ANIMAL PLANET Part Three

PART THREE

ENDS OF THE EARTH

1. MANIFEST DESTINY

THEY PASSED THROUGH howling storms and frozen tempests. They passed through regions of dizzying whiteness. They passed through blizzards of static electricity and bluish showers of cosmic debris. They weren’t even certain where they were going. They knew only that they couldn’t turn back.

Eventually they reached a ramshackle trading outpost on the rim of the Kantchung Peninsula. The outpost was managed by a wiry, obstreperous otter named Dave.

“What can I do you boys for?” Dave asked, offering them a table by the glowing coal fire. “Tea, hot chocolate, road maps, lodging?”

“J-j-just a little wh-wh-while by the fuh-fuh-fire would be nuh-nice,” Buster chattered. He was slapping the circulation back into his wings and stamping the crusty ice from his boots. “I’m tuh-tuh-too cold to thu-think.”

Dave wiped his hands on the hem of his clingy apron and eyed Charlie suspiciously.

“How about you, pal? You want to order something? Or you boys just being sociable?”

Charlie scowled at the bar menu and tossed it spinning across the splintery wooden table.

“One room,” he told Dave succinctly. “One double bed, two continental breakfasts, and two packed lunches to go. And as for right this moment, pal, I’ll have a large Jameson’s, straight up.”

Charlie was leaning across the table, matching Dave’s unblinking stare with a pretty unblinking stare of his own. He nudged Buster an aside with his frosty wing.

“How about you? Some bottled spirits to warm up the old circulation, bud?”

“Uh-uh-I duh-duh-don’t know, Chuh-Chuh-Charlie. I cuh-cuh-can’t suh-suh-seem to muh-make up my muh-mind.”

Charlie and Dave continued observing one another in a sort of ocular standoff. All around them the small, cluttered igloo smelled of urine, dead fish, and rotting vegetable matter.

“Make that two large Jameson’s,” Charlie told Dave without blinking. “And like I said–hold the goddamn ice.”

***

DAVE’S TRADING POST did sparse but profitable business with the local community of voles and snow martens. The local rodents couldn’t believe their luck, nudging and grinning at one another while Dave toted their latest diggings on a small Trojan brand free scale.

“Three ounces of gold,” Dave said evenly. “That means, let’s see here”–scratching reflectively at a lined yellow legal pad–“you’ve just bought yourself three spanking brand-new kernels of grain. So name your poison, buddy. You want it in rice, corn, wheat, or what?”

The rodents carried away their supplies wrapped in oily white butcher paper, tittering shamelessly.

“Just imagine that,” they congratulated one another outside. “Food for rocks! Who ever would have figured, huh?”

“Happy voles,” Charlie muttered cynically after his third Jameson’s. Buster had fallen asleep against the table and was snoring fitfully. “Happy happy voles.”

Charlie enjoyed the brief, edgy silence his cynicism invoked. He felt the slow heat of steam building.

“You got a problem with that, buddy?” Dave was securing his latest capital influx behind a solid steel door. He pulled a Schlage lock into place and clenched it shut with an abrupt little snap. “It’s called commerce, pal. It’s called the exchange value negotiated through competitive free trade. The voles put away some winter provision and I put away some cash toward my impending early retirement–what’s more fair than that? I’m planning to buy this tropical island, see. Somewhere in the South Pacific. Mainly ‘cause I’m so bloody sick of the South Pole I could puke.”

Charlie dug deep into his parka for one of the choice items he had nicked over the years from bedroom bureaus, jewelry shops, and street-corner vendors.

“How much you give me for this?” Charlie slapped it down succinctly like punctuation.

Dave came over with a small glimmering jeweler’s glass screwed into his right eye. He turned Charlie’s bright stone in the light and snicked his tongue a few times.

“Not bad,“ he said.

Charlie emptied his glass and set it up for another.

“Human beings have invaded the western rim and they’re headed this way,” Charlie told Dave and the Trading Post’s variously distracted inhabitants–a few boozy voles, a fox with a bum leg, and a scuzzy looking Eskimo chick wrapped up in mossy caribou pelts and coffee-stained sackcloth. “They’ve got tanks, barbed wire, electrified fences, history books, foreign trade secretaries, corporate spokespersons, and a lot of dumb, well-intentioned military grunts just looking for adventure and a good time. They’ve imprisoned every penguin they can lay their hands on and are currently teaching them to operate snow plows and word-processing equipment. Pretty soon the penguins will be empowered by the world court. They’ll be expected to pay their fair share to the IMF, and issued their own military fatigues and helicopters. Then these suitably authorized penguins will be sent off to acculturate the seals, and the seals will be sent off to acculturate the walruses, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam, etcetera. Click click click–I believe in Southeast Asia it was referred to as the domino effect.”

Dave was brushing the bluish diamond against his cheek, as if he found it soothing to his chapped, flaky skin.

“Oh really?” he responded distantly. He was thinking about his island in the South Pacific, where he intended to build a beautiful resort hotel with five-star nouvelle cuisine dining and the latest in satellite-dish TV. “Human beings–and they’re looking for a good time? Well, jeez.” Dave thrummed his fingers against the bar’s grainy surface. Ta-ta-ta-ta-tum.

After another reflective moment he added, “This could mean some serious business opportunities for our close personal friend, yours truly.”

***

BUSTER DREAMED OF Sandy, Estelle, Whistling Pete, and Pete Jr. They were ascending a smooth snowy hill, pulling a wooden toboggan on a frazzled rope.

“Let’s go back,” Pete Jr. implored. “I’m ready to go home, Dad.”

Buster exchanged a quick look with Sandy and Estelle. The girls were holding hands with strange familiarity, wearing gray dungarees and red flannel shirts.

“Let’s just climb a little farther, okay?’ Whistling Pete indicated a high, misty copse of trees with one wool-mittened flipper. “Let’s continue a bit farther, and then we can all go home for brandy crumpets and hot tea…”

Buster awoke with a start in a cramped, musty room, his heart racing from the dreamed exertion. The air was close and humid, his mattress clamp, lumpy, and inflexible. He tried to reposition his bristly pillow.

