Lisica Chapters

Thanks for joining us for the fourth and final volume of our Scientist Soap Opera escapist journey to the mysterious island of Lisica! You can find previous episodes in the link above or column on the right. Please don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you enjoy what you find!

Audio for this episode:

58 – Saving The Baby

“I really don’t think this is a good idea,” Alonso confesses, his legs ready to give out from the pain. It clouds his mind, making it hard to think or make decisions or be brave. And the hillside ahead only goes more steeply down, each footfall an increasing stab of agony. “I am sorry, everyone. Here is where I reach the end of my limit.”

“Then here is where we pop you onto the travois.”

“Mirrie, I already told you…”

“Stop, Alonso. Just stop.” Miriam puts a calming hand on his hunched shoulder. “Look. It’s too far to turn back, eh? So if we’ve got to carry you, it might as well be forward as back.”

“I cannot abide the idea of being a literal burden. You know—”

“Zo. Darling. Sweetest?”

“Yes, mi amor?”

“Shut the fuck up and get on the travois.”

Once he finally does so, they follow their earlier tracks down the slope of loose soil under the trees, pine camp behind them. Miriam leads a large knot of the crew, six in all, back to the canyon and the lake. Back in the sub, she’d promised an evening swim. Everyone but Flavia, Mandy, and Esquibel had enthusiastically grabbed towels and followed. Now Amy and Jay range eagerly ahead, finding better paths on the hillside. Maahjabeen descends with Triquet and Miriam toward the stream at the bottom, as Pradeep and Katrina drag Alonso awkwardly downhill. He grunts at every impact and won’t stop complaining, loudly and bitterly, in Spanish.

“Why don’t you sing us something, love?” Miriam asks with forced cheer as she takes her turn at Katrina’s travois pole.

But the way she looks at him only makes Alonso feel more like a child. “No!” he shouts back, petulant. “No lo haré!”

They finally reach the banks of the stream. Alonso rolls out of his conveyance and scoots down the steep bank until he can soak his legs in the cold water. He groans with pleasure and falls back against the rocky shoal behind him. Time passes. He listens to their efforts to dismantle the travois of nylon straps and branches. The warmth of the day fills him. He nearly falls asleep. Then someone blocks the bright sky and he squints up at them. “Yes?”

“We have built a raft for you.”

“Now this is getting ridiculous…”

“Not a word, you ungrateful sod. We have three extra inflatable sleeping pads from storage. Never needed them. Two get used today. Everyone’s been working hard for you while you’ve dozed.”

“Yes, yes… How very kind.” Alonso heaves himself to his feet and stares at the long black avenue of the stream, curving into a canyon dark with woods. There stand Pradeep and Katrina, knee-deep in the shallows, proud to show dad what they made for him. The gesture touches him and he holds up a hand, resolving to act with more grace, regardless of what happens or how much it hurts.

They have bound the mats loosely into an X. He drops himself in the middle. The water is nearly shocking at first, but the streambed is dark, warming the water, and it is getting later in the season. Soon he finds the current refreshing. Amy tows him, wading hip deep upstream. Now he can sing. “Don’t cry for me, Argentina…!” But the ballad isn’t suitable and he lets the echoes fade to silence.

They enter the canyon, wading through the rushing stream. His bottom bumps against the rounded riverstones. Alonso hasn’t ever seen a forest like this. The grove at the beach was just a fringe of trees compared to this deep wilderness. The nooks and crannies of this canyon have never felt the tread of human feet. So this is the pure unspoiled natural world environmentalists rhapsodize about. It is hypnotically beautiful, with glowing mushrooms and hanging lichen and flitting birds and bugs. The winding side canyons they pass are chock full of redwoods and ferns. Their amount of organic wealth defies reason. The higher orders of emergent processes that he and Flavia spoke so persuasively about are writ large here, with such a degree of fineness in the clouds of buzzing gnats and haze of pollen dusting the leaves, that it scales up out of his ability to sense it. Now this is where actual magic is, where we can tell that even after we’ve reached the limits of our measurements, there is still something immeasurable beyond.

The eight people speak in a hush, as if in a cathedral. The water sounds fill the canyon instead, and the intermittent cries of raptors overhead. The sky cracks open just as Alonso looks up through the trees, and a banner of blue appears between the gray clouds. Rays fall on the stream, making its pale-green waters luminous. “Mira.” Alonso tugs on the strap Pradeep hauls on. “The sky. What do the locals think when the blue sky shows up like that, eh? You said you think their sky is a surface. So what is this? Their egg is cracking?”

