Beasts of New York: A children's book for grown-ups

by Jon Evans

  Beasts of New York: A children's book for grown-ups

  Jon Evans

  Published: 2007

  Tag(s): fantasy, "urban fantasy", animals

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  The Center Kingdom

  1. The Missing Acorns

  A long time ago, when humans still lived in cities, on a cold morning near the end of a long, cruel winter, in magnificent Central Park in the middle of magnificent New York City, a young squirrel named Patch was awakened very early by the growls of his empty stomach.

  A squirrel's home is called a drey. Patch's drey was very comfortable. He lived high up an old oak tree, in a hollowed-out stump of a big branch that had long ago been cut off by humans. The entrance was only just big enough for Patch to squeeze in and out, but the drey itself was spacious, for a squirrel. Patch had lined his drey with dry leaves, grasses and bits of newspaper. It was warm and dry, and on that cold morning he would have liked nothing better than to stay home all day and sleep.

  But he was so hungry. Hunger filled him like water fills a glass. The cherry and maple trees had not yet started to bud; flowers had not yet begun to grow; the juicy grubs and bugs of spring had not yet emerged; and it had been two days since Patch had found a nut. Imagine how hungry you would feel if you went two whole days without eating, and you may have some idea how Patch felt that morning.

  Patch poked his head out of the drey into the cold air and shivered as he looked around. Clumps of white, crumbly ice still clung to the ground. Gusts of cold wind shook and rustled the trees' bare branches. The pale and distant sun seemed drained of heat. Patch took a moment to satisfy himself that there were no dangers nearby, no hawk circling above or unleashed dog below. Then he emerged from his drey and began to look for acorns.

  But what marvels, what miracles, what mysteries are hidden inside those simple words!

  Squirrels are extraordinary creatures. Think first of how they climb. When Patch left his drey, he went up, not down. He passed the drey of his friend and neighbour Twitch, climbed to the northernmost tip of his oak tree's cloud of barren branches, and casually hopped onto the adjacent maple tree, home to his brother Tuft. To a squirrel, every tree is an apartment building, connected not only by the grassy thoroughfares of the ground but by sky-roads of overlapping branches. Tree trunks are like highways to them, even branches thin as twine are like walking paths, and they leap through the sky from one tree to another like circus acrobats.

  When he reached the last of the thick grove of trees, Patch paused a moment to look around and consult his memory. His memory was not like yours or mine. Human memories are like messages written on crumbling sand, seen through warped glass. But squirrels have memories like photograph albums; exact and perfect recollections of individual moments. Patch, like every squirrel, had spent the past autumn burying hundreds and hundreds of nuts and acorns, each one in a different place. And he had stored all of those places in his memory book. The winter had been long, but Patch's memory book still contained a precious few pages that depicted the locations of nuts buried in the autumn, but not yet dug up and eaten. Patch climbed to a high branch, stood on his hind legs, and looked all around, seeking an image from one of those memories.

  If you had looked at Central Park that morning with human eyes, you would have seen concrete paths, steel fences, a few early-morning joggers and dog walkers, all surrounded by fields of grass and ice and bare trees and rocks, and beyond them, Manhattan's endless rows of skyscrapers.

  But with Patch's eyes, with animal eyes, he saw no park at all. Instead he saw a city in itself. A vast and mighty city called the Center Kingdom. A city of trees, bushes, meadows and lakes; a city scarred by strips of barren concrete; a city surrounded by endless towering mountains. All manner of creatures lived in this city. Squirrels in their dreys, rats and mice in their underground warrens, raccoons in the bushes, fish and turtles in the lakes, birds fluttering through the trees or resting in their nests. At that hour on that day, very early on a winter morning, the Center Kingdom was almost abandoned - but soon spring would come, and the city would bloom into a thriving maelstrom of life and activity. All Patch needed to do, until that blessed time arrived, was find enough food for these last few days of winter.

