Beasts Like Us

by Feral Sephrian

  “I understand. But how do you know which animal is the right one for you?”

  “You feel it in your heart,” Dazi said. “You look at the animal and know there is a kinship between you. Sometimes people receive omens in dreams, though, or they can fast and try to find their puha through a vision.” Dazi remembered the day he knew he would choose the mountain lion. The night before, he had had a dream he was hunting alone, crouching low to stalk his prey. Soon he was crawling on all fours, and when he looked to the side he saw his shadow was that of a large cat, black and rippling along the ground, with bright yellow eyes.

  The memory gave Dazi pause. It had been so long ago, and it had been a while since he thought on that dream, but now, here, in a hotel room in Alabaster Springs with a man he just met who could also turn into a cat—a large black cat with bright yellow eyes—Dazi wondered if there hadn’t been a second meaning to his dream. Perhaps, he pondered, he and Mateo were always supposed to meet. Perhaps that was why Mateo’s scent had captivated his attention so, why his heart rolled like thunder anticipating the answers he would get, and why he was willing to take such a risk to get them.

  * * * *

  Mateo listened to the legend with rapt attention. He had performed enough magic to know it was real, but he had never heard of something on this scale before. This wasn’t mere energy manipulation; this was an entire group of people with a supernatural ability. “So…the dog and the prey I smelled earlier…”

  “My friends, Kesi and Kuhma. They chose coyote and elk, respectively. Kesi’s younger brother, Tommo, is with us too, but I don’t know if you would recognize an eagle’s scent when there’s so much else to smell.”

  An elk would explain the prey scent, although Mateo had never eaten one personally. He had hunted plenty of deer, and he hoped he hadn’t accidentally eaten one of Dazi’s relatives. His stomach growling involuntarily. Changing always made him hungry, and the sandwich and granola bar he had already devoured hadn’t been enough to satisfy him. Mateo opened the plastic packaging on his second sandwich. “What made you decide to follow me?” he asked. He didn’t think Dazi had any hostile intentions, but he had to know.

  Dazi shrugged. “Like the first shaman, I saw something that intrigued me and I pursued it. I’ve never heard about other tribes of skin-walkers, and I wanted to know more about you.” A subtle change in his face made his expression sterner, though Mateo wasn’t sure what it was. “Which means it’s time for you to fulfil your promise.”

  Mateo sighed. “Yes, young warrior. I will grant you your wisdom. You won’t gain any new powers, but you’ll get your answers.”

  “That’s all I want.”

  “Okay then.” Mateo chuckled softly. “I guess it’s fitting that your story ended with your first shaman, because my story begins with our last. My great-great- and great-grandfathers were the last true shamans of my people, descended from what people now call the nagual, shapeshifters loyal to the Jaguar of the Night Sun. For nearly a hundred years, my great-great-grandfather kept them hidden from the invading Spaniards.”

  “You mean they were in hiding that whole time?” Dazi asked. “He kept them safe for a whole century?”

  “Oh, they had been avoiding the Spanish for about three or four hundred years at that point, but my great-great-grandfather was their leader at the time. He was a shaman for…I think my grandfather said between ninety and a hundred years, but it’s hard to know since they weren’t exactly using the Gregorian calendar back then.”

  “So, wait, are—are your kind immortal?”

  Mateo snorted through a mouthful of sandwich. “No, no we’re not, and I am one hundred percent okay with that. I don’t want to live forever. We just age a little slower, that’s all. My grandfather is one-hundred-seven, and he says my great-great-grandfather lived to be one-hundred-twenty-eight, or roughly thereabout. He would have lived longer except, well…I was getting to that.”

  Dazi nodded. “Okay, yeah, sorry I keep interrupting you, but…how old are you?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  Mateo thought by now Dazi wouldn’t be shocked by anything he learned, but his eyes nearly spun out of his head as he looked Mateo up and down. “Really? I thought you were my age, or younger!”