“No, the idea, as far as I can tell,” Pradeep answers, “isn’t that there’s anything beyond the clouds. They are a ceiling. A dome. Therefore, the blue we see is only a dash of paint against that surface. Their cosmos is enclosed, according to what Jidadaa has told me, although she has nothing but scorn for Lisican beliefs. But what must they think on the rare occasion they see the blinding sun? Where does that light and heat come from? God has gotten angry, very angry indeed.”

“Or the phases of the moon?” Triquet asks, wading at Alonso’s floating shoulder. “Do they even recognize it as the same body when it’s all over the sky in different shapes and colors when they can catch a glimpse of it at all? Can they track the craters and think, ah yes… a planetoid lit from various angles! I doubt it. They’re all just in this big like room of island and water, however many kilometers wide, with a perpetual gray ceiling and people appearing every once in a while from what she called the line between the sea and the sky. How many kilometers is it? Someone do the math. On a clear day how far is the horizon away?”

“Well,” Alonso reasons, “first we must know the curvature of the earth. And then the height of their point of view. I think, standing on the beach, we could see no more than a kilometer or two.”

“Yes,” Maahjabeen adds, “even standing on that fallen log on the beach, you could double the distance. These cliffs, ehh. How high did we say? Four hundred meters? We have seen from the top. It is very far. Maybe a hundred kilometers or more.”

“I’m getting a radius of like 34, 35, if I’m calculating it right.” With one hand, Katrina consults her phone for the equation while she trails her other fingers in the stream, tapping its surface like a keyboard. “Distance = 1.226 x the square root of the height.”

“So that is the extent of your whole world. Seventy kilometers in diameter on a clear day. What is that, like a couple hundred square kilometers?” Triquet muses. “A tiny little universe indeed.”

“And only like twenty of those square kilometers are land. It is nearly all open ocean. But even so, these still aren’t any kind of seafaring people.” Maahjabeen luxuriates in this water, pushing against the strong current. keeping herself in the deeps up to her waist. It is so much warmer than the ocean. And just kinder to her in nearly every way. She has very little experience with fresh water. There wan’t much in Tunisia so she spent all her time on the beach and in the sea. “The Lisicans were always completely closed off from the ocean by the surf and currents just like we were so they could never learn to build boats. Just net fish in the lagoon. So, to people like them, the ocean must be as impassable and mysterious as the sky. What do they think happens beneath its waves? They must see whales and all the marine life break the surface. How do they…? I mean, do they know fish live down there? They must. Their ancestors were a whaling people, yes? Didn’t they teach their children how the world works before disappearing in here?”

“Who knows?” Katrina muses. “They didn’t bring music. I thought music was essential to being human. So that means all kinds of things can be lost or forgotten. Even the sea and the sky.”

They finally fetch up at the base of the deadfall that blocks the canyon, damming the rest of it upstream into the lake. But it is a serious climb, perhaps thirty meters up at a steep angle, on slick black logs poking out every which way. Alonso regards it, baleful. This is impossible. He gives up before he even thinks to try.

“I think the best route is over here,” Jay calls out from the far left of the dam. “Got to hug this side on the way up to avoid a big hole in the center. You don’t want to drop down into like dark rushing water and never be heard from again.”

“Yes,” Alonso declares loudly, “I think I will be just fine here. You can all go on. Please do not worry about me.”

“But we can’t leave our big papa behind!” Katrina pats his head and smiles down at him with love. “We’ll figure something out.”

The others have already started clambering up the wreckage. Miriam turns her back to the dam and sits, scooting upward, using her arms. “Look, Zo. You can do it like this.”

“It is too far, Mirrie.”

“Oh my god, listen to you.” Amy laughs at him in disbelief. “Can you believe this is Alonso, Mir? Our Alonso? Boy used to swing through the trees like Tarzan now you ask him to scooch a bit—”

“And he bawls like a baby.” Miriam joins in her laughter. Alonso scowls at them both. They don’t know how depleted he is.

“Be nice.” Katrina comes to his defense. “Good days and bad days. I learned with Pavel. Probably for a very long time.”

But the older women aren’t chastened. They both sit backwards and scoot their bums up the broken terrain, laughing as they go.

“Fine.” Alonso sits up in his floating mats and grabs the nearest broken branch. He hauls himself to his feet and wades toward the dam. He even manages to take a dozen steps upward before the cold wears off and the pain returns. Then he turns and sits as they did and scoots himself ignominiously backward up the fallen logs. Each move provokes a grunt, but he does find a rhythm, recalling once again the strength that remains in his arms and shoulders. Soon he is the only one left on the face of the dam, the only sounds a trickle of water and his echoing sounds of effort.