  He saw in the distance, near the edge of the densely wooded area he called home, a jagged rock outcropping from his memory book. He was so hungry he paused only a moment to check for dangers before racing headfirst down the tree trunk and towards the rocks. In his memory that same outcropping was just there - and the nearest human mountain visible over the treetops to the west was there - and a particular maple tree, which had been covered in orange and scarlet leaves on the day Patch buried the acorn, had been exactly there, and that far away.

  Patch found his way to the exact spot where all those landmarks fell into place, so that the place where he stood and the page from his memory book matched perfectly, like a picture and its tracing. Then he began to sniff. He knew as an undeniable fact that in the autumn he had buried an acorn within a tail-length of where he stood. And squirrels can smell perfume in a hurricane, or a dog a half-mile upwind, or a long-buried acorn.

  But Patch smelled nothing but grass, and earth, and normal air-smells.

  His heart fell. It seemed to fall all the way into his paws and seep out through the tips of his claws. Patch let out a little murmur of awful disappointment. There was no food here. This acorn was gone, already gone.

  This was not unusual. Squirrels often found and ate nuts buried by other squirrels. But the same thing had happened with every nut Patch had tried to unearth for the last two days. And that was unusual. It was such an astonishing run of bad luck that Patch had never heard of such a thing happening before.

  He dug anyway, hoping that maybe this acorn had no smell, or his nose was not working right. But he found nothing. And when he found the next burial place, again there was nothing. He ran to the next; and the next; until finally there were no more pictures left in Patch's book of memories, no nuts left to try to unearth. And he was so hungry.

  By this time other squirrels too had emerged from their dreys and were digging for food. Patch knew all of the half-dozen squirrels he could see around him, and the dozen more whose presence he could smell in the cold wind. They were all of his tribe.

  Squirrels are social animals, they have family and friends, clans and tribes and kingdoms. Patch's tribe, the squirrels of the Treetops, were not like the Meadow tribe who lived near the city's grassy plains, or the Ramble tribe that inhabited its rockiest wilderness, or the red Northern tribe. The Treetops tribe was more a group of individuals than a community. If they had had a motto, it would have been, "Take care of yourself." None of the squirrels around Patch were of his clan. It would have been a terribly low and shameful thing for Patch to go to one of them and ask for even a single bite of an acorn. But while pride is important, it cannot be eaten, and hunger is more important still. Patch was so hungry he would have begged for food.

  But there was no one to beg from. For not a single one of the squirrels around him had found a nut this morning. All of them had been digging for nothing.

  Patch sat and thought.

  He was, you must remember, a squirrel, an animal, a creature of instinct. Thinking did not come naturally to him. He had to sit for a long time while he thought, in a little fenced-in patch of grass near to one of the concrete-wasteland human trails. Around him there was little to see. In winter most birds flew south, rats stayed underground, raccoons hibernated. There were only the other hungry squirrels, a few fluttering pigeons, and the occasional passing human.

 
At one point an unleashed dog came near, and Patch had to interrupt his thinking to watch this threat. It was a very strange dog. If it was indeed a dog at all. It looked like a dog, but it was unaccompanied by any human, and it had a rich, feral scent like that of no other dog Patch had ever encountered. The dog-thing said nothing, which was also unusual, but it watched Patch with a leery grin full of sharp teeth for what felt like a long time. Patch was very glad of the fence that surrounded him. When the dog-thing finally moved on Patch sighed with relief. He could have escaped to the safety of a nearby tree if necessary. But he was so hungry that the effort of running away, combined with the terrible strain of thinking, would have left him weak and dizzy.

  By the time Patch finally finished thinking, he had drawn one conclusion and made two decisions.

  The conclusion was that something was very strange and wrong. It was not Patch alone who had lost all of his food. That would have been bad enough. But the same thing seemed to have happened to every member of his tribe. That could not be mere ill-luck. Something more, something worse, was happening. There were dark stories told in whispers among squirrels, ancient legends of winters that had outlasted all the Center Kingdom's buried nuts, famines in which nine in every ten squirrels had died of hunger, and the few survivors had been forced to eat the bodies of the dead in order to live. But there were no legends in which all buried acorns had vanished uneaten from the earth. This was something new.

