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The Caterpillar

The caterpillar shrugged its way down a diseased branch dusted with pollen. Leerily, Dickie leaned closer (though not too close) to better observe its impossibly disgusting dozens of little feet, the alien blondeness of its eerie fur. He couldn't bear more and pulled back. Yet he wished for a more profound contact with the thing. To show it who is in control. It was the first caterpillar that he had ever seen. Its ugly appearance was like a warning that all would not be as pleasant for him as it might have seemed until now and a challenge for control of his earthly hegemony. Dickie plucked a twig from a carpet of molting dead leaves underfoot and picked at its bark with the broad fingernail of his thumb, rolling up pulpy sediment under the cuticle, splintering and peeling away the shriveled dead wood - paring it down to the faded yet sill vital green of new bark beneath, whittling and whittling yet still more with the edge of his teeth, until he was satisfied with his instrument: his spear. It was for combat with a microcosmic world that might grow too large some day, devouring him and everything else on the planet. Then he stood faced off with his adversary which still continued unabated its slow shrugging voyage down the branch. He felt its power now, inflated by the contrast in scale between them: savored the lovely stupidity or ignorance of the caterpillar; knew, instinctively somehow, that it was completely unintelligent - and was clueless to the nature of his industry, his purpose. This was very satisfying. And he had time on his side, could wait for at least as long as it took the caterpillar to reach the hollow knob at the end of the branch. There it could somehow escape and so he'd have to strike before it lifted its antennaed head to climb. He felt an urge to make connection now, gently jabbed the stick into the caterpillar's side without penetrating it. The caterpillar stopped, curled itself into a tight ball. Disappointed, Dickie prodded the furry fist. It didn't move. And now, he felt shame, had not wanted to scare the caterpillar, only to frustrate it. This was not an adversary equal to him. His hot feelings turned cold, his eyes like two brown buttons as he nudged his twig spear into the soft furry center of the caterpillar's knot. He lifted it, bared his teeth, his drawn-back lips shifting indecisively, and put it in to his mouth.

Sucked from off the stick, the caterpillar tasted good. He looked for another; none around. Only ridged green pods, some burst open with cottony insides from which something pretty with wings seemed to be struggling to emerge.

He leaned his wet black snout up close to sniff the borning butterflies but felt no appetite and moved off, down the leafy path.

His knuckles sank in the soft earth. Occasionally, he glimpsed a grubworm snaking in the detritus and scooped it to his mouth. They were very sweet. Round green tunnels in the shapeless forest branched from his eyes like great beams, the longest shooting to the very base of the mountain, in whose shadow he had been born and now lived. Soon, his mother had told him, the herd would begin their ascent up the dense forest-covered slope to spend the long hot summer by its streams. And there were wonderful groves to play among the great rocks, she told him, picking ticks from his fur, her brown eyes limpid with pleasure.

How he loved to lie in the crook of her arm, blinking at nothing, trying to imagine the things she spoke of.

The corridor-spokes extended from his eyes, his head the hub, and where he turned the vision wheeled to with degrees of adjustment that sealed off some accesses, opened others. Through these fired the shapes of living things, fracturing and reassembling. A Macaw feather-splashed against the sky. A King Cobra slither. Striped orange bright a tiger slipped through the shredder of slashing fronds, fragments winking at great speed and rematerialized a hundred yards nearby beside a Conimack tree, where it lay down and waited for him, though he did not realize it, only saw. He sensed, though, that it was dangerous, that he had strayed a long way from the lair, the farthest that he had ever come on his own.

He did not know what to do about the tiger. It represented a level of threat beyond his comprehension: a great black divide as absolute as sleep compelled him to stand swaying on his knuckles, surprised by the strangeness of his indecision.

He desired both his options with equal and maximum portions of his being: to attack headlong in a ferociously uncompromising assertion of his absolute dominion, his refusal to be cowed, or else flee pell mell and propelled by terror so fierce that his young heart might seize up and kill him in his flight.

And then all at once, he saw what the tiger also just now understood. The corridor from his eyes to the tiger's panting non-committal face ran uninterrupted without so much as a log in the way. The tiger risen on this thought to its running feet crushed the gap with bruising force, jaws poise to snap his neck.

Mathilda, his mother, had told Eddie to watch carefully over his brother, Dickie. Even though they had been born together, she said that he was first out and so older and would thus know better then Dickie what to do in an emergency. His brother's irritating curiosity was a constant burden which led him again and again into unpleasant encounters with things which Eddie know nothing about but about which he learned all too quickly, as when Dickie pushed his nose into the burrow of a frenzied mongoose who nearly nipped off his nose and Eddie had to charge it snarling to warn it off. The mongoose stopped, reared up on its hind legs and began to eye him in a strange lethal-feeling way, swaying left to right as though Eddie were a Cobra and not some young ape just poking around. Instinct warned the hair on the back of Eddie's neck and he turned, growled at Dickie to take off and with a fierce backward glance at the mongoose, escaped, his gut moiling with hurt pride and relief.

Now he was in his favorite perch in the tallest banyan tree for miles around but could see no trace of his foolish brother. He had been feeding himself on succulent leaves, tearing off the thick foliage and calmly, rhythmically putting it to mouth, chewing, hands busily but meditatively tearing the green stuff into portion size, his black furred body ensconced in a thicket of nourishing food, in the forest womb of his mothering earth.

