cringing to the back of the pack,
tail low between its legs.
Silverback charges the first dog, his
wragh
sending it howling back to its pack.
A new dog tries, this one with a ragged ear standing up
and the other flopping down.
Behind it are more dogs than Snub has toes,
enough dogs to block the canyon
from one side to the other.
Snub wonders why they are coming near at all,
when Silverback is there to defend.
Silverback yawns widely and slowly
so each dog gets a good view of his long teeth.
Teased pulls herself past Snub and Brother and Mother and Silverback
so that she’s the farthest along the canyon,
leaning heavily against the wall, gasping.
Brother runs tight back-and-forths behind Silverback,
kicking at rocks to add to his ruckus,
though they strike Silverback and not the enemies.
The dogs in the back press against the dogs in the front.
Without courage, the whining, snarling pack
creeps steadily closer to Silverback.
Silverback’s fear-scent is thickened
by the close canyon walls,
enough to make Snub gag.
Breath whimpers with fright,
switching to Snub’s belly from Mother’s.
One of the dogs, yowling as if it has already been attacked,
tries to creep past Silverback.
Its eyes are on Snub—or actually, she realizes,
its eyes are on Breath.
Holding tight to the baby,
Snub backs down the canyon,
huddling with Mother.
No dog will eat Breath while Snub is still alive
to protect him.
Silverback lunges at the dog and it leaps away,
the gorilla’s meaty fist slamming into rocky ground.
The pack retreats, but only for a moment,
again pressing forward, another dog in the lead,
this one all black with a single tan burst on one ear.
Silverback leaps right where the dog tries to escape.
His fist cracks its back.
Silverback bounds back to the center of the canyon,
leaving the dog’s halves to thrash.
Its eyes are panicky, tongue lolling,
front and back legs moving at different speeds.
The dogs hassle forward.
Brother springs into motion, clubbing at a dog.
His fist hits its snout,
but the dog is barely injured,
whirls and sinks its teeth into Brother’s forearm.
He punches out, sending the dog flying back into its pack.
Another dog feints forward,
and again Silverback leaps to fend it off,
leaving the far side of the canyon unguarded.
Brother lets the dog creep past him.
It circles Snub and Mother. Breath.
The baby is terrified,
little fingers digging into Snub’s ribs.
She would fight the dogs if she were on her own,
but the need to protect Breath
makes her want
only to run and flee,
whatever will let the baby survive.
She hears the cries of gorillas and the squeals of dogs.
The close rock walls make everything echo
so that she is unsure who is in pain or where.
Mother is alive.
She is beside Snub,
cowering against the canyon wall.
Brother and Silverback are fighting off the pack.
Together they block enough of the canyon
that no more dogs can stream through.
Snub can still hear the sounds of a gorilla in pain.
She cocks her head at the echo,
only slowly realizing that there are new cries fueling it,
that a gorilla is still being attacked,
that this pain is new and continuing.
It is Teased.
The dogs have come from both ends of the canyon.
While most of them are harrying and distracting Silverback,
a pair has sneaked down the other side of the canyon
and set upon Teased.
They are pulling and tearing at flesh and skin.
Teased is not moving, not anymore.
Her cries have stopped.
Teased has stopped.
Snub has seen the dogs
stop Teased.
Fear heats up.
Fear becomes something blinding.
Snub cries out her
mrgh
at the dogs and strikes her chest in rage
until her vision returns.
Silverback turns toward her,
charges toward the pair of dogs to send them
howling and scattering from Teased
or what, Snub sees now, once was Teased and now is
leg, tissue, skin without Teased to combine them,
the inside of her facing out.
Silverback roars right next to Snub,
mrgh
in his voice and also pain.
Brother and Mother have thronged to his side,
while he
whirls and circles,
whirls and circles,
fists whaling at dogs.
Clutching Breath,
Snub steals to the shelter of Silverback’s body.
A dog has slinked back to Teased’s corpse,
its snout stained red, whining all the while.
Silverback makes sounds of
mrgh,
wragh,
charging the dog and sending it fleeing.
