by Ness Wheeler
“Beasts” placed fourth in Southern New Hampshire University’s 2023 Fall Fiction Contest.
The long winter had forced every creature to be bold in how they got their nourishment, and few were as bold as I had been to keep my brood fed. At midnight, every ten sunsets, I gathered my murder and brought them to a small clearing in the depths of the wood. Then, the humans would come, and they would leave one of their own behind, unmoving in the grass.
Crows always take care of their dead. When I stumbled upon a corpse of my own kind, I cast strangled cries to heaven to alert my murder. My companions swarm to stand vigil with the body, singing mourning songs and guarding it against greedy-eyed foxes and vultures. We covered them with leaves and branches. It did not matter if we knew the deceased, if they came from far and wide or if they slept a few branches over; we grieved, protected, and sang all the same.
The humans left the people they brought where they fell. They would drag the victim from their home or a cage and bring them from the cluster of human nests into the woods. The executioners in dark mantles did their work swiftly and abandoned the butchered to be stripped of its flesh by creatures like me. By the time they returned with their next prisoner, the birds and the wolves had left the sliver of forest free of remnants of the last.
I sat atop the branch of a tall ash tree, close enough to claim the corpse before any other beasts could, but far enough away that none of the humans would consider catching me for an easy meal. My murder waited deeper in the woods for my call to descend. Among them were my mate and our children, silent and anxious. Even with these ventures, the cold had ravaged us to bones and feathers. My feet shifted on the bark.
They came when the nearly set sun had dyed the snowy ground purple and blue, after most humans were fortifying the fires in their homes to fight against the chill of nightfall. Two men in clothes the color of midnight strode into the clearing. Between them, they dragged a man with a hood tied around his head and a wooden sign hanging from his neck. His mostly bare body was young, and he was much smaller than the two men at his sides. Red, patterned scars stretched across his calves and forearms–like all the victims brought into the woods.
I leaned forward to see better. Above, the evening stars turned away from the scene. The woods were silent as if even the spirits of the trees dreaded what was to come.
They kept his hood on as they forced him to kneel and positioned his neck atop a boulder. I was grateful. It was necessary to eat, and so we would, but it was much easier when we did not have to take a good look at who it was. Our work was necessary, but not always enjoyable. That was why we limited ourselves to feasting on those unwanted by their own kind. Vain and conceited doves who always ate from the hands of men would call even that grossly vile. They had much to say when I poked my head into the houses of the people that owned them, but none of them had felt the wind in their feathers. Nor did they have a mandate from the great Mother Bird herself, as crows did. It was our duty to cleanse the world of rot that would otherwise spoil it, a great duty at that.
Humans left us much to clean. Other creatures abandoned scraps of prey they could not finish, or intentionally left their dead behind after they found there was nothing else that could be done for them. These creatures, however, did not seem to kill due to a need to feed.
Irredeemable things.
One of the men glanced up at me from his post beside tonight’s victim. He had a ring on his thumb, which glittered more than the snow beneath the coverings on his feet. Our eyes met momentarily. Curiosity shone in his blue eyes. I poised myself, ready to call off the patrol around us. A meal was not worth losing our own to be roasted or boiled, no matter how deliciously facile it could be.
The man turned away from us to mutter something to his comrade in the vulgar human tongue. This second fellow raised a brow but said nothing in response as he took his blade from his belt. He held the hilt up high and passed it to his companion. I admired how the moon rippled over its surface. It was the type of material I would love to tuck into my nest, though the man’s stick was far too large for me to carry off. Many men carried such things. They used them to hurt each other in disgusting displays of brutality. My mother had told me that crows sometimes fought, over the edges of territory and carnage–but in all my seasons of living, I had never seen such a thing. The only other murder of crows I knew of lived on the other side of the forest, and I had seen enough foxes sleek around trees with black feathers in their mouths to know they had enough troubles that their territory would not be worth a fight.
A low moan came from beneath the hood, one so soft I almost mistook it for the wind. He started to babble. I did not know why the men came to kill each other in this part of the forest, so I could not fathom that for which he was begging. Freedom or forgiveness, or something to cover his bare, blue toes with.
The man with the ring moved quickly. His steel came down in a flash of grey and sliced through the prisoner’s nape. I looked away, but the sound I was waiting for never came. When I looked back, the kneeling man was still mostly whole. The blade had not been sharp enough. Heads had a habit of wanting to stay attached to the shoulders they rested on.
The man with the ring raised the glimmering steel again and brought it back down upon the prisoner’s neck with a mighty swing.
Plop.
Heavy smells permeated the air. I heard wings rustle from behind me. My son, I guessed. He was always the first to dive in.
The men both exhaled, and they murmured a solemn vow. They cleaned their steel with a rag and set off on the road that had brought them there. The man with the ring cast me a final look, his furry face screwed up and wrinkled, before vanishing beyond the rolling hills of trees. I waited a few long moments, until the sound of their feet crunching frost was long gone. Then I rose on my haunches and opened my beak wide to give my call.
A woman burst through the thick of the forest, cracking twigs and pushing past bare branches with reckless speed. Her grey hair was wild, and her brown skin was scratched from the thorns she had run past. She fell to her knees beside the prisoner’s body, cradling it in her arms like an infant. Screams ripped from her throat until it sounded raw and hoarse. They echoed through the bleakness of night like the cries of wolves. Tears trickled down her cheeks, frozen before they could fall to the snow.
I could only watch. Surprise shuddered through my feathers, and my heart pounded with hurt. None of the other victims had people to cry over them. Hers was unlike the songs we crows sang. Nor was it like any other ritual I had seen any of the beasts of the woods practice. Still, I understood.
“Come, let us return to our hunt,” I said to my murder, cawing into the trees. With a great flap of my wings, I took to the sky. In the distance, the members of my murder fluttered up from their hiding places to dance amongst the clouds. They would understand when I gave them my explanation.
We would return another day. For tonight, there were better meals to find. Ones who did not have mourners.
Category: Competition, Featured, Short Story, SNHU Student