“Jesus Christ,” Charlie said. “Watch out, willya? That’s my neck.”

“Sorry,” Buster said. He sat up and reached for a glass of water from the wobbly bedside table. An amazed wind whistled outside.

Dressed before dawn they found their way hesitantly down the dark, leaning stairway. In the lobby the crippled fox was snoring in his sleep. A dim yellow candle glowed behind the bar, where Dave the Otter was figuring the night’s totals on a pocket calculator.

“Good morning,” Dave said cheerily. “And how did you fine fellows sleep last night?” Dave’s attitude had improved significantly ever since Charlie presented him the bluish diamond.

“Two black coffees,“ Charlie said. “And keep them coming.”

They chewed dense, croissant-shaped pastries and drank their coffee at the wooden table. Beside them in the dark, the Eskimo chick was untangling a knotty mass of five-pound test fishing line in her lap, spinning it neatly around a small gray cardboard tube. The whites of her eyes gazed out at them from her grungy, tangled hair and sweat-stained animal pelts.

The Eskimo smiled, revealing stubby yellow teeth.

“Come here and I’ll give you a tumble, Little Black One,” she said, and patted her right thigh with a sealskin mitten. “Won’t charge nothing, neither. That’s ‘cause I like you.” She uttered the words with a mechanical incomplexity. It was like watching cans of peas roll off an assembly line.

Charlie refused to acknowledge anything but his black coffee. Within moments Buster watched the amorous invitation shift his way.

“Hey, I mean, thanks anyway,” Buster said. “But like, I been through a lot lately, and, well. I guess I’m just not into sex anymore. You mind?”

The Eskimo chick straightened her pelts and resumed spooling her tangly fishing line. She wiped her greasy forehead against the back of her hairy forearm.

“You’re heading in wrong direction, bird brains,” she said simply, gesturing at the white vistas. “Out where you’re going, no furniture. No restaurants or gas stations. No newspapers, no governments, no suburbs, no clocks. Minds come untethered in places like that. Take it from me, birds. My name is Muk Luk and I know.”

***

DAVE THE OTTER helped them into their parkas, snowshoes, and hats. He strapped nylon backpacks over their shoulders and loaded them up with bagged lunches and provisions, two bottles of dubiously sealed Jameson’s, three cans of Sterno, and a box of Blue Point matches.

“You come back soon now, y’hear?” Dave said, slapping the mud from their shoulders. “Remember–Dave’s Outpost is always open.”

Muk Luk was outside unloading a large, prehistoric-looking fish from her sled. The fish featured gnarly, crooked teeth, translucent whiskers, and weird dorsal extremities like tiny clenched fists.

“Big dinner,” Muk Luk said proudly. “Mighty good protein feast for me and any friends who care to join me.”

Charlie marched past her with a little swagger.

“Cheerio,” Charlie said.

The departed storm had left the sky scrubbed with brightness. Pale glacial shapes rimmed the horizon. Without another word, Charlie and Buster proceeded into the trackless waste.

“I warned you about the tundra, no kidding,” Muk Luk called after them, following along in a rattly sled pulled by an anxious, unwormed husky named Rick. “Terrible forces lurk out there, forces even sneakier than our friend Dave the Otter. Very nook-nook, these spirits, very devious. In the regions of colorless ice, your warm animal flesh will not be without its admirers.”

“Thanks for the warning, Muk Luk,” Charlie called briskly over his shoulder. “Don’t forget to write.”

“May the great white spirit protect you from all the nasty little spirits running around,“ Muk Luk said. She brought her sled to a halt, pots and pans dully chiming, and performed a concise genuflection.

“Take care of yourself, Black One,” she added in a whisper. “Muk Luk thinks you’re kind of cute.”

Charlie’s heels stirred up clouds of frost that stung Buster’s eyes and cheeks. All around them the landscape lacked weather and definition.

“By the way, Charlie,” Buster interposed. “Where are we going, anyway? I don’t mean to keep pestering you, but it’s something I’d like to know.’

“It’s not where we’re going that matters.” Charlie said. “It’s what we’re leaving behind.” Charlie gestured at the past’s dim horizon, where the figures of Muk Luk, her dog, and her sled had diminished to a brief, shimmering ellipses.

Muk Luk waved good-bye one last time.

“L’amant de neige,” she muttered bitterly. Wiping a crusty tear from one eye, she watched the small birds disappear into the vast staticky whiteness.

Then Muk Luk turned her mangy sled around and went home.

***

“SO THIS IS the part that confuses me, Charlie,” Buster said, skidding across the crusty powder in his oversized pink snowshoes. “If we want to warn everybody the humans are coming, then why’re we heading off where there ain’t nobody around to warn? I mean, Dave’s Trading Post isn’t exactly Boston, Massachusetts, you know.”

“It’s perfectly simple,” Charlie said, trudging ahead with dogged consistency, as if he were stamping out counterfeit coins with his feet. “I’m an animal-rights activist, committed to furthering the cause of my animal brethren throughout the universe. But at the same time, see, I also really need to be alone.”

Every so often a steel gray military jet passed overhead, pulling behind it a taut pink ribbon of exhaust. Whenever one of these jets appeared, Buster and Charlie would huddle underneath their white camouflage blanket, nibbling fugitively at thin butter sandwiches and chocolatey digestive biscuits.

Charlie gestured with the crust of his Wonder Bread.

“That’s a Mirage F1CR-200 spy plane, Buster. It’s got a twenty-seven-foot wingspan, an in-flight refueling boom, infrared cameras, and a complete range of airmobile image-processing equipment. That sucker can outfly, outsee, and outbattle any animal that was ever conceived of in the history of this feeble Animal Planet. I may not care much for human beings, Buster, but you gotta hand them one thing. They sure do some crazy things with metal.”