It is not fast enough.
Silverback’s jaws are around its neck.
After one quick and ferocious bite,
the dog’s body jerks uselessly on the ground.
Silverback charges down the canyon,
racing heedlessly toward the patch of blue sky,
toward distant home,
dashing wild dogs with wide sweeps of his arms,
his breath so ragged and choppy
that Snub can track him by sound alone.
Brother follows him.
Snub takes Mother’s hand,
brings her bobbing and hobbling down the canyon.
Mother makes gurgling confused noises as she goes.
The canyon whips past
as they follow Silverback.
The dogs’ excited cries fade, turning to
snarls as they tear at the body that used to be Teased.
The
mrgh
of it makes Snub run faster.
Though part of her wants to whirl and attack,
to release the feeling,
to kill a dog,
she is stopped by her
acha
for the baby clinging to her ribs.
Silverback slows his charge,
watching over his shoulder
to be sure the dogs aren’t following.
Snub is glad to give Mother the chance to recover.
The sharp rocks of the canyon have scraped her limbs.
Whimpering, Breath moves from Snub back to Mother,
holding himself tight to her chest and beginning to feed.
Snub would like nothing more than to lay out flat
on the rocky floor of the crevasse
and rest,
but Silverback won’t let them stop.
Panting and stumbling,
vision blurring and feet numbing,
Snub follows Brother and Silverback
along the rock-strewn floor.
Though most of the canyon wall
is tall and unbroken,
the gorillas pass a fallen-in spot where a rockslide
has formed a steep slope up to th
e top.
A pair of dog pups appears at the edge,
staring down at the gorillas,
mouths opening and closing,
as if unsure whether to make any noise.
A mother dog is behind them, whining,
nipples swollen.
She nuzzles her pups out of view.
Silverback picks up speed.
Snub is following, but her mind
is on Teased,
on the parts of Teased
that are meant to be
inside Teased.
It is all Snub can do to keep her limbs moving
under the hot and constant sun.
Finally
the sharp, rocky ground slopes.
The canyon walls open out.
Ahead the earth is not broken.
The land beyond the canyon is
green,
slopes intersecting in fogged ravines,
all of it covered by trees and vines,
flecked with bright chattering birds.
Mist flows through,
shrouding the trunks and hills,
until it parts in the distance to reveal
a waterfall
as tall as the tallest tree,
its flow sparkling
into a lagoon of gray stone
whose glistening surface twinkles the light.
This is not home.
But could it become home?
The familiar foods of their old homeland
grow here, too:
a cluster of red figs at the summit of a palm,
nettles sprouting from the cracks of a rotting trunk,
ponderous fronds shaped like elephant ears
that will taste bitter until Snub bites into the stalk
and the sweetness inside makes the mouthful soft.
Though her body is still jangly with exhaustion
after the flight from the dogs,
Snub senses that maybe,
even though her family has lost
Wrinkled and Teased,
they could all come to feel
hoo
again here.
Black lines draw themselves across the sky,
and Snub looks up to see the two magpies soaring past,
coasting the currents
rising over the sheer green slope.
They land on the glossy smooth stones
at the edge of the lagoon.
Snub is the only one still on the orange canyon rock.
Forward, the swell of clean blue sky,
the promise of safety
and of future
hoo.
Snub looks back one last time.
Though nothing is moving in the canyon,
teeming ash and smoke in the background
make the passage of broken rock
appear simultaneously to grow and shrink,
the air itself crawling.
Snub finds motion in it,
and not just the tricks of the air.
There.
Almost invisible at the canyon’s horizon,
she can make out the tips of the dogs’ ears.
They think they are hiding,
but they are not.
One of their ears pivots and then goes still,
cupped in the direction of Snub’s family.
The dogs are intent on the gorillas,
want to eat the gorillas,
but they dare not follow them into the new green area.
Snub is confused.
The dogs were brave enough to attack even Silverback.
What are they scared of now?
Snub is glad for the lagoon.
The sound of the waterfall tumbling.
hoo.
Time passes
without gorillas noticing that
time passes.
