The Council of Animals

by Nick McDonell

  “It’s impossible,” said the bear, slumping. “Humanity is finished.”

  “I have a plan,” said the cat.

  Silence in the cave. Against the wall, the dangerous moles sat in absolute stillness.

  “Well?!” said the dog. “What’s the plan?!”

  The future balanced upon the edge of a cat’s claw.

  “The moles have found a tunnel from this cave to the human camp,” said the cat. “We can warn the humans and be away before the other council species find out.”

  “But even if we get in and out,” said the dog, “how would we warn them? They never read nature’s signs before.”

  “One of them,” said the cat, “speaks grak.”

  The bear and dog looked at each other in disbelief.

  Silence in the cave.

  “A squirrel heard an old woman in the camp,” the cat went on. “They call her a witch.”

  “And you believe this … secret squirrel?” asked the dog.

  “I do.”

  The dog frowned. This notion that an old human lady in the camp spoke grak was far-fetched, at best. What would the pack say? He’d been sent to represent them and report back the decision of the council, and now he was being drawn into some … feline conspiracy. He looked to the bear for guidance, but the bear turned away and lay her head down on the cool stone.

  “Bear,” said the cat, “you can’t turn away and ignore this. What of your speech at the council? Were you only acting?”

  The bear wondered: Am I? She cast her memory back over her life. Her mother. A silver salmon leaping. She was so young when she was captured. The humans who were always gentle with her. What a good bear. Did it mean nothing?

  “Bear,” insisted the cat, “what of loyalty?”

  The dog, listening, was surprised at the question. Cats weren’t loyal.

  “I am loyal,” said the bear, deliberately. “I am loyal to the vote.”

  One of the dangerous moles rose silently from his place on the floor. He seemed to flow rather than walk through the turquoise gloom. Equidistant from bear and cat, he stopped and held in the air: a cocoon.

  The first cracks showed along its side.

  “What’s this?” asked the bear.

  The mole gave a brief nod, then secreted the cocoon away and returned to his cross-legged pose against the wall.

  “It’s a timer,” explained the cat. “When a butterfly emerges from that cocoon, the moles’ access tunnels to the witch’s camp will collapse. We’re running out of time; we must go.” The cat caught the eyes of the dog and winked. “You say you’re loyal to the vote, bear. In that case, let’s have another. We vote on whether to warn the humans.”

  The cat raised her paw. “I vote aye. And these moles’ vows prevent them from voting.”

  One of the moles rose, bowed, and sat again.

  “Dog?”

  The dog looked over his shoulder, but there was no pack to guide him.

  “Dog,” purred the cat, approaching, close enough that the dog’s congested nose was filled with cat stink, “thank you for protecting me from the baboon.”

  “Just my job,” the dog said automatically.

  “This is the moment,” purred the cat, “when hero dogs rise up.…”

  To the bear, it looked like the cat was hypnotizing the dog.

  “The moment,” continued the cat, “when they are best friends not only to man, but to all animals. Guard dog, sheepdog, Seeing Eye dog, attack dog. Rescue dog. This is their moment. They are the kind of dogs that a … goda would fall in love with.”

  “Well, I, what, I mean, love, there’s no, not at…”

  “How do you vote, dog?”

  The dog wagged his tail.

  Chapter 15

  The bear could have left. The vote in the cave, instigated by the cat, was nonbinding.

  Instead, after the dog voted in favor of warning the humans, the bear stuck around. She joined the cat, the dog, and the three moles on their quest.

  I wonder whether she would have made the same decision if she had known what lay ahead.

  Every vote requires courage. Not the kind you need to battle mutated tunnel slugs—though that’s important, too. No, the kind of courage that allows you to look the slugs in the eye and say: let’s decide on this together. In the belief that a calamitous slug is, finally, not so different from a bear, or dog. Idealistic? Naïve? Perhaps. Perhaps the act of writing history is idealistic, too.…

  But I digress.