***

THEY JOURNEYED INTO regions of white storm and cold conquest where they encountered primitive cultures and strange, savage dialects even Charlie couldn’t comprehend. A wandering tribe of shaggy polar bears wearing wolf-head masks, bone necklaces, and burred, mossy dreadlocks who worshiped a rudely claw-carved wooden totem named Awe. A paranoid community of mollusks who could speak only two words and accomplish two purposes: “Procreate!” and “Die!” A couple of foxes with bad skin, a half-mad sea tortoise trying to mate with an aluminum pie tin, and a lone albatross drowsing in the branches of a dead tree.

“They call themselves human beings,” Charlie warned them, resorting to rough wing gestures and ice-scrawled rebuses when he had to. “They’ve got two legs, two hands, two eyes, and two ears. They walk on these big thick feet they’ve developed, kind of like me, see, only with these long arms swinging at their sides. They can’t swim very well without a lot of over-priced technical equipment; they can’t fly, they can’t smell, and they’re ugly as mortal sin. But just because they’re ugly and kind of stupid, whatever you do, don’t underestimate them. Okay, troops, repeat after me: Hu-man Be-ings. I’ll say it again. Hu-man Be-ings. Okay, now. Everybody!”

The pack of wary echinoderms glanced around self-consciously. They held their spears and shields with a loose-limbed discomposure.

“Ho-hum beanies,” they muttered in a weak, ragged chorus, shuffling anxiously from side to side. “Ho-hum bean-ies.”

“No no no, you blithering spelunkers! How are you going to combat a menace you can’t even pronounce? Now come on–and I mean everybody. Let me hear you!”

Everywhere they traveled, Charlie wielded his fiercest and most inspired oratory, causing many highly placed savages to fear his conviction. Village elders and witch doctors shook shrunken heads at Charlie, or tried to dispel his pungent rhetoric with burning incense and smoky torches. They claimed Charlie and Buster were evil spirits, bad Gods, figments of illusion, terrible dreams unleashed in the night.

“Big fish in small ponds,” Charlie explained to his slowly blinking acolytes and hangers-on. “They want to keep you stupid so they can continue seeming wise. If they’ve got such heap-um big medicine, why do they want our heads on a platter, huh? I’ll tell you why, you jabbering primordial boneheads. It’s because the imminent human oppression I’m warning you about is the same age-old oppression your local politicos have been practicing on you for generations. Remember this, guys–Charlie’s First Law. It’s not man against animal, or male against female, or even proles against bourgeoisie. It’s us against them.”

***

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT they were roused from their sleep and urged into scratchy clothing while swift offerings of doughy flour and salted meat were shoved into their pockets. Then they fled through the darkness pursued by hooded animals with flickering torches and wild baying wolves on long leather leashes.

“Holy mackerel, Charlie,” Buster complained during the most strenuous periods of fleeing, his blubber flapping against itself with the sound of wet laundry in a sirocco. “I heard something about they want to feed us our own bowels on a stick. It’s called the ogle-crunch ceremony or something.”

“The Ogle and Munch,” Charlie corrected, and pulled Buster into the abrupt, frosty aperture of a cavernous passageway.

“Ow ow ow, Charlie!” Buster was wriggling and squealing. The front half of his body was plunged in darkness, his buns and toes upended and exposed to the rushing, malevolent white world. “Help me, I’m stuck!”

“Come on, Buster. Quit fooling around.” Charlie fastened onto Buster’s bristling lapels and, taking a determined breath, pulled.

“Ow ow ow, Charlie, I mean it–I’m stuck!”

“You’re not stuck, bun brain. You’re too tense. Now take a deep breath and try to relax. ”

“Relax, Charlie? You want me to relax?”

Fear had dilated Buster’s pupils until he could see the long, moody cavern, gnarly with stalagmites. Behind them in the dark the mob of howling black boars came thundering closer, their blazing torches upraised like murderous clubs.

“All intruders must die!” they screamed. “Especially the penguin!”

Buster took a hard deep breath, clenched shut his eyes, and felt his bowels evacuate with a splash.

At the exact same moment, Charlie grabbed Buster by the neck and gave him a terrific yank–and with a wet, soggy plop Buster landed in the refrigerated cavern just as the scrabbling boars roared past overhead.

“Close call,” Charlie said, falling back against Buster’s panting stomach with a sigh.

Bright, refracted starlight whirled in the cavern like illuminated insects. Buster could smell the sharp, acidic tang of his own incontinence staining the snow outside.

“Tell me about it,” Buster said.

2. BAD LOVE

BACK AT DAVE’S Trading Post, Muk Luk pined and fretted away her days in a perilously leaning, Welfare-subsidized igloo constructed from ice, wire mesh, and Styrofoam packing insulation. The only Eskimo of her tribe to be relocated to the South Pole by America’s Federal Housing Program (which had decided to save money by offering housing to needy people in places they didn’t want to live), Muk Luk had eventually subsided into this strange new world with all her oldest, most familiar feelings of loneliness and anomie. In fact, some mornings she was so depressed she couldn’t even get out of bed to go to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She just lay there for hours, chewing beef jerky and examining herself in a small handheld mirror encrusted with grimy costume jewelry.

“No matter how much you tart yourself up, and no matter how many budget cosmetics you order through your local Avon representative, you will never be attractive by any means,” Muk Luk informed her puffy reflection. “No matter how politely you behave, nor how generously you offer your bodily fluids to strangers, human men will never do anything but disdain you, even sexually repressed military personnel, such as those you’ve occasionally bonked at the local weather stations. In fact, if it weren’t for large doses of Dave’s whiskey carefully applied, you probably wouldn’t engage in any sexual activity whatsoever. And when you come right down to it, what good is a heavily sedated man, anyway? Well, maybe a little more good than the various slimy pseudomammals you’ve been known to bring home. Maybe a little more good than the tattered dirty magazines you recover from military trash bins, or the long-distance call-in sex lines you desperately engage through pay phones, or the gas-powered vibrators you purchase from dubious mail-order catalogs.”

