The Council of Animals

by Nick McDonell

  “Eggs have mercy,” cawed the crow, and recited his favorite prayer, Our Finch, under his breath.

  “The seventh council member…” said the cat.

  “Mark my vote, bear!” said the baboon. “Kill the humans!”

  The tally for humanity stood at 3–3. And the seventh council member had arrived.

  Chapter 11

  It is the historian’s business to separate fact from fiction. Still, we must recognize some biases are inescapable. Even the most circumspect tortoise scholars, even whales with their extraterrestrial purrviews, have the prejudices of their time and pod. I often think that historians with shorter life spans capture the essence of history with greater grace and insight. I direct you, for example, to the books of cricket wisdom.

  Humanity, however, as has been noted, never spoke grak, and so could not learn animal histories. They were therefore blinkered to some realities that were obvious throughout the Animal Kingdom. Chief among these: the existence of so-called “mythical” beasts.

  What was it about humanity that prevented them from admitting the existence, for example, of the yeti? How many yetis did they need to see? Some of our less sympathetic thinkers have suggested that humanity only believes in animals it captures or kills. A grim explanation but not entirely out of character, I’m afraid.

  The yetis didn’t mind, mostly, though there were a few outliers, romantics who would have liked exchange of one kind or another. I am reminded of a doomed affair between a yeti and a human in the Jharlang valley. The former had rescued the latter from a rockslide, but the obstacles of their respective cultures overpowered their affections. Within the local cave complex, the yetis were concerned—rightly—that humanity would kill and skin them, or concoct some gruesome use for their livers, as they had done with geese. (Yetis and geese share an aesthetic tradition.) The human in question understood their concern and swore he would never return to his village. But his yeti lover was so incensed at the insult from her fellows that she stormed from the cave complex, enraged, and was banished. The two of them could not, obviously, live in the human village. And so they lived out their days among the highest peaks.

  But I digress.

  On hearing the call from beyond the cliff, the animals looked to the sky for the seventh council member:

  The “mythical” creatures had elected to send a dragon as their representative.

  But there was no dragon to be seen.

  The cat had a keener sense of hearing than the other creatures. She walked to the edge of the cliff. It seemed to her that the call they’d heard had come from down below, rather than up above. She looked over the edge.

  Far beneath, where the waves crashed white and foamy on the rocks, she saw the creature who had made the enormous noise. There were several names for her kind, but most often the creature was called goda.

  Like all goda, this goda had both paws and fins and was covered in black fur. Her face, the only hairless part of her body, was the color of fire coral. She was about dog sized, and eight hundred years old.

  The cat looked down at the goda, and the goda looked up at the cat.

  Chapter 12

  “I don’t see a dragon,” said the baboon, searching the sky, panic in his voice.

  “If the mythical beasts said a dragon will join us,” said the dog, “a dragon will join us.”

  “This council was a bad idea.” The baboon’s voice wobbled. “We should never have met. The dragon will eat us!”

  “Calm yourself,” said the bear. “We’re civil with one another. We build trust. So will the dragon.”

  The baboon spat another great wad of phlegm, nearly at the dog’s paws. The dog thought to himself: Something is wrong with that baboon’s lungs. He remembered visiting a veterinarian as a pup, when he had an infection. Every breath had been clogged, like having your snout stuck in the mud. There was all the unpleasantness of the sterile white room and the stranger poking him, but the humans had been telling the truth. The vet helped him breathe. He might never have been a soldier if it hadn’t been for that vet.…

  “Baboon,” said the dog, “do you know about vets? Some of the humans are very good at healing animals.”

  “I wish,” said the horse, who had been thinking hard since the goda’s call, “that they had sent a unicorn.”

  The cat, returning from the cliff, informed the council: “It’s not a dragon.”

  “Don’t trust a word this cat says,” said the baboon. “She’s—”

  Before the baboon could carry on with what surely would have been a nasty string of invective, the goda arrived. With her strong paws she had climbed the side of the cliff and was now standing before the animals, her curly hair rippling in the breeze, the dusk light reflected in her dark eyes. Her voice was like rocks crashing against each other underwater.

  “Greetings,” she said.

  * * *

  The animals of the council fell silent. They did not know many “mythical” beasts. No creature, however, impresses cockroaches, and a great many of them were watching the goda, too. The weeds and grasses and shrubs around the cliff were in fact dense with cockroaches, all of whom watched and listened to see how the vote would go, as they groomed each other and nibbled on the available organic matter. The cliff was also dense with mice and rats, peering from burrows, observing the proceedings.

  Most of the animals at the council were so interested in the goda that they did not notice the extra rodent scent on the breeze, which had strengthened as the sun was setting.

  The baboon, however, was well aware of the watchers.

  The baboon had, after all, recruited the bugs and rodents into a plot.

  Such terrible violence among these animals.

  Among all animals.

  I do not like even to continue with this history.

  But it is the duty of the historian to face the hideous facts, and violence is one.

  Some weather was coming in off the horizon.

