M—nt-kw-: Tale of a Man-Eater by Chris Aahkoleeka Bowyer
Twisting branches creak loudly at the passing contact of the boy’s body. His limbs bash against branches and scrape across bark, causing blood to well in shallow drops on his skin. Hair catches in searching forks and yanks his scalp back and his eyes up. His labored breathing is almost imperceptible over the panicked footfalls, his own, crashing through the wooded undergrowth.
What follows him is unconcerned with noise. Silence betrays it more than sound – an absence of movement, a cloistering of air and soul that blankets sensation. Its terror is wrapped in down and soft furs, deadened as a muffled drum but deep as thunder. An invisible but hungering maw awaits each footfall, talons show no sign save certainty that they reach for a hand or shoulder. Truth means nothing in the soundless din of terror that is the being’s pursuance.
Faster go the boy’s feet, faster the too-loud footsteps, their pace nearly catching his heart’s as he skips over roots and ruts he’s known for years. He’s certain he can hear a second heartbeat – too calm, too regular – in the darkness around him. It comes from everywhere and nowhere, from in his head and from the boughs above. The path he’s known for so long betrays its alien nature, hidden until this moment.
That placid-paced, tepid beating had been following him since the moon had first appeared in the last dusk’s sky and long before. This sound, whose known-ness of rhythm should have done something to belie the danger it signified, had only been following him tonight. The sound, the feeling that a second heartbeat was beating near his own in the darkness, had been following him for months.
“Come back before dark,” his grandmother had warned him, “and you must be quiet, or the spirits will hear you.”
She spoke with grim seriousness. He knew which spirits she meant: those spirits were why he knew not to whistle at night, were why he hadn’t wanted to take this path back to his family’s sugar camp. His grandmother was adamant – they had forgotten two bags of the sugar they had spent weeks making, and what was the point of making those bags if they weren’t even going to be left as an offering, just left?
He’d only just picked the sacks up from where they were buried near his family’s sugar camp, when the sound he had felt became this sound he could hear and fear had flooded his senses. He’d dropped the sacks where he stood.
Well, they’re just left now.
It should have been a short trip and he should have been back already. He regrets his spitefulness before he has finished the thought.
“Besides, grandson,” and she had paused, misty-eyed, “you know the path so well.”
He’d known the monster longer than the path. It had shown him the worst places to trip, the best gnarls to set snares beneath. The only reason the path was wider than those the deer left, Mahkoonsa told himself, was because of he and his brother’s feet. It – he – had shown him how to clean the flesh of his quarry so he would not become ill, to prepare and inter the bones beneath their flesh so that the slain animal might return and its spirit be reborn again.
Aware that the monster would not bother cleaning his bones, he focuses his attention back to lifting each foot in time, pushing himself further through the forest. He urges the questions of his bones away as he plants a moss-wet moccasin on a protruding root, a kind of bone itself, and pushes his speed.
Mahkoonsa ventures a glance behind him but sees only the shifting undergrowth, freshly trampled. He finds this anything but encouraging as he stumbles over the path, catching himself without falling and immediately trying to regain his pace.
He lifts his gaze and can see the tree line ahead, can imagine the open air of the clearing on his sweat-dampened brow. The heartbeat thunders louder. He knows from his grandmother’s stories that the moonlight might deter the monster but also hopes, naively, that he might outpace it in the open: a rabbit from a fox.
The last clinging bits of flora give way to windless air, the clearing offering not so much as a breeze to dry his sweating face. He does not drop his pace, only sprints further into the openness as the second heartbeat quiets ever so slightly. It still feels like it’s pounding from within Mahkoonsa’s own breast, competing with his lungs in a breathless, bloodless contest of strength. His lungs gain the smallest ground.
He approaches the center of the clearing and slows, finally, to a stop. Gasping at the stillness as his vision swims, forcing the stagnant air into his chest, he finds himself unable to look up from the earth at his feet. Doubled over, he tries to will his head back and up to the air above.
He freezes mid-motion, transfixed in an ungainly crouch with his hands halfway to his head and his mouth agape. His vision is arrested by a figure in the trees, darker than the sky in the night’s long storm. The silhouette it casts is tall and lean, impossibly so on both accounts. He was not that tall before. It had once been stout and strong.