Gazing into her handheld vanity mirror, Muk Luk felt the terrible absence in her heart and she cried. Everything Muk Luk desired was negated by these hairy, heavily pockmarked cheeks, calamitous teeth, and red, rheumy eyes.

There were small rewards in her life, but not many. The resident heat of Rick the Husky’s body in her bed, and the thin blanket of soft blond hairs he was perpetually shedding throughout the cluttered apartment like dingy manna. There was the flickering illumination of Dave’s Trading Post on the hill, and the occasional choice cigarette butt discarded from roving military helicopters. Some nights, emboldened by cheap alcohol, Muk Luk even enjoyed a minor epiphany of sorts, staggering to the summit of a nearby snowy dune and gazing up at the radiant amazement of auroras and stars. A universe ruled by light, swirling with physics and indeterminacy. Distant, incomprehensible planets inhabited by strange bugs, birds, flowers, elephants, and trees. Submarine creatures, creatures that subsisted on plutonium and silicon, creatures without mouths or eyes or minds to make things matter. Lying on her back against the impacted ice, Muk Luk wondered at the bright universe and relapsed into her slow, swelling discontent. Stars popped and plummeted out there. Others exploded and collapsed. The universe wasn’t much more than a violent altercation, really, an infinitude of biological accidents and catastrophes. If you looked far away from the inhospitality of your own body, life ceased to mean anything. There was just all that light, all that motion, all that space you didn’t belong to.

If you thought about the universe in all its breadth and complexity, then logically your own sadness shouldn’t matter. But the crazy thing was, your own sadness always did.

***

ONE MORNING DURING winter’s waning Muk Luk was unloading supplies from her sled when she heard a thin mechanical revving in the distance. The tearing sound kept flat to the horizon, churning up a long plume of icy exhaust in its wake.

In the doorway of Muk Luk’s igloo, Rick the Husky wagged his ever-optimistic tail and grinned.

“Company’s coming,” Rick said. “What do you think of the chances, Muk Luk? You might even get laid.”

The jeep was army issue, and the two men in it wore shaggy white wool parkas, matching trousers, and wide tinted sunglasses. Their faces were weather roughened and raw.

“Lieutenant Jack Hollister, ma’am,” the driver said. “Navy Intelligence.” The jeep continued revving, as if anxious to get somewhere. “And this is my Soviet liaison, Sergeant Yuri Rudityev.”

Hollister performed a curt, patronizing salute while Yuri sneered around at the filthy reservation. The modular-style tract of crumbling, abandoned igloos. Overturned trash barrels and rusty steel sleds. The smell of animal urine and spoiled whale blubber.

“What a bloody tip, wankers.” Yuri had spent the last few months attached to a cultural-exchange unit in East London, and he still loved to exert the warm round shape of foreign vowels in his mouth. “Flippin’ ’eck. Get a load of this grungy squat.”

Lieutenant Hollister removed an eight-by-ten glossy photograph from his pouch pocket. He handed it to Muk Luk and instantly she knew. It was the message she had been waiting for all her life, passing through her skin like a thin field of electricity.

“You ever see this joker around?” Hollister asked. He propped his sunglasses on his forehead, giving Muk Luk the full benefit of his suspicious peer. “We think maybe he’s traveling in the company of a small black-and-white penguin.”

Muk Luk held the photograph in both hands like a psalm. If she had a beautiful voice, she could sing it. Then the entire world would know.

“We don’t want to hurt them,” Hollister said. “We only want to help them understand.”

Muk Luk looked at the photo one more time. Then, in her warmly blossoming heart, she said good-bye, and surrendered it with all the noble indifference she could muster.

“Stranger to me, stranger,” Muk Luk told the Lieutenant.

And began reloading the provisions onto her sled.

***

“SEEN THESE GUYS?” echoed Dave the Otter. “Hell, I wish I never. But I’m a compassionate sort of guy, right? A couple of my fellow animals show up out here, hungry and cold, well, I make them at home. I give them warm beds to sleep in. I listen to their sob stories. That’s what the world’s all about, ain’t it? The Judeo-Christian heritage and all that?”

Lieutenant Hollister cleared his throat, removing a dull pencil and a blue loose-leaf notebook from his shirt pocket. Sergeant Rudityev was busily pouring himself another tall glass of Stolichnaya.

“Cheers, you stupid tossers,” Yuri told the bars smelly disreputables, and showed them his tall glass before perfunctorily draining it.

Outside in the faintly falling, falling faintly snow, Muk Luk leaned into the frosty window, breaking the cold glare with her furry mittens. Dead fish were smoking on a wire rack over the fireplace, and a group of wary voles were being lured into a crooked card game by a pair of traveling corn-liquor salesmen.

“Subversive literature, that’s what they were selling,” Dave told the Lieutenant, pouring himself and the officers more free booze as he swelled with self-importance. “I never actually seen any of it, right, but it’s pretty obvious, ain’t it? They show up out here ratty and half-starved. They don’t mix socially with the other guests. They keep to themselves and don’t even join in with any of the gambling or whoring. All they do is act better than everybody else and spout off a lot of highly political mumbo jumbo. Denigrating you fine military types. Talking about animal oppression and the ‘so-called’ free market. We’ve heard it all a million times before, haven’t we? A lot of subversive chatter that never did any animals any good, just stirred up a whole lot of pointless blood and struggle. Look at you Russian guys, right? You finally learned the errors of your ways, didn’t you?”

Yuri didn’t respond, by this point immobilized by vodka. He stared into his empty glass as if he were explicating chemistry through a microscope.

“Pointless blood,” Yuri said softly, with a drunkard’s meaningless clarity. “Pointless struggle.”

Outside in the snow, Muk Luk and Rick the Husky heard the incoming night sweep toward them across the white ice like a manta ray, accompanied by a sparkling flutter of ionized particles. Muk Luk felt the hard click of temperature in the frosty window. Rick paced in a tight circle two or three times to get warm.

