Winner
Terrain.org 15th Annual Fiction Contest
A long time ago, very close to where you and I live, there was a stream that ran through a forest. The water was clear and icy. Beneath the clear, icy water, the streambed was a chute of smooth brown and orange rocks and fine, dark silt. The banks were soft, rubbery grass and cool moss-covered stones. Thorny sawbriar grew from bank to bank over the water like the bows of a covered wagon. Like veins, perhaps. And far above the sawbriar, a lush, green canopy of ash leaves. At the time this story takes place, no human had ever been here.
Elsewhere, a man who thought he loved animals accidently caught a live thylacine, known to some as a Tasmanian tiger because of its short golden fur and dark stripes running down its back and tail. Other than the stripes, it looked to the man like a cross between a wolf and a fox. He had never seen anything like it. Instead of putting a bullet into the interesting creature and sending it to his taxidermist, the man decided to take it back with him across the ocean and keep it chained on his estate as a conversation piece. His guests could throw the evidence of his overseas exploits scraps of meat while he regaled them with the tale. How exciting. The man had no idea the thylacine was almost extinct. It wouldn’t have mattered if he did. The man had no idea it was pregnant. It wouldn’t have mattered if he did. The thylacine, her foot clamped between two steel jaws, baring her teeth, made no sound to indicate she understood her life was over, but she did understand. Sometimes dying takes a long time.
She gave birth to four joeys in a dark cage in a ship’s hold halfway across an ocean. Two female, two male. They almost never ventured out of their mother’s pouch. The pouch was warm. The cage wasn’t. Other than that, they were perfectly content.
The ship landed. The cage was put here. Then here. Then finally loaded onto a truck. Several days later, the truck’s driver lost sight of the road in the middle of a thunderstorm, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere. The truck flipped on its side. When the driver came to, he found himself in the passenger’s seat, pressed against the door, his head bleeding, mud seeping in through the cracked window. He slowly crawled out of the cab. The thing in the cage was gone. After hearing the news, the man who thought he loved animals never thought about the thylacine ever again. He had already basically forgotten.
The thylacine didn’t recognize the land. The trees were different. The rocks were different. The dirt didn’t taste right. Back home, the largest body of water she knew of was in the direction the sun appeared in the morning. So she traveled in the opposite direction, following the sun day after day, stopping only to sleep and hunt, more for her joeys than for her. All she had to do was find the large body of water and home would be on the other side. But no matter how far she traveled, nothing became more familiar. Just different kinds of unfamiliar.
More and more, she had to stop so that her joeys could run and tumble and move about in the sun. During the brief moments the joeys had spent out of their mother’s pouch back in the cage, they assumed the cage was home. Now, they assumed this was home. They were having a wonderful time. To their mother, they smelled like the cage. They smelled like this place. She knew that wasn’t their fault, but she also knew she was running out of time. Soon she wouldn’t be able to carry them. They would need to learn how to hunt. They would need to strike out on their own. But they had to find home first. How could she explain that to them? She kept moving.
One day, she left her joeys in the elbow of two fallen trees and went off in search of food. She hoped they would be safe there, but what was safe? Two coyotes heard their yips. They too were far from home. Theirs didn’t exist anymore. They were nothing but bones and fur. The lead coyote’s mother once told her some babies are better left alone. What kind of babies were these? She didn’t know and was too hungry to care. She approached from the front. Her brother hopped up onto one of the fallen trees, approaching from above. The joeys thought what was happening was a game and never truly understood that it wasn’t.
The thylacine hit the lead coyote from the side, sinking her teeth deep into the soft heat of the neck. The brother coyote attacked her blind spot, which only made her bite harder. They tumbled and rolled, a jagged knot of limbs and wounds and bloody teeth. The sounds were horrific. The coyotes eventually broke free from the tangle to reassess. Two against one, the fight should have been over by now. The thylacine should have been dead, but she stood her ground, her eyes blazing, her teeth brandished. The lead coyote was bleeding badly from her neck. Her brother was missing an eye and part of his tail. Too expensive. This must have been what their mother had meant. They bounded away several paces, turned, and glared. The thylacine made a noise she had never heard herself make before, and the coyotes disappeared into the trees.
The joeys were dead. Bleeding, shaking, the fire of the fight still burning inside her, she cleaned them best she could. She put them back into her pouch. She kept moving.
The next morning, the thylacine came upon the stream in the forest, below the ash leaves and sawbrier, dragging behind her a long trail of blood. She was thirsty. She had never been so thirsty. She allowed herself a rest. She dipped her mouth into the stream. The water was cool and almost tasted like the water back home, but she couldn’t get it past the blood in her throat. She knew then that she would never get up. The sun she was following moved on without her.
Elsewhere, earlier, a deer surveyed his forest, moving at no particular pace, traveling in and through his mate’s scent. Sometimes loping, sometimes strolling, he would find her and their fawn soon enough. He always did. He wasn’t worried. Her scent led him to a green dell where his mate would sometimes leave their fawn curled in a ball while she went off to feed. Which she had done. A man with a gun found the fawn and waited for its mother to return. When she did, the man with the gun shot her. Then he shot the fawn, who was still curled up where his mother had left him and was patiently waiting for all these terrible sounds to stop. The man with the gun told himself that he shot the fawn because it didn’t have a chance on its own, but really it was because he wanted to see what the bullet would do to it.
The male deer smelled the path his mate took into the dell. He smelled where she died and the direction she was dragged. He found what was left of their fawn. After leaving the dell, the deer wandered the forest for days. He didn’t know if he was looking for their scent or trying to get away from it. Either way, he would always find it again. And lose it. And find it. It was not his forest anymore.
He eventually came to what had been their favorite place to drink. The stream below the ash trees and the sawbrier. There he found the thylacine. Moving just her eyes, she looked at him. Then looked away. It was all she could do. The deer had never encountered whatever she was before. She was clearly something that ate other animals, could eat him if she were so inclined, but he wasn’t afraid. He knew what a mother looked like. And he knew what dying looked like. She was both.
He sat down in the grass next to her, folding his long legs beneath him. He rested his chin on her shoulder. She took a deep, labored breath. Released it. Water glided across the rocks. Sunlight flickered through the leaves. A breeze swayed the canopy back and forth as if the forest itself were breathing. It wasn’t home, but she liked this place.
The deer stayed with the thylacine the entire time it took her to die. Before she died, she sometimes forgot that her body had given out. When she closed her eyes, she could feel herself sprinting through trees and brush, her joeys warm pulses in her pouch. But when she opened them again, she was right where she had been, her nose inches away from water she couldn’t drink. When she finally stopped breathing, the deer stayed with her a little while longer. Slowly, he got up. He needed to find a place so far from home that he couldn’t find it again if he ever changed his mind. He needed to move and keep moving.
That small piece of ground was never the same after that, radiated by what transpired. Nature’s radiation. To this day it feels different. Not just different from what it was. Different from any other place on earth. Entering is as tangible as walking through a curtain. Like walking from sunlight into shade. Or shade into sunlight. You’ve been there. You’ve felt it. And once inside, your sense memory doesn’t quite recognize the shape and texture of what is possible and isn’t possible. The place feels capable of immeasurable cruelty and horror and beauty and awe and magic and sometimes even forgiveness—though you know better than to count on that last one. You’ve felt all that and wondered why? What happened here that made this place this way? And now you know.
Seth Borgen’s work has appeared in Story, Water~Stone, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. His first book, If I Die in Ohio, received the New American Fiction Prize. He received his MFA from the University of Mississippi and lives in Ohio.
Header image by Vac1, courtesy Shutterstock.