  “And how old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  Mateo shrugged. “Well, an eight year difference isn’t much. Frankly I don’t feel that old either, since my life doesn’t really change, so I can’t accurately track my age based on my accomplishments. Three decades, and most of what I have to show for it is I got taller.”

  Dazi opened his mouth to ask another question, but just as he said, “And how do you—” he was cut off by his phone ringing. He quickly pulled it out of his pocket. “Text from Kesi. She wants to know where I am and how much longer I’ll be away.” He smiled at Mateo. “Do you mind if I get a picture with you to send her? Y’know, to prove I’m not lying bloody in a ditch somewhere?”

  The hair on the back of Mateo’s neck stood on end. He knew why Dazi’s friends were nervous, but he also knew being dumped in a ditch wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to any of them if their secret was discovered. He squared his shoulders. Though he had only met Dazi an hour prior, and in very odd circumstances, he knew they had to stick together, which meant proving to Dazi’s friends that he was in good hands. He nodded.

  “Great! Do you mind wearing your fake ears while I wear my hood?”

  Mateo grinned. “Why don’t I wear your hood and you can wear my ears?”

  Dazi laughed. “Even better! Come here.”

  They swapped headgear and got together for the photo. It was the closest they had been since the bathroom, and now, where the air wasn’t so foul, Mateo could fully appreciate both the familiarities and the novelties of Dazi’s scent. The smile on his face was completely genuine, and the picture turned out better than he expected. Though he didn’t know Dazi well enough to recognize his default facial expression, his first impression was that Dazi looked particularly pleased with himself in the photo. Mateo thought he looked goofy in Dazi’s fluffy wolf-ear hood, but better goofy than untrustworthy.

  “Okay, that should placate her for the time being.” Dazi tossed his phone aside. “I want to hear about your great-great-grandfather.”

  Mateo nodded. “As I said, he was old, and he knew he couldn’t protect his people forever. I’m a bit ashamed to say, but my ancestors thinned their own numbers with war and sacrifice before the Europeans arrived, then Spaniards came and killed or enslaved the survivors. It fell upon the shamans to protect them for centuries. One night the Spaniards advanced on the group led by my family. My great-great-grandfather and his children stood together to distract the Spaniards while their people fled farther into the jungle. The Spaniards captured them, planning to take them back to Europe and put them on display, the savage tailed people of the Americas.

  “What the Spaniards didn’t count on was that the shamans wanted to be captured, to be taken back to the Spanish camp. There they took on their jaguar forms and slaughtered the invaders. My great-great-grandfather was killed, along with a son and a daughter, but three of his sons survived. My great-grandfather, the youngest, immediately went in search of his wife and daughters, who had escaped with the others. To his surprise he found many of his people had been taken in by missionaries. His wife was among them. He didn’t dare live among his enemies, but he remained nearby as a jaguar, watching over his family and occasionally meeting with them.

  “When my grandfather was born, and they saw his ears and tail, the missionaries claimed he was the spawn of the Devil and cast out my great-grandmother and her children. My great-grandfather took his family and searched for a safe place for them to live. By then, the Mexican Revolution was underway and my people, who joined with other descendants of the Maya who are known today as the Tzeltals, supported the revolution but tried to stay out of it. Even so, the constant fighting made it difficult to find a stable home, and my great-gr
andfather kept his family constantly on the move. It was the only lifestyle he knew at that point, and he was good at it.

  “When my grandfather was old enough, he met with—”

  Dazi’s phone chimed again. Mateo paused and finished his sandwich while Dazi checked it. Dazi narrowed his eyes, turned his phone off, and cast it aside once more.

  “Bad news?”

  “Hm?” Dazi’s face softened. “Oh, no, she’s being a pain, that’s all. You were saying?”

  Mateo frowned. “If your friends want you to head back, you don’t have to stay here.”

  “I want to. I want to hear the end of the story.” Dazi smiled. “Besides, you have a promise to keep.”

