M. Wren - A Gift Upon the Shore

Wind moved the black plumes of branches above her. She shivered, dizzied by their stately bowing and rising. The sky was perceptibly lighter than the trees, and the moon was sinking behind them. She could see, dimly, the ephemeral clouds of her breath. Dawn. The dawn’s early light, pearly light, first light I see—

Damn, she was getting hysterical. No, that was over now. But the shivering wouldn’t stop. Laura. Poor Laura. And Jamie, only three weeks old. They couldn’t have survived.

Those bastards! Those inhuman, insane —

She couldn’t find words adequate for her rage. Perhaps the words to encompass it had never been invented, not in all the centuries that humankind had suffered at its own hands.

She looked around in the ashen light that bordered on darkness. A road. She was on a road. Winter-dead weeds at the sides and in a fringe down the center, but it was a road, and it must lead somewhere.

All she had to do was walk down the road until she came to a house, ask the residents to call the local or Auxiliary Police. Must be an Apie station in Shiloh Beach.

All she had to do was walk….

Her teeth chattered uncontrollably, and it seemed that ice crystals were forming under her skin, exquisite fronded patterns slowly coalescing. She struggled to her feet, the effort wrenching out cries of pain, took two steps, and fell to the ground. She didn’t try again. The neural links between her muscles and brain were frozen.

She looked up at the bowing plumes. I’m going to die here . Some bleak, unfathomable irony lay in that.

In the distance a sound. She wasn’t sure whether she heard it or imagined or remembered it.

The murmur of the sea.

I am here… I am always here ….

Under a white sky in a white, frozen ocean, she lay on a white ice floe waiting for it to melt out from under her. It seemed fitting. Broken and useless things must be discarded for the good of the tribe.

But the sound was puzzling. Sniffing. A soft whine. Something touched her cheek. She opened her eyes, and the creature drew back, watching her with amber brown eyes, cabochon gems trapping golden light. How did a fox get on her ice floe? Fur of russet blending into brown; under the chin, a ruff of white. Ice white…

She realized then as her mind and eyes came into focus that her ice floe had vanished, that she lay in a place full of color: sky blue, looming conifers deep ever green, grasses winter rose and gold.

With a cry, she jerked away from the animal, and it jumped back, teeth bared. She tried to get to her feet, but she was too weak, and the pain hit too hard. She only managed to prop herself on her left elbow, right arm raised to fend off the dog. And now there were two of them, the second smaller, blacker. They danced and whirled and barked, the sounds like bludgeons. The piercing whistle cut into her skull.

“Topaz! Shadow! Here—come here !”

Mary numbly watched the dogs retreat to flank the figure moving toward her.

A woman. Age indeterminate, but past forty certainly. Small, compact body clad in jeans and a red jacket, both faded with wear. Below her knit cap, fine hair the color of sand lay on a high forehead; her face was all one color with her sandy brows, the weathered skin lined as if she turned her deep brown eyes often to distant vistas.

Mary’s fear dissolved as it would if she’d met a friend of many years on this remote, forest-girded road. She didn’t understand that, but neither did she question it.

The woman knelt beside her, regarding her with concern but no surprise. She asked, “What happened to you?”

Mary didn’t try to answer that. She wanted to say, I know you . Instead, she asked, “Who are you?”

The woman answered, “I’m Rachel Morrow.”

Shadow stretches every fiber for her tumultuous runs after gulls, unaware, apparently, of the insurmountable advantage wings give them. At the end of each chase she returns to me, pattering along on the delicate feet of her mirror image in the sea-wet sand, and I remember the first Shadow. Rachel’s Shadow. Like her namesake, this Shadow is mostly black, a silky black like the waters of the night, with white stockings, belly, and ruff, white at the tip of her plume of a tail. Russet marks the divisions of black and white, forms expressive commas above her eyes. She is a replicate of the first Shadow, and from the moment I saw her as a blind, wavering pup, I claimed her as my own and named her for her ancestor, the good mother of our canine tribe.

Topaz would have been a good mother, too, but there are no throwbacks to remind me of her.

How many generations did the first Shadow and Sparky beget? I can’t remember, and the bloodlines were muddied—or invigorated—by feral dogs and by Agate, whom Rachel and I stole as a pup from a feral bitch. The dogs at Amarna now—there are only six since Desdemona died this winter—tend to pointed noses, long hair, upright ears, with black the predominant color, although Agate’s genes manifest themselves occasionally, as they have in Stickeen and Diamond, in a leggy sturdiness and tawny coat. Sparky was a mongrel, part spaniel, part terrier, black except for the white locket on his chest; he had the tenacity typical of terriers. I see his personality in his descendants more than his physical attributes.

Is that anthropomorphism, to think of personality in animals?

Perhaps. But I’ve lived too intimately with animals not to recognize in them the existence of unique characteristics of mind.

I look down at the sand, at my tracks: drag lines between each print, the holes made by my cane like periods punctuating terse sentences. Then I look ahead and choose a log as a convenient resting place. I make my way up the slope of the beach and ease down on the weather-polished back of the log. To the north looms the dark, basalt wall of the Knob, at its base a tumble of rocks terraced by the sea that even on this calm day strikes with white detonations and rains spray into the tide pools.

Shadow is sniffing about in the rocks, and I reach for the silent whistle on its chain around my neck. What she might find to eat on the beach can harbor salmonella and prove a deadly repast. I blow at the whistle, hearing only a faint wheeze, but Shadow looks up and lopes toward me. The whistle was Rachel’s, and it has served well through all the generations the first Shadow and Sparky begat.

When she reaches me, fur beaded with water and sand from her futile pursuits of gulls, she lies down at my feet and smiles at me.

Anthropomorphism again?

I am the alpha in Shadow’s mixed species pack. She trusts me and lets me dominate her and seems to enjoy physical contact with me. She moves closer, presses her forehead against my leg, and she knows I’ll stroke her head, scratch her back. It’s bonding behavior, I suppose, and it works. I’m bonded to her as I seldom was to humans.

But she stiffens now, looks intently to the south, gives a sharp bark, then catapults into a run toward the figure walking up the beach.

Stephen. I told him to meet me here this afternoon. I watch, laughing, but a little envious, as he runs exuberantly, with the unaware grace of youth, to greet Shadow, then runs with her until they reach me, waiting inert and weary on the log. He isn’t even panting.

“Good day, Mary.”

“Good day to you, Stephen. You and Jeremiah and Jonathan certainly did yourselves proud on your fishing expedition.”