Until the Lights Went Out

The snow fell in drifts, dusting Frances’ entranceway in yet another sparkling layer, the frigid air bitter. It was only December, and she did not relish the months ahead, her old joints were aching against the cold ground. She stretched her hips and back, shimmying to loosen them. No matter what she did, her home’s earthen floor took a long time to heat up. Grumbling, Frances trundled towards the shelter of the tallest tree in her neighborhood, and began to climb. Cautiously she ascended, nimbly moving her thick limbs against the bark. She knew the northwoods better than any other, and even in the dead of night, she could navigate the canopy with ease that came with decades of climbing. Her ancestors had dwelled in these canopies for over three million years, and the succulent gifts of these trees nourished them, giving everything they needed. The forest was changing, and only a few areas of old growth remained, free from the depraved hairless ones. 

She nuzzled her Liam in encouragement further up the trunk. Young Liam was still afraid to balance on the outer branches to forage. His feet wavered and wobbled, and for an instant, Frances wondered if she had pushed him too far. His bodyweight began to push the branch lower, bending against him. A brisk wind, and fear gripped her. The cold might make the branch snap. He held firm, and Frances reminded him to relax and listen to the tree. Tension in their limbs would only end in succumbing to the dark inevitable grip of gravity. 

Frances took another chunk of bark into her mouth, and bit down. Sweet, and stringy, the tree was passable though she longed for gorging on sweet apples and acorns in autumn. Her orange red incisors made quick work of the bark, strong swift gnashing. Frances took pride in her intimidating teeth. Now that Liam had shed his milk teeth, he too was sharpening his incisors daily. She watched him gnawing the tree with pride. He began to make gentle squealing sounds of delight as he ate. The snow absorbed the sound of his whimpering and squealing as. The hush of winter was a comfort.

A thump.

Another thump. 

Swift, white movement as the snow darted across the trail. Not snow, it was Bessie camouflaged in her winter coat.

Another thump, as the rabbit lifted her foot against the ground, warning her warren. 

A fisher was on its way. Frances’ heart raced. 

He shouldn’t be out so early. Dawn hadn’t begun to dust the skies with light yet. His den was miles away. 

They should have had more time. Frances cursed, clacking her teeth together at Liam, and they darted upwards. Limb after limb. She held with every breath against the thinnest of branches, begging herself to move with the breeze. “Let the darkness hold you.” she whispered against Liam’s side. She could feel him trembling. “The fisher will do anything it can to get us down, to knock us out of this tree, remember that this tree is home.” 

Liam won’t survive, if he comes for him. We should have trained harder, practiced and danced with the quills. 

Frances watched, heart in her throat, as he entered the clearing. The fisher was a male, hefty. His thick coat was glossy black and brown, glinting in the moonlight. The apex predator, his muscles were thick along his back. 

The branch cracked loudly at the shift in weight, and the fishers' eyes darted up, searching the canopy in the starlight. As Frances watched, she noted the fisher looked strange. When she made eye contact with the fisher, she no longer felt pursued. He was drifting in his own consciousness. Losing touch with himself. As she met his eyes, she felt dizzy, lost. He smelled wrong. She clattered her teeth down to Bessie, trying to convey what she was seeing. The fisher vomited in the snow, and walked away, swerving this way and that, like a drunken sailor lost in a storm. He wandered towards the ice next to the lake. Sorrow gripped her. Sorrow, rather than gravity pulled at her. She sniffed this way and that, trying to understand what she smelt. Sick sweetness in the mess from his gut, and blood, so much blood. The copper and sickly sweet smell was nauseating.

“I need to go investigate, darling. What impacts them impacts us.” she said quietly. “Go back to the den, Liam, I will be back as soon as I can.” 

Frances shivered her black and white quills, shaking off the accumulation of ice. They clacked together loudly in the silence. She walked to one of Bessie’s warren entrances, and clattered there, to tell her family what she was doing. 

Frances sniffed his tracks, following his twisting and meandering through the forest. Looking with alarm at where he had fallen sideways and left huge areas of flattened snow. 

