The Last Panther

by Todd Mitchell

  “Kiribati, try to understand,” said Martin, reaching for her.

  But Kiri had heard enough. She ran off.

  Her da let her go. He probably thought she’d calm down and forget why she’d been upset. But she wouldn’t forget. Not this time.

  Paulo and Tae and the others waited for her a couple of skiffs up the beach. If Kiri went to them, they’d ask what had happened and she’d have to explain why everything she’d promised wouldn’t happen. They’d hate her and kick her out of the village for good then. She couldn’t face that. And she wouldn’t return to the waller city, either. She’d never be a waller.

  She was no one from nowhere, just like Ap had said.

  Kiri ran toward the sea-grape tunnels that led to the ghost forest. Maybe she could go to the stilt house in the swamp and live there with Snowflake. Or she could hide out in the ruins and never speak to anyone again.

  At the edge of her vision she saw a shadow move beneath the sea grapes. For a brief moment she thought it might be a panther, but the panthers were all gone—dead or taken away.

  She peered into the dark gaps under the red bark branches, unable to shake the sense that someone was there, watching her.

  “Ma?” she asked, feeling a faint glimmer of hope. “Is that you?”

  Perhaps it had only been leaves swaying in a breeze. Kiri left the path and walked along the edge where the sea grapes met the dunes, searching the shadows under the branches for some sign of where she should go and what she should do.

  “Ma, I need you,” she said as she approached the area where she’d seen movement. “I tried to tend the tree. I tried to fix things like you said, but nothing worked. No one listened to me.”

  The shadows didn’t respond—not with words or movement. There was nothing but the sound of ocean waves behind her, and wind through the leathery leaves of the sea grapes.

  “Please don’t be mad at me,” she said. “I’m sorry I failed. It was too much. I couldn’t change anything.”

  Still nothing.

  Kiri tried to conjure up a specific image of her mother. All she could recall were scenes from different vids her da had shown her. There was the one of her ma holding her when she was only a baby and humming a fugee song to her. Another of her ma catching geckos with her when she was just a curly-haired toddler. And her favorite—a vid of her ma making funny faces and chasing her around the kitchen table while she giggled and ran, looking back every couple of steps to make sure her ma was still there.

  “Where are you?” she asked. “I need you.”

  Kiri searched the darkness under the sea grape branches again. The fronds of a palm tree in the distance looked almost like braids sprouting from the top of her mother’s head, cascading around her face. But it wasn’t her.

  Maybe she’d only seen her mother before because of the fever. She might have just hallucinated her. Or maybe, like the fugee stories of ghosts luring people away from life, she’d only seen her mother’s ghost before because she’d been close to dying. If that’s the price, I’ll pay it, thought Kiri.

  “Please come back,” she said to the shadows. “I miss you so much. I’ll go with you now. There’s nothing here for me anymore, and I’m not afraid of death, okay? I just want to be with you. So can I be with you now?”

  Dry sea-grape leaves rattled in the wind.

  Kiri knelt, unable to stand. It was foolish. No one was there. She felt emptier than she had ever been.

  Shadows on the sandy ground in front of her began to move. She cocked her head, fearing it might just be a breeze stirring the branches above. But it wasn’t—the sand actually moved. Then the earth roiled and shifted, as if something miraculous was bubbling up.

  Snowflake crawled out of her hood and hopped onto the sand. He sniffed the ground and scampered back as the sand moved again.

  Kiri leaned closer to get a better look. A black snout, smaller than the tip of her pinkie finger, poked through the sand. Then another snout emerged, and another. Soon there were ten or twenty tiny black snouts, followed by wriggling necks and blinking blue eyes. Thin flippers pushed against the sand as teardrop-shaped bodies squirmed out.

  They were turtles! Perfect, miniature versions of the sea turtle Kiri had seen all those weeks before, with ridged shell-like backs and white speckles on their black skin, like stars in the midnight sky.

  The turtles kept climbing out of the ground. Once they surfaced, they braced their flippers against the sand and shoved themselves forward in an odd, stutter-stop way. Each one looked exactly like the mother turtle, and yet they were so small—smaller even than the palm of Kiri’s hand or the stuffed turtle Ap had given her.

