Death. Everywhere death. The reports were brought to Queen Serena as many times during the Big-Light as there were seasons. A creature of the night, the queen had assured her feathered and furred subjects that they could interrupt her during her daytime roost, as the grizzly findings were uncovered. Rabbits, hares, pheasants and other ground-nesting birds were being hunted down and slain, but left uneaten. And throughout the dark period when the sun slept and was replaced by the moon, the queen’s night-time scouts brought further stories of the wanton slayings.
Queen Serena, an eagle owl and huntress, having once been held captive by man, was familiar with many of the ways of her one-time captor, and knew this was not his work. Man generally took with him his quarry.
Having been elected Queen by the forest dwellers, once they had overcome their initial fear of the huge owl, she took her role and its responsibilities with the seriousness that her title commanded. That aside, Queen Serena was outraged that one creature should kill another for any purpose other than to heal hunger. As a creature whose life depended on the sacrifices made by her very subjects, the queen respected every bird and beast under her rule. That there existed in her territory a rogue hunter that slaughtered others for perverted pleasure she would not tolerate. But when her top scout, Red the fox, came to her with new details about the killings, details that shook her to her very quills, she forewent the remainder of her Big-Light-time roost, and blinked away sleep.
Through her other scouts, a cast of falcons that patrolled her territory in the big light, and a cloud of bats that were on constant alert, visual and sonar, under the bony light thrown by the moon, Queen Serena sent the command to her subjects to attend a gathering.
To accommodate everyone, nocturnal and diurnal, the gathering was to take place at that lazy period when the Big Light was growing dim, and the moon, in white feathery robes, poised in the cobalt-blue sky in readiness for her role as guide through the shadow-land.
From her pine tree roost, Queen Serena watched and waited while her subjects scuttled, scampered, flew, bounded, trotted, crawled and dashed towards the tree’s base. The fastest four-footed runners, the rabbits and hares arrived first. They came in hundreds. Behind them came the stoats and pine martins. Despite the rule known to every creature that hunting and slaying wasn’t permitted during a gathering, the buck-toothed twitchers shifted about nervously, their noses crinkling and their eyes bright, with the gangs of stoats and martins slinking about behind them. The stoats and martins, in turn, zipped about, pausing to stand on their hind legs, their compact heads shifting from left to right, skyward and to their rear. For they, too, were predated upon by the fox, the hawk, and the badger. Behind them snuffled the local badger colony – behind the badgers, a troop of foxes. Last of the four-footed to arrive were the deer. Herds of Sika, Fallow, and Red deer approached cautiously. Although the adults were the prey to no predators besides Man and his domesticated wolf, the deer retained inherited fear of their extinct predators.
Less cautious than the land-dwellers, the birds arrived in brazen bands and chirpy charms, while others came in huge flocks, which looked more like great insect swarms. Every clump of trees and band of bushes was quickly festooned with brightly coloured jays, thrushes, finches, warblers, doves and pigeons. Last to arrive were the falcons and hawks. They flew in low and slow between the oaks, the birch and the elm, and took up individual perches in isolated trees. All except Tertius, the peregrine falcon. A screech from high above upturned ten thousand heads. Only now with their eyes upon him did the falcon go into a swoop.
Tolerant of his showy antics, Queen Serena blinked lazily as Tertius bolted towards the land like a creature for whom Death was a challenger to overcome. A collective gasp, though in many tones and shift pitches, came from the huge gathering as the falcon’s slender form neared the earth.
Unable to hold their nerve, a trembling of various flocks of finches, like spores from a hoofed puffball, exploded from a beach tree. But just as it seemed to all that he had finally misjudged his flying prowess and was about to collide with the earth, Tertius pulled out of his swoop, arched upwards with outstretched legs and splayed talons, and grasped a gnarled limb of an ancient oak, long ago slain by lightning. The perch he chose lower than the queen’s.
A commanding screech from the queen reassured the fleeing finches to return.
Though shaken and still trembling, the finches returned. The queen then turned her flat face in Tertius’s direction. His body language displayed the necessary allegiance to the queen, while also maintaining his usual self-regard.
