do I represent, Johor?’
‘Do you remember what we taught you?’
I sat up in my nest, and pulled up the thick coverings all around me and over my head, so that only my face was bare. Close to me, Johor’s face showed under his hood.
‘I remember how we first understood that you were teaching us something in a way none of us had done before – directly. You asked us all to go up into the hills on the other side of the wall, and to choose a place where the ground rose all around. We massed there, all of us from the town and from a long way about. You asked us to bring one of the animals – those that are extinct now – that we intended to kill for food. You asked us to have it killed before the people assembled, and we, the Representatives, were pleased that the act of killing was not to be associated with your presence, for while we did not conceal what lay behind our eating of meat, we tried to see that there was no reason to dwell on it all – the slaughterhouses, the preparations. For when we came together to discuss this particular thing, we Representatives, we always found for some reason a reluctance in us, a fear, to do with this business of killing other animals: It has always seemed to us that here was an area of danger. Something that could take hold and spread – and yet we did not remember Canopus ever saying anything about it.’
‘One of four species that were used to make you was easily roused to killing. Some of us on Canopus did not wish to make use of that material, but others did, for this was – and still is – a physically strong species, enduring, able to bear hardship.’
‘When we all stood there on those hillsides looking down at that dead antelope, and my old friend Marl took up the knife to cut it open, I felt thrills of sensation all through me – and I was afraid to call this pleasure, but I knew that it was. And when the stomach was split from throat to tail, and the guts fell out, I knew how easy it would be to plunge my hands into that mass and then …’ A red mist blew across my mind, and when it had gone, the frosty twigs of the roof, the grey rocks, the pinched face of Johor looked even more meagre and ugly.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you did well to be careful.’
‘Yet you called us there, to watch the body of that animal cut up. We stood under a warm sun, and the wind brought us the spicy scents from the lake, and we saw the guts laid in a heap there, with the heart and the liver and the other organs, the head and the tail and the hide together, and the bones laid bare like the branches of a tree. And we were restless and moved about on our hillsides, and we sniffed at the scent of blood which seemed to belong to our memories, and then you came out from among us and stood surrounded by those bloody bits of meat and bone. And you said to us, “You are wondering, every one of you, where the beast has gone – where what is real of the beast, as you know it. Where its charm, its friendliness, its grace, its way of moving that delights you. All of you know that what is lying here is not what is true about this dead beast. When we look around at the hillsides, where the wind is rippling the grasses and whitening the bushes, we see there the same spirit that was the truth of this dead animal – we see a quickness and freshness and delight. And when we look up now at the play of the clouds – there is the reality of the beast. And when we look around at each other and see how beautiful we are, again we see the beast, the pleasantness and rightness of it …” And so you spoke, Johor, for a long time, before you stopped talking of beauty and grace. Then you bent over the piles of meat and bones, and you held up in your bare hands the heart, and you said to us that each one of us is a package of hearts, livers, kidneys, entrails, bones, and each one of these is a whole and knows itself. A heart knows it is a heart and feels itself to be that. And so with a liver and every other thing inside every animal, inside you. You are a parcel, a package of smaller items, wholes, entities, each one feeling its identity, saying to itself, Here I am! – just as you do, in moments of sensing what you are. But this assembly of heart, lungs, skin, blood, packaged so tight and neat inside a skin, is a whole, is a creature … And you made us laugh, Johor, standing there on that lovely morning, which I remember as colour, colour – blues and greens and soft reds and yellows – saying that a liver probably believed it was the best and highest organ in a body, and a heart too, and the blood too, and perhaps they even believe that a body is made up entirely of heart, or liver or blood … Yes, I remember how we all laughed. And that was how that lesson ended. And when Canopus came again to visit us, you brought with you the instruments for seeing the very small, and for a long time, every one of us, down to the smallest child, studied the very small through these instruments.’
‘And what did you remember of that occasion, what stayed with you most strongly? Was it the unlikeable sight of the bloody organs spilled out on the ground, and your pity for the beast?’
‘No, it was how you taught us to look for the charm and quickness of the animal everywhere – in the movement of water, or the patterns flocks of birds used to make as they swirled and darted and flowed about the sky.’
Alsi came sliding quickly into the shed, opening the door as little as she could. She was heavy and clumsy in her carapace of skins. She smiled at the two of us, though, and went about her work of pushing the heathers and lichens and bark through the openings into the pens of the snow animals. It took a long time, and I was remembering how quick she had once been. When she had finished she stood in front of us and opened the front of her coat, and we saw there the little confiding face of one of her pets, with its bright blue eyes, and she stroked it, in a way that said how she needed this contact with aliveness, with trust, and she said: ‘The Representatives for the Lake say that there are few creatures left in it.’
‘Do not worry,’ I said, as Johor did not speak. ‘We shall not be needing much more food.’
She nodded, for she was already beginning to understand what was happening. She said: ‘News comes in from many towns and villages now that the people have decided not to eat, but to let themselves die.’
Johor said: ‘Please collect together as many of you as have the will for it, and go to these places and say to them, Canopus asks you to stay alive for as long as you can. Say it is necessary.’
‘It is necessary?’
‘Yes.’
‘Although we shall all die very soon?’
This was only the breath of a reproach, and she found it hard to look at him. But she did, and there was such a bewilderment there he felt it strike him – I could see how he shifted his limbs about inside the skins, as if he were adjusting himself to take on a physical burden. She was such an honest direct creature, so strong, so fine – and she had not let herself go at all into the general lassitude and indifference.
‘There is more than one way of dying,’ he said gently.
He looked straight into her eyes. She looked back. It was a moment when invisible doors seemed to want to open, want to let in truths, new knowledge … I could feel in myself these pressures. I was watching her eyes, so bravely searching Johor’s. Meanwhile she stroked and stroked the head of her little friend, who looked up at her with such trust.
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I will see that the message gets to them all.’
And Johor nodded, in a way that said: Yes, I can count on you, and she slid out again, letting in the roar of the storm outside, and a flurry of white flakes that did not melt, but lay in a patch on the stone of the floor near the door.
I said to Johor: ‘It is easier to bear the news of the death of a million people than to think that Alsi will die of starvation inside a heap of stinking furs. And I hate that in me, Johor. I have never been able to accept that partiality in us.’
‘You are complaining that we constructed you inadequately,’ he remarked, not without humour.
‘Yes, I suppose I am. I cannot help it. I have never been able to see someone weep and agonize because of the death of someone close, yet respond not at all to some general ill or danger, without feeling I am in the presence of some terrible lack, some deep failure.’
‘You forget that we did not expect for you such ordeals.’
‘Ah, Canopus, you do indeed expect a lot of