  * * *

  The moment the lion takes down the gazelle is not good for the gazelle. The tendons rip, the blood spurts, the gazelle’s consciousness returns to the void or perhaps moves on to the heavenly savannahs. I have always been most sympathetic to the herbivores. Sometimes I think that the worst mistake animals ever made was evolving out of the antediluvian ooze. What a tranquil, nutrient-rich time that must have been.

  Alas, there is no turning back the evolutionary clock. We evolved to eat each other.

  And at this moment in our chronicle, as the goda prepared to cast a vote on behalf of dragons and the other “mythical” beasts, the animals teetered on the brink of carnage and betrayal.

  The baboons and cockroaches and mice had entered into a brutal alliance. If the vote did not go the way they wanted, if the council concluded that humanity should be left alone, they would swarm. They would kill and eat the pro-human animals, and then move on to the humans.

  Such a conspiracy was not unprecedented. The great auk councils of centuries prior had been plagued by intrigues, though the root cause of their extinction, of course, was humanity. The destruction of the Maya followed a particularly turbulent political season among the animals of the Yucatán. A human disease had wiped out a great number of the creatures in the nearby rain forest, and the council convened, voted, and subsequently carried out a campaign of immense destruction on the people of those Mayan cities. Carried them off screaming into the jungle, devoured them in their beds. Nothing left of the whole civilization but empty cities, bones, and panther scat.

  But I digress again.

  A million roaches, watching.

  * * *

  “Greetings,” said the bear, respectfully, to the goda.

  “Bird blessings on you,” said the crow.

  The goda nodded to each in turn.

  The dog, perhaps because he’d spent so much time among men, was most surprised of all by the goda. He could not place her particular scent.

  He also found it quite fetching. Somet
hing about the goda reminded him of a shih tzu he’d loved long ago.

  “Welcome to headquarters,” the dog blurted out.

  The goda turned her dark-eyed gaze upon him, and the dog scratched himself, drooling.

  “Would you like some sugar?” said the horse, nodding at the chewed-up box.

  The goda bowed again, slightly.

  The animals waited to hear what she would say. A few seconds, then a few more.

  As the time passed it seemed that the goda was looking deeply into each one of them, considering. In actuality, the goda moved very, very slowly because she was eight hundred years old.

  The baboon, impatient, twirled the fur on his head in such a way that he now had small tufts pointing in every direction. Finally, he could take the silence no longer:

  “Where is the dragon?” he asked.

  The goda looked up into the sky, and all the animals followed her gaze. But there was no dragon, only the cooling blue and pink and yellow of the sunset. When they looked back down, the goda was looking over the bear’s tally. She lifted one of her paws.

  All around them, the rodents and roaches crouched, watching the baboon for the signal, ready to charge.

  And the goda marked her vote.

  The baboon, triumphant, threw a hairy arm into the air and hooted with pleasure.

  All around, roaches and rodents relaxed.

  “Wait, but, please,” said the bear, “goda, why? The humans venerate you. They worship dragons, why…?”

  But the goda was already walking to the edge of the cliff.

  “Please,” said the bear, “where is the mercy? There is no evil in nature. We must not do this thing!”

  The goda stopped and turned and asked the animals a question. But it didn’t sound like a question.

  “How,” she said in her great undersea voice, “do you get a goose out of a bottle?”

  And then she dove over the side of the cliff.

  Chapter 13

  The bear and the dog rushed to the side of the cliff, but there was no sign of the goda.

  “Look there,” said the dog, “eleven o’clock, a, a, an unidentified…”

  A glowing orb sped away beneath the waves.

  The dog couldn’t explain how he knew, but somehow he knew—it was the goda. (Knowledgeable sea creatures confirm this “lighting up” is common goda behavior.) His heart skipped a beat within the furry confines of his chest.

  “Wait!” he cried out.

  But the goda, with her lovely curly fur, was gone.

  The dog looked to the bear with unconcealable sadness. The last light of day was blue; the stony smell of rain blew in off the sea.

  “You did well to save the cat,” said the bear.

  “But we lost the vote,” said the dog. “We lost…”

  The bear frowned. “We must have hope,” she said, slowly, “that the animals will come to their senses. Come.”

  They walked back to the council as the first distant thunder rolled.

  “Come out,” the baboon was shouting, “show yourselves!”

  He rang his bell, and the rodents and the roaches emerged.

  “What’s this?” asked the bear. “Were you all watching, all the time?”

  “Down with the mammals!” came the collective cockroach response.

  Fat drops of rain began to fall.

  “No time for questions, bear,” said the baboon. “The vote is over. This is a war council now. We must return to our species with this news. We meet here again in two days, and then kill the humans. Terrible humans, terrible! The council is adjourned! For victory!”

  The baboon rang his bell again, but its note was lost in the rain. He stowed it away and knuckled off, followed by a mass of roaches and rodents.

  “Blows around The Egg, a bad wind,” cawed the crow. He spread his wings and stepped into the air, circling higher and higher until he was lost to the other animals.

  The horse sniffed at the yellow box, now empty of sugar, then turned to the dog.

  “Sugar cubes? Carrots?”