His gaze drops. Below, one of the Thunderbird clan stand at the edge of the stream, watching him. Seeing the youth makes Alonso’s breath catch in his throat. He had been lost in his misery, thinking he was alone. But there are few more powerful forces in the human heart than vanity. What a pathetic figure he is. They’ve surely never seen anything like him before, a pale gray man bloated with all the ills of the modern world, unable to climb a pile of logs.

Pride deeply stung, Alonso stands. Ignoring the shattering pain, he marches stiff-legged over the last logs to clear the top edge and behold the lake for the first time.

A patch of sun shines on it. Ancient primeval trees crowd its banks on both sides. The sunlight is luminous, blue and green and gold. All his toil is forgotten. This lake is a paradise. The pain and the humiliation have been worth it, indeed.

The others follow Pradeep, stringing along to the left at the base of the canyon wall where a fringe of lakeshore provides a narrow path further in. Except for Katrina. She’s already in the water, paddling happily beside them like a dog.

Alonso sighs in pleasure and rolls into the lake at his feet.

Their waterproof packs provide both Dyson readers and lunch. At the pocket beach ringed by willows, they find the gravel sharp but the logs plentiful. They set up a porch and benches and a camp chair for Alonso. But he refuses to get out of the water yet.

Maahjabeen does too. Now that she’s in the lake she relishes it. Fresh water has so many different properties from salt. She is less buoyant here and has to work harder to stay afloat. But the water is cool and crisp. So fresh. And she can drink directly from the lake. The best water she’s ever tasted. No, she will never get out. They will have to drag her kicking and screaming from this lake. From now on she is no longer a proud and noble orca, she is an eel slithering about in the mud. And it couldn’t feel better.

Her crew on the shore are busy setting up their day camp. Look at them. Her very own Pradeep, busy and serious as always. Amy, who has gently removed the weak little kit fox from where she kept it, in the chest zipper pocket of her windshirt. She now crouches at the shore, digging up grubs or any other nutrients she can get in its mouth. Katrina, standing unabashedly naked in a spot of warm sun, wringing her hair out. Miriam kneeling at the edge of the treeline, rearranging her backpack for geological work. Triquet in a sarong, picking their way barefoot to the shore, collecting flowers. Jay, scrambling restlessly further in. They are her family. They really are. It did happen. All those she cares about right now in the world are here, in this sacred little valley hidden away from the rest of the world. Sure, add Esquibel and Mandy and Maahjabeen’s Italian sister Flavia and she will be complete. This lake shall be her private little ocean, this canyon her temple to God.

Alonso floats beside her. His trailing hand accidentally snags a strand of her hair that has snuck out from under her wet scarf. “Oh, I am very sorry, Miss Charrad.”

“It is no problem,” she turns her body in the water to face him, “Papa.” And she favors him with a dimpled smile.

Alonso beams with satisfaction, like he just completed a jigsaw puzzle. Maahjabeen had surely been the last holdout, hadn’t she? They had all embraced the family, except for her. But now she has found her own way in, through the love she shares with Pradeep.

“I never want this to end,” she continues. “You are all too dear.”

“Here we have found our heaven,” he agrees.

And then they hear a distant cry, from above the canyon’s rim somewhere, a ragged scream of outrage and pain. It stops them all. Everyone stands and those in the water paddle over to a fallen log so they can stand too, hip deep. The cry comes again, from a voice they don’t know. It is human, certainly, but that is all they can tell.

“Dear lord. Impossible to say…” Miriam studies one rim then the other, “where that originates. Which side…”

“Yeah,” Jay agrees. “First I thought it was from the far side up there. Then our side. Now… I don’t know.”

They wait for another cry. They wait and wait. But it never comes. Five then ten minutes pass.

“Starting to feel foolish here…” Triquet mutters. “Who even was that? And what do we do now, people?”

“Are we sure that was human?” Amy asks. “I’ve heard some calls from rutting elk that didn’t sound too different.”

“Seen any elk on Lisica?” Miriam asks.

“Well, no, but…” Amy shakes her head, none of the catalog of life she has found here appropriate for that tortured sound. “I don’t know. Maybe it is human. But they can’t be looking for us. Right?”

“Maybe they are,” Pradeep shrugs, “but they just can’t find us. Maybe that is their frustration at losing our trail in the stream.”

“Well, I am getting cold,” Alonso decides. “Let us all keep doing what we were doing. Get to work. All we can do is keep our ears open. But I don’t think we should go anywhere. Doing anything rash like moving back to pine camp now will only expose—”

The cry reaches them again, like a white noise wolf’s howl from over the horizon. Its pain and rage is horrible to hear. Whoever it is must be tearing their throat to shreds.

