Feral Creatures

A bite is a very sudden thing. Cheeseburgers, Evander Holyfield, Peter Parker, the boat from Jaws, and mailmen throughout time immemorial have been ambushed by them. I was powerless, filled with hypnotic venom.

I had been bitten by the travel bug.

I was incurable, plagued by wanderlust fantasies of traversing the big beautiful blue. I was, you see, an American crow who yearned to see the MoFo wonders of the world. I found myself daydreaming about the dazzling Taj Mahal in its tighty-whitey hue, the haunting Incan citadel of Machu Picchu, Lady Liberty with her hostile headgear, the lusty rouge of the Golden Gate Bridge, Pisa’s topple-y tower—even fucking Stonehenge to be honest, though it had lost its mystique when Big Jim explained the rocks had simply been plopped there by unimaginative aliens. In the shimmery lagoon of my mind, I’d hop onto the downy back of Migisi, my majestic bald eagle companion and avian chauffeur since I damaged my right wing in a dramatic showdown with a deceptively glassy window. Migisi and I would soar above a velvet tapestry of continents, drinking in the rich MoFo magnificence before the vines, grass, and green swallowed it whole. I’d marvel at how MoFos had dragged their beautiful fingernails across the landscape, before the clandestine conquering of formidable elements—moisture, fungus, bacteria, and the gluey gluttony of insects—demolished it to dust. Before the bird feces corroded it all. Listen, I don’t mean to gloat, but I’ve always maintained that pigeon poop will be the end of us. Alas, the jet-setter fantasies were only to be enjoyed in minute-long bursts, because it turns out that having an infant really puts a damper on your travel plans.

You know what else bites? Alaska. Not to be the bear of bad news, but although Alaska is beautiful, it’s also quite deadly—like a hormonal honey badger with an Uzi. Toksook Bay was an alright place to be, but it wasn’t Seattle, wasn’t where the soul of me roosted. A crispy, tea-stained map in our little cabin confirmed my suspicions—Toksook Bay is Alaska’s literal armpit. So, I hadn’t been in the armpit and our little dusty cabin long, and although I was homesick for the Starbucks logo, my heart throbbed a proud crimson that the Golden Gate Bridge could only dream of.

Because I had Dee.

Oh, Dee. My little Fabergé flower, whose face was an Alpine forget-me-not in full bloom. Dee, whose shy sliver of a smile was a balm for the soul. My nestling—a tiny miracle with breathing skin and Cheeto® fingers and a gorgeous bald head like a dove egg. I had fallen in love with her in a way that made the world shiver with magic. She made the nights warmer and the air smell cotton crisp and fresh, except when she farted, which put the cabin’s foundations at risk. She had canny, darting eyes and the lungs of an operatic howler monkey. It was the sort of love that rallies armies and makes one skip and caw in soprano like a helium-filled eunuch. Just imagine—a tiny, silky-skinned nestling with no teeth and no claws. And she was the last.

The very last MoFo on earth.

The snowy owls, Migisi (the wings beneath my wind), and I were doing our very best to provide Dee with what she needed, to keep the last MoFo alive. I was her fierce guardian, her murder, and so, I worked on her wellness, preparing to return to our Seattle safe zone at the University of Washington’s Bothell campus where I could raise her with my fellow crows, Kraai and Pressa, and teach her about my beautiful heritage of coffee, rain, weed, Kenny G, more rain, and the Seahawks, whom I’ve posthumously renamed the Seacrows.

Five snowy owls had been the first to find Dee as an abandoned infant, alone under the strange Toksook trees on a star-stapled night. They’d worked together to lift her bassinet to our little cabin, sending for me (the MoFo-pro crow) to help them keep her alive. The alabaster owls and I spent a lot of time huddled together deliberating about how to ferry the planet’s most precious Fabergé flower across Alaska: The Last Frontier, where no man has gone before without freezing his balls off.