It bends down, eye level to the boy and close enough to touch, and Mahkoonsa realizes – an unbearable epiphany – that only his brother’s stoutness had left him. It steps closer, escaping the abject blackness into obscuring grays, near enough to the tree line that Mahkoonsa swears he can smell the rot of his brother’s ever-empty stomach. He remembers the stories: a hunger that cannot be sated, an implacable relentlessness no warrior could match, an indomitable endurance beyond any living thing.
That was the only lightness in the memories: his brother was dead as far as he was concerned. He had died last winter, wandered out into the blinding storms with their father. Neither of them had returned. But if his brother was gone, why was this face so uncannily similar?
He thought of the fat, crawling bugs – the ones his sister said had too many legs to be cute and sometimes had spots on them. Mahkoonsa’s father had said that these moohsiaki, these little crawling ones, painted these eyes on their bodies so as to scare away the birds that would’ve liked to eat them. His mother scoffed at his father’s idle stories, uncorroborated by any elders before, but Mahkoonsa knew those same birds that ate the crawlers could fluff their feathers up to look bigger, scaring away their hunters. Starkly he realizes that he had known of no meat-seekers, no animal-eaters, so suited to turn this sort of trap on prey rather than on predator. Looking into the murderous maw of recognition, he does now.
The eyes staring into Mahkoonsa’s own have the same patterns – the same dark beams radiating from charcoal pupils, black suns darkening an iris of churned earth dimly illuminated by the moon. His mother had cried when she looked at Mahkoonsa for months after his father and brothers’ deaths; she wept at the sight of his eyes, somehow partners to his brother’s. While he and his brother had been born three winters apart, their eyes were born twins.
The elder set now sank like stones into a jagged face, a lake of shattered ice. Its rictus grin splits the familiar into a rift, a valley separating and connecting the unnervingly familiar halves and their distinctly predacious aspects. Two frozen banks, dimpled like cobblestone ice, drift away from the kinoonki, the deep part of the water, as more teeth bare themselves. Flesh hangs loose at its neck, yet the features above its chin are twisted memories given life. The corners of its – his – eyes pinch back until finding his temples, where tufts of unkempt hair hang from irregular patches of ashen, rotting skin. Merely a glimpse of the emaciated face leaves a permanent wound on the mind, a slice that will never scar. Now the boy has no doubt that his brother is long dead, regardless of who the monster may have once “been.” His brother would not – could not – be rotting alive in that gaunt shell.
As Mahkoonsa stares across the space, his vision blurs once more. Every shining point of moonlight on stone or dew tells him that it is instead the point of one of his brother’s sharp teeth, every gleaming fleck of dust another reddened eye fixing him in place. Fangs and spinning eyes weave in and out of existence – reflecting on aerial flecks of detritus. Motes of terror dance in a halo around the monster and through the clearing, dust and pollen siding with it rather than the boy. At last, blinking away the stinging of undisturbed tears, Mahkoonsa drops his gaze to his feet and sobs, expecting claws at his throat already. He weeps onto his mahkisina, leather seams dampening above his toes, and waits.
No taloned digits are at his throat, no brutish hand grasps for his neck. He does not wipe away the tears that run in rivulets over cheeks flushed with wild heat, but takes stock of himself before forcing his eyes to rise up again.
Instantly he realizes he was never near the monster, at least not since entering the clearing. Something about his mind’s dancing switches between that… thing being brother and monster and neither and both had played a trick on the distance between them.
Mahkoonsa remembered the scales of the fish in the river. Swimming below the surface, their imbricated faces opening and closing in airless gasps, the water and the light worked together to hide the fishes’ true distance. Bodies too far below the waves to reach, even with the extension of Mahkoonsa’s spear, appeared to be so near that they might break the surface—not by virtue of their own movement but by the dipping drops of the shallow valleys between ripples.
