Calvin Baker - Grace

We were in an area with only a sparse copse of trees here and there, and could make our way through easily. The air sweetened and I had the sensation we were nearing the lake, though in truth, I had had that sensation many times already, from wishing it so.

The sound of the sluicing river off in the distance was soothing in our ears, even as the trees thickened around it. The ground was flat, at least, and it was light enough that we could see plainly. We hugged the sound of the river, and hoped just to whistle down the darkness until daybreak.

Our phones did not have reception, making it impossible to map our location or call for help, but we felt sure the lake was getting closer, and even the throbbing pain of my shoulder had turned to a white noise against the blue darkness. It was sufferable as long as I did not think about it but stayed focused on walking and fighting off the weariness and creeping hunger, until I ceased to care anymore about what would happen.

Sylvie looked at me tenderly, and tried to mask the pain in her eyes as she took my free hand in her hand. “Just walk with me,” she said, holding my hand and leaning into me, trying to ease my weight as best she could.

“Do you want to rest?” she asked, as we came upon a place a little further on that was open and dry.

“Just a little while,” I agreed.

We sat down in the dew-jeweled grass to take water and rest. It was good to feel my muscles relax, but the pain in my shoulder had started throbbing with greater urgency.

Sylvie handed me the canteen, and the water was cool from the metal and sweet to taste, making me feel we would make it.

We sat there awhile in tranquility, collecting our strength. As we prepared to leave, though, the air became charged with the sense we were being watched. We scanned in opposite directions, and when Sylvie stopped moving I turned slowly to where she was focused, and saw in front of me a pair of deep black eyes, staring at us in pensive silence.

It was a massive blackback, with an enormous head and those preternaturally large eyes contemplating us without blinking, nailing us to where we were. We did not have the sense to be afraid at first, it was so uncanny an intelligence behind them, making us feel less threatened than that we were made of glass, and being turned around in the sun to see how we were composed. When fear finally stirred, it was bone deep, and I moved my hand slowly toward the pistol without thinking. The gorilla saw my movement and charged, shrieking as she rose up onto her two legs so that she was half a head taller than me, and roared close enough that we felt her breath. If I had moved any more she would have taken me from life, but I stayed still, resigned to the worst, as my fear settled and there was nothing to think of except how my life had been. Whatever unfolded, so it was and so be it.

She stopped when I did, and I realized her vocalization had been a warning, as she dropped back to all fours with slow composure, all the while keeping me in her gaze, with a stare of fiery intensity that seared the wall separating us. I was glass and the wall was glass, and the glass thinned and thinned until I felt seen through completely, and it was only a bent note across.

I stood held in her stare, not knowing if she would attack, but feeling at peace with whatever happened. I released the breath I had held, and she let loose a ferocious screech that wakened the birds, making them flock from the trees overhead as she soared up on her feet again, before returning back to all fours on the ground, still staring at me. But I had lost my fear of her, because there was no life beyond that point, simply what I had already had and already was or had been and the shape of her claw. I was content for it to go either way, but knew somehow, or thought I knew, we would be let to pass.

When she settled on the ground, she started moving away in a great rush, until she was twenty feet back, where she stopped at the wall of trees by the bank. We saw the rest of her family then, which we had not before, another blackback, and two infants, who rushed to her and began crawling on her, which she indulged. When she had made it to the far field we could see also another figure in the dirt, a gigantic silverback stretched out immobile, in a snare.

She sat in front of it, pulling the leaves off a branch, which she gave to the juveniles, and did not move any further. We knew what she did not, however, that the poachers would return soon, and we could not be there when they did.

The two matrons both looked at us as we began to back away, and started to rush toward us, but they stopped short and wailed to end the world, before returning again to the corpse and the cubs, who did not understand and wished still to play.

It was the damnedest thing I ever saw.

We were transfixed and watched them, and the matriarchs watched us, until we took another step away and they paid us no mind, but stripped the leaves from a low tree and fed their young. We were like that for one second or else one year, until the light made it clear we had better keep moving.

When we felt safe to turn our backs they hooted again and began fleeing up the mountain, in the opposite direction.

“They are people,” Sylvie said, as we pressed on toward the lake. “I did not know they were people.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Those poor people,” she said. “They look so wise, like ancient old people. Those poor people.”

“It’s a rough business,” I said.

“The poaching?”

“Peopling.”

“They are gentle, and it is the same thing that happens to all wise people.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think they have souls?” she pondered.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“They do. I know it. I felt it. They are souls. They rise from the earth, just as we do, and have the same spirits, just like us.”

“That’s for the cosmologists,” I said.

“That’s just something clever to say. You think I’m being irrational, and are damming it off. But I don’t care how clever anybody tries to be. They have souls.”

“Maybe.”

“God—”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“Don’t be petulant, honey. God is a metaphor. I thought you knew things.

“And the same God holds them, just like us, and rocks them, just as whatever you want to call It does us, in the hollow of His hand.” Her eyes were bright with tears, which she wiped away as they slipped down her face. “I don’t care what else anyone says. I know it. The way you just know some things. The same way I know I love you.”

The sapphire water of the lake twinkled in the distance. The sky blazed with bands of teal, saffron, red, and the pure gold of first light in that part of the world, as the wavelets on the water rippled in the dawn, reflecting the sun like veins of fire.

We reached the bank, and began searching around for a boat to hire or borrow without too much fuss. But there was no one on the shore, and we walked the rim a long while in silence, before we spied a low line of houses, set back among the trees. We stopped in front of the first one, where there was smoke rising through a hole in the roof, and called out.

We did not know who the people on this side of the lake were — what part they had in the fighting, or how they kept themselves out from the vise of it — but there was no other way. We called at the door until a little boy came out, staring at us in a moment of dazed wonderment before running back inside for his parents in fear.

From deep inside the smoky room a tall thin man, wearing a red sarong around his waist and a T-shirt that had been washed to a single cellular layer of material, walked out to us. The man was blue-black, like the boy, and looked at us with the same bewilderment, trying to figure out where we had come from.