It had only been days, but it soon became apparent that MoFo nestlings do not have the esophageal prowess of pelicans and should not have whole blackberries pelted down their throats. There may have been a terrifying choking incident where yours truly had to dangle over Dee’s gullet like Han Solo heroically nabbing an imperiled Lando from the Sarlacc pit.1

Dee had the resting habits of an insomniac ant, so the five snowy owls and I were the most sleep-deprived feathereds in the history of the big beautiful blue. I witnessed The Hook—really a king among snowy owls—fall asleep midflight and smack headfirst into a quaking aspen. And then he just lay there, enjoying a moment’s peace. The Hook was an agreeable sky hunter, white as bone. I grew fond of him, even though he remained unmoved by my motion to change his name to Owlfred Hitchcock. The largest owl was Kuupa, a magnificent creature who never took her tutelary stare from Dee. Ookpik and Bristle—hypnotic brush flicks of black embellishing their magnificent bodies—both separately passed out while attempting to feed Dee blackberries (lovingly and sensibly squashed by the toes of an exhaustipated corvid). I saw both owls lose their battle with consciousness and slump onto Dee’s tiny chest to her utter hilarity. I learned to sleep on my side while being gummed until I looked like a machine-washed merkin, and even once napped upside down.

Little Wik, the smallest of the snowy owls, along with Ookpik, Bristle, and The Hook, was given the task of finding provisions. They’d bring blankets, healing herbs, fresh water, blackberries, and headless red-backed voles no matter how many times I explained this to be a cultural collision. We took turns with diaper duty, being very careful to bury her pellets away from the cabin—away from those whose noses guide glistening fangs.

One day, as I was supposed to be plotting how the owls and I would transport my Fabergé flower to Seattle, I slipped into the warm waters of a daydream. In the dream, I was pressing a brush held in my beak to the peeling artwork of the Sistine Chapel and patching up some of Michael Angelo’s unfinished bits with a splattering of Shit Turd flair. I’m happy to report that The Creation of Adam was greatly enlivened by substituting my bloodhound bud Dennis for Adam and having the bearded man in the nightdress proffer him a Milk-Bone. In reality, I had nodded off. Because of this, I never heard her approach. It was my fault because it happened on my watch.

Dee had been crying, cheeks salmon pink, salty streams glistening down the sides of her moon face. Just outside the cabin, white-spotted sawyers sang her a squeaky serenade. The owls and I had pulled her makeshift bed over to the window so the air could kiss skin free from the fuss of fur, and those cunning eyes could enjoy the rapturous quiver of leaves and how the light playfully painted the paper birches. She was a watcher, our little Dee. I was so tired, I didn’t notice the white-spotted sawyers abruptly silence their song. When my nictitating membranes slid open and the scene pulled into focus, Dee’s tiny eyes were on an alabaster head the size of an ottoman, looming over her face. My nestling remained silent, but her tiny chest lifted up, down, up, down, up, down—the beautiful rhythm that meant she still had a chance to survive a world that had obliterated her species.

The polar bear was female, unusually large. Her hunger announced itself on shiny saliva strings that slipped from her black jowls, fusing to the ancient sealskin blanket we had bundled Dee in that morning—a morning when she had hiccuped and giggled, swallowed beak-delivered drops of fresh water, and pulled playfully at my defective wing.

Had I kissed her enough?

“Don’t. Touch. Her,” I warned the pallid predator breathlessly. I was shaking, perched on the wood table next to the dusty, fat stove. The cabin was small—Dee a few frantic flaps from me—but it might as well have been the Taj Mahal. I was too far away, my speed no match for a polar bear.

“A cub,” came the slow response from the female bear, thick and slippery, as if caked in blubber. “A young cub of the Skinners.” Her voice lowered to a shuddering growl. “I thought they were gone.” Saliva pooled on the blanket and I felt my ribs constrict, cracking under the weight of the mistakes I kept making with my poor helpless Dee. If I had chosen the fleece instead of the sealskin, would the bear still have come here?

“Back away from her,” I warned, my voice a vibrato, unable to steady the fear that snakes around your esophagus when your whole life is in the paw of a predator.

“Why do you want the cub, Crow?” The polar bear shook her massive head. She lifted gargantuan paws onto the cabin’s cobweb-festooned window frame. A quick breeze brought her smell to me, a condensed aroma of moss and briny seaweed. Oh no. I caught a glimpse of her side and my heart plummeted. Her ribs jutted out in desperate protest, the skin around her neck hanging loose from a diet of algae, berries, and birds’ eggs.

She was starving.

I bargained. “There are caribou near here! Many. You can have every last one of them!”