  “You just voted to end humanity, you bloody imbecile!”

  “Easy, dog,” said the bear. “No, horse, no sugar cubes. The council is over.”

  The horse looked blankly from bear to dog and back again.

  “… And so you should go, now. Tell the other horses.”

  The horse shook his head and trotted off through the rain, into the falling darkness.

  The cat, dry in the cockpit of the helicopter, looked at the two creatures who remained. The losers of the vote, wet and despondent.

  “Come,” said the cat, “I know a cave where we can shelter from this storm.”

  “I must return to the pack,” said the dog. He had never visited a cat den before and didn’t want to now.

  “Dog,” said the cat, hopping down from the helicopter into the wet grass. “A storm is coming. It is not a good time to return to the pack. There are even bones in this cave. You are welcome. Bear, will you come?”

  The bear grunted in assent, and together they departed.

  “Blast,” said the dog, watching them walk off. “I’ll be a stew before I go to some cat’s stinking cat hole. Orders are orders, a vote is a vote, we’re soldiers, not politicians, dammit. Hate the way it’s gone but nothing to do and that’s that.”

  The dog saluted no one in particular, determined to make the long walk back to his pack.

  Just then a great crash of thunder broke over his head. Lightning forked across the sky.

  “Wait, wait!” shouted the dog after the cat and bear. “I’m coming!”

  And he ran off after them.

  Chapter 14

  The cat’s cave was down at the base of the cliff. A curtain of glowing Spanish moss obscured the entrance. The bear was no botanist, but she knew it was the post-Calamity moss. Many plant species had mutated during The Calamity—certain forests had turned to plastic—and one of the more common mutations was the glow. A bright turquoise, pulsing in the veins of the moss. The bear followed the cat and dog through the glowing curtain.

  The cave smelled of old moss. The stone walls muffled the sound of the rain.

  “Bloody rotten weather out there,” said the dog, shaking himself off. He wouldn’t admit it, but this seemed like a good spot the cat had found. Dry and warm and, sure enough, there was a pile of bones against the wall.

  “Cat,” the bear said, “what happened between you and the baboon?”

  The dog walked over to the pile of bones. Not clear exactly who they’d been, but they looked tasty enough. He was just leaning in for a long flat one, perhaps some kind of scapula, when the pile exploded outward, bones clattering.

  The dog yelped and leapt back.

  A trio of moles tumbled elegantly from the pile of bones. Flipping and cartwheeling, they landed, with perfect stillness, in a triangle around the dog.

  Soft and velvety though they were, they seemed rather dangerous.

  “What in the blazes?”

  “Not to worry, dog,” said the cat. “They’re friends.”

  The moles, as one, bowed to the cat. The cat bowed back.

  The bear studied the moles. When she was a cub, she had worked on a film playing the pet of a warlord. It had been a formative role in her artistic development—she had realized that the acts that brought her the most joy did the same for the audience. Now her mind returned to the film, but not because of artistic development. These moles reminded her of some of the characters the humans had played.… What were they called? Dressed in black, creeping on rooftops, masks … They disappeared in smoke, carried curved swords and nunchukas and throwing stars … The word was on the tip of her tongue.…

  The three moles sat cross-legged against the wall of the cave.

  “We feared we’d lose the vote,” said the cat, trailing off. “But hoped…”

  The cat seemed suddenly very tired. Then she gathered herself, swishing her tail.

  “Now,” said the cat, “we have muc
h work to do. These moles have found a way into the human’s camp.”

  “Cat,” said the bear, “what are you talking about?”

  “Diplomacy has failed,” said the cat. “The baboons are out of control. They play on the other animals’ fears about humans for their own ends. You heard yourself, bear, the lies that baboon told. But we have a backup plan. Humans are too useful for us to let them be slaughtered.”

  “But we have a system, a tradition,” said the bear. “We’ve lost the vote. We must abide by the results. What do you think, dog?”

  “I’m a soldier. Politics isn’t my business.”

  “So you think the humans should all be killed and eaten?” said the cat.

  “I think it’s a damn shame, but orders are orders.”

  “When the orders are unjust, it’s your duty to disobey.”

  The dog grunted.

  The cat said: “We’re going to warn the humans—”

  “Mutiny!” barked the dog. “The baboons will never stand for it!”

  “We’re going to warn the humans,” the cat pressed on, “so they can escape extinction.”

  “You saw the bugs with that baboon,” said the bear. “Even if the crows don’t see us first, the bugs will report our movements to the baboons. We’ll never make it to the humans without their knowing. And even if we did, the humans would never be able to escape the other animals banded against them.”

  The cat fixed the bear with a stare through the darkness.

  “What do you propose, bear? Let them die, abandon hope?”

  The bear was so tired. Since The Calamity, the seasons had become disordered. She’d tried to argue; she’d tried to teach the dog new thinking. All for nothing. The bear was feeling that it had been a long time since she’d hibernated. And this was such a pleasant, dry cave; perhaps she would just lie down for a few months and let all the trouble with the humans and the vote take its course.…