Thaan
Thaan opened her eyes,
lifted her head from the ground, and sniffed the air. There was nothing. The
wind had stopped dead, the temperature was rising, and everything was away, or
in hiding. She dropped her head down onto the pillow of leaves that she had
swept together, and closed her eyes again. The sun would be low in the sky
before she came to her hands and knees, stood, and stretched her body in
preparation for the hunt.
This quest for
survival was becoming more difficult. She was feeling older than her seasons,
and the wound in her side had started to fester. Before she set off, she would remove
the bark that she had tied to her body, dig a hole, and bury it deep, covering
the place with earth, leaves, twigs and feathers. She would drag her body to
the river where she would wash the wound until it was raw. She would strip the
soft bark from the weeping river tree and tie it in place. She would heal
herself. She would make herself strong again for the sake of her children, and
do what she must do. Finally, when the job was done, she would prepare a hollow
in the ground, fill it with soft, fragrant branches, lie down on top of them,
and cover herself with them. There would
come a time for the long forgetfulness.
For three
nights she had lifted her head at dusk only to let it fall again, down into that
other world where loss could be recovered. Here she was with her children,
alive, sleek and strong, playing on the river bank. Here they crept through the
long grasses where a small herd grazed, ready for picking. She showed them how
they must take the old and save the young to keep the herd strong. Here, they had
eaten their fill. She slept with one eye open while they played at her back,
tumbling over one another and laughing. When they were strong enough to travel,
they would leave this place and track along the river towards the sunrise until
they reached the ocean. Perhaps they would
find the others.
It was a hot
day. They flattened their bodies at the river and drank thirstily. Tdu fell in.
She grasped his leg and pulled him out. He shook the water from his fur. She took
a stick and combed it through. Va tumbled and rolled around on the grass for
her attention. She sat back on her haunches. The sound of the river water trickled
by and the scent of mud hung in the air.
There was something else – the smell of man. She signaled to her
children to stay back as she ventured forward, moving soundlessly into a close stand
of trees from which she would find a vantage point. She had miscalculated. Something
was dreadfully wrong. Slowly, as if pulling herself through thick mud, she
turned to see what she must see.
Here were her
children playing in silence, and there, the two men watching. Something that was
long like a stick and hard like black stone was held at their shoulders. Lightening
cracked and the world exploded. Her children jerked back as if they had been
struck. They slumped to the ground. The men walked slowly towards them and
placed the sticks on their bodies. Another lightening crack. And another.
Here were her still
and silent children. One of the predators moved them with the stick that had
just exploded into their bellies and backs. This one leant back and bared its
teeth. It was making a noise that jerked from its body between gulps of air. It
bent over, holding onto its sides, making that noise. The larger one stood
still and stretched out to its full length. She leapt out, but this one was too
fast, and the stick exploded again. There was a searing fire in her side. Her
body took over and bounded away.
The men left. She
circled back and fell across her children. It was too late. Their blood had fed
the earth. She howled for them through the night. They grew cold and hard in
her arms. At last she rose and gently laid them on the earth. She dug a hole
and lined it with the softest of the branches from the fragrant tree, placed her
children there, and covered them. She lay
down beside them, feeling nothing but exhaustion, and asked the earth to take
her.
Now the hunger
had begun to gnaw at her belly and overtake her longing for sleep. This time it
gave her the push that she needed. She knew that if she didn’t rise this time,
she would not rise at all. Her need for revenge battled with her desire for
sleep. She would find the children of men and cause their herd to grow weak,
before she allowed herself to rest. Her compass was set to the sound of young
human voices that she had heard blending together in a mockery of birdsong. She
had work to do.
*
The three days of sleep
and hunger had sharpened her senses and Thaan felt ready to travel again. She was
moving slowly, emerging from the sleep world, where touch and smell and taste were
dead. In this other-world, floating images of the already done and the yet to
come, stirred her fear. Now she moved softly on all fours, stopped and felt the
heavy earth descending, the life that moved in its body, the long fingers of
trees, the slow expansion of fungus, the scuttle of small prey and of those
insects and spiders too small for her to bother. She felt the shapes of the
leaves and seeds that had dropped and burrowed down beneath her feet, the way
the ground made subtle changes beneath her. She felt the changes that told of
who had passed this way, and showed what they were doing.
The trace of
the two men was cold now. It led her to a place where the endless hard strip that
smelt of pungent resin and fire, ran between the trees. Beside it, in the soft
dirt, were furrows left from the thing that had carried them away. The filthy stench
of smoke lingered where it had forced its way into the edges of the vegetation. The tracks of men and their atrocities passed
through whatever could be torn.
These children
that she now followed were changelings. They would grow to become this kind of
atrocity. It was in their nature. For now they were creatures of the forest.
They stopped, they sensed, they played. In their tumbles she felt the
vibrations of her own children in life. It sharpened her anguish and pushed her
onwards.
*
The torn
silver threads of a web showed her the way when she lost the scent. These
children were learning to take on the smells of the birds and the forest, to
walk through water, to disappear into the trees. In other ways they left their
traces so carelessly – the broken threads and branches, the disrupted patterns
that she read so effortlessly. She tracked on, lifting her head to sniff the
wind and to listen.
There it was again.
She stopped, confounded by the response in her body which simultaneously drew
and repelled her. The children had joined their voices together and lifted the
air. There was something heart-wrenchingly familiar and sacred in that sound.
It rooted her there. She found herself unable to move forward, unable to move. When
the song ended she found that the hair on her back was standing on end, and that
the will had drained from her gut. A
crow broke the spell with its gaw-aw-graw-aw.
She shook her
head, opened her eyes, and saw again the empty place where her lifeless children
should have been. In its place was the flash of that first image. She registered
again the predator’s disdain as it pushed at Va with its foot. She heard again
the ugly sound it made, a fractured howl, as it held its sides and shook to
produce that cruel sound. These children who brought her to her knees with
their sweet voices, were of its kind. She
drew her lips back and pressed on in the direction of the sound.
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