  “Hatchlings,” whispered Kiri. More turtles crawled out of the sand. “Leatherback hatchlings!”

  She looked up, wanting to share this incredible sight with her mother. But her ma wasn’t there—not in a way she could see or touch. Still, Kiri knew her mother had led her to this. She thought she’d been called away by a ghost, but instead she’d been called to life. New life.

  Kiri’s breath caught and her eyes blurred. She hadn’t let herself cry for weeks. Not when the sea turtle had been killed, or when she’d been kicked out of the village, or when the panther had been shot. The tears hadn’t gone away. They’d simply built up, and now her eyes overflowed with them. They poured down her cheeks in big, warm sobs. She couldn’t stop crying. She cried for her mother, and for the panther, and for the incredible miracle of leatherback hatchlings emerging from the sand like tiny fragments of hope.

  “I’ll stay,” she whispered to the shadows before her. “I’ll tend the tree. Goodbye, Ma.”

  The turtles paid Snowflake no mind. As soon as they made it to the surface, they set off toward the ocean, flopping and dragging themselves across the sand like little, determined rowboats on land.

  Another layer of turtles emerged after the first. Kiri couldn’t believe how many there were. She laughed, even while tears trickled down her cheeks.

  “So it’s started,” said a driftwood voice.

  Kiri glanced up. The thin, stooped form of the woman who’d presided over nearly every birth in the village stood nearby.

  “I check on them in the evenings, when the air turns cool like this,” said the Witch Woman. “Something I remember from when I was a girl, younger than you, even, is that turtle hatchlings always emerge when the temperature shifts and night begins.”

  “You did this?” Kiri’s thoughts skipped back to the night of the feast, before she’d been marked by the panther. She recalled the white orbs that the Witch Woman had collected in a bucket. They were turtle eggs! That was why the Witch Woman had been close to the sea-grape tunnels when Kiri encountered the panther. She’d been burying the eggs, just like the mother turtle would have done if she hadn’t been killed.

  “I merely helped nature along,” said the Witch Woman. “The real miracle is what you did.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” said Kiri. “I didn’t save the sea turtle or the panthers, or anything. I failed.”

  The corners of the Witch Woman’s eyes crinkled as her lips turned upward. “No, Kiri. Because of you, things might be different now. What happened before doesn’t need to happen again.”

  Paulo approached. His mouth fell open as he saw the hatchlings. “How did you—”

  Before Kiri could explain, Paulo shouted for others to come see. “Look!” he yelled, pointing at several hatchlings flopping across the sand. “Water devi!”

  Tae and Akash and some other fugees ran to see what all the fuss was about. Spotting the hatchlings, they called others over until dozens of villagers were rushing across the beach toward them.

  Murmurs spread through the crowd. Kiri feared what the fugees might do. The hatchlings were so small and helpless. What if netters bucketed them to use as bait? Or hungry villagers caught them to cook and eat, like they’d done with the mother sea turtle?

  “It’s time,” said the Witch Woman. “Tell them what to do.”


  A few of the tiny turtles were going in the wrong direction. Others were stuck behind mounds of trash they couldn’t climb over. All around her, Kiri sensed the hatchlings’ frantic need to reach the water. The ocean had called to her in a similar way when she’d been stuck in the waller city, but this seemed much stronger and more urgent. The turtles could smell and taste the ocean, and they needed to get to it quickly.

  Seagulls circled overhead and crabs peeked out of their holes, looking for a meal, but the people merely stood. Then a crab raced from a hole and tugged at one of the hatchlings. A seagull dove to eat another.

  “Help them!” shouted Kiri. “They need to get to the waves!”

  To her surprise, the villagers listened. They shooed the seagulls and crabs away, and lifted the fragile tear-shaped bodies over trash and holes, shepherding them to the ocean. There were fifty or sixty hatchlings now, spread across the beach. And for each one, someone from the village stood nearby, making sure the hatchling’s path to the water was clear.