“Let’s either go after them,” Rick grumbled irritably, “or get back to bed.”

But of course by this point Muk Luk had already decided.

***

SHE MADE SURE the doors and windows of her igloo were double-locked and bolted, that the Sterno was extinguished, and the radio turned off. Then she wrapped herself in the layered stain and muddle of her entire furry wardrobe, and ate everything in her refrigerator not fit to carry.

Minutes later she was driving Rick the Husky across the spuming snow.

“I much prefer action to self-pity,” Rick confessed, thrilling to the rise of his own heat and adrenalin. “I mean, making the effort is a lot more important than getting good results, don’t you think? But on the other hand, I’ll sure miss our toasty bed.”

They were flying across the white World on skimming steel runners. They were hurtling into the quickening future rather than dreading the inviolate past.

“There are better things worth living for than our own hurt and misery,” Muk Luk declared to the white permafrost. “There are better things worth dying for, too.”

3. A DISCOURSE ON NATURE

“NASTY, BRUTISH AND short,” Lieutenant Hollister proclaimed, popping a Pall Mall between his lips. “That’s what Thomas Hobbes had to say about nature, Yuri, and nobody ever said it better. Nature red in tooth and claw. A vast hairy malaise of poisonous bugs, hissing snakes, rabid squirrels, and rocky beds. You look at nature, Yuri, and what do you see? Urine and feces everywhere. Rotting corpses and maggoty meat. You know what nature’s composed of, once you journey outside the warm, protective environs of our cities, shopping centers, and public schools? It’s a big toilet bowl, that’s what nature is. A big bloody cannibal feast. Everybody eating everybody else. Shitting everywhere and chewing up the scenery. So don’t try giving me any of that communistical ‘Oh how I love Mother Nature’ crap, Yuri. Because I just don’t buy it.”

They were driving back to the new military base on Penguin Island while Yuri leaned his forehead against the padded dash, moaning in a distressful self-communion. “Oh Mummy,” Yuri drooled. “What a royal pisser.” Yuri had spent all last night drinking vodka and all that morning throwing up.

“You know what I think we should do to Mother Nature, Yuri? I think we should tie her down with ropes. I think we should beat her over the head with a big stick. I think we should lock her in an iron cage with a television, some stuffed chairs, and a case of Diet Pepsi. And if Mother Nature makes a fuss? We hose her down with cold water and cut off her chow line. Because Mother Nature needs to learn discipline, Yuri. She needs a solid tour of duty with the good old-fashioned US. Marines.”

***

PENGUIN ISLAND WAS connected to the mainland by a short pontoon bridge erected by the first armored division. New tar and gravel roads had been laid, telephone lines established, and various corporate franchises installed. McDonald’s. Burger King. Pizza Hut. Safeway. Wal-Mart and Unocal. The canning factory had been shut down and replaced by a gigantic Bob’s Discount Warehouse. These days, local penguins either worked as “food-dispensers” for one of the corporate franchises or as junior clerks at the new military base.

“I love Burger King,” Yuri said, with a faint gleam in his eye. Then, as succinct as a genuflection, he leaned over the side of the jeep and retched up the last few drops of green bile his roiling stomach possessed.

“You know who started all this ‘love nature’ crap, don’t you, Yuri?” Hollister had pulled the jeep up to the new Military HQ, which was conveniently located next door to what was formerly the Ice Floe Bar & Grill, and what was presently the Officer’s Mess. “Jean Jacques Rousseau, that’s who. Another one of you flaky Europeans, Yuri, and please don’t take that personal or anything. Have you ever read Jean Jacques Rousseau, Yuri? My motto’s always been ‘Get to know the enemy before the enemy gets to know you.’”

Hollister cranked on the emergency brake and leapt out of the jeep. He was already unzipping his shaggy white overcoat when he came around to help Yuri disboard.

“Oh, Jesus Christ, matey,” Hollister said. He was looking at the mess Yuri had made down the side of their freshly requisitioned army jeep. “This is what I call goddamn unprofessional.”

***

“JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU was the first communistical type to talk about communal living, and peaceful coexistence, and nuclear disarmament, and God knows what else. He had this crazy idea that nature is a wonderful place. Go back to nature, he kept saying. Be one with glorious Mother Nature. Kiss the earth, fuck an Indian, marry a tree. Jean Jacques Rousseau, incidentally, was a self-confessed masturbator, liar, thief, and perhaps even a homosexual. God, sometimes I don’t know who I hate most. The goddamn Communists or the goddamn homosexuals. It’s so, I don’t know. So natural, I guess. So steeped in the vile squalor of nature, all the awful pain and imprecision of it. Butt fucking, Yuri. That’s what’s ruining this great world of ours. A bunch of retarded animal types who can’t tell one hole from another.”

Lieutenant Hollister was smoking his Pall Mall and being blithely carried along by the warm integrity of his own voice. He heard Yuri snoring faintly beside him in the brightly lacquered, harshly fluorescent waiting room. It felt so good, Lieutenant Hollister thought. It felt so good to finally understand what the world of nature was all about.

“The General will see you now.”

Lieutenant Hollister glanced up. The receptionist didn’t look half bad for her age. She was wearing a misty haze of blush and cosmetics, and a tight lacy skirt that showed off her spectacularly large, wobbly behind.

Lieutenant Hollister loved girls with big behinds. Especially native girls.

“Thank you, dear,” Hollister said, reaching out to give slumbering Yuri a little stir. He felt a sparkle of confidence rise up from his chest. It was like inhaling bubbles off the surface of a champagne glass.

Then, suddenly, his newfound confidence was speaking itself on his lips.

“And what might your name be, honey?”

The penguin looked at him out of one cocked, disamusing eyeball.

“My name’s Sandy, Officer. And I might as well let you know right now. I’m already married.”

