Of Dodos and Men
Elaine Hughes
It was a hot day. Two people were walking in the sun and suffering. One was a woman with an unraveling fiber-straw hat, and the other was a man streaked with colored mud. They had been stumbling around the shoreline, and the heat had overpowered their last argument. The man's colored mud was streaked from sweat, and he was having difficulty holding his spear in his sweaty hands. The woman held nothing but the brim of her hat. Suddenly the man stopped and squinted into the distance. Puddles from last night's rain were turned into sheets of reflective magma under the unrelenting sun.
"Do you see something?" asked the woman.
The man squatted down, resting on his knuckles. He grunted and took off down the beach on all fours, apelike. She shouted for him to wait, and ran to catch up. Halfway down the beach the man transitioned to running with two legs. Still sprinting, he reached into a bouncing backpack and pulled out a club. In the center of the beach was a white fluffy bird, with a large beak on a small head. It waddled on stubby legs, and made a honking noise when the man slammed his club over its back. The bird sailed across the beach like a golf ball and landed at the feet of the woman in the hat. The man raised his club again; the sun blazed behind him turning him into a smiling, spitting shadow.
"Stop!" the woman cried, throwing herself on top of the crooked bird. "Don't kill it!"
The man was panting and sweating, his arms sagged over his head and he dropped the club to his side. "Not gonna kill it," he said. "Just gonna knock it out."
"By beating it half to death?" the woman asked. She hugged the bird to her chest, it made a small honking noise.
He stared at her in disbelief. "Not this again. Can we come out here just one time without you trying to save every damn bird?"
She stuck her tongue out at him. "There is no good reason for you to hurt this poor, innocent, wittle fluffy wuffy birdie wirdy." Her speech slurred into baby talk, she booped the end of its beak.
"I'm hungry! You're hungry! We need it for eggs!" He paused. "Or meat."
"You barbarian." Her stomach grumbled. "There are enough berries in this jungle for everyone." She held the dodo under one arm, and with the other reached back into her own backpack and pulled out several four pound jars filled with colored berries. She scooped some out with her bare hand and crammed them into her mouth, red juice dripping down her chin and staining the white dodo. Her stomach rumbled again.
"Starve then, vegan." He glared at her. "What can you do with an untamed dodo?"
"Make it a symbol!" She held it over her head. The dodo's neck was bent like a curly straw. "This dodo represents the unchained, free, and…" she glared back at him. "…innocent, creatures that live in this jungle. As long as I shall live they will be under my protection. SAFE! From any ill-doers and…"
A dilophosaurus sprang from the brush, sailed above the two people, and sank its teeth into the dodo's crooked neck. The breeze it created knocked off the woman's hat. "Kill it! Kill it!" she shrieked.
The painted man sprang into action, slamming his club wildly into the tangled mess of scales and feathers. He beat, and beat, and she screamed, and screamed until the dino stopped moving. Blood sprayed everywhere, streaking his war paint further. He turned to her, she was crouching behind a skinny berry bush.
"Is it okay?" She asked, tiptoeing towards him.
"It's a little mushy."
The dodo had been pulverized into a feathery washcloth, and the dilophosaurus was equally flat. But as she crept closer, she saw the brief flair of a nostril or the rise and fall of their chests. She sighed.
"At least they're still aliAHHHH!?" She screamed in horror.
The man was wrenching they're jaws open and packing them to the brim with black berries.
She took off her hat which unraveled back into grass making it more of a pom pom… and beat him with it.
He stood up. He was practically a foot taller than her, but despite his looming stature, he backed away from her swatting hands. "What? It's already knocked out. Am I supposed to NOT tame them?" He traded his splintered, bloody club for his spear and waltzed towards the water.
The woman threw the shreds of her hat at him, which fell lamely to the sand. She stomped the sand, red in the face, completely apoplectic, as he waded into the cold water.
