The Angels of Our Better Beasts Read online

  I push the gasping owl away from the nest. She squawks about “the agreement, the agreement.”

  I rub my eyes and begin wiping away the gunk to figure out who is who. I’ve seen small rodents mangled in traps before—traps that misfire, spring on a leg, clamp down on the body of a mouse, and by morning, the mouse hangs divided by the metal mesh. It’s bothered me in the past, but not like this.

  One of them is barely moving; I pick it up and see that it’s Orleans, and I wrap him in my scarf and place him in the warmth of my pocket.

  “We have to go back to the cabin,” I tell them. I don’t listen to their protests, and I don’t check on the owl, even after I see her in my peripheral vision, stumbling out of her nest.

  The cabin is full of scientists and a seven-foot-tall polar bear. All of them see me come in, and I go straight to the desk.

  “Something happened,” I say. My lemmings jump up on the desk. The cabin is warmer than outside, but you can still see everyone’s breath. I think I catch concern in Dr. Brulé’s eyes; he’s reacting to something I’m giving off, something on my face.

  “One of the lemmings,” I tell them as I unwrap Orleans and lay him on the table. He’s still. “Can I have the first aid kit?”

  I’ve never patched up a rodent before—not a lemming, not a rat, not a mouse, not even the flying squirrels I studied in California. If they were injured, they died; if they were dead, we catalogued them. We put them in frozen bags until we were ready to take down notes. We thawed them a few days later along with all the other dead animals, and we wrote down how they died, where they died, how much they weighed. We sexed them, measured their molars to discern their age, and we put them in a large black garbage bag because we had everything important we needed from them.

  Dr. Brulé helps me orient Orleans on the table, pulling his little arms to his sides. Dr. Kitashima stretches out the scarf like an operating blanket.

  “We were interviewing a snowy owl, and then she ate him. He was moving fifteen minutes ago,” I say to Brulé.

  “He has some deep wounds,” Dr. Kitashima says. Some of the gunk we wipe off keeps returning from the open beak marks near Orleans’ tail. There are two cuts on either side of his face, too, and I can’t tell if the blood is coming from his neck or his cheek. Cheek would be a flesh wound; neck would not.

  Luxor, who rests his arm on a cup of water, says, “We have the data. This is what happens.”

  “Well,” I tell him, “I didn’t want to let it happen. I’m sorry.”

  I pull off some bandages and I cut a tiny square to wrap around his hind end—almost like a diaper. I’m thinking that if I can stop the bleeding, he’ll be okay.

  “Someone will have to go back and stay with the owl,” Luxor says. “If we don’t, she might get upset, and that will ruin all our data so far. This might spark a revenge cycle and increase her numbers of lemmings eaten per day. Revenge factors are difficult to measure.”

  Dr. Brulé gives me a look like he’s doing the best he can, but it’s not going to work. Neither of us has seen Orleans move. He’s gone limp in my hands even as I raise his tail to wrap the bandage.

  “If he’s dead now,” Bellagio says, “we can take him back as an offering to the owl, and maybe save the data.”

  I snap. “I’m not interested in saving the data! God, he’s your colleague! You weren’t even the envoy to the owls. You were my envoy.” Dr. Kitashima can’t feel any pulse at all. He has sensitive fingers, worked with small seedlings and plants all day. I’ve watched how tender he could be when growing things. “This wasn’t going to happen,” I say to Dr. Kitashima because I don’t know to whom I’m supposed to say this. How I’m to account for this.

  Both doctors stop for a moment, help me find my composure. They don’t condemn me for my outburst. I respect that. Then Dr. Brulé takes out a syringe with a dose of stimulant in it. He injects this into the lemming, and we wait.

  I remember my sister had a hamster when we were little. It escaped one day and ended up in the inner workings of the dryer. We found it when the smell from the dryer turned sour. She cried for days. I was stoic. I offered to buy her another hamster—a generous offer, I thought. She wouldn’t speak to me, ran off to her room. I didn’t understand why she was so upset. Later, she almost went into veterinary work; I went into biology. She owns two cats and a dog, a budgie, and several fish. I have no pets.