A distorted image of one of the moohsia flashes through Mahkoonsa’s mind, “painted” eyes huge and distorted and light-dappled by the same watery illusion. The monster feels close, it looks as though it could pluck his searching eyes from his skull with every wandering glance at its frame, but it is not. He wonders what the eyes of those long-eaten fish saw as they stared into the exotic existences above them, far across a barrier deadly in its crossing and magnanimous in its shelter.
As the surface defined the edge of life for their underwater world, so too the edges of the moon’s light and earth’s shadows confine Mahkoonsa. But just as his eyes are fixed on the monster, it too is bound to the murky shade.
Bound within, but not stuck in place; it moves.
Its head remains fixed atop a swiveling neck, vision tunneling into Mahkoonsa as it steps slowly back. Its feet move searchingly, almost gingerly through the foliage. No rasping whispers escape the leaves that wave at its passing. Mahkoonsa imagines them curling away from its touch.
The thought is smothered as the monster circles the clearing in a languid gait. Its movements are too smooth, so smooth that its body appears to glide silently above its knees in an untethered detachment.
Mahkoonsa turns with it, never looking away.
The night is clear, clear enough that he could run all the way back to mother and grandmother waiting at the lodge. The moon is fully grown and could protect him in its light. Could, could, were it not for the forest and its shadows and their monster, now standing directly between him and home.
It crouches among the trees, setting its too-thin elbows on knees knobbed by tension. Its flesh is drawn so tightly that its limbs seem flayed and skinless. Tendons and muscles are visible in ridges at its joints, bunching in hills above and below. It is not the potential for force visible in its body that he finds most intimately distressing, but the lack of flowing veins. Blood is noticeably absent from its bodily landscape.
A shadow, slower than the monster’s crawling stalk, seeps into the northern side of the clearing, now to the boy’s left. Mahkoonsa looks away from the monster long enough to see a single broad cloud beginning to threaten his sight of the moon. He glances back to his brother – the monster – and is greeted by absence. The frightful figure has gone, if only for a moment.
Mahkoonsa turns back to the clearing’s northern edge and its newly mobile shadows. It is already there. The thing still moves slowly, discordant with the impossible distance it just crossed. It sets outstretched fingers on the ground before it in a rhythm unrelated to its frictionless lumbering. Its half-crawling, half-falling drift matches the cloud above as it closes the gap between its mouth and its meal, following the cloud’s trajectory as it tills light into disturbed shadow.
It emits a shrill, piercing noise as its gulley-wide mouth narrows and, incredibly, purses.
It’s whistling at him. Sedately, unhurriedly, it whistles a tune clearly meant for him. Especially for him.
When their mother wasn’t encouraging him to instill more discipline their father was not a hard man. Mahkoonsa thought that his mother had loved this about his father despite his father’s “attempts” to hide it, though his disappearance had made all his oddities seem more loveable. Mahkoonsa felt this was true for his heart as well. Still, he couldn’t have forgotten this normally beautiful melody if he’d had the love and attention of six fathers and six again.
The song was lilting because his father’s voice had been lilting, but everyone in the family had whistled that tune on a bright day in the trees or the fields or the rivers. It caught in the ear and settled there, urging its resuscitations in joyful repetitions.
How many times I have wanted to sing that song since they left.
How many times has he – it – whistled that song to the blackened sky since they…
Its mouth widens again, and the whistling lifts its volume and hurries its pace. The noise then tears itself into a hoarsely high screech. The melody of their – no of his father’s song is twisted and distorted by the peaks and valleys of the monster’s screams.
It balls its hands into fists, striking the ground before it with starving desperation as it begins to pace at the foremost edge of shade, striking as if to force the cloud faster through the sky.
Its teeth are closer now, closer than they’ve yet been to Mahkoonsa. The clearing is oblong, stretched slightly farther from north to south than from east to west, and the darkness has crept nearly halfway across its length. The thing’s fury is evident – the shadows are too slow for it to stomach and are preventing it from stomaching Mahkoonsa. Its pounding of the ground leaves small furrows where its strikes are unconsciously concentrated.
The strikes, the steps, the sounds are all disconcerted in mismatched cadence.
Mahkoonsa backs away from the shadow, southward in his retreat. Milkweed tickles his elbow, its petals leaving streaking pollen scores. It falters through the air, shaking away his brief intrusion, and drops several little bodies from its leaves.
