Dana Stabenow: Powers of Detection

“Shut up! Shoo!” the ugly one said.

“Hey, hey, hey… cut that out!” Gunk yelled back.

Gunk wanted a few minutes alone with the dead thing. He wanted to get some of the fat under the skin and some of the lovely-smelling food cooked down in the intestines before he called the rest of the real creatures over. The only thing worse than not finding food was wasting it by letting it sit too long and letting some other nasty animal get to it. The real creatures would make the best use of the dead thing. It upset him that this human being was trying to get rid of him.

The fat man rolled the dead thing over and kept searching it. He stuffed the leaves in his own pocket, then rolled the dead thing down the slope toward the water. The ugly one stuffed rocks into the outer folds of the outside skin where he had gotten the leaves.

“Hey! Hey! Hey!” Gunk yelled.

“So long, buddy boy,” the fat one said. Then he rolled the dead thing into the deep water.

“Doo doo!” Gunk screamed. “You big basket butt! What the hell are you doing!” The raven was livid. He hopped up and down, then walked straight up into the air by the man’s face. “Hey! Hey! Waste! Waste! Waste!”

Gunk was so mad he decided to follow the ugly one until the ugly one killed something else. He hadn’t taken any food at all, and this fat man must certainly eat a lot, so it seemed clear to Gunk the fat man would have to kill something again soon. Gunk would be ready. He would rush right in and not wait for this stupid basket butt to waste another beautiful dead thing by giving it to the skittery little sand fleas and the sad swimmers who flew on the surface of that other world.

The fat man waved him off. “Gawh! Get the hell away from me!”

Gunk hopped on the wires above the street, following the fat man as he lurched along on his strange round legs.

“You can’t lose me, fat boy!” Gunk yelled. “Don’t even try! Go and kill something else and hurry up about it.”

The day carried a slurry of scents from the fish plant and the dump up the hill. Gunk liked this section of the waterfront even if he had to compete with the dim-witted eagles and the bothersome crows. There were black mushrooms of garbage in the backs of buildings, and now and then he was lucky enough to find a dead dog in the ditch. Once he had even found a hapless eagle who had gotten too close to the transformers on the buzzing power poles and had cooked himself up and fallen onto the street for Gunk to find.

Gunk’s world was a gorgeous curve and tumble of rock and waterways, lumps and swales, places of shade and sunlight, updrafts and calm. The world glittered and curved from Gunk’s perspective, and everything human beings did transformed into hard angles and bossy lines that cut across anything in their way. Maybe that was why the fat one was so stupid and wasteful.

Gunk stopped yelling at him, thinking that it might ruin the human’s hunting luck. Gunk had learned this by following brown bears. If one of the real creatures spoke too loudly, whatever it was the bear was hunting would overhear and go to ground or disappear up into the mountain. It was bad for the bear and for Gunk, so he shut up and flew down the street to the wire high up on the intersection. He’d wait for the man. Humans were easy to follow because of their love of straight lines and hard edges. They always stayed on their paths, and you could always hop up ahead to the next intersection. It was sad in a way. Humans were even more predictable than the bears.

“Gunk! What? What? What?” Tawk called out to him from a low alder tree above his favorite garbage can.

Gunk said nothing. He tried to be invisible because he didn’t really want to have to deal with Tawk while he was waiting for the fat human to kill something else.

“Hey Gunk! Hey Gunk! Hey Gunk!” Tawk came and settled next to him, causing the wire they were both on now to sway.

“Gunk! Gunk! Hey! Hey! Hey!” Tawk said. Tawk was one of the real creatures, but he was not exceptionally bright. “I heard there was a big dead thing somewhere down by the water shadows. Did you see it?”

“No,” Gunk said, not taking his eyes off the fat man.

“I thought I could smell it, but I wasn’t sure,” Tawk said, then he followed Gunk’s gaze, knowing that he was watching something important.

“Does that fat man have something…”

“Listen, Tawk,” Gunk cut him off quickly and pointed with his beak back toward town, “there is music in the big building. Someone playing piano. It’s really quite lovely. I just heard it. You should go and listen.”

“Really?” Tawk said, standing alert as if the music was happening right then, right now. “Big building, you say?” And before Gunk gave him an answer Tawk was away.

Real creatures love nothing so much as music. Tones rising and falling tickled a real creature as if those sounds contained the voices of all their relatives. When real creatures heard music they could barely think straight, so caught up were they in the flying tones. They loved music almost as if it were invisible food. In the summer the real creatures gathered near the back of the big building when the Dumpsters were full from the tourist lunches, and human beings played music inside with the doors open. Gunk didn’t want to tell poor Tawk that it was only a school group listening to a recording of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg variations. Tawk couldn’t tell the difference between the Goldberg variations and a piece of cherry pie, but at least he wasn’t distracting Gunk any longer.

Yes, real creatures love nothing so much as music… unless it is some tasty dead thing ripening in the sun. When Gunk turned his attention back to the street, the fat man was gone. “Awww,” said Gunk. Then he flew down into the street, to the stop sign where the streets crossed. There was no fat man. He flew to the top of the dead spruce behind the ball field. No luck. Then he flew to the buzzing electric pole near the hospital. Nothing.

Deer can disappear up inside a mountain, and river otters can turn themselves into water, but everybody knows human beings cannot disappear. They can walk into buildings or crawl inside noisy machines, but they never leave without a trace. So the fat man must be in one of the buildings back on the street where he had been distracted by that stupid Tawk.

As he began gliding through the air, Gunk was feeling guilty about how he had treated Tawk. Tawk was kind of slow, and Gunk certainly didn’t want to share the first few minutes of his dead thing with him, but Tawk was a real creature, after all, a real creature and a loyal friend. He would be sure to let Tawk know when he found the new dead thing. He would let him know after he had had a few minutes alone with it.

Gunk found the place he had last seen the fat man, and he landed in the middle of the sidewalk and began waddling down the street. Sometimes you had to get close to the ground and look carefully. “Hey!” he said softly, not wanting to be heard by any other real creature. “I’m looking for a fat man who smells like a dead thing. Anybody seen anything?”

The dog tied up in the muddy yard lifted his tired head and looked over. “Nope. Wasn’t paying attention. Sorry.” And he put his head back on top of his dirty paws.

“Me. I might have seen him,” a skinny brown cat with scars running across her face said from under the sagging wooden stairs. “What’s in it for me?” She watched Gunk with a steady gaze. Cats cannot be trusted unless you are certain you are out of their jumping range, or offering them something well within the realm of their own self-interest.

Gunk took two short hops backward. “He killed a human being just a bit ago, but he wasted it. I’m assuming he’s a decent hunter and must be going to kill something again soon.”