The polar bear’s nose wrinkled, drawing in the biscuity smell of my nestling. She lowered her head, coal eyes inches from Dee’s button nose. Dee’s eyes widened. The bear’s mouth gaped open, unraveling a purpled, liver-like tongue. She ran it along a salmon-pink cheek. Dee’s face was frozen in shock, eyewhites glistening. I scanned the room for a weapon, a noisemaker, a knife, a gun—oh god, why wasn’t there a gun—old boots, chairs, the table, the stove, a broom, old MoFo clothes, pots, there were pots full of Dee’s blackberries, blackberries I’d stayed up late squashing, empty pots; I planned to grab one…

And when my eyes flashed back on the polar bear, she had her great black lips sealed around Dee’s tiny skull. Her bone-crushing jaw cocooned my hatchling’s egg-shaped head. Between tooth and fleshy tongue, I saw glimpses of a cave seals don’t come back from. Ocher fangs were inches from clamping down, and when that happened, there would be nothing left. The world would be scooped out. Emptied. Forever hollow.

“She is my cub!” I screeched, rocks dragging across my throat. “I am The One Who Keeps! I will kill you if you harm her; there is no earthly law that will stop me!”

The polar bear flinched, seeming to recognize something. My heart thundered out an SOS call. The She Bear slowly ran her lips across Dee’s face. Dee grimaced from the musty stench, the cold and slimy trail of a tongue. She made no sounds. Five snowy owls—Dee’s defenders—burst onto the scene. They beat their wings in fury outside the cabin’s traitor of a window.

Glass-breaking screeches sent my skull into spasms. These were not just the screams of our snowy owls. Up in the trees, all around us, was a dappled mosaic of ferocious eyes—yellow and orange—blinking in horror.

There were flammulated owls, with their adorable oversize pupils and Pixar-rendered cuteness (don’t be fooled; they’ll fuck you up). Northern saw-whet owls, their rain boot–yellow eyes hosting a centrifugal blast of facial feathers. Short-eared owls, intricately speckled, and long-eared owls with ear tufts like a Viking warrior’s horns. Great gray owls in their dapper charcoal suits, faces a hypnosis of misty moons. Northern pygmy owls, little crackle-and-pop predator puffs. Burrowing owls, the elusive Mr. Beans of the owl kingdom, frowning quizzically. There were even great horned owls, who are known to snack on other owls, earning them the nickname tiger owl. These sky hunters, many nocturnal and nomadic, had come to this unfamiliar land from faraway places under a bidding. A potent parliament of owls.

Here to defend the last MoFo on earth.

The owls held their breath, waiting for a signal. Kuupa, largest of the snowy owls, turned her head—a satellite dish tuned to pick up the murmur of a millipede—and lasered the polar bear with golden wrath.

“Go, Seal’s Dread! Go! Goooooo!” screeched the parliament.

The female polar bear held her ground, sniffing at Dee voraciously. She let out a wet huff. Her growl detonated like a bandolier of grenades—

“There is nothing more dangerous than the Fire Hunter you keep.”

“Fuck off!” I said, with some emphasis, puffing my feathers to show her how intimidating I am even though I weigh the same as four sticks of butter.

“The last Skinner cub. She will be the death of you, Crow. You keep a monster in your nest.”

Kuupa struck like the Discovery Channel’s F-111 Aardvark swing-wing bomber. Her militant talons snatched at wicked white fur, at Grecian column legs. The other snowy owls joined in the mobbing. The polar bear pulled her head from the window, lifting to swipe at the owls. Deterred only by the sheer number of raptors, she lowered, taking a last lazy paw swipe at Kuupa.

The behemoth white bear left in a slow, commanding lumber, Queen Of The Ice Fields. And with her she took our sense of security. Our confidence trailed behind her in clawed tatters. That day, a polar bear stole my hope of returning to Seattle.

My hope of going home.

The snowy owls flew in through the rickety old window that would never be left unguarded again. I hopped gently onto my nestling, dabbing at her with yarrow leaves and smoothing her arms with my beak, inspecting her for damage.

“You’re okay, my nestling; everything’s okay,” I told her, breathlessly. “I’m here.” Every feather of my inky body trembled with terror. Never had I so much to lose. Here I was, a crow with a disability—a broken wing that wouldn’t let me ride the sky—and lofty ideas, making every mistake possible, endangering this tiny, fragile being. I was the uniformed guard, strained and sweating under an African sun as I stood watch over the very last rhino in existence.