“Yes,” Maahjabeen agrees, climbing up the submerged log until she can grab one of its upraised roots. She holds a hand out for Alonso to join her. “Let us carry on. You are right. Nothing else to do. But Jay, please don’t go any farther. Stay close.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right.” Jay’s spidey sense is totally tingling. That sound is evil, like straight up dangerous. He had been about to skirt around an outcrop to see what the next inlet held but now he returns to the safety of their little pocket beach. Leaning down, he hauls first Alonso then Maahjabeen from the water.

Katrina dresses as they dry off. Jay locates a nice stout branch that would make a good club. Amy begins preparing lunch.

Alonso sits and listens, their watchdog. He leans back and scouts the broken edges of the canyon rims above, their dark shadowed slopes against the sailing clouds. Bits of sky still break through and patches of sun race across the redwood treetops of the far canyon wall. He hears nothing. Idly, he removes his laptop from a dry bag and arranges his workstation with the external hard drive and a pair of batteries. Might as well get some Plexity tasks done.

Miriam finishes ordering her kit and hauls her pack on, facing the wall of the canyon behind them. She only needs to go a few steps before she touches a formation of pale epidosite hiding behind a fern. Finally she might get to see the island’s interior ophiolites in all their glory. It is just further confirmation in her model of uplift and the remnants of the Kula plate beneath. “The Late Cretaceous,” she muses to herself, “was a happening place.”

Maahjabeen joins Pradeep in preparing the Dyson readers for lake organism collection. They have five with them and a couple aren’t charged. They plug those in and Jay takes one, leaving the two others for Pradeep and Maahjabeen. Pradeep crouches at the shoreline, looking under rocks for pale annelids and Belostomatidae waterbugs and Pacifastacus crayfish. She re-enters the water with a sigh, wading out into its velvety embrace. Now it doesn’t feel cold at all. She takes one sample of the lake’s surface water at the edge, then others at meter increments heading into deeper water.

AAAAACCCCCCHHHHH!

The cry echoes through the canyon again, this time closer and if anything even more wild and urgent. Triquet flinches, weaving the flowers into a garland, and scowls at the sky. Maahjabeen ducks her head under, instantly resolving to get water column samples from a place she can’t hear that awful scream. Reveling in the silence, she opens her eyes underwater. It is still and deep green, only turbid and dark below her feet. With her fuzzy vision she looks at her glowing hand and the white reader. Pressing a pair of buttons, she takes a sample at the depth of one meter, then two.

She surfaces just as another scream erupts from above. Yes, it is indisputably human now, there is a slur of inaudible words in the gaps between. Maahjabeen swims over to Pradeep. He looks up at the cliff tops with an anxious frown. No. She will not let him slip into the clutches of his panic. She will hold him tight.

Now there is no break in the screams. The unseen figure circles above somehow like a raptor, their cries splitting the air again and again. The crew share worried glances and draw close.

“There!” Jay shouts, pointing down canyon toward the top of the cliffs. They can all see the huddled figure atop the highest stone, lifting his face from where he found something at his feet all the way up to the sky. But he uncharacteristically sways, this barrel-shaped Lisican, and lifts his arms in triumph. With a final scream he steps confidently out into space, arms windmilling.

They all cry out in shock, watching him plummet over a hundred meters to the ground. His last scream is cut short by impact.

Alonso stifles a sob. Triquet cries out, burying their face in Miriam’s embrace. Maahjabeen can’t move. Her mind is blank. Pradeep whips an arm around her and turns them away.

“No way.” Jay edges back toward the dam. His breath comes in fast shallow gasps. “No fucking way. That just happened.” He can’t process the gruesome event. He doesn’t even want to. But his feet move him to the dam regardless. The man landed past it alongside the stream below on the same side of the canyon they occupy.

Pradeep joins him, as do Katrina, Miriam, and Amy. In silence they make their way down the slope of fallen logs back to the stream. It is the oxbow where they had stopped during their first exploration of the canyon that they halt again. “Yes,” Pradeep estimates. “It was directly up there…”

Jay finds the body a surprising distance from the cliff, in a field of rubble. The man lies still, on his side in a pool of blood and gore, quite dead. “Yooo. Oh my fucking god. It’s Wetchie-ghuy.”

Miriam joins him, clapping a hand over her mouth at the gruesome sight. One of his eyes burst from his skull on impact. His jaw is shattered and blood still leaks from his skull.