  Kiri watched, amazed by how gentle people could be with the smallest of beings. Then she spotted Sonia and Martin near the water’s edge. They must have seen all the commotion.

  “Get a collection bin!” ordered Sonia, speaking to one of the soldiers back at the tridrone. “Hurry!”

  A second soldier stayed with Sonia and Martin, pointing his gun at nearby fugees and shouting at them to keep their distance. The tension between the two groups felt thick and familiar.

  Kiri raced to her father, careful not to step on any hatchlings flopping toward the waves.

  “I can’t believe it!” said Sonia. “Dermochelys coriacea! I thought they were extinct. This is incredible! Martin, there’s one. Quickly!”

  Martin had a plastic collection bin with five or six hatchlings in it. Sonia picked up another hatchling that had almost made it to the water and put it in the bin. Villagers stood, grim-faced, as the wallers captured what they’d tried to release, but none of the fugees dared approach with the soldier standing guard.

  “Let them go,” said Kiri.

  Sonia was too preoccupied with capturing hatchlings to acknowledge her.

  Kiri tugged on her father’s arm. “Da! Listen. You have to let them go.”

  “We need to preserve them, Kiribati. They’ll die out there. Sharks will eat them, or they’ll choke on trash, or get tangled in debris. Catching them is the only way.”

  “Why won’t you listen to me?”

  Martin kept collecting hatchlings.

  “They belong here,” said Kiri. “If you take them, they’ll die. Like Ma died.”

  Her father paused.

  The words had slipped out before she’d thought about them. She’d never confronted her da about her mother’s death before. Never blamed him for it—not aloud.

  For several heartbeats he stared at her with knotted brow. She feared she’d broken something between them and now her da would reject her.

  “They belong here,” she repeated. “So did Ma. So do I.”

  Her father’s gaze softened. “Are you sure? We could have a good life in the city.”

  Kiri touched the waller mark on her arm. The city might be part of her, but it wasn’t the place for her. “I want to stay here. This is my home.”

  “It’s too dangerous here. Nothing will be easy.”

  “Nothing worth doing is ever easy, right?” she said, using the phrase he often did. “We can’t hide behind walls, waiting for things to get better. We have to change things now. We have to tend the tree.”

  The words must have sparked something in her father because a look flashed across his face, like he’d found something that he lost long ago. “You…sound like your mother,” he finally said. “She always talked about protecting the whole tree instead of just a few fallen leaves.” His gaze fell to the turtles swimming in the bin he held. Then he took a deep breath and nodded, as if completing a conversation in his head. “Perhaps she was right.”

  Without another word, Martin pried back the lid of the collection bin and released all the hatchlings he’d captured into the clear water of a receding wave.

  The turtle hatchlings swam into the surf. Some immediately got pulled out by the current, while others were pushed back by incoming waves. Still, they moved much more swiftly in water than they did on land, and one by one they disappeared into the depths of the ocean.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Sonia. She splashed through the water to catch a hatchling Martin had released. “Those are all we have. Collect them!”

  The soldier turned his gun on Martin.

  “Sonia,” said Martin. “If there’s no place left for them to live, then what’s the point?”

  “But they’re worth—”

  “More than we’ll ever know,” finished Martin.

  “I can’t believe this. You’re giving up?” asked Sonia.

  “No. It’s the other way around. I’m learning to hope again,” said Martin. He walked over to Kiri and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Da?” she asked, wondering if he was okay.

  He leaned down and hugged her so tight her feet left the ground.

  Kiri hugged him back, holding on to him like she hadn’t done since she was a little kid. He slumped but didn’t let go. “I should have paid more attention, Kiribati. You grew up when I wasn’t looking.”

  “This is crazy!” interrupted Sonia. “The hatchlings are all swimming away. They’ll be lost!”

  Martin finally set Kiri down and regarded Sonia. “I don’t know how the mother leatherback managed to survive for so long,” he said. “Maybe it was a miracle, or a devi like some of the fugees claim. What I do know is that sea turtles always return to the beach where they were born to nest. Which means, if some of these hatchlings survive they’ll come back here someday to lay their eggs.”

