[100 Challenge] Ocean_15

Moon vision: all animals gaze into the tusk moon.

A shaggy, be-tusked face rises through the shimmering grays and glowing silver-whites of the moon– elk? No: the antlers rooted from the jowls, and long and arced like the rib of a whale. From the fur-face a voice: “You have never seen us before. We are now bones, ground down and river-ridden to the sea. And so might you be, if their song doesn't find its way back to their lips.”

Owl and Salmon look to each other, then back to the moon: “Who are you, face-in-the-sky?”

“I am Mastodon, long-gone under. Gone under a thousand thousand thousand seasons ago. Our people have finished our time tromping the sweet grasses of the world.”

“Then how are you here?”

“Your cries opened the cave-way, and I heard, and I came. The moon is a tunnel through the thicket of the sky. The moon is a hole that moves around the sky. And changes shape. And watches.” 

“It is bright on the other side.” 

“So bright.”

Salmon, the wets in her eyes, and Owl, the wind sifting her wing-shell, gaze on this apparition, this Ancient of Ancients.

“Children of the wild world, of the giving earth, your people still touch the wind and the waves and the earth, your boughs still sway and your burrows fatten with acorns and the dreaming of your cubs. But there is an end to the end…”

Tusk Moon

“Of what do you speak?” hoos owl.

“We speak of he becoming-ancestor of all of a people. None remaining. Not a hoo in the wood, not a gush in the shining pools of redds. No babies anymore. No livingness.”

Salmon shudders in her bed of liquid dreams; owl clutches round herself her feather cape.

“Glide the blackbirds and splash the waters— rolling around the sky! It is the song, younglings, the song that has drifted from their lips and got lost, gone gliding on eagle wings away. The ones who forgot to sing are extincting other peoples: the winding people, the flying people, all of you. Well most. Racoon and crow, bug and the Smallest of the Smalls seem to live through anything. But we mastodons are gone into the dream of the mud. The ones who forget the song bring down the world.”

Moongazing with eyes wide, Owl and Salmon beseech: “What can we do?" 

“After extinction, we cannot sing. You must keep singing, sing so the two-leggeds can hear. Sing their song back to them. Your young ones will meet their young ones. Their young can still hear the song. They might remember. The living two-eggeds used to hear their Old Ones, their Old Ones whispered the songs through them. But they no longer hear their old ones whispers. For them to sing again they must listen. Glide to their ear feathertip-light. Glide in, that they might cant a head in the direction of leaf-shutter and cloud-sigh and all the whispering world again. Sing them, lovelies, sing them home.”