greens and yellows of the grass,
as the magpie pair flies off into the canyon ahead.
They land in the upturned soil, inspecting the ground.
The magpie with the wounded leg looks at Snub,
head tilted quizzically,
then pecks out a bug and eats it.
The family approaches the canyon.
Air sloughs down from the mountains,
whistling and grumbling in Snub’s ears.
It parts her hair, awakening the scrapes
and bruises along her skin.
They have reached the punctured edge of a new land.
The cliffs are an aged gray on the outside,
broken only by light green patches of moss and lichen.
The shattered inside of the canyon walls is
vibrant orange,
sharp and crumbling.
It looks like something that shouldn’t be seen,
like the inside of a body,
and Snub hoots in sympathy.
Shards litter the ground.
Homeless bees swarm angrily around the rubble.
At the far side of the canyon,
blue sky in the direction of home.
Slowly,
pausing to sniff each orange boulder he passes,
Silverback climbs over the debris
and ventures into the canyon.
The family stays in a huddle
as they pick their way over the jagged terrain.
Canyon walls loom on either side,
framing a ribbon of cinder sky.
This is all Snub can see:
shards of orange rock beneath,
sandy sharp walls along either side,
teeming gray above.
Motes of ash drift down the narrow passage,
dusting the gorillas’ hair in white gray,
making Silverback look like some other animal entirely
as he leads the way.
They come across nothing like food or shelter,
nothing that could ever produce
hoo.
But in the blue sky at the far end,
there is the promise that
hoo
might return someday.
Snub strokes Breath’s back
and grooms trembling Mother
at the very sight of it.
Skitter-scatter of rock
shards tumbling into the canyon,
sending the gorillas clutching one another—
except Silverback,
up on two legs and roaring.
Shapes line the ledge above.
Darting, grunting.
Maybe these are new gorillas.
Silverback beats his chest,
wragh.
Brother beats his chest,
wragh.
There are three of the creatures
looking down from the lip of the ridge.
They look almost like gorillas,
but if these are gorillas
their hair rubbed off somewhere,
and they are standing on two legs
for a very long time.
It must make their hips ache,
like Snub’s did the night she spent in the dark pond.
These maybe-gorillas are excited,
shuffling positions to better peer at Snub’s family.
Their hoots raise Snub’s hair,
the pitch higher and louder than a gorilla’s,
and changing within each breath.
The not-gorillas are running now,
making their strange calls,
pounding the ground.
Where once were three now are four.
Even though Silverback is on his back legs and
making his most ferocious
wragh,
these not-gorillas do not run away
but come toward Snub’s family.
Their arrival sends loose stones tumbling.
Snub’s family cowers,
arms over their heads.
Snub shelters Mother and Breath as best she can.
The not-gorillas make their jabbering calls,
kicking more stones down onto the family.
Silverback roars in outrage,
tries to climb the cliff face,
only making it a few feet
before he falls back,
clattering gravel.
With an especially loud jabbering shriek,
one of the not-gorillas picks up
a large rock in its two hands.
Its body becomes a straight line from fingertips to toes,
something Snub has never seen a gorilla do.
For a moment the not-gorilla is motionless,
silhouetted against the pale sun,
rock in its hands.
Then it casts it into the canyon.
The gorillas are stilled by the horror of it,
one creature throwing a rock at another.
Tumbling end over end,
the rock slams into the ground,
sending up a spray of shards,
then rolls away.
Snub shakes her fists at the not-gorillas
before coming back to the ground,
beating her chest, making a string of
wragh
and
mrgh
as ferocious as any Silverback ever made.
The not-gorillas are motionless,
staring down at them.
Snub whirls in confusion,
now aware of the chaos of sound around her.
The gorillas’ cries echo,
combining and layering in the narrow canyon walls.
The not-gorillas are making their own cries, too:
excitement
lust
hunger.
One of the not-gorillas has another rock in its hands,
is once again silhouetted against the sun.
It sends it bouncing against the canyon walls,
slamming the sides,
fragmenting into a hail of smaller stones.
Snub protects Mother and Breath with her body.
Mother is beyond
wragh,
weakened by the journey,
quieted by shock.
Breath is motionless against her breast,
suckling for comfort.
Snub wants to race away,
but Silverba
ck is holding his ground,
screaming his
wragh
at these not-gorillas.
Surely as it feels like waiting
for the next pitched rock
means waiting for death,
it also feels like
leaving the protection of Silverback
is even more certain death.
So Snub stays, roaring her
mrgh
up at the not-gorillas
even as one of them readies another rock.
While Silverback roars his loudest threat yet,
Snub again braces herself over Mother,
hoping her body can save Mother,
and that both their bodies can save Breath.
The rock does not fall.
Instead, Snub sees
the strange creatures back away
from the canyon’s edge,
soon out of view,
vanishing like mist.
Silverback lets out a proud, defiant
wragh.
As the sound fades,
it reveals beneath it another sound,
one that has started to become almost familiar,
even as it sets Snub’s spine straight and her muscles tight.
Yips.
The dogs look pathetic, famished, powerful, mean.
They must be why the not-gorillas left.
Long ago, Snub watched dogs worry down an antelope,
chasing it until it fell into the grass, exhausted,
then eating it without killing it first.
Now she watches them lope into the canyon,
one taking the lead for only a few moments before