  “That’s true.” Mateo thought for a moment. “Okay, I’ll do the Cliffnotes version of the rest of the story. My grandfather met a Tzeltal woman whose family remembered their beloved jaguar shamans, so she wasn’t afraid of him. However, his love for her made him bold, and he was eventually discovered by the Spaniards. To escape them once and for all, he cut off his tail and snuck into America with my future grandmother. He’s still technically not a citizen, but my mom is because she was born in the US.”

  “And they didn’t freak out about her tail?”

  “The women in my family don’t have tails, just the men.”

  Dazi nodded. “Ah, I was wondering about that when you said your great-grandfather already had kids, but they were living with humans.”

  “Yeah, we think it’s because whatever causes tails is on the Y-chromosome, so women can’t get it. I’ve had my DNA analyzed, but obviously the results came back inconclusive.”

  Fear sparked in Dazi’s eyes. “You gave someone your DNA? Who? Did you tell them it was yours?”

  Mateo chuckled. “Okay, time for the last part of my story, and I will try to make it quick. True to his roots, my grandfather did his best to protect his people, so he helped anyone of Maya descent that wanted to sneak into America. My mom fell in love with one of them, and he still followed the old ways, so after they got married he found a Pagan community to move into. They accept anyone of any faith, and they own a few acres of land where everyone can come to practice their beliefs. My family lives on the farm where they have a community garden and some livestock.”

  “And they have a lab on the farm?”

  “Sort of. Modern Pagans are remarkably scientific, and they’re always looking for logical explanations behind magic. Most of the time the answer comes back magic works because it’s magic, but they find ways that science and magic work together sometimes. Naturally they wanted to see what genes would govern shapeshifting, and while they didn’t find that, they did discover that when I’m human, I have the usual twenty-three chromosome pairs, but when I’m a jaguar I only have nineteen pairs, which is normal for jaguars, and the rest turns into junk DNA. Everyone has junk DNA, which doesn’t express itself even though it’s there, but now everyone in the community is wondering what normal human junk DNA could turn us into.”

  Dazi’s eyes glazed over for a moment. His shoulders were tense. “But…if so many people know about you…about what you are…” He chewed his lip. “That wouldn’t be allowed in my tribe. The only ones who know about us are the other tribes who share the reservation with us, and even then it’s only a few people who keep the rest from bothering us. It’s not safe.”

  “It’s not as though we get crowds of people who come to see me,” Mateo said. “Only a few dozen people know me well enough to know my secret. Pagans have their own codes. Everyone on the farm took an oath to keep my family safe, and Pagans take their oaths very seriously. Oaths bind anyone involved, even the witnesses, to ensure they aren’t broken. We’re proof their gods exist. They’ve done everything in their power to hide us. I mean, I have a birth certificate and a social security number and everything, but I’ve spent the majority of my life on the same three square miles of land because they know it’s not safe to let me wander.”

  “That sounds terrible,” Dazi said, his eyes full of sympathy.

  Mateo shrugged. “Like I said, not much changes in my life. A few camping trips to remote forested areas with my family, got to swim in a lake once, but these days there aren’t that many secluded vacation spots. That’s why I came to the Con-fur-ence. Everyone is convinced my eyes and tail are part of a really well-designed costume, and I get to feel normal for a while. Well, as normal as one can feel when they’re surrounded by people in fursuits.” He cocked his head to one side. “So why are you here?”

  * * * *

  Chapter 3

  Dazi’s heart clenched. “We’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “My tribe…well, to say they don’t like furries is a bit of an understatement. We call them fake-skins because to us it looks like they’re trying to be like us, but without the—” He almost mentioned the spiritual part of the ceremony, where the human soul joined with an animal’s as the animal blessed the person with its skin. “Without the magic powers,” he said.

  Mateo didn’t seem as offended as Dazi worried he might be. “If you don’t like them, why attend the convention?”

  “Same reason I followed you, I suppose. We wanted to know what the fa—I mean, the furries were like, whether they were a real threat, that sort of thing.”

  That stirred a defensive posture in Mateo’s shoulders. “Why would they be a threat?”

