make an opening large enough for
her body.”
I hope he’s right.
He slips the wood panel through the
bars in the side of the cage, just in front of the pacing tiger,
and pushes it along until it extends out the other side. “Now, you
can open the front of the cage to clean it and bring in food and
water.”
Wonderful. That makes me feel so much
safer.
Tiger or no tiger, there’s still an
ark full of animals to feed, so I take my leave of the hunter and
head back to the river to collect my cart.
***
I thought fresh pitch on a hot day
might be the worst odor in the world, but I was wrong. The worst
odor in the world is the urine and dung and sweat and fear
emanating from dozens of caged, confused animals, all cramped
together in a wooden structure on a muggy afternoon. When I first
enter, the smell nearly knocks me over. I should probably clean out
some of that dung, but I decide I’d rather put up with it and get
out of here faster.
It’s dark in here, too, and with all
the cages that weren’t here yesterday, I find myself stumbling as
my eyes adjust. Gradually I make out my mother and Aunt Zeda,
Father and Uncle Ham and Japheth, all running around carting sacks
of grain and barrels of salted meat, looking nearly as frantic as
the animals themselves. This is a huge job, and I’m sure the
presence of a tiger outside doesn’t help.
Mother sees me and grabs me by the
arm. “Don’t go near the meat-eaters,” she tells me. “The men will
handle them.” I’m happy enough to obey her, but there are still so
many animals left—in addition to the ones that arrived yesterday,
Japheth has been trapping all week. He’s brought in two
knock-kneed, trembling young deer he’s fenced into a corner;
porcupines and hedgehogs that appear permanently curled into
prickly balls; rabbits and squirrels and even mice, though I
suspect quite a few of those are already hidden in the dark
recesses of the ark. Or perhaps the cats have frightened all the
wild mice away, even from within their cages.
Some of the animals are so far outside
my realm of experience, it’s hard to know what to feed them. When I
reach the large, stick-legged birds I’ve decided to call
flower-birds for their pink, petal-like wings, I sprinkle grain on
the floor of their cage. They peck disconsolately at it for a
moment and then turn away. I can almost feel their homesickness
through the bars between us, and it makes my chest ache.
“ Fish,” a high voice calls
just behind me, and I turn to see Shai. I didn’t even realize she
was here. “Feed them fish.”
“ I don’t
think…”
She’s already run off, and she returns
a minute later with a handful of salt-cured fish. I frown down at
it.
“ They live near the sea,”
she insists, breaking the fish into small pieces and throwing it
right into the birds’ full water trough.
“ Shai! What are you
doing?”
“ The trader told me!” she
protests in the pouting voice of a child too used to being
scolded.
Before I can say more, both birds
hurry over and dip their heads into the water, their beaks opening
and closing so fast they appear to be shaking, or shivering. In a
few moments, the fish are gone.
“ Well.” I put one hand on
Shai’s shoulder, glad she was here to help me. “Good
job.”
Shai follows me to the elephants, and
I find that someone—probably Japheth, as he’s skilled and quick
with wood—has built a two-sided fence, enclosing them against the
ark walls, and filled the space with hay. Perhaps Japheth sensed
how much I liked the elephants, and he wanted to give them what
little comfort he could. I’ll have to thank him.
Japheth has even built a little
latched door into the fence, and I step through it, dragging the
pig trough, while Shai follows with a water skin. As soon as I
empty the water into the trough, the male elephant lumbers over,
sucks the water up with his trunk…and dumps it all over his
back.
I want to call out the elephant’s name
in reprimand,
Rhys Thomas
Douglas Wynne
Sean-Michael Argo
Hannah Howell
Tom Vater
Sherry Fortner
Carol Ann Harris
Silas House
Joshua C. Kendall
Stephen Jimenez