  The first decision he made was that he would seek out his family, and see if they had any food. Patch was solitary by nature, and had not seen his family or indeed spoken to any other squirrel for three days, but he knew they would help him if they could, just as he would help them.

  His second decision was that if his family did not have food, then … he would try something else. Something very unusual, for a squirrel. Something very daring and dangerous. But by this time hunger was growing stronger in Patch than fear.

  2. Patch's Family

  Patch's mother was named Silver, because high summer sun made her fur shine that colour. She had a marvellous drey high up a spruce tree, carved out long ago by a woodpecker, and since extended into a two-chambered home full of bright things. The journey along the sky-road to her drey did not take long. When Patch looked inside, he saw a hundred colours glittering in the sunlight, shining from bits of metal and glass set into Silver's walls and floor. But his mother was not there.

  He could tell by the faintness of her smell that no squirrel had been here in some time. There were two faint traces of scent, several days old; that of Silver, and that of another squirrel, a musky scent that Patch did not recognize. A scent that made his tail stiffen as if danger was near.

  Patch stared into his mother's empty drey for a moment. It wasn't normal for a squirrel to abandon her drey for days, not in the middle of winter. And he hadn't seen Silver for three days. Not since all the acorns had disappeared from the earth.

  Patch ran back to his own tree, and then to the maple tree next door, to his brother Tuft's drey. He ran very fast. He was hungrier than ever, and he was beginning to be very worried. He was relieved when he looked into Tuft's drey and found it occupied. Tuft himself was not present, but Brighteyes was, and their babies, and it was clear from the smells that Tuft had only just departed.

  "Hello, Patch," Brighteyes said weakly. "Would you like to come in?"

  Patch entered. Brighteyes was curled up with her babies in the drey's deepest, warmest corner. The last time Patch had visited, a week ago, this had been a den of noise and chaos, with all Brighteyes' four babies running and jumping and playfighting. Today they lay weakly beside Brighteyes, and the once-shining eyes from which their mother had taken her name were dim and clouded.

  "Uncle Patch," the littlest baby said, in a piteous mewling voice. "Please, Uncle Patch, do you have any food?"

  The other children looked up at Patch with bright, hopeful eyes. As hungry as he was at that moment, if he had had an acorn, he would have given it to his nieces and nephews. But he had nothing.

  "I'm sorry," Patch said, ashamed. "I haven't found any food for days."

  "No one has," Brighteyes said.

  "Have you seen Silver?"

  "No. She hasn't come to visit since the food ran out."

  Patch considered. "Is Tuft out looking for food?"

  After a long moment Brighteyes said, very quietly, as if she were admitting something terribly shameful, "Tuft has gone to the Meadow tribe."

  "The Meadow tribe?" Patch asked, confused. "What for?"

  Brighteyes said in a voice hardly louder than a whisper, "To accept their offer."

  "What offer?"

  Brighteyes stiffened with surprise. "You haven't heard?"

  "Heard what?"

  "You spend too much time on your own, Patch. If you talked to others more you wouldn't always be the last to know."

  "The last to know what?"

  "The Meadow tribe has offered food to Treetops squirrels. But only if we join their tribe."

  "Join their tribe?" Patch looked at her, perplexed. "Join the Meadow? That's not possible. We're of the Treetops. We can't become of the Meadow."

  "They say if we swear an oath of allegiance to the Meadow tribe, if we swear by the moon, then we will become of the Meadow, and then they will give us food."

  After a long moment, Patch asked, his voice now as hushed as that of Brighteyes, "Swear by the moon?"

  This is not the place to explain what the moon means to animals. Suffice to say that an oath sworn by the moon is even stronger than an oath sworn on blood. Such an oath can never be broken or unsworn.