  The moles led the way to the back of the cave, to a mole-sized hole.

  It slanted down into darkness. One after another, the moles flipped inside and disappeared.

  “Who planned this mission, cat?” said the dog, sniffing the hole. “I can barely fit. Need the ratter squad for a job like this. And the bear’s not going to fit in there at all—she’s a bear! Classic cat plann—”

  The cat disappeared into the hole.

  “Well, that’s bloody something, isn’t it,” the dog barked at the bear. “All this windup about heroism and a vote and now the cat leaves us off mission, behind the wire like a bunch of pups.”

  The bear sniffed at the hole. She smelled something … chemical. She remembered it from certain action sequences she’d shot, but couldn’t quite place it.… She sniffed again.…

  WHMUPF! KABANG! SHRUUSSH!

  The floor around them shuddered and collapsed in on itself.

  The bear and dog, sliding at high speed down a steeply slanted tunnel and then, falling through space: a vast cavern.

  Then the sharp embrace of icy water. The dog gasped as he went under.

  * * *

  The subterranean salt-lake cavern into which the dog and bear had fallen was of unusual historical significance.

  In this cavern, philosopher bat kings had ruled over what is universally regarded as the bat midnight (or noonday, depending on your circadian rhythm). Their lengthy reign saw the emergence of the sonar epics, cave portraiture, and guano statuaries which would influence so much artistic life throughout that biosphere.

  Humans, of course, had no idea this was going on beneath their stubby toes. The philosopher bat kings tried frequently to initiate contact, but to no avail. Their bat kingdom was eventually destroyed by the white-nose fungus that presaged The Calamity. Even in death the bat philosophers were graceful. At dusk when we hear strains of sonar death sagas in the squeaking of the rare survivors, even insects are moved. Though no death is agreeable, among some insects, death in the jaws of a bat is considered ideal.

  The dog spluttered to the surface.

  The cavern was so enormous he could not see where it ended. But from darkness he emerged into light: everywhere he looked, cool green phosphorescence. The water all around him glowed and swirled. The bear was some lengths to shore already. The dog paddled after and dragged himself, shivering, onto the rocky bank. The cat and the dangerous moles were waiting.

  “Apologies for the bath,” said the cat.

  The bear, though she happened to like swimming in cold water, shook dry in a great, unhappy spray. The dog, panting and puffing, did likewise.

  “Cat,” the dog said, “we need to communicate. Comms is the key to any mission, and that break in the chain was an opsec disaster! You keep at it like this, I’ll have your tail court-martialed.”

  The cat only licked a paw.

  “Which way now, cat?” growled the bear, rather threateningly.

  The cat pointed with her tail down the shoreline toward the cavern wall, against which stood a giant boulder, twice as wide and tall as the bear. “Behind that boulder.”

  “Behind that boulder?” asked the bear. “How did the moles get past it? It’s solid rock all around there!”

  The moles whispered in the cat’s ear.

  “Yes, it is strange,” said the cat. “The boulder wasn’t there before.”

  “Then what in the blazes are we going to do?” said the dog. “Are we stuck down—”

  “ANIM
ALS, BEGONE!”

  A powerful voice echoed off the cavern walls, interrupting. It seemed to come from every direction.

  Tail to tail to tail, the cat and dog and bear braced themselves for attack. The bear reared up on her hind legs, the cat hissed, the dog growled. The moles vanished in a cloud of purple smoke.

  “APOLOGIZE!” echoed the booming voice.

  “Who’s there?” cried the cat. “We mean no trespass and would talk with whatever animals are here.”

  “I think it’s coming from the water,” said the bear.

  Just offshore, the water churned and sucked. Something was rising up.

  “There!”

  High on the walls of the cavern, the three moles aimed their poison dart blowguns at the roiling water, prepared to fire.

  From the froth emerged a mighty head, silver and white. Such a head as the bear had never seen. It was massive. Cave kelp hung from its teeth. Green slime sloughed off its scales. And this fierce creature, a giant cave lizard, fixed the animals with its unblinking eyes.