“Dear god.” Pradeep grips Miriam’s arm as nausea sweeps through him. Even his trained clinical detachment is challenged by this much carnage. He retches.

Amy stays back, looking up to the clifftop. “There’s still someone up there. Waving.” She waves back.

A tiny voice reaches them, repeating the same phrase again and again: “Ja sam sada íx̱tʼ! Ja sam sada íx̱tʼ!”

“It’s Xaanach.” Amy shades her eyes with her hand. “She’s got something in her hand. Like a paper. Oh! She dropped it!”

The small parcel flutters down to them with the weight of a leaf. It lands in the stream and Jay has to chase it down like a retriever. He returns with his prize, holding it up wordlessly for the others.

It is a small ziploc with a pair of pills and chalky residue in it.

“What am I looking at?” Amy asks.

“Oh my days,” Miriam sighs, recognizing it.

Jay’s voice is flat. “This is the bag of drugs Katrina brought. It was like pretty full when Jidadaa stole it.”

“And then it somehow ended up with Xaanach and…?” Pradeep falls silent, staring up at the cliff top, dark thoughts gathering.

“He lost our rap battle and took off. I didn’t see him again ‘til now…” Jay shakes his head in horror, his own part in this tragedy becoming clear. “I mean, fuck. This is seriously hardcore. Way way too messed up for me. They fed dude the whole freaking bag. “Tripping balls. That was like forty hits of acid and a whole handful of MDMA. He didn’t even know where he was. Or what he was doing when he fell off the cliff. Never even knew he died.”

“Oh, he knew… He knew what he was doing.” Pradeep backs away from Wetchie-ghuy’s corpse to the water’s edge. He can’t take his eyes from the clifftop. “See, that’s where Xaanach left my blood. On top of that rock. Then she filled him with drugs and led him here. That’s my blood on the rock.” His voice trembles, the anxiety clawing at him, impossible to deny. “This wasn’t accidental. He was hunting me.”

“And Xaanach killed him,” Amy tells him, in an attempt to allay his fears, to soothe his trembling limbs and startled eyes. “He’s gone now, Pradeep. He can’t hurt any of us any longer.”

Xaanach sees him from above. She lifts her own ring finger, the same one as Pradeep’s where she drew his blood. Xaanach laughs and calls out to him again in triumph, repeating the same phrase as before. “Ja sam sada íx̱tʼ!”

Ξ

Mandy finds she can move her arm again. It hurts, and it makes her ill thinking how torn and ruptured the fibers of muscle and flesh are, but she can move.

She sits up in the clean room. Esquibel has rebuilt it around her. Pine camp is quiet. It is amazing how exhausted she is from getting shot. Hollywood’s got it all wrong. It’s such an emotional event. There is somehow so much grief in it, like she’s lost a part of herself that she’ll never get back. Like her soul was just punched right out of her frame. And that makes her so tired. But now a bit of her energy has returned. Enough to get her moving.

She finds her sandals and shuffles out the slit door. Esquibel is at the stove, cursing a teapot. Flavia sits in Alonso’s camp chair on her laptop. She looks up in surprise when Mandy appears. “Eh, the soldier rises. She is ready again for battle!”

Mandy smiles at her weakly and waves with her right hand. She moves toward Esquibel, who watches her critically, with a doctor’s assessing eye. “How are you, Mandy?”

“Uhh… great. Fantastic.” A tear leaks from the corner of her eye and she wipes it away. “Hungry.”

“Ah. Well.” Esquibel sets the teapot down and steps away from the table. “That is one thing Flavia and I found we do not do well. Perhaps you can show me how to turn on this stove. And then I can try to make you a—”

“You don’t know how to turn on the stove? It’s been eight weeks.” Mandy doesn’t mean to sound so critical. Or maybe she does. She doesn’t know how she feels about Esquibel anymore.

“We all have our specialties, no?” Flavia calls out.

“You know how I feel about kitchens,” Esquibel says.

Mandy just shakes her head. Cooking is too essential. It’s like saying you don’t know how to bathe yourself or brush your teeth. She turns the stove on but even before she hits the electric ignition she can tell from its silence that its canister is empty. In a bin at her feet she finds a pile of them, the empties mixed with the few full ones left. “Could you please…” Bending hurts. Talking hurts. She nods at the bin. “A full one.”

Esquibel frowns at the bin. “How can I tell which are full?”

“They’re heavier. And they have caps. Please, Esquibel! Stop being so useless right now!”

Esquibel looks at her with a level gaze. “No one has ever called me useless before.” She bends down and grabs a canister, placing it silently on the table before retreating to the clean room.