One is somewhat less little, and Mahkoonsa sees that they are all moohsiaki, the little crawling things. The less-little one is familiar – he’s seen it several times tonight already. It peers blindly up from below, its painted eyes suggesting snake more than worm.
“Snakes,” his grandmother said, “are our people’s grandfathers.”
The monster’s screaming pauses – had it not yet taken a breath? – and is loosed again as the shadow and the shadowed cross the halfway point of the glade. Mahkoonsa looks back to moohsia at his feet, and it still peers… perhaps not so blindly back at him. Its tiny top-heavy form lifts slightly and swings toward the eastern side of the clearing.
Mahkoonsa follows its direction and sees, unbelieving, a copse of light there. No more than four armspans of a broken corona rests at the edge of the trees. It connects to the free-but-threatened light of the clearing by a terminally shrinking span. He looks again to the little crawler, thinking to take it with him to the light or return it to its vacated stalk as thanks, but only the wildflowers and brushy grasses are there to wave him on.
He turns and sprints.
The monster mirrors him along the cloud’s earthbound edge.
His feet tear sod as they sink into the dirt, suddenly soft in the urgency of the run.
Its taloned fingers swipe at the moonlight, smoking where light touches claw.
Mahkoonsa can see that the claws are only human nails, long forsaken of maintenance and stretching back up their digits to ragged beds. He can feel the air between him and the monster shrink and flee at its swipes. The first wind he’s felt, excepting his fearful flight’s.
The bridge of light narrows as they approach it along parallel paths. The monster’s scream is deafening at this distance, his ears ringing with reverberations. Every bone howls at him to freeze, every mutinous muscle demanding rest. His father’s melody is perverted by the new, horrid voice cutting even through his innate desire to be, to not have been. The air is thick within its potential reach, stinking with rot and the smell of hunger, if such a thing has a smell. Hot, sour, and nauseating—Mahkoonsa is confident that it does.
Sharp nails continue flashing in the light, dancing like the traitorous motes still hanging in the air. They leave streaks of steaming smoke that reek of burning hair.
He had helped cut his brother’s hair before they left, giving the tips and ends to flame so that his power would not be taken by another. Certain spirits and bad men sought such trinkets, tokens of the spirit to ransom against the families of those represented in discarded effigy, or worse yet to drain strength from directly. This is just such a spirit.
It doesn’t smell the same. It doesn’t.
It does, but he can’t think about that yet. The bridge to safety is now no wider than their two sets of shoulders.
The shrieking stops, and the monster is suddenly ahead of him faster than he can follow. Its chest begins to swell as it waits to the side of light’s last delta, staring through his body and into his heart. Its feet are planted and it’s resumed the same awkward crouch as before, arms forcing fists into finally finding the same melody as its cacophonous song. It drums a cresting heartbeat at its feet as it purses its lipless face, its chest now swollen like a ruffled owl. Ribs’ sharpness threatens to tear free of its captivity before one final round of melody is released.
Mahkoonsa’s eyes lie to him, tell him that the sound is shaking the sky and moving the air with it. He can smell the piercing verse as blood on his upper lip, taste it in the vibrating of his teeth against their skull. The whole world is shaking to knock him over.
It succeeds; he falls flat and slides to a stop on the wet grasses, propelled forward by his final flight. Thistles burn his hand as something moves it forward, clawing into the earth.
A nail breaks as it ricochets off stone, Mahkoonsa’s welling blood mixing bits of ochre mud in the channels beneath the nail.
The broken nail is his. His blood scores his progress, not his death.
His feet have forced his ankles to twist them into action, toes churning earth through leather and cord. His knees lift as his chest floats a few handspans from the ground. His arms flail in burning surges onward to introduce hands to more stone and sod. His is not the monster’s desperation—the torture of hunger’s unending victory—but is borne by a clinging, consuming will homeward.
If someone is to weep he will cry. He will not be wept for. His mother still mourns. His family has enough grief.