  “Greetings,” said the cat.

  “Why do you enter the bat cavern?”

  “We’re on our way to a human camp aboveground,” said the cat.

  “The bat cavern is the sacred homeland of the bats.”

  With astonishing speed for a creature so large, the lizard boiled up out of the water and touched down on the shore between the animals and the tunnel. On land, the lizard was even bigger than they’d imagined, three times the size of the bear. It could clearly eat them all up.

  “Apologies,” said the bear, “we did not know—”

  “You did not know that the abovegrounders infected and oppressed us?”

  “Well, we…”

  “We’re not going to listen to your above-splaining. To your bipedalist hate speech! Only bats can know the truth!”

  “My friend,” said the dog, “what bats are you talking about?”

  And indeed, the dog had the right of it. There was not a bat to be seen anywhere in the cavern.

  “WE ARE BATS!” roared the lizard. “SQUEAK ON!”

  “Squeak on,” echoed the bear, trying to get in the swing of things.

  But this was evidently the wrong thing to say.

  The giant lizard flicked its tongue out in anger and screeched, a horrible sound.

  “Who gave you the right to squeak on?” he demanded.

  “I, I, I meant no disrespect,” said the bear. “I—”

  “It’s not enough that you invade our cave and infect our ancestors. Now you have to steal our language?”

  “Steal whose language!?” barked the dog. “You’re not even a bat!”

  The lizard’s eyes went wide as headlights. He reared back. Curved rows of teeth in green bio-light.

  The dangerous moles, clinging to the cavern wall high above, assessed the situation. In their mole hearts, chips of ice. Campaign after campaign, mission after mission, killing after killing, these moles had abided by a code. Darkness above light, loyalty above death, tunnel forever. In bygone times such moles had served badger lords and turned the tide of certain conflicts. It was a secretive tradition but robust; their legend spread. In The Calamity, however, these moles had lost their masters. In their wanderings they had fallen in with the cat.

  And now they would watch this giant lizard, who thought he was a bat, eat the dog.

  Chapter 16

  “Please,” said the cat, before the lizard could strike. “Forgive my friend. He needs education. He’s not awake to the realities of aboveground/underground.”

  The lizard relaxed his mighty neck. “We must educate the ignorant.”

  “Please,” said the bear, “educate us.”

  “They never treated us like animals,” the lizard began. “They treated us like machines. Guano-producing machines.In the beginning we didn’t mind, humans coming down here, carting it all away. They used it to fertilize their vegetables. But the more they came, the sicker we got. And they didn’t care. Other animals danced to the sonar epics. And all the while humanity is coming down and taking our guano, infecting our cave. And one day, I look around and there’s only a few hundred of us left. And then fifty. And then just me and my family. And then only me.”

  The giant lizard shut his scaled eyes and sucked air through serrated teeth.

  “I am the last of the bats.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the cat. “That is … profound.”

  “It is the truth.”

  “Well, look,” said the cat, “no animal can make up for what the humans did to you. But the aboveground animals have decided to kill the humans.”

  “Bats have a different justice.”

  The lizard was right, of course. Aboveground justice relied on a jury system. Down below, the system was older and depended wholly on judges—typically highly respected female bats (though never members of the royal line). Disputes were resolved rapidly, and nonviolently. Emphasis was on reintegration of the perpetrator into bat society, even in the rare instances of bat-on-bat violence. It was a low-crime society.

  (An aside—in the bibliography, you will find reference to the remarkable Informal Justice in the Midnight Kingdom of the Philosopher Bats. A work of both legal theory and anthropology, squeaked by a distinguished, multidisciplinary bat, and translated into grak. I cannot recommend it highly enough—it shaped my own thinking as a legal historian.)

  “And a fine system bat justice is,” said the cat. “We don’t believe in executions either. Which is why we need your help. We were going to go to the human camp, to warn them about the other animals, but that boulder is in the way. Do you know another way out of this cavern?”