Here are vines with spicy leaves
that make Snub’s tongue tingle.
Here are macaws, parakeets,
and always the pair of magpies.
Here wounds heal,
become scars and not scabs.
Though Snub is careful to stay
within sight of Mother and Breath,
she once again might go the whole day
without seeing Silverback or Brother
until it is the time to make night nests.
Snub and Mother pass their fingers
through each other’s hair
whenever they are next to each other,
searching for worms or ticks but really saying
We are alive together.
Whenever Mother lies down to rest—
which happens more and more often
as dry season becomes wet season becomes dry—
Breath tucks himself onto her belly,
clutching her hard,
desperate for warmth within the swelter of midday.
When Mother’s naps go long
he journeys off along the jungle floor,
often placing his face right beside Snub’s,
studying the plants Snub eats,
taking his own tiny handfuls of whatever Snub tastes,
chomping gustily with his tiny teeth.
Breath has stopped attaching himself to Mother’s breast.
Even when Snub is cross with him,
when Breath has set on her with his tweaking pinches
she never thinks of him as the pink worm anymore.
This young gorilla has sprouted a mop of thick hair on his head,
a particularly big reddish curl rising
in a wave,
like the licks of water that taste the edge of the lagoon.
Snub gets distracted
and sits on Brother.
She had been picking through a thatch of ferns
for the youngest and springiest fiddleheads
and didn’t notice him behind her.
Snub realizes that they have not played
their falling-into-each-other game
in a long time.
Maybe it is because
ever since the canyon,
the fight with the dogs,
the seasons at the lagoon,
Brother doesn’t play.
He doesn’t lag behind the world anymore,
because he is behind Silverback.
Wherever Silverback goes,
Brother goes, too,
even though his back isn’t at all silver.
No one else seems to care that this is not home.
They forage at this nut tree like it is the same
as the nut tree that grew between the two rocks.
They eat these green spaded leaves like they are the same
as the green spaded leaves of Teased’s favorite fern.
But Snub has memories of another, better place.
Every day, she seeks out the limits of her world,
hoping to find a sign of which way is home.
She travels far over the jungle floor,
as far as the clay-brown river
or the orange cliffs of the canyon.
She runs until she is exhausted,
until she has rushed far from the lagoon,
along the clay-brown river,
through the reeds at the bank,
scattering the columns of flies skimming the edge.
She collapses into a patch of soft wildflowers,
chest heaving and arms trembling,
calmness stolen by longing.
The sky and the flowers eventually relax her,
and she places her arms behind her head,
lets her thoughts unfocus as she stares at the clouds.
The magpies are near, following her as always,
pretending not to be aware of her
as they pick seeds out from between the wildflowers.
Maybe they remember home.
Maybe Snub’s family is the last piece of it they can find.
&nbs
p; Snub follows the clay-brown river
away from the lagoon,
farther than she ever has,
hoping for clues of home.
It threads through the jungle,
overhung by spindly trees
that drape lichen,
that host parakeets and monkeys.
Snub follows the river until it disappears
into marshy ground,
turning into still water blanketed in mosquitoes
that mire in Snub’s coarse hair.
Snub has seen rivers flow into lakes and ponds,
but never slowly weaken and disappear like this,
like they are dying,
like the ground is a dry dog
ripping and biting the river
until it is gone.
The sight takes away Snub’s flimsy feeling of
hoo.
Did she hear voices?
Snub whirls on thickets of reeds,
glaring into each one.
Courage breaks, and Snub speeds
back toward Silverback.
She’s already at the lagoon
before she remembers herself and stops.
She turns around despite the fear inside her,
but realizes that the day is too old
to go back exploring.
Snub takes a long look at her family.
Mother is asleep, her back rising and falling.
Breath has just woken, belly-down on top of Mother.
He props himself up on his elbows,
the better to watch Snub.
There’s a look of sleepy outrage on his face,
as if he’s unsure of what sound he should make,
confusion or sorrow or anger
at the fact that Snub has been wandering again.
The sky is dropping rain today.
The clouds bleach the sky