***

GENERAL HEATHCLIFF WAS in a jovial mood. Promoted just two weeks before, he had been flown in from London after distinguishing himself as Head Caretaker in charge of the London Zoo Rationalization Program. Now he had a higher rank, better pay, and his pick of the local native girls. As a result, General Heathcliff was very, very happy. He didn’t even mind Antarctica that much.

“These are good people,” General Heathcliff generously pronounced, passing around a bowl of mixed nuts. “These are kind people. These are simple people. You know what your average penguin wants out of life, boys? A nice evening meal of greens and mackerel. A warm place to go to the bathroom. And maybe a little raw nookie out behind the snowplow. Penguins don’t run themselves ragged with a lot of big, overpriced ambitions like us humans do. Fancy automobiles, say, or luxury yachts. That’s because penguins experience the fullness of life in ways us corrupted Homo sapiens types never will. I don’t want to spoil that for them, understand? When I leave Penguin Island in a year or two, I want to think I’m leaving these penguins just as sweet and innocent as the day I found them. Do you boys follow me? Do you have any idea how much more important the quality of life is than the quantity?”

“Absolutely, sir. My thoughts exactly.”

Hollister suppressed a deep, labyrinthine yawn, one that reached up from his belly and toes. Yuri had fallen asleep again and was faintly snoring against Hollister’s left shoulder insignia.

The General droned on and on, making the neat, featureless office seem increasingly remote and inspecific.

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that’s what I want to protect these cute little penguins from. Knowledge, boys. A lot of intellectual mumbo jumbo that’ll just worry their puny little brains.” The General was gnawing a large, flaky brazil nut. He got up and came around his desk with an informal, self-deprecating shrug. “And I don’t need to tell you that despite the remarkable progress we’ve made in the world of international diplomacy lately, there are still some pretty sneaky, evil creatures running around. Creatures who talk too much. Creatures who think they know all the answers. Creatures with bad attitudes toward authority. Creatures who don’t believe in our free-market economy. I think you boys know precisely the sorts of creatures I’m talking about.”

General Heathcliff perched on the corner of his varnished black desk. He was looking directly at an eight-by-ten glossy photograph tacked to a bulletin board on the bathroom door. The glossy photograph depicted the face of a large black crow. A shiny red bull’s eye was painted over the crow’s face with what looked like nail polish.

The General himself, however, wasn’t looking at the glossy photograph. Instead, he was looking into Hollister’s eyes and making sure he looked at it.

“Some men are called on by history, Hollister. These men are ordained by God, or by the World Spirit, or by the Great What-have-you. These men must be ready to make the Big Decisions.”

“I realize that, sir.”

“Are you one of those men, Hollister? Are you ready to make the Big Decisions when called upon by History?”

“I hope so, sir.”

“Do you believe in your country, Hollister? Do you believe in all the little countries, like poor Yuri’s there, that need us to protect and inspire them? Little countries want to be good, Hollister. They want to be like us. But at the same time, they need our shining example to point them the way. Especially these days, Hollister. When sometimes the night gets so black you can hardly see your own hand in front of your face.”

“I know what I have to do, and I’m fully capable of doing it, sir.”

Yuri continued to slumber, breathing fitfully into Hollister’s left ear. In many ways, this was the happiest moment of Lieutenant Hollister’s entire life.

The General performed a curt little shrug and clasped his hands together in his lap, as if he were cradling a scared baby bird in the mesh of his fingers.

“So tell me, son. Tell me what you’ll need.”

Hollister was looking at the half-depleted can of Planter’s Mixed Nuts on the General’s desk. He imagined that every individual nut was a hand grenade, and that every hand grenade contained a tiny metal pin.

He spoke with a conviction and self-confidence he had never felt before.

“I need a Sikorsky EH-6OC Blackhawk, sir. I need it fitted with a GR-9 intercept receiver and a TLQ-27A jammer. I need the full range of Aircraft Survivability Equipment, and flare dispensers mounted in the tailboom. I need flak jackets. I need Code R Clearance. I need a brilliant tail gunner, like Yuri here, and heat-seeking missiles, and a grenade launcher, sir. I need it all by tomorrow at oh-six-hundred hours, sir, and then I promise. Our big-mouthed friend mounted on the bathroom door?”

“Yes, Hollister?”

This time it was Hollister’s turn to gesture, and the General’s turn to look.

“Just give me one week, sir,” Hollister said. “And I’ll blow that cheeky little bastard right out of the sky.”

4. THE UTOPIAN IMPULSE

SOME NIGHTS BUSTER lay awake beside the crackling fire and tried to remember what his life had been like before Charlie. Back then, when life had seemed so unreal, he awoke every morning before six to take out the trash. Then he fired up the wood stove and activated the gas central heating. By the time he finished his ablutions, Sandy was already poaching his eggs and frying his toast. Then they went off to their respective jobs, came home, listened to the radio, and went back to bed. Much like the island on which he was born, Buster’s life had been perfectly circumscribed by routine and nonadventure. Sometimes Buster missed his old life and wanted it back. Other times, though, it all seemed terribly detached and meaningless, like photographs and memorabilia snatched from somebody else’s scrapbook.

“Charlie?”

“Hmm?”

“When it’s all over, where will you go?”

Charlie rolled over in his ragged muddle of pelts and plastic tarpaulins. “What do you mean where will I go?”

“I mean where will you go, Charlie? You don’t want to spend the rest of your life out here, do you? In Antarctica?”

Logs cracked and disassembled. The red heart of the fire glowed momentarily brighter and a strange softness fell over the minimal encampment. Something unfamiliar was happening, Buster thought. It was almost like being… relaxed.

After a while Charlie said, “I guess if I could be anywhere I wanted, I’d probably go live in the country, like maybe New England or the South of France. Some place with seasons in it. Fall, winter, summer, you know. And I’d stay put for good this time, no more migratory hassles for me ever again, all that ridiculous packing and unpacking and storing things in everybody’s basement. I’ve done my share of traveling, Buster. I’ve done my share of searching for greener pastures. When I finally settle down, boy, I intend to really settle down.”