But Mandy doesn’t have the ability to care. She is bruised, inside and out. She just wants some tea, then some soup, then—

“Phone.” As if by magic, Mandy’s lost phone appears in the air before her, gripped by a slender brown hand. She squeals and jerks back, hurting her shoulder and nearly losing her balance.

Jidadaa stands beside her, a simple smile on her face. She laughs at the physical comedy. “Mandy phone.”

Mandy gathers herself and snares the filthy phone. Its pink shell is cracked and the battery is nearly dead. “Why did you…? What did you do to it?”

“Vid-yo for you. See?” Jidadaa reaches for the phone again but Mandy wards her away.

“Video?” Mandy opens her phone to find a series of photos, most of them obviously unintentional blurred shots of green. But there are a pair of 41 second and 54 second videos near the end.

The first is a covert view of the Ussiaxan village from a distance. Jidadaa, watching over her shoulder, exclaims in disappointment. “Ai. People so little.” Mandy spreads her fingers on the screen to zoom in, eliciting another exclamation from Jidadaa. The people on the screen are now fuzzy blobs of dark pixels in their town square. But she is still able to identify them. “Chinese man. The Daadaxáats shaman. Kasáy.”

“The one we call Lady Boss. What’s her name? Kasay?”

Jidadaa nods. “Means ‘always sweaty.’ Here her men.”

Flavia stands and joins them. “Eh, what are they doing?”

“Kasáy, she make decision. Chinese man her koox̱ now. See?”

He wears a collar and they lead him like a dog. One of the villagers pounds a stake into the ground and they leave him there, leashed to it. The video ends.

“Seriously?” Flavia asks. “That is what Wetchie-ghuy hopes to do with me? Lead me around with a collar and leash?”

Jidadaa shrugs. “If you don’t act good.”

The next clip is from a closer vantage from above. Jidadaa must have taken refuge in a tree. The camera is canted, panning and tilting with frantic energy. Screaming people run beneath the tree. None think to look up. They are all focused on the edge of town.

Nearly a hundred people congregate, surging toward the treeline. They have left Jidadaa behind. Something gray flickers before them in the canopy and they all fall to their knees, like they’ve all been chopped down. The whole crowd falls silent, unmoving.

“What is this?” Flavia demands. “What are we seeing?”

“That is first time they see dla x̱ald, mother fox. First time for Ussiaxan since the eleventh mother. She will choose to give baby fox to one person in Ussiaxan.”

“Wait. The fox decides?” Flavia hadn’t believed this silliness until now. But here is the proof, digitized and indisputable.

Mandy points at the screen. “Look, here comes Kasay-jah like a big bully. Oh my god, even she falls to her knees? Wow, she looks like she’s starstruck. This must be like such a big deal.”

Flavia scowls. “No, do not give the fox to that mean woman…”

Jidadaa laughs as the video ends with the people crying out in shock and outrage. “She do not. The baby go to young girl. Starts big fight. Kasáy try to take baby fox. All people say no. She is sent out of village with her koox̱. Now they must find new home.”

The phone’s battery dies and the screen goes black. Mandy stares stupidly at it. What has she just witnessed? Somebody’s life was just really really fucked with. Two people, actually. The Chinese spy and Lady Boss. Things will never be the same for either of them.

Jidadaa claps, remembering another detail. “And the Ussiaxan wreck the Chinese man radio. No more orders. He is lost.”

Mandy doesn’t know how she feels about that. It brings her no joy that the man who shot her is now a bound slave to an outcast village chief on an undeveloped island thousands of kilometers from his home. Maybe a vindictive person would feel pleasure. But he must have a family and hopes and dreams of his own that have nothing to do with being discarded on Lisica like this. But at the same time, Mandy can’t quite bring herself to feel sorry for him. Fucker shot her.

“Who is there?” Esquibel calls out from the clean room door. “What do you want?”

“It’s just Jidadaa…” Mandy begins but Esquibel interrupts her.

“No. There. Out on the meadow. What do they want?”

Mandy and Flavia turn. Among the green and gold grasses a hundred meters away stand two women, the Mayor and Yesiniy. They watch pine camp, standing patiently in the open.

Jidadaa answers. “I tell them. You leave soon. Sewat and Yesiniy say no, they must tell woman story first. Woman to woman. They do not ever see woman on Lisica. Only Maureen Dowerd. Then only men. Now you are women.”

“Now we are women,” Flavia echoes. “Well, I didn’t know girl power mattered. I mean, if it did, they could have been a lot more nice about it before now. Okay. We have a sisterhood now. Fine. What is this woman story? Some secret?”