  “I put the boulder in front of the tunnel.”

  “But why?” asked the cat.

  “There is no respect for bats. We will not tolerate insults from abovegrounders, passing through our sacred cavern, using it as they please.”

  The bear stepped forward.

  “Bat,” she said, “we apologize for trespassing in your cavern. We didn’t know what we were doing—”

  “The moles knew,” said the lizard, looking about for them.

  High against the cavern wall, moles in perfect stillness, camouflaged against dark rock.

  “We can’t speak for the moles,” continued the bear. “But if we don’t warn these humans, the rest of the animals are going to kill them. All of them. Their species will go extinct.”

  “Like mine.”

  The bear and cat nodded seriously.

  “It is a tragedy for any species to go extinct.”

  “Yes,” purred the cat. “Exactly.”

  The giant lizard picked at a fish head between his teeth.

  “How will you warn the humans?”

  “There’s a human who speaks grak.”

  “Impossible.”

  “It’s true,” said the cat. “The animals of the forest have all heard.”

  “If this is true, they must know our pain!”

  “Yes,” said the cat to the bear, “if only we had some creature who could speak of the injustice the humans have perpetrated. Even when they didn’t mean to—”

  “Yes,” agreed the bear, “the way they treated animals like … like guano machines.”

  “They did!” The lizard snarled, and the cavern walls shook with his rage. “I will tell the humans,” he declared.

  “You?” said the cat slyly.

  “Yes! I will testify that the humans killed my bat brothers and bat sisters with their carelessness, with their white-nose fungus. My truth will be heard.”

  “Squeak on!” said the cat.

  “SQUEAK ON!!” roared the lizard. “Bring me to the humans!”

  “Would love to,” said the cat, “but first, we need to warn them, you see, so they can survive to hear your testimony, and their camp is down the tunnel, on the other side of that boulder.…”

  “You may pass through the bat kingdom!” said the lizard.

  And then he put his s
caly shoulders against the boulder.

  “Hunhnn…”

  The boulder shifted.

  His vast claws dug into the cavern floor, his scales scratching against the cold stone of the boulder, his black-and-green eyes slit in effort.…

  “HunhnnnhnAARR!”

  And the boulder rolled away, revealing a tunnel, just large enough to fit the bear.

  “Now,” said the lizard, panting, “go. Quiet as the stars, smooth as the light at dusk, softly as the dew. Like bats. When must I come above-ground to testify?”

  “Tomorrow,” said the cat, “on the cliff’s edge, by the human boat.”

  The lizard held his front legs up, as though they were bat wings. But, of course, he flew nowhere.

  “I will squeak truth to power.” The lizard lowered his front legs.

  “We thank you. Bear, dog, let’s go.”

  The moles were already ahead of them. Walking away, the dog glanced over his shoulder and saw the lizard slithering back into the frigid salt lake.

  Chapter 17

  The tunnel stretched out. Soon it was high and wide enough for a locomotive. The animals walked abreast among crystal stalactites.

  “Are you really going to call that lizard to … testify?” said the bear to the cat.

  “I already did,” said the cat.

  “And you think it will come aboveground?”

  “If he does come aboveground, what harm? Let the humans hear from him.”

  “That lizard is crazy!” barked the dog. “It thinks it’s a bat!”

  “So?” said the cat.

  “So it’s a lizard, not a bat!” said the dog. “I think that lizard ate all the bats.”

  “All mammals are evolved from lizards, or some common creature. Let the lizard channel his bat-self.”

  “Nonsense,” said the dog. “What if the lizard said it was a cat? Or a dog? Next you’ll want it sleeping in our doghouses. Well I won’t have it! It’s not right. It wouldn’t even fit inside a doghouse.”

  “Pooch,” said the cat, “doghouses are human constructions anyway.”

  “Call me pooch again, cat, see what happens.”