Buster rolled onto one elbow and tried to look into Charlie’s eyes, but Charlie’s eyes were closed. Charlie’s back was to the fire, his face as black and featureless as a silhouette.

“Would you have a house, Charlie? If you were going to live somewhere all year round, you’d need a house, wouldn’t you? Would you have a guest room, Charlie? I mean, if I were to come and visit, would there be a place for me?”

“I’d have tiers and tiers of guest rooms, Buster, don’t you worry. It’d be a house with enough space to accommodate dozens, perhaps even hundreds of visitors, friends, and extended-family members, free keys and electric blankets for everybody. If you’re like a snow marten, or a cardinal, or even a peripatetic penguin such as yourself, Buster, and you happen to find yourself in my neck of the woods? Well, you’d be goddamn welcome anytime of the year, no kidding. A place where everybody takes what they need and gives what they can afford.”

“What about food, Charlie? What about curtains and furniture?”

“A couple of enormous refrigerator-freezers, packed with goodies. Häagen-Dazs, Buster. Corn dogs, chili con carne, Sarah Lee Pound Cake, all the Pringles you can eat. And no drapes or curtains at all, because we’d have nothing to be ashamed of, right? Certainly not our sexuality, or our bodily functions, or our bad moods and blemishes. We’d just let the whole wide world stare in at us, Buster. What would we care?”

“We wouldn’t care at all, would we, Charlie?” Buster was breathing a little faster. “And because we’d be taking care of each other, we wouldn’t have to worry about anything, right? About Army Intelligence, or kids with BB guns, or, I hate to say it, but you know, Charlie. We wouldn’t even have to worry about them.”

“Cats,” Charlie concluded emphatically. He sounded as calm and disaffected as a math teacher announcing the solution of a logarithm. “We wouldn’t have to worry about anything, Buster, especially not cats. We’d be what they call a self-sustaining, self-governing, self-determining community. Which means we wouldn’t just sit around waiting for some human being or religious charismatic to come along and make our decisions for us. We’d simply be ourselves, probably for the first time in our natural lives. If somebody didn’t like the way we acted, or the way we chose to live, well, they could just leave. No hard feelings. We’d show them straight to the door.”

It was the best night’s sleep either of them had enjoyed in ages. When they awoke the next morning, the campfire was extinguished and warm spring sunlight was pouring down from the blue sky. All across the permafrost Buster could hear the bright, brittle sounds of ice cracking.

They gathered up their few possessions with a new affection, like wondrous religious artifacts or letters from home. Two plastic spoons, two forks. Two battered aluminum plates and one iron saucepan. A large packet of beef jerky and a smaller packet of Bull Durham smoking tobacco. It wasn’t as if life was more fully lived out here in the wilderness, Buster thought. It was just more easily accounted for.

The two set out with a renewed sense of purpose. For the first time in their travels, they weren’t in a hurry to get somewhere, or to get away from somewhere else.

“Wouldn’t it be great, Charlie, if like there really was this worldwide animal revolution and all?” Buster was a leaner, hungrier version of himself, with firm haunches and a grizzly, unshaven face. He had learned there was just no telling how far a penguin could walk if he set his mind to it. “Animals living together in perfect harmony, like this amazing leap forward in terrestrial evolution. Not a group mind or anything simple like that, Charlie, but just this really benevolent animal concord, like music, Charlie, only sweeter and more lasting. Animals helping each other get by. Horses, dogs, birds, beasts, humans beings, gorillas, shrimp, perch, zebras, and giraffes. Roaming freely all over the world. Sharing their thoughts and opinions, their food and their beds. Wouldn’t that be great, Charlie? Wouldn’t that be something?”

“Absolutely,” Charlie said. He was marching with a lighter step than before, showing Buster the way. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

It was a great moment, Buster thought, a single point in time when they didn’t need anything but dreams to sustain them. Wouldn’t it be great if this moment could last forever?

But of course it couldn’t last. Not even for another moment.

***

“WHAT’S THAT?”

“What’s what, Charlie?”

A white instant. A faint whistle of wind and expectation.

“I don’t hear anything, Charlie. What are you talking about?”

“That,” Charlie said. He had swung his backpack onto the ground. “That.”

Thin. Unresonant. Filled with flat spaces. Just a rhythm at first. A vague melody.

Duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh.

“That, Charlie,” Buster whispered. “What’s that?”

’ere we go, duh-duh, ’ere we go.

Charlie was already disentangling their white camouflage blanket from the backpack.

’ere we go, ’ere we go, ’ere we go!

“Footballers?” Charlie said, grimacing. “That’s funny. I didn’t think anybody in Antarctica even played football.”

They saw it before they heard its muddy thunder, a black knobby shape sweeping toward them across the flat plains with faceted glass eyes like some prehistoric insect. A helicopter. An army-green whirring helicopter.

’ere we go,

’ere we go, ’ERE WE GO!

’ere we go,

The voice boomed out across the plains through a pair of enormous Blaupunkt loudspeakers mounted on both sides of the nose like weirdly arched eyebrows. The roar of the engine was overtaking the helicopter itself, and then suddenly the wind whipping past, ruffling their feathers with a hot dry belligerence, like bullies pushing past on a subway.

“But, Charlie,” Buster said. He was staring at the miraculous leering speed of it. The fit-fit-fit of the rotors seemed at once compelling and profound. “What’s a helicopter looking for way out here?”

At this point Charlie pulled the white camouflage blanket up over their heads with a flourish. It whoofed open like a parachute and settled over them like a shroud.

“Who the hell do you think they’re looking for, Buster?”

Fear was cold and mechanical, Buster thought, not feverish and clammy like you’d expect.

Then the thunder was lifting up from the ice and rock, rattling at their camouflage blanket. They heard nothing and they heard everything and then they heard nothing again and the shadow of the machine roared over them like a miniature storm and diminished again into the blue sky.