“Come.” Jidadaa beckons to Esquibel as well. “Come, please. They wait for you. To tell.”

“Brilliant,” Esquibel mutters. “More nonsense.” But she follows, bringing a chair.

As they approach, Flavia asks, “Ehh, where is Katrina? None of us speak their language. She is the one they want.”

“Maybe one of you could record it for her?” Mandy asks. “My phone’s dead.”

Both Esquibel and Flavia agree, taking out their phones. And not a moment too soon. Before they even reach the meadow, Yesiniy begins intoning a chant.

“Wait! Wait!” Flavia calls out. “We haven’t started recording yet!” They hurry into position as Yesiniy continues.

Jidadaa translates. Esquibel puts her chair down and turns her own camera on her. “It is the story of two sister. First mothers. In beginning they were Ganaaxteidee clan, hibernation frog. Before they are mothers. They are little girls. Two sisters only share little names. Names they only call each other. They forget their old names. They call each other Init and Ta.

“Init and Ta live in Qe’yiłteh. Alone on island. The people do not like Init and Ta. They make their family live alone. They are outcast family. There is no love. But then white men come in big ship. There is fight. Men from the village are killed. They take one white prisoner. This is Tuzhit. He is slave. They make him live with family outside town. He meet Init and Ta.”

“Wait,” Flavia interrupts. “You’re telling me this is their origin story from like three hundred years ago? Can they prove any—?”

Mandy hushes her as Jidadaa continues her translation.

“Hibernation frog clan do not like Tuzhit. Treat him like dog. Tuzhit and Init and Ta steal boat. They try to go down coast but storm take them out to sea. They think they die. Eh. Here is where Yesiniy tells about gods of water and wind. Many gods. Some love, some hate. Three people on the ocean and one mama fox, babies in her belly. Now there is more talk of the gods of wind and water. Sewat repeat what Yesiniy say. Repeat three times. The boat land on Lisica. Here they become big family. Init and Ta have many children. Children marry and have babies. Again and again.

“In the time of sixth mothers there is new shipwreck. Two men. One is dark from south islands named Mkuwelili. One is pale like Tuzhit named Kristaps. Lisica people take them as slave. But time is bad. Island is sick. Too many foxes. Mkuwelili and Kristaps say must kill foxes to save bird and little animal, so people do. They kill many many fox. Then there is almost no fox left and island lose its heart. They blame Mkuwelili and Kristaps. Make them exile in north canyon. Forget their words, forget their language. Only names remember of them.”

“So they were like off some nineteenth century whaling ship?” Esquibel wonders. “Grim end for them, I take it.”

But Jidadaa continues, keeping pace with the chant. “In the time of ninth mother first Japanese ship. They cruel. Lisican people hide. Then American soldier and Russian soldier, all bad. People of all village fight to keep them only on beach. But then Maureen Dowerd come. Everything change.”

“The woman story.” Mandy smiles at the Mayor, who continues her litany uninterrupted.

“Fox say,” Jidadaa tells them in an aside, “Lisica is for woman. First fox tell Init and Ta. They listen with their hearts. That is why, after Tuzhit give them babies, they push him into water and kill.”

“Wait, what? Init and Ta killed Tuzhit?”

“He was first bad man. Bad white man. Bad soldier. Init and Ta escape from bad village. Only after he gone, Lisica is good.”

“Escape from the village back on the Alaskan coast?” Flavia asks. Yesiniy and Sewat have fallen silent, realizing they’ve lost their audience. “So this is the lesson they learn? Murder solves your problems? Their whole lives were bad until they killed the father of their children? But these sisters are not like the Christians, are they? They do not call this murder their original sin. Instead they say it’s when things finally got better. Eh. A brutal age.”

But Jidadaa doesn’t understand the question. She repeats what they already know, just slower. “Init and Ta have clan that hate them. Hibernation frog. They escape with bad man. Come here. Start the people. Past is bad. Him and old clan. So they forget all. Teach children new way. New gods. New traditions. Follow the wisdom of fox.”

“Damn,” Mandy grimaces. “They went hard.”

Sewat, the Mayor, takes up the tale again. Jidadaa shares her words but they already know this part, about Aan Eyagídi the shaman and the love affair between Maureen and Shanno and the baby that came of it. The disputes with Ussiaxan and the advent of the Chinese. The burial of the sub, which cut off their access to the beach for a long cruel time. And how the cycle is coming to a close, with the arrival of the lidass and their inescapable Jidadaa ending this time of peace and prosperity once and for all.