She came upon the fisher’s body, and it was still. Deathly still. His body lay in the snow in the moonlight, and she could see that as his body cooled, it was no longer melting the snow, and the white was beginning to bury him. 

Frances wept, her quills rattling with every breath. Unnatural. The fisher may well have killed Liam if he had survived, and regardless it was wrong to have him die this way. Taken far too young. For the way he hunted them was a part of the circle of life, and this was something else entirely. She could smell it all over him, poison. She keened. You deserved better. She brought him some of the snow berries and branches, laying them over his body in blessing. Soon, the coyotes would come, and take his body and his bones, but she wanted to warn them away. For his flesh was contaminated. Even the strongest stomached scavenger could not survive the type of rot she smelled. 

“Poison.” she whispered aloud to the forest around her. She walked back and told the rabbits of what she had seen, the best way they knew how. They could not fully communicate, but Bessie was good at warning others, and she knew that even though there was no shared language for poison between them, the sounds she made were a clear warning for the others. 

Frances snuck silently, following his tracks to see where he came from. Where the poison lie. She was a natural sleuth, used to nocturnal sightings and observations, often tracking people and from great heights, as her subjects moved unawares. The sunrise was coming, and with it, danger. Her short legs were slow moving along her territory, she wasn’t as swift as she used to be. Still she trundled, moving with surety towards the huge garages. The epicenter of the scent she followed was there. 

As she got to the edge of the driveway, Frances stilled. This was new. This was all new. 

Huge beasts made of black and yellow, bones of iron stood silent in the snow. The bright lights stung her eyes, and still she took it in. There was no canopy for her to shelter in. All the scents she had been used to, erased, replaced by a metallic and oily smell. A whole area was cleared, where just last week there had been forest. She read the name on the side of the equipment. A timber company she knew all too well. Despair. 

The words chilled her, these were the beings that took everything from her.

The silence of the firm stumps, where giants used to stand. Her oldest advisors, the guardians of the land, no longer. Roots, drawing water to nothing. The cathedrals torn to the ground. 

In the clearcut, She could smell where the fisher had hidden, where his den had been destroyed. His den, the roots, stood empty now. She was not sure where his children were, but the silence where there used to be owls, the ceaseless hum of electricity shattering the sound of the night, and the brightness where there used to be star-filled sky shocked her into silence. She used to lick the salt off of the tires of vehicles, but now, she buried a quill inside of one, satisfied as it deflated. Rage boiled up inside of her, not enough, she thought. She opened up the excavator, and buried some of her smallest quills into the fabric of the seat, bouncing her rump against it, and spinning, and turning around, checking that they were camouflaged, so that they would jab the next person to sit. Her fury was still not satisfied. Remembering the dam they put in the river, the falling of the eagles nests. 

She sniffed the ground, coming to the source of the smell. A small black box with green disks of poison. Anti coagulant. She coughed. The temptation was great to eat it, because even though she knew it would mean death, it smelled sweet like candy. She grabbed the poison in her paws, the sickening green, and wrestled her way into the shed. Frances smiled as she thought about telling Liam about all this. He would never believe me. He never thinks I am cool. Her paws shook, as she hit the machine, trying not to break it, desperately batting until it opened. She added the disk to the back of the coffee pot, where the water waited for the morning brew. A porcupine always settles her debts. She remembered whispering to Liam, when she was teaching him how to burrow his spines into the faces of their enemies. She smiled, thinking of how, if she didn’t survive the night, he had trained to swirl and dance, with the sharp quills of her ancestors. She could hear the haunting hoot of owls. She banged her quills together loudly, calling her fellow woodland creatures. A call of a wolf responded, and she grinned her orange red teeth, grateful to hear their calls.

Frances found a handsaw hanging on the wall, and took the handle into her mouth. Frances gnawed, freeing them all of the destruction that it wrought. Until the wood that held the blade existed no longer. 

Even as she heard the humans stir, she kept going. The daylight was encroaching, but a desperate fervor overtook her. She shuffled towards the thickest of the wires, her quills rattling. And Frances chewed and chewed and chewed, until the lights went out.