  "Yes," Brighteyes said, looking away from Patch.

  "Tuft has gone to swear by the moon to join the Meadow tribe?"

  "Yes. We will all go. We will all swear. Tuft will bring back some food for the children, and when they are strong enough they will go and swear themselves."

  "You can't do this," Patch said, shocked. "You can't leave the Treetops. You can't give your children to another tribe."

  "We must. We haven't any food, Patch. You see how weak my babies are. No one else can help us. Silver is gone. Jumper is gone."

  "Jumper is gone? Gone where?"

  "No one knows. No one has seen him in days. Like no one has seen Silver. Or any of the other clan leaders."

  "The King," Patch said. "We'll go to King Thorn."

  "The Ramble is too far. Even if the King sends help, it will never reach us in time. My babies are starving, Patch. My babies are dying. The Meadow is our only hope."

  After a moment Patch turned away, unable to face Brighteyes, and said, "I wouldn't have let this happen to you."

  "Don't say that. There's nothing Tuft could have done. There's nothing you could have done if I had chosen you instead."

  "There is. If I had known. I know another place to get food."

  "Then why are you hungry?" Brighteyes asked.

  Patch hesitated. "It's dangerous. It's in the mountains."

  "In the mountains? Are you mad?"

  Patch was saved from answering by the appearance of his brother Tuft at the entrance to the drey. Tuft held two acorns against his chest, but he looked perilously thin, and weak, and tired.

  "It's done," Tuft said. His voice was grim. "I have joined the Meadow."

  Tuft carried the food in to his family. As the children devoured one acorn, Brighteyes and Tuft and Patch stood around the other, staring as if it glowed.

  "This one is for you," Tuft said to Brighteyes. "The Meadow gave me one for myself when I was there."

  Patch knew Tuft was lying.

  Brighteyes said, "We'll share it. All three of us."

  Patch wanted a bite of acorn so much that his whole body trembled with desire.

  "No," he said faintly.

  Tuft and Brighteyes turned to him, amazed.

  "I will go to the mountains," Patch said.

  Right away, before the acorn's temptation became too great to deny, he turned and fled from hi
s brother's drey. He ran straight down the maple trunk to the ground. From there Patch ran north and west. His hunger was a searing flame within him.

  3. Patch and the Birds

  It was not entirely true that Patch knew there was food in the mountains. He had never been to the mountains. No squirrel in all the Center Kingdom, as far as he knew, had ever been to the mountains. For between the kingdom and the mountains, surrounding it on all sides like a moat around a castle, there lay a blasted concrete wasteland, as wide as fifty squirrels laid nose to tail, and horrific death machines roared up and down this wasteland at terrifying speeds, all day and night. What's more, humans and dogs often crossed between the mountains and the kingdoms. And sometimes the dogs were not leashed. A squirrel would have to be very desperate indeed to dare the wastelands.

  It was Toro who had told Patch about the food in the mountains. Toro was Patch's friend. And that itself was extraordinary.

  Patch had always talked to birds. The drey he had grown up in - Silver's old drey, before she became leader of the Seeker clan - had been only a few branches away from a nest of robins. Once, in early spring when he was still a baby, Patch had crawled out of Silver's drey and into the robin's nest, and had spent a whole day among the chicks before Silver returned home and retrieved him. The robin mother had been unamused by Silver's profound apologies, and even less amused when Patch had returned to her nest the very next day.

  Eventually Silver taught Patch to leave the robins alone, but not before he had learned how to speak Bird. Most squirrels of the Center Kingdom could say and understand a few simple things in Bird, but Patch could actually hold conversations. And so, one autumn day when a bluejay swooped past and stole an acorn out of Patch's paws, Patch shouted angrily at the thief in Bird to bring it back; and the thief, intrigued, wheeled around in midair, perched on a branch above Patch, and looked curiously down at the irate squirrel.

  "Thieving feather-brained no-nose hawkbait!" Patch shouted up.