  Orleans does not recover. “He was only in there for a few minutes,” I say.

  Dr. Brulé moves around to my side of the desk. “Owls have a narrow throat, Kate. He was probably crushed and suffocated in that amount of time. It’s possible that there’s a lot of internal damage. I don’t know.”

  I look up at the ceiling. It’s a high ceiling, made for bears to walk around in comfortably. The one here now simply watches. He fills up the room in my mind, like a supernatural being—if I believed in such things. Talking animals have that supernatural quality, the kind that makes me think I’m living in a fairy tale. I’m sure the bear doesn’t understand the sanctity of life. I don’t think I understand it anymore.

  If animals talk, then they can’t just be eaten as food anymore. They aren’t any more a part of the food chain than humans are. If everything talks, where do you draw the line on feeling for them as individuals? God, I was slipping into subjectivity. They warn young graduate students about getting attached to the animals in the lab.

  Don’t name them. Don’t pet them.

  Don’t ever let yourself get interviewed by them, either.

  Luxor writes in his notebook. Bellagio and Mirage walk over to the body. Bellagio picks up the scarf ends and starts to drag the body off the desk. Inevitably it will fall on the floor with a heavy thump. It’s all senseless. This whole place is senseless.

  Mirage stops her. “Wait,” she says, and goes over to the body and looks down at Orleans’ face. She sniffs his face, and then backs up and looks at his ink-stained body. She traces her hands across the stains as if she is reading the last marks. He’s become a notebook himself, I think. She says, in the quietest voice—I can barely hear her at all—“He had very good penmanship.”

  I want to scream, but Dr. Kitashima speaks instead. “How long did you work with Orleans?”

  Mirage looks up at him slowly. “We catalogued data and research in the libraries for a season. He had good penmanship there, too.”

  Luxor says, “He was brave.”

  “He was efficient,” Bellagio says. “And he drew nice pictures.”

  Mirage stands up and walks over to the inkwell. A small notebook rests against it. It’s obviously Orleans’; it has blood on it. “We have his notes,” she says. She begins reading.

  “Snowy Owls eat two lemmings per day. She doesn’t predict that she will be increasing or decreasing that amount. I believe, of course, that she’s lying.”

  No one speaks. Mirage looks at all of us. Her small eyes, all pupil and dark, stare at each one of us in a glance. She closes the notebook and sets it against the inkwell, carefully, as if the weight of it will tip the inkwell over.

  Luxor looks grave, and when he speaks, his voice seems loud. “I concur. I believe she’s lying, too.”

  I notice that her fur is turning to its winter coat. Not all in one place, not like a white patch, but as if every tenth hair has changed to white. A subtle change, a gradual one. I look over at Orleans, now eternally brown, except for the ink scratches and a black, ink-stained front claw.

  “It’s a shame,” Mirage says.

  “Yes,” Luxor agrees. “Kate should have let the owl finish. Now the data is skewed.”

  “No,” Mirage says, “It’s a shame anyway.” She walks back to Luxor. “She was lying. You both knew that. Why do we trust data from lying subjects?”

  “We’ve always known they lied. That’s what makes it accurate.”

  She looks at me.
“No,” she says, “that makes it a waste of time.” She steps down off the table onto a stack of books until she is on the floor, and Bellagio and finally Luxor follow her, down to the floor and out a small hole in the wall. Like a little procession, they leave. I think, there you go, Ms. Future Scientist, lead them away from this. She makes me want to smile, but I can’t.

  I take a paper towel and wrap Orleans in it, but I don’t put it anywhere. I just sit at the desk for a while. Dr. Brulé makes tea for everyone. Dr. Kitashima opens a notebook and writes something I’ll never read. The scratching sound of his pen makes my eyes blur, and I look up and see the great white mass of the polar bear looking down at me. I get shocked every time, thinking they will eat us. Can I really trust them when they look like this?