Ookpik and Bristle perched at each side of Dee’s bed, their talons scarring the cardboard. Wik nestled on the chubby, neglected stove. Kuupa fluttered her peppery wings—a sound like the flogging of old dresses—atop the table, sending cobwebs into a winged waltz. For the first time, I noticed a small silver band spiraling her leg. The hundred smoldering eyes of a great owl guardianship sequined the trees outside the cabin, and I knew then that it was Kuupa who had summoned them. Kuupa kept her razor gaze on little Dee as Ookpik, Bristle, and The Hook fussed over the last MoFo. But now, Kuupa saw Dee in a whole new way, because the bear had taken one of her golden eyes—a potential death sentence for an owl. She did not complain as Little Wik tended to it. I realized then where Kuupa truly perched, how much tiny Dee had invaded and conquered, burrowing into the hearts of the owls. Dee was not only a nestling but an owlet.

Would a guardianship of owls be enough? I was haunted by the bear’s scowl—the raw liver-blue loathing that ran an Arctic chill through my plumage. I thought of what the polar bear had growled…

“She will be the death of you, Crow. You keep a monster in your nest.” Because while the last of the MoFos was my miracle, a priceless present to which I had pledged my plumage, to many others she was an unspeakable horror. She was the last of the most violent species to ever walk this earth. Creatures of the natural world called humans Hollows because of their dead-eyed destructiveness. Death in bald flesh. What had the bear called her? A Skinner. A Fire Hunter. The creator of the most feared entity in the animal kingdom, that silver slug—the bullet. They saw her as an incubating killer. Now just a small, beady-eyed pet-store snake, one day she would grow into a murderous predator, taking lives and stealing skins. I often thought of something I’d read by the MoFo T.S. Eliot—“We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.” If only I could tell every being on earth that I was reanimated with purpose because of Dee. If only they knew what I knew, if I could show them the crackling genius of MoFos, the kindness, the creativity. Humankind.

Human. Kind.

On grocery store excursions, I never actually laid eyes on the mythical milk of human kindness, but never doubted the existence of at least some version of it—perhaps the Lactaid of human civility? If only creatures of the natural world knew about good MoFos like Elizabeth the First, Chance the Rapper, and Ellen the Generous. But how could I show them? There were no more left. Aura confirmed it almost daily, along with other darker happenings that I couldn’t allow to dilute my focus on the last MoFo on earth.

And I had more to worry about than what was lurking in the molasses mantle of an Alaskan night…

“The Hook,” I asked the great owl, his plumage a brighter white than new printing paper, “what were we discussing a few suns ago? Tell me again.”

“Your molting is very bad, so you asked what I thought of the moss toupee you were wearing, and then you asked if I thought your legs looked too skinn—”

“Oh, what? No, not that, the other thing. About the geese.”

“The geese no longer make their great migration; they stay here and feast off the seagrasses.”

“And the shoreline? What did you tell me?” I said, regretting being so dismissive of him days ago. I had been pretending to listen but actually reading a book I pillaged from the Nightmute library about potty training your young MoFo called Poop! There It Is! It felt sensible to get a jump on that shit.

The Hook’s face was round and inquisitive. He moved with the confidence of a glacier. “The ocean’s angry, coming for us, eating up the distance from the cliffs. We see it all with our watchful eyes. The insect hoards rise. They are destroying the trees and so the ebony forest is spreading. This is the change we see with our watchful eyes.”

“Do you know why this is happening?” I asked, afraid of his answer.

The Hook rotated his head 180 degrees. Owls do that shit willy-nilly, but it brought back unsettling memories. “We do. It is the Sun. We can no longer read the big beautiful blue like we used to, because the Sun is nearing. She drinks the lakes. She gives life and she claims it. There is no greater power than Her.”

“I understand.” And I did. I understood everything. My nestling sat, ocean eyed, learning the peppered patterns that speckled her owls while sucking on heartbreakingly beautiful fingers. It was a betrayal to tell The Hook nothing of a warming world and its cause, but the risk was too great. I would stop at nothing to protect my nestling, and so I would not share that the oily footprints of MoFos were still changing the shape of the soil beneath us. That the symptoms were starving bears and ebony forests.