’ere we go, duh-duh-duh, ’ere we go.

Duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh.

The air was cold again.

The sun turned from yellow to white.

After a few more invisible beats, Buster took a deep breath.

And started to his feet.

“Jesus, Charlie. That was a close call–”

But he didn’t see the same relief in Charlie’s eyes. Instead, Charlie stood poised on the verge of his own attention, peering into the helicopter’s ebbing thunder with an abstract scowl.

“Listen,” he whispered. “Just listen.”

Buster saw the shadow first, rippling on the horizon.

And then the rotors.

And then the voice of it.

Duh-du-duh, duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh.

“They’ve picked us up on infrared,” Charlie said, as matter-of-fact as a bus announcer sending passengers to Gate 27. “We’re gonna have to run for it.”

***

HEADQUARTERS REFUSED THEM the Sikorsky, but finally came through with a Bell AH-1 Cobra, which featured a General Electric turret under nose with a M197 20mm. three-barrel gun, and a Minigun plus 40mm. grenade-launcher.

“The Sikorsky’s a bit overkill, don’t you think?” suggested the General. “After all–we’re only talking about a couple of stupid birds.”

The Cobra lacked the sort of high-tech sophistication that usually sent Hollister’s hormones spinning. But he liked riding high in the cockpit, with wild boyish Yuri in full view below him, furiously manning the weaponry and microphones.

“We’ve got the little bastards now,” Hollister said. He was taking the ’copter around in a keen 360-degree pivot. “I think it’s time we cooked ourselves a little bird pudding.”

Then he drove the Cobra down toward the white ice until there was nowhere the fleeing birds could run but up.

***

IT WASN’T LIKE fear at all. It was like turning on an appliance, or activating some secret interior engine in yourself. It was like life, really. Like some perfect implicit expression of life itself.

“Run, Buster! To the top of the hill! Run like you’ve never run before!”

Buster was already trying, the slushy ice absorbing his energy like a sponge. It was like running up a down escalator. It was like running in a dream.

“Up the hill and over!” Charlie shouted. He was behind Buster, pushing at his lumbering buttocks with both wings. “You can do it, Buster! I know you can!”

The bullets were hitting the snow with muffled, splattery pops. Plup-pluppa-plup. It was almost funny, the sound the bullets made. Buster almost laughed.

The helicopter gliding down through the air like a summons, drawing the moment thin and resonant. You could hear every sound your own blood made. You could hear every whisper.

“You gotta believe, Buster, even when it doesn’t make sense! You gotta believe there’s something over that hill, something worth running for, some place you’ve always dreamed of getting to. Perfect community, Buster. Eternal love, great sex, loads of cash, I don’t care, Buster. Anything, anything at all. But whatever you do, run faster than those bullets. Run faster than that overpriced machinery coming at us. Run faster than time, Buster, because that’s what it means, see? When you’re running toward something you believe in, you’re running outside history itself. You’re running toward places only your mind can get to. Believe, Buster. Believe that a better world’s waiting for us on the other side of that hill!”

Buster felt the lean hard-knotted muscles in his calves and his flanks. He was strong. He was hungry. He was all-penguin.

“A few more yards, Buster. And then dive, no matter what’s out there. No matter what’s waiting for us–just DIVE!”

Plup-plup-pluppa-pluppa-plup-plup.

The bright blue sky. The startling white ice. And then the round summit, the verge of all possibility. Altitude, oxygen, atmosphere, light.

They felt the heat and wind of the rotors on their backs as they reached the summit and then they were looking down into the face of it. Perfect love. Total happiness. The ideal utopian world, waiting for them with open arms.

“It’s you,” Buster whispered, hurling himself over the summit, his soft round body floating through the air like a blind dirigible. “I never thought it would be you.”

She was standing on the brow of the hill, wrapped in muddled furs. The biggest, ugliest, and most wonderful-looking female Eskimo anybody had ever seen in the entire history of the Animal Planet.

And she was poised to hurl an enormous metal spear.

5. ON TARGET

THE WHITE ICE rushed to greet Buster as he splashed and tumbled in a confused assortment of limbs and expectations.

Charlie was next over the hill, the helicopter’s vast shadow wrapping itself around him. Then, from out of nowhere, Charlie felt Muk Luk’s hard hand on his shoulder, pushing him out of the way.

“Watch out,” Rick the Husky warned from where he lay in back of the barricaded sled. “And let the lady do what the lady does best.”

Then Muk Luk was taking four long striding steps across the ice, arched, wristy, tiptoed, and sublime. Everything about her for these few moments was totally perfect.

“Maybe she’s not half so ugly as I thought,” Buster conceded, and lapsed exhausted into the unconscious snow.

The helicopter lifted over the summit of the hill like a dull green God, wrathful and indolent, rotors churning, guns blazing away.

Then the spear was in the air.

And Charlie watched.

There was a crack and a chatter and the spear penetrated the whirring rotors, pinning the entire helicopter to the blue sky like a butterfly specimen to a killing tray.

The rotors missed a beat. Two beats. Three.

‘ere we we go

‘ere we we go–

Then the entire machine performed an extraordinary backflip.

Then, just in case nobody had been watching the first time, it performed another.

“Muk Luk hate the military-industrial complex,” Muk Luk said, shrugging her stiff shoulders. “Muk Luk wish they take all their stupid toys and go home.”

The helicopter landed upside down in the snow with a lumbering crack. There was a slow pause like an afterthought.

Then, succinctly, it exploded.

Drifts of glass and metal fluttered over the breathless spectators like snowflakes at Christmas. Muk Luk and Charlie took two steps to the hill’s summit and gazed down.

“Jesus, Muk Luk,” Charlie said. “I guess there’s only one thing left to say.”

Muk Luk’s lips were pursed. Oily flames reflected in her eyes like a memory of determination.

“What’s that, Black Bird?”

Charlie shrugged deferentially.

“Nice shot, lady.”