  He just stares for a few moments, like I imagine God would stare—a god with big teeth and black gums, who makes me feel small and insignificant; a god that stares incomprehensibly, maybe unable to think of anything to say, of any excuse to give for such a mixed-up world. Here the whole natural drama plays itself out like it always has, except now I’m privy to all the voices, all the personalities, all the individualities of each player, each animal or bird that is stalked, chased, and killed. I get the privilege of talking with them over tea before it happens. I get to see their beautiful sketches of snowy owls.

  That’s either all wrong, or the way it should have been all along. I don’t know which is better.

  The bear leans over the desk and fills my vision with his face. He breathes through his nose at me, a puff of smoke. Bears believe you can read a person’s thoughts in their breath—the breath that we see coming out of our mouths in the winter. Those are thoughts and feelings unexpressed, they think.

  I sigh back as an answer, and my breath sneaks out as a flat line of smoke. He looks at it, closes his eyes, and moves away. I hope I said something right.

  >?

  It’s October now, and Luxor, Bellagio, and Mirage have gone back to their community of lemmings, not far from our cabin. They handed back their research—not only the research on which predator would be the most destructive, the most costly to their community, but also the recommendations they have based on the evaluation and gap analysis they conducted on their own research methods. Honourably, they have completed the mission of any scientist—human or lemming: they concluded their research, and it’s up to the community to make decisions. Having returned, they stay in our cabin now.

  “We would have sacrificed ourselves anyway,” Luxor shrugs.

  “This way we get to learn more about research,” Bellagio says. They are all almost completely in their winter coats now. They line the railing on the cabin deck, and we look out onto the snow-swept plains, erased in the half-light of early winter, until they turn blue, merging with the frozen sea.

  Mirage turns to me and asks the question I have been thinking about now for months: “What do you do, though, Kate, when you don’t have a community to give your research to? We have no purpose for our research anymore. We can learn. But what does it do?”

  I have a cup of coffee in my hand. I don’t know where the coffee comes from—somewhere south of here. The bears trade for it. It’s not the same as coffee from home—it’s bitterer, a bit spicier, a darker flavour. But it’s hot and it’s good and it’s my coffee now.

  “You do it for yourself,” I tell them.

  She nods, hums a little, and then they chitter for a few moments. And then, soft as twilight, the darkness sweeps over us, silent, like a bird with black wings.

  Heartbreak, Gospel, Shotgun, Fiddler,

  Werewolf, Chorus: Bluegrass

  “What wondrous love is this that caused the lord of Bliss to bear the dreadful curse for my soul?”

  —“Wondrous Love”

  A werewolf has always been hiding in our gospel bluegrass band. I seem to be the only one who knows what you have to do when the moon is minutes from rising. Yes, if you’re the bus driver, you have to be clever, you have to be fast, but eventually, because they are blinded by faith, you have to be the one who figures out how to save them. Because it’s not just his curse anymore, not if you’re all fleeing the same moon.

  >?

  First, get out of there. Get Tommy and Amelia into the tour bus. Tear them away from the fans that wave their CDs to sign. The plastic bounces and reflects the setting sun like flashbulbs, but you have to ignore that. The fans crowd the bus. “We have to go,” I tell them.

  It’s one of our nights.

  Eric and Jimmy lead them away from the bus. The sun winks below the church roof. Behind me, in the heart of the bus, I can hear Amelia snapping the metal shackles on Tommy, pulling the leather straps. “Dadgummit, tell him to drive,” he pleads. Even before we’re on the highway, I can hear the straining, woeful sound of her fiddle, warming up, like a woman crying.

  Second, get out of sight. I park the wide, monstrous Tinderbox tour bus outside of town, at a small hotel. I don’t look back. I lock the bus—lock them both in there. It’s a motel night for me and Eric and Jimmy and Wayne. Not so lucky for Amelia. I don’t care about Tommy. I look back at the bus one more time before heading into the Sleepyland Motel. Pray to God she’s okay for another night. ’Cause, at this point, Amelia’s at the mercy of some moonlight, some leather straps, some metal clasps, and a god who thinks it’s all too funny.

  >?