“Thank you for joining us, Tertius,” she said, her flat face impassive, her round eyes crowded with sarcasm.
The peregrine bobbed his head thrice as was customary when addressed by the queen.
“And thank you too,” she added, “for the acrobatics.”
Appreciative laughter bubbled from the front of the huge gathering.
Queen Serena, a critter’s queen, understood her subjects. She allowed the laughter snake through the crowd like a ripple through a body of water. She then blinked her eyes in a silent command, before the high feeling reached an out-of-control crescendo. She ruffled her feathers, twisted her head slowly to the left and to the right. Not a bird to hold with preliminary words, she blinked again and began her speech.
“Birds, beasts and elements. Every one here today, from the tiniest among you, who combine your strengths and abilities in great hoards to survive, to those of you who operate alone, has a purpose.” She paused and twisted her head about so far in both directions she took in the entire gathering. “Whether you survive by feeding off death and decay, or by foraging and feasting on the living, you have a right to be.”
Many of the rabbits and hares hopped about nervously, an excuse to cast an eye on the stoats and martins. The stoats and martins, in turn, scampered atop hillocks and tree-stumps, from where they sniffed the air and regarded the foxes and badgers. The larger predators, their muzzles ajar, and tongues lolling, kept their attention on Queen Serena.
Ensuring that none of her subjects had been foolish enough to bring with them their kits, fawns, cubs or chicks, the queen spoke about the spate of wanton killings.
The great gathering of birds and beasts shifted about exchanging with their fellows squeaks, chatters, grunts, trills and snorts of unease. But what she next disclosed, acted upon them like a sudden thunder roar. The clatter of a thousand wing-beats lifted the many bird flocks skyward, their startled whistles and chattering a collective screech. The rabbits and hares bolted for the cover of scattered gorse bushes. The stags among the deer herds snorted louder and hoofed the earth. The carnivores, too, stood their ground. The martins and stoats barred their teeth, while the delicate foxes curled back their gums, and the badgers, with bunched hackles, muscled forward, anxious to hear more. Queen Serena Resumed.
“What seemed at first to be the slayings of a rogue carnivore, now, from Red’s closer examination of some of the victims, is something worse.” The queen called forth Red the fox with a high whistle. Red worked his way through the gathering and positioned himself on a raised bank below the queen’s perch. This, Queen Serena knew, would give her subjects a necessary diversion from the images she was laying before them.
The queen went on to tell her subjects that the slayings were not, as it had first seemed, the work of a lone-hunter. “There are two of them,” she said. “The claw marks and puncture wounds on the victims are from two separate creatures. And at every slaying, Red has detected two different sets of footprints.”
Red nodded as Queen Serena revealed his findings.
“The two beasts responsible are among you here today at this gathering,” Queen Serena continued.
Uneasy squeaks, yelps, chatter and grunts resumed.
Queen Serena screeched a calming call. “Cowards,” she said with their returned attention. “This diseased duo ranks among the greatest cowards in the animal kingdom. Lone females are their prey. Between Red’s discerning nose and my instincts, we have clear images of the offenders. Those images bring with them the killers’ stories. The reason why they do what they do.”
Tertius the peregrine released a harsh, drawn-out staccato call from his perch.
The queen understood and acknowledged Tertius’s high feeling with a blink in his direction. She went on. “One of the duo, although thin and weak of bone, is a skilled and cautious tracker. His hunting partner, equally skilled at locating and targeting prey, is thickset and built for combat. And slaughter.”
The gathering listened as Queen Serena revealed that the, as yet, unknown identities were from different species. Thus, they were breaking another law: the law that came as the instinct preventing one species from cavorting with another. More disturbing still was that the two marauders were slaying females of their own species. And what they subjected their victims to before their slaying was more horrific still.
Sensing now a sudden and collective urge for blood, the queen urged her subjects to be calm.
Rounded or beady eyes, suspicious of their neighbours, relaxed; bunched-up hackles fell, and curled gums compressed. She reminded them that they were all animals, not irrational creatures like Man. There were laws by which everyone was obliged to follow.