  Dazi nibbled at the edge of his lip, his habit when he was torn between speech and silence. He tried to put it as delicately as he could. “Your powers are inherited. The only way someone could have the same powers as you would be for them to be your ancestor or your offspring. With us…there’s a reason only the shamans are allowed to know the specifics behind the ceremony. When we were first discovered by the Europeans, we weren’t enslaved like your people. They either killed us or tried to get us to tell them how they could use our powers, then killed us when we wouldn’t talk. We killed most of them in return, and many of us hid in animal form.

  “Then they started killing animals for sport, including us, so we hid among our neighboring tribes. Eventually the Europeans started killed them for sport, and by then there wasn’t much we could do but fight alongside our brethren and help establish the reservation where we live now. We’ve been distrusting of Outsiders ever since, obviously, and now we find out there’s a nearby gathering of people who want to be animals, like us, again. Of course we’re scared.”

  Mateo furrowed his brow. “But that was over a hundred years ago. My grandfather wasn’t even alive then. How would they find out about you now, of all times? You said you don’t tell anyone and even the people who do know won’t let anyone find you.”

  “Then why are they here?” Dazi snapped. “Why would they come together so close to our reservation?” He heard the fury in his voice after it already left his mouth, and the concern in Mateo’s yellow eyes replaced his anger with regret. “I didn’t mean—Of course you wouldn’t have anything to do with—”

  “No, I get it. But…it’s not about you, or your people. It really isn’t. This just happens to be the only convention center in the area that would take them in. The next closest major furry conventions are either in San Jose or Denver. They’re like me. I’m one of the last nagual left. We don’t even know if my great-aunts or any of my other distant cousins are still alive. It gets lonely, being surrounded by people who can’t identify with you. The people at the Con-fur-ence come together so they don’t have to be lonely. This is about solidarity, not trying to discover a way to actually turn into animals. Sure, some of them would give up everything they had to truly live as their fursona, but they know it’s impossible.”

  Dazi was stunned by Mateo’s conviction, how passionately he spoke about the fake-skins. He didn’t consider Mateo one of them, since he was a true skin-walker, or nagual as he called himself. Still, Mateo had a point. If this was truly coincidental, the tribe sounded more paranoid than cautious. Dazi chewed his lip some more. His instincts told him to trust Mateo, but the truth
was he had only known Mateo a few hours. True, he had been keeping his own secret for thirty-two years, but that was because he had spent most of his life isolated. Dazi wanted to have absolute faith in his new friend, but it wasn’t that simple.

  Kesi’s text had left a bitter taste in his heart. You had better not be thinking with your dick. If you tell him anything, you know what they’ll do to both of you. Dazi had broken the tribe’s law and he knew it. Outsiders weren’t allowed to know about their powers under any circumstances, but the Mukua’poan had never encountered someone like Mateo, nor had Dazi. Just as he had felt kinship with the mountain lion, he now felt a connection to Mateo. If only he could make them understand…If only I understood it myself…

  “Look, maybe we should head back,” Mateo said. “I told you what you wanted to know, you told me what I wanted to know, so…yeah.” He started to get up, but Dazi reached out to him.

  “Wait,” he pleaded. “You’re right, I’ve never been alone like that. In my tribe, even though we’re all different, we’re all family. That’s what this is: a tribe made up of many who share a common…feeling. If I were the last of my kind, I would take solace where I could as well.”

  Mateo blinked at him. “I’m not just here because I’m the last, or at least might be. I don’t care that I’m the last. My mother says if keeping our kind alive means living in constant fear, she would rather this end with me. She was ecstatic when I realized I was gay.”

  Every other statement out of Mateo’s mouth was filled with some strange new wonder. “You are?”

  “Yeah. Is…is that not a thing that happens in your tribe?”

  “It is, sort of. We recognize that the spirit is a fluid thing. While certain bodies can come together to reproduce and others can’t, one spirit may love another regardless of what form it’s in. My parents are a bobcat and a raccoon, but they still love each other.” The thrumming in his heart returned, though with a sour note. “I’ve…only taken one partner, and he was male.”