The moonlit bridge is collapsing, shadow nearing darkness: an outline of biting fangs closing on gnashing teeth. Mahkoonsa is caught between them, his waist held fast as the stem of a grape popping loose its bounty.
Claws flash into smoking brilliance and catch his shirt. He slides back a hand’s breadth, into deathly dark, before their hold breaks. The snap of shredding fabric forces him through the closing gap of light and propels his face into another brace of stone. His temple makes first contact on the smooth surface.
The last scene he sees is that of his brother's calloused fists trying to break the earth apart. He is screaming. He has tears in his eyes.
Why is my brother upset? I am not upset to see my brother again. Is he upset to see me?
Then the tail of the cloud yields to the bright sky behind it, illuminating the night and banishing the dark from the clearing.
Orange light filters through the whispers of windblown leaves and dances on his eyelids. It stings. Everything stings. His face is stiff and his lips feel as though they’re covered in dried mud. His ears ring with a distressingly familiar pitch, but he can’t remember why it’s familiar. A sharp intake of breath through his nose sends a shock to his eyes, breaking them open.
The mud is blood, coating his lips and chin in hardened scales. He can smell wildflowers over the tang that had broken his dazed dozing.
It is early evening, he can see the sun only two handspans from the tops of the trees and falling. He knows this clearing, he’s not so far now. Where are his sacks?
He rolls, winces, and sees a silhouette looming above him. It is taller than him, amber light hiding its features in dark obscurity. Vermilion flesh hangs before it, and his heart races.
“Don’t get up, you’re hurt.”
His sister stands before him, holding a blood-soaked leather scrap.
“I got most of the mud off you and cleaned your fingernail. How did you get into this clearing if you were just going to the sugar camp? You’re four hands’ trek from the path and you’re lucky brother taught us both how to track. I was ready to go home and tell mother and grandmother that you died!”
He rises to an elbow, his stomach threatening rebellion.
“What did I just say?”
The trees around him aren’t as familiar as he’d thought prior, but he still knows them well enough. How had he confused this clearing with another?
His sister yet stands over him, shielding his face from the light. This place isn’t so far from their summer lodge.
One hand from home in two hands’ light.
Mahkoonsa remembers the night before in the time of a twig’s snap. It echoes through the trees in sinister mimicries.
He falls in an attempt to scramble to his feet. Where is the energy of that desperate will home? Why does everything have to hurt so much?
Two hands from home in two hands’ light.
He rises shakily. His side fights the attempt to separate it from the softness of flora thankfully free of needling nettles. He commands it up and rests on his knees. His hands tremor and throb from the weight of his shoulders while he builds the courage to continue.
Ancestors, let it be two hands from home.
“Come on, it’s not right to have any more of my brother’s blood on my hands – dried or not. If you’re going to stand against my advice, you’re doing it yourself.”
His knees prove reliable in a final endeavor toward the far-flung dream of standing. Behind him are the final beaten traces of the monster… of his brother. Somewhere back there is the little crawler that had pointed his way home. He hoped it would fly soon. He would return and offer something to it if—once he made it home.
Mahkoonsa tries to speak, but his voice offers only a cracked whisper that says nothing. How long had it been since he’d spoken?
He sucks what little moisture is in his mouth to his tongue and swallows, coughs, and groans. He braces his elbows on his knees, doubled over once more.
“Need… to go n… go now” he chokes out. The blood on his upper lip cracks as he speaks.
“We’ll be home just after dark with you beat up like that.”
No. No no no no.
Mahkoonsa, Little Bear, stumbles haltingly toward the trees, picking up pace as his bruised knots begin to loosen. His sister Waapanswa, Rabbit, follows concerned, shouting questions to her little brother.
He spends no breath to reply.
She thinks of hitting him, but decides she’ll spare him further injury.
They go eastward: homeward.
Behind a tree on the western edge of the clearing wickedly pointed teeth disappear behind lipless aperture. It is not so far from them that it cannot see its siblings – nearly the only things it sees – but they do not see it.
A shrill but quiet whistle escapes the monster’s hold as their father’s high, hearty song begins again.
It sees its brother’s panic as he begins to run, their sister matching him just behind.
It follows, eastward.
Homeward.