“We are noble creatures,” she said. “We know what we are and what we are for. We do not enslave our fellows and force them to do our hunting or foraging for us, while we grow fat and get ill.”
The birds and beasts began to settle down. They listened as she outlined the superior qualities that set them and Man apart.
“Man, although one species, divides himself into tribes. With his tribe, he hunts down other tribes, attacks and kills his own. He kills because they are of a different tribe, or because he has been slighted by one of their members. So, for Man, if one is guilty, all is guilty.”
The creatures among them with more savvy, like the foxes and the raptors, nodded comprehension, or cocked their heads sideways to hear more. Those not so burdened with intellect, the ungulates and the smaller grazers, shook the buzzing flies from their heads, or twitched their muzzles, and then promptly forgot what the queen had just said.
“But he does not confine his persecution and killing to those in tribes not his own,” Queen Serena went on. “Man turns on the very tribe of which he is a member. He attacks those weaker than him. He even breaks that law of laws in the animal kingdom: The law that beats at the heart of every bird and beast. The law that prevents a male from attacking a female of his own species.”
Snarls and growls started up among the carnivores. As predators, with killers’ instincts, they got it. The beasts that had turned beast killers were animals behaving like Man. Ill-equipped, for whatever reason, to form a natural pair bond with their own, the marauders had utilised their hunting skills to satiate a perverted urge.
“Do not imagine,” the queen said, directly addressing the unidentified killers in the gathering, “that because you ape Man that your punishment will be the punishment meted out by Man to Man. Man who gives shelter to his law-breakers, who feeds them, and keeps them alive until they grow old.”
“Sniff them out,” a gravellish, meat-eating voice called from the crowd.
This was echoed by another voice, a deeper one, and repeated by a succession of angry voices, until Sniff them out became a chant that filled the wetlands and the surrounding trees.
Queen Serena allowed the chant to continue and grow.
“Bring them down,” the chant’s initiator added when the communal cry began to wane.
The crowd took up the addition: Sniff them out. Bring them down, they called and repeated.
The queen listened and blinked her approval, which, in turn, emboldened the gathering and inspired the chant’s author to hunt down an ending to his chant. Sniff them out. Bring them down. Tear their throats boomed through the air. So loud was the collective chant, the birds and beasts felt the thunder tones vibrate through their padded feet or slender toes. And that ferocious sound galloped over the land and dove into the river’s running waters. There it was taken up by a hover of trout, a pack of perch, and a bind of eels.
Before closing the gathering, Queen Serena gave her approval to hunting down the killers of her subjects. But one thing she warned. They were not to meet the fate of their victims. She ordered that they be captured and brought before her.
Following the gathering, the moon and the sun bid each other Good morning and Goodnight six times times, and no further slayings were reported. But, on the Day of the Sun, a day when Man often came to Queen Serena’s Kingdom – some as walkers, others as animal slayers – a young mother vixen was attacked in her earth while her mate was away on a hunt. Hearing her screams, Tertius, who was also scouring the air and land from the skies for prey, startled the attackers with a screeching alarm call, while he bolted from above, his wings tucked in close to his body. A phalanx of birds and beasts, on hearing the peregrine’s cry, closed in on the offenders.
The attackers, a fox and a badger, were quickly seized. A mob of outraged finches, jays, thrushes and warblers fell upon them like a cluster of bees defending their hive. They jabbed and stabbed the two terrified animals with their beaks. But the birds scattered quickly when the heavyweights – the badgers – and the ferocious – the foxes, martins and stoats moved in. While the foxes snarled, though stood out of snapping distance, and the smaller carnivores launched themselves at the larger animals in an attacking frenzy, the badgers seized the two assailants by their throats. And then, as instructed, brought them before Queen Serena for judgement.
Before giving her judgement, there was another important law that applied in Queen Serena’s kingdom: any creature accused of breaking a law, natural or animal-crafted, had to, apart from admitting to his actions, recognise his deviancy. The Queen, to this end, spoke to the two accused alone. This was carried out in a natural hollow by the river at sundown. A select trio of badgers stood guard on land. While from the treetops, her parliament of owls ensured no aerial interference. She recognised instantly that the slighter of the two, the fox, was of advanced intellect – even greater than the justified reputation of his fellows. Contrastingly, his hunting companion, a muscle-bound badger of middle age, was less harried by brainpower. She assessed right away that the fox, with his wiliness and superior powers of discernment, had manipulated the badger the way man controls a horse. Her reasoning she therefore directed to the fox.