She'll be fine, he thought. He knew they needed meat to tame the dilophosaurus -if it survived- and fish were made almost entirely of meat. Spear in hand, he held his breath and sank under the water. He saw no fish. A long ways off there was a bubble of jellyfish, and he was surrounded by leafy seaweed, but there were no fish. He came up for air, then went back under. He looked harder, like he had on the beach, and saw something. It was small, black, and swimming. Bingo.
He swam further into the ocean, the sand dune sloping away leaving a much larger, emptier space under him. As he got closer, he realized that it was coming closer too. Stupid fish, he thought. It was also getting larger. He tried to concentrate on it, but found the lack of oxygen too distracting. He swam up for air. As soon as his head broke the surface his ears opened to sounds. Primarily he heard the furious shouts of the woman, which were distant, and then the cawing of seagulls. After a gulp of salty air he dipped back down to catch his prey.
It was gone. He looked around. He felt sandpaper yank the hair of his leg. His eyes darted down and connected with a pair of blazing, blood-red eyes, eyes he knew well, for he had seen these eyes before - eyes that plagued every fisherman. Those eyes belonged to a Shark. The Shark began to circle him, marking the outskirts of its death pen. Instinctively the man stabbed the side of the Shark, his spear piercing the rough skin revealing the delicious insides that the Shark housed. With the spear still embedded in its meaty back the man whipped around and rushed back to land.
It was one torpedo racing after another. The man's arms slapped the water and threw up frothy wings behind him. All he could feel was his heart contracting in his throat, and the pins and needles numbing his limbs. Suddenly his hands struck sand, sediment ground under his nails. His hands dug into the ground as he propelled himself forward. He threw himself out of the water, arms open to the air with the sun on his back. It was welcoming, even relieving, to feel the wind chill the water that encased his body. The bright sun that had greeted him with safety and warmth slowly began to vanish, being eclipsed by something much larger, and sinister. The man looked up and saw a pale white belly stained red with its own blood, looming over head. His eyes widened. They both came down. Just from the weight of the shark the man could guess where all the fish went.
He felt like the underside of a boulder, having to feel gravity's wrath and every grain of sand wedging into his pores. There was no air, no light - no room for anything but him, the beach, and his colossal oppressor. Just as his slow internal screaming began, the pain of the sand lessened, and his body un-crumpled like a balloon receiving air for the first time. If only, he thought to himself, I had tasted meat one last time… or breath. He really wanted to breathe again. The thought became more plausible by the second, and suddenly his wish came true. He was able to roll onto his back and found himself squinting at pockets of sunlight. The shark was dissipating into the air in shreds, floating away like flakes of ash from wood on a fire. Through the flair of the sun and the ribbons of shark he saw the woman's face.
She was sunburned, bloody, panting, and her eyes held more murder than the shark's had. "You imbecile," she spat. She was carrying an axe, but switched it out for his spear which fell to the ground without its holder. Sand scraped his skin when she dug the butt of the spear underneath him, and pried him up like a stone.
"How do I look?" he asked.
"Like an idiot," she said, "like the world biggest, flattest, dumbest idiot."
"Not mushy?"
She glared at him like the sun and handed him his spear. He propped himself up and tried to rub the sand out of his eyes. "Thanks," he said.
She grunted. "The Dilo woke up and ate the bird."
He looked up at her. "Sorry."
"It's fine."
It was clearly not fine, but he didn't say anything. Instead he worked on standing up, then looked across the beach. The sun was in its earliest stage of setting, and the sky was beginning to turn a soft orange. Both of their stomachs rumbled. He asked, "Do you have any more of those berries?"
"I tried to feed them to the dodo, and..."
He sighed. "Then let's go back to the base, there might be some fiber to chew on." He started to limp down the beach, but stopped. "Are you coming?"
She looked down. "I can't move."
"Why?"
She opened her backpack. It had been relatively empty before, only carrying a few tools and the berries, but now it was packed to the brim with raw fish meat. Then he noticed her pockets were filled with meat, prime meat. He looked down at her hat, which was only a few knots, but now it was a hanging pot full of meat. He smiled. "Let me help you carry some of that." As the sun set, they walked, hand-in-hand towards the glow of the small campfire.