  “But that could take years,” said Sonia. “It could be a decade or two before we even know if any survived.”

  “It’s a big ocean. Some will find a way,” said Martin. “And when they do, out of all the beaches in the world, these turtles—the only known leatherbacks in existence—will return here. So if Gen Tech wants to collect leatherback hatchlings, then this beach better be here, and these people better watch over it. Don’t you agree?”

  Kiri suddenly understood what her father had done by releasing the hatchlings. She turned to Sonia and grabbed her hand. “Sonia, don’t be angry. This could be a really good thing.”

  Gradually the lines in Sonia’s brow eased. “If any sea turtles return here,” she said. “I know Gen Tech wouldn’t want to risk losing such valuable assets. They’d want to make sure they could claim them, and the best way to do that would be to work with the fugees to turn this section of the coast into a refuge.”

  “And if Gen Tech and the fugees turned this part of the coast into a refuge,” added Kiri, “then wouldn’t it make sense to bring the panther cubs back here as well?”

  “It could. But that’s a big risk,” said Sonia. “Someone from Gen Tech would need to oversee the project.”

  Kiri looked to her da. There was a mischievous glint to his eyes that she hadn’t seen in years.

  “I might know a father and daughter who’d be willing to give it a try,” he said.

  “Definitely,” agreed Kiri, squeezing her father’s hand.

  Sonia sent the soldiers back to the tridrone, which helped ease the tension with the fugees. No one interfered as the villagers shepherded the remaining hatchlings to the waves. Kiri, Martin, and Sonia stood by the water’s edge and watched the last ones swim into the darkening water.

  Once all the hatchlings were gone, Martin walked Sonia back to the tridrone to work out the details of what they’d tell the Gen Tech board. Kiri stayed behind with Snowflake. The poor rat had gotten splashed by a wave and was shivering. Every time she stopped petting him, he nudged her hand until she stroked his fur again.

  At last, the tridrone thrust pods whirred to life. Kiri waved goodbye to Sonia and wish
ed her luck. Her da came to join her at the ocean’s edge. The nearly full moon cast a silvery light across the tops of the waves while the jagged remains of the ruins offshore looked blacker than black, like pieces cut out of existence.

  “It’s not going to be easy,” said her da. “Trying to change the way people live never is. If this has any chance of working, from now on everyone in the village will need to be a protector of the Shadow That Hunts.”

  “We’ll be more than that,” said Kiri. “You’ll see. We’ll be much, much more.”

  Kiri and her da arranged their picnic blanket between two dunes near where the hatchlings had emerged almost eight weeks before.

  Several other families had set up picnics along the edge of the sea grapes and ghost forest as well. Kiri saw Paulo, Tae, and Charro’s blanket a little ways down the beach. And Nessa, Senek, and Akash were just beyond them. Some families had brought small tables, and they set out plates and cups of offerings on them, while others had hung strings of flowers and brightly painted bones from twisty sea grape branches. Everyone in the village had lost someone, but today wasn’t a sad day. Instead, people were in a festive mood. They ate, drank, and played, setting out extra cups and sweets for those not there.

  It was Kiri’s first celebration of the dead. Martin had been reluctant to make much of a fuss about it, but since their stilt house had been airlifted to the village almost two months ago, he’d been willing to go along with the village’s traditions. And besides, he couldn’t get much work done today—not with all the aqua farmers, caretakers, and rangers he’d been training taking the day off. So once the panther cubs were fed and cared for, he’d come back to the beach to picnic with Kiri.

  Kiri arranged the food she’d made, or had tried to make, on their blanket. The jellyfish soup was runny, and the seaweed-clam-and-coconut skewers had gotten burned. Cooking wasn’t her specialty, but Paulo and the Witch Woman had been trying to teach her how to make a few simple dishes. And everyone in the village was learning to cook some of the new foods they had now, like the seaweed and clams they’d begun to farm. Raising edible seaweed had been Kiri’s idea. The first harvests were already coming in, and the spicy soup Paulo made with it tasted delicious.