“Consequences,” she began.
The fox, at first, refused to look in her direction.
She continued. “Consequences belong to the living.” She waited until he looked her way. “The dead need pay no heed to consequences.”
The fox, incapacitated from the injuries received during his capture, pulled himself out of his prostrate position and sat up. His muzzle trembled. His white-furred lips, moistened by a swipe of his tongue, glistened.
“I’m a fox,” he said. “I hunt. That’s what foxes do.”
“But not your own species,” the queen said.
The fox yawned a painful yawn. “They were weak,” he said. “Nature has no place for the sick or weak.”
“Nature needs no interference from perverted instincts to assist her.”
The fox tilted his head sideways and raised an eyebrow. He then dropped his eyes to his paws.
Queen Serena, a seasoned huntress, with her quarry now in sight, shifted flight path, turning her prey in the desired direction. She began to tell him a tale of a young fox cub playing with his brothers and sisters in the warming spring sunshine outside their birth den. All around them the shifting scents and awakening sounds that came with Spring’s arrival. She reminded him of that time when all was new and wondrous: The things he and his siblings felt, smelt, and sensed for the first time. The melting skins of ice covering the rivers, like huge arteries running through the very Earth, freeing the land about it to feel again the beat of life as new shoots broke through its warmed surface. That time when he, as a young fox, witnessed for the first time, the dark, winter-wood burst forth into pelts of light green, and when the last snows stopped falling and the land grew lush, and new shadows sprouted, which created the world anew for him and his siblings to play hide and seek, when they honed their future hunting skills so that they too, like their parents, could do what parents do and fill the lands with awakening life and laughter.
The fox arched his eyebrows, clearly looking at the images given him by the queen. His black tear marks appeared damp. She could see he wanted to speak further his own defence, but from his throat came only an involuntary whine.
With the fox now cornered, the queen could feel in her claws that imminent thrill that shoots from her curled talons, up through her legs and courses like lightning around her body when the strike is made. With killing talons, she swooped.
“Did you ever for one moment,” she said, “think that you would end up a destroyer of life instead of a creator?”
The fox’s muzzle parted; in his eyes she detected a trace of normality. She saw broken images of the fictitious den she’d spoken of. The harder she looked into his eyes, the stronger the images, and the greater the scents of newness, of life unburdened by mature responsibility.
“What would your beautiful mother think of you,” she went on, “if she knew that the cub she bore, into which she breathed life, nurtured and protected had turned into a marauder. A creature who, to satisfy his perverted lust, developed a hunger to prey on creatures not for food but pleasure, and on his own species, on vixens just like her?”
The fox was now openly whimpering.
With the moon fully arisen and casting its bony light upon them, Queen Serena seized the opportunity.
“Let the two of us sing our sorrow to the moon,” she said. She raised her head skyward and gave a deep and plaintive cry.
The fox likewise lifted his head, his jaws parted and his lips rounded. In accompaniment with the queen’s mournful cry, he wailed. In his wail the manifest admission the queen had hunted. And in that wail too the realisation that his actions were the actions of the dysfunctional.
Just before sunrise, the queen’s ground and aerial scouts carried out her orders and summoned the birds and beasts that had been left bereft of family members because of the fox and his badger companion. The two beasts went quietly before them into the forest. That’s when the Dawn Chorus started up.
Sweeter than the swollen fruit dripping from the trees in the nearby farm peach orchard, the melody reached a crescendo before the sun was fully awake. So perfect was the pitch, the refrain so flawless, as made by the robin and the wren, the blackbird, blackcap, chiffchaff, chaffinch and the dunnock – the lead vocalists – the last sounds made by the fox and the badger went unheard. Except, that is, by those birds and beasts that fell upon them with slashing talons, unsheathed teeth and blinding bills.