“But why?” Mandy asks. “Why does it have to end? That’s what nobody’s told us. Everybody’s all ready for the good times to turn into the bad times. Why aren’t they like fighting against it?”

“Jidadaa you cannot escape,” the eponymous girl says with a sly smile. “It come when it come.”

“But why are they being punished?” Esquibel shakes her head in disapproval. “This is just a story. There is no real external factor here causing this change, is there? They could stop it if they really wanted to, eh?”

Jidadaa patiently explains. “In the days of third mother they forget to honor first mothers. First bad time. It start long string of curse. First Mkwelili and Kristaps. People from between sea and sky who come. Even Maureen is curse. Yesiniy is curse, all her life. Kula and me. The people deserve Jidadaa very long time. Curse split them into three village. Fox grow very few. Ussiaxan get dark in their chests. Divide island with the creek. Then you come.”

“Oh, yes? We are part of this story now?” Flavia would rather not be included as a co-author on any such disreputable paper.

“You are women,” Jidadaa responds with a simple shrug. “You hear the story and remember.”

Ξ

“No, really. Go on,” Amy tells the others on their return from the lake, stepping away from them. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Well… ask him if he like needs anything,” Katrina calls out as she and the others keep walking, heading back to pine camp. The dark mass of the crew disappear into the gloom. They are still mostly stunned from the tragic events of the day and none of them have the energy to argue with her about splitting up.

Amy watches them go, then turns back to the small fire Morska Vidra has built in front of his tiny hut. She approaches the grove of madrones in which he has built it. Her sandals make noise on the dried leaves. In response, his dark head pokes out of the narrow doorway. The old man watches her approach.

“Bontiik.” Amy chucks his chin. He does the same to her. “Where’s your fox?”

But Morska Vidra just looks glumly at her, his face closed.

“I know. Can’t live without them, can we?” Amy gently removes the fox kit she keeps in her pocket. The poor thing is fading. She just can’t find enough nutrients for it.

Its appearance makes Morska Vidra exclaim in shock. He pulls away, outrage flaring in his eyes. He begins to lecture her.

“No no. The mama rejected it. She told me I could have it. It would have died otherwise. I swear.”

But Morska Vidra won’t hear it. He tries to take the baby from her but Amy is afraid of what he might do with it. She clutches it close, daring him to fight her. Protective instincts surge in her.

Morska Vidra sees the ferocity in Amy’s eyes and hesitates. He goes back to appealing to her, his words coming out too fast for her to follow at all.

Amy pulls back and waves goodbye. “Uhh. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry.” Perhaps she can catch the others before they get too far away.

The old man suddenly stops talking. He looks out at the gloom instead and asks a loud question.

“Oh, shoot.” Amy turns, dismayed. “Someone out there?”

But who emerges from the gloom isn’t human. It is two foxes, Morska Vidra’s fellow and the vixen he impregnated.

“Wait!” Amy cries. “Mama, what are you doing here? Where are your babies? Oh my god, you didn’t lose them…!” She can’t make sense of it. There isn’t hardly a single mammal in the world that will abandon her babies so soon after giving birth.

The vixen’s teats are swollen with milk. Amy drops to her knees as the silver foxes approach. She holds out the tiny kit, wriggling in her palm. Its mother blinks at the tiny thing and approaches. She nickers at it, licking its head, then nudges it toward a teat.

Morska Vidra carefully approaches as Amy encourages the tiny thing to latch and suck. He may have opinions about its life or death but he won’t gainsay its mother. But it may have already been too long. With a gentle pinch Amy coaxes a drop of milk from the teat and the little thing starts slurping greedily.

Morska Vidra’s fox sniffs his child, blessing it with a lick.

The man looks up at Amy, his face filled with wonder.

“Uh… This wasn’t my idea. I only did what she told me.”

It is dark now. Morska Vidra’s face is in shadow. She can only see his eyes. Still he stares at Amy. There is something coiled in him, as if he is about to pounce on her.

“What? What is it?”

His fox pounces instead, landing in Amy’s cross-legged lap. But she is too familiar with animals to react. Staying still, she allows him to crawl around, sniffing at her. The creature stands on her bent knee and watches the mother and baby nurse. Amy finally releases a held breath, which ends with a quiet laugh.

Morska Vidra laughs too, scratching his old boy between his ears.

As the infant finally gets the nourishment it needs, Amy’s maternal anxieties finally ease. “Thank you, Morska Vidra. And thank you, mama.” She reaches out and strokes the vixen’s head with a fingertip. “Thank you for saving the baby.”