  Here’s the story, quickly, about how he got turned from a God-believin’ missionary man into an achin’, pitch-perfect bluegrass player after a dog bite. The way Tommy tells it is that he went to Romania when he was twenty and just beginning to play the banjo. He weren’t no Earl Scruggs, but he had a lot of passion for playing, and went over to Romania to teach some kids how to play instruments—instruments they could make themselves out of boxes and rubber bands. He wasn’t paid very much and he didn’t have another job. But he believed in God, and that God would bless him someday. He did as much good as he could as a missionary and as a man.

  He was out walking the streets of a little village outside Negrești-Oaș one night—which isn’t a good thing to do, but he didn’t know that—and he was praying, and he was praying, “God, what kind of difference am I really gonna make here? I’m just gluing together some instruments, and the children don’t really have nothing to play. My real instrument—my banjo—well I could do more good with that if you blessed it. If I became big and famous playing the banjo then I could have the money to buy these kids some instruments.” And he prayed and he prayed for God to bless him—to give him what he needed to be able to play. And wouldn’t you know it, at that moment, a dog, a big black dog, came out of the night, right up to Tommy, and bit him on the hand. And he cursed that dog, and he shouted to God, why did you let this dog bite my hand? And the dog, sure enough, looked at him, cocked his head and said in a voice as human as you or me, “You don’t have enough ache to play good bluegrass yet. But you will now.”

  Now Tommy didn’t know that this dog was a werewolf, or that he too would become a werewolf every time the moon was full. Or that one day, he would kill one of those children he loved.

  >?

  In the morning, I’m up early and outside to check. Because when you’re the bus driver, you’ve got to be willing to do the dirty work—get the bus checked, keep it running or know where to take it, make the difficult calls when it breaks down, be willing to break the rules of physics to get them there on time. Check on the banjo and fiddle players locked in the trailer, keeping each other alive and killing each other. Watch over them like a blessed protecting angel if you have to.

  The bus shines like a silver bullet in the morning sun. Clean. Cooling down. Texas, wide and flat, yawns and stretches out beyond it, a few miles north of Plainview.

  Before I can get to the door of the bus, Amelia steps out looking like a sparrow tossed in a tornado, her body leaning over the edge of the step. She hangs on the door handle as if she
might fall. Like always, I have a tube of her hand cream ready. Clovertree. Organic. Nothing else does the trick for her tired hands, her cramped elbows, her stiff shoulder—products of tireless playing all night long. I stumble to her that morning, as if to catch her.

  “I got it.” She looks up and smiles, wide, genuine—in love. She’s been in love with him for seven years. She usually tells me, He was a lot better tonight. I could feel it. But this morning, she says nothing, no hopeful words. She’s starting to realize that it’s not going to change.

  I decide then and there that I’m gonna shoot myself a bluegrass player. I’m going to shoot our star, Tommy Burdan. Set her free. Set us all free.

  >?

  We should have shot Tommy a long time ago. Not these merciful, God-can-forgive-you Christians. They wouldn’t hear of it. But I don’t think it was their forgiveness or their Jesus slippin’ in as much as it was their greed, pure and simple. “Capitalists,” I whispered sometimes when I drove. They were only concerned with money. I’d never seen the books, but I knew they played some big concerts—upwards of 10,000 at most of ’em.

  “Without him, we’re nothing,” Eric, the Dobro player says. He often rides shotgun, watching for fast food places where he could honour his love of french fries. “He writes the songs, he plays out the melodies, and he sings till your heart breaks. He’s our ticket, yes sir.”

  Tinderbox is a five-piece bluegrass gospel band—banjos, guitars, fiddle, Dobro, bass—and they’ve had hits with their last seven albums. Lots of love and heartache and prayer and Jesus-walkin’-beside-you in their songs, and so churches love ’em. They can pack arenas and convention centres with the faithful who loved gospel bluegrass, but fill up festivals, too. My job was driving, connecting all the arena dots on the map across the South, the Midwest, the Prairies, up into middle Canada, and making sense of their touring schedule.