Only a slight edge of concern tainted his pleasure. But it was enough to keep his soft brown eyes peeled to the tree line, ears alert for the sound of his brother's voice. Visual corridors bored through the forest beamed from his eyes with radar-like accuracy. Then he saw the orange slash the cleared runway of its imminent rush and his brother, Dickie, hunched to face it, knuckles frozen to the ground.

He bolted through an explosion of scattered foliage, pollen, batted insects: a lumbering mud rat tumbled under the feet of his charge. He screeched with teeth bared, hurtling hands extended reflexively to break his fall against the thick green elegantly curved neck of a banyan branch, which he caught and used to propel his momentum to the next branch, sunbursts splintering his eyes, bats and birds slashing through his sight, the orange blur closing rapidly with Dickie's stock-still stance.

Then, terribly, Dickie moved. Full knowledge of what was to occur panicked him. His fisted knuckles shifted. Then he broke into a screaming trot, looking back with horrifying hopelessness at the looming freight of orange death bearing down upon him, and Eddie was just too far away to reach him yet close enough to see his brother's face and what he saw stopped him full in his tracks at the perimeter of the glade that was about to become a slaughtering ground and where he sorrowfully shrieked with rage and futility as in one instant Dickie was only afraid yet unharmed and still not quite believing in the teeth about to kill him, and then suddenly surprised and hurt and agonized as they closed around and sank into the hump-shaped muscle at the base of his neck and severing tendons and vessels, clamped tight and shook the little gorilla from side to side with an almost lethargic motion, until the vertebra was severed from the skull and Dickie's head rolled from his shoulders as his lifeless body fell from the jaws.

Then it looked at Eddie with massive calm as though considering him for next, and Eddie shrieked at the gigantic cat who looked away blinking and with a grunt flopped to his belly, Dickie pinned under his paws, tore off a leisurely piece of the little gorilla and chewed contentedly.

Eddie didn't know what to do. And so he began full-flight to head for home, calling his mother, Mathilda, his voice a haunted high-pitched wail through the forest's roof-line, and from their tree top homes many different kinds of creatures came out to see what had happened, spider monkeys and owls and lynxes and wild hares, and squirrels and parrots and hawks, heeding his voice, unable to decipher to decipher the specifics but attuned to the pitch of loss that was familiar to each of them from their life in the forests, and when it reached Mathilda's ears, far away in a grove of banyan trees near the last creek before the mountain climbed, she felt a surge of razor-tipped anguish slice through her mid-afternoon somnambulance and uttered a weak cry that her only surviving child could not hear.

A second older female named Louise appeared, her head and then her body rolling out from an enormous pile of leaves and she beat the ground with her hands in desperate sorrow. Now came a great silver-backed gorilla, named Joseph and then a second, slightly smaller one but no less magnificent, named Victor. This was the father of Eddie and Dickie. The two males fell back on their haunches and numbly watched the females who waved their arms and wept. Then the little surviving gorilla was amongst them, screeching its story, rolling on the ground, beating the earth that had betrayed him, taken his brother, their child. Mathilda held him close and he struggled but she held him. The males did not approach. Joseph rose and walked on his knuckles and hinds a few feet and sat back down again. Then Victor rose and did the same.

They sat watching, sunken, compelled to physical inertia by the sheer unbearable weight of emotion unexpressed in them. The females, however, danced with grief as though on fire and Eddie, not knowing any better, joined with them; was still at an age when doing so would not jeopardize his position in the herd.

He danced with the sense that somehow he had failed. Rolled and screeched and stamped his feet and waved his arms helplessly, and when he saw Victor's narrowed bloodshot eyes watching him accusatorily, his worst fears were confirmed: they blamed him. Even Mathilda was cool towards him now, as though the passage of time had jarred the truth into a reassembled, more palatable version that was a lie necessary to their future survival: as so unbearable that it threatened their very existence, since their brood were now cut in half, and with it their future. If he were killed the herd would disband, find others with whom to link up. It was the way, he knew, without ever knowing how he knew so much, since nothing like it had yet happened in the very brief span of his young life: an instinct older then memory.

Now, the silver-backed gorillas moved off to find the tiger and, if able, to kill it. The females circled to a higher ground to wait and watch, if able to, the execution. Dickie's screech reverberated in Eddie's skull. He stroked his head, whimpering and scratched an itch. In the distance the tiger roared and the silverbacks roared back. He saw Dickie's face as it had been an instant before the razor-toothed orange blur had impacted with his brother's flesh, upending him in a fury of dust and limbs, the head snapped clear off its shoulders. Again and again it replayed in Eddie's mind. The females had not even looked back at him as they retreated to safer ground; the males had not asked him to come along. He was, for now, outcast. He bared his teeth and nibbled an unbearable itch. When it reappeared on his belly he snapped at it miserably with his exposed incisors and scratched it had with his fingernails. Now the itch ran near his calf and he scratched, then bit with his teeth, again and again, until blood ran. He bit, snapped, scratched, rubbed, and bled. The itching spread. He cried and scratched, his teeth and cuticles red-stained. Rolled in the dust to no avail whatever, it was beneath the skin, inaccessible, driving him positively mad. Now he scrambled into a tree, scraped his back and hinds until fur and skin was left clinging to the bark, over which a caterpillar crawled without interruption to its constant slow procession to nowhere. The itch forgotten now, he poked his finger at it. It curled into a ball. Teeth bared, Eddie plucked it up, swallowed it. It tasted good. He looked for another; found one; ate it. And ate several more. He brought his wet black snout up close to the branch, his limpid brown eyes bright with greed. There was a colony swarming around a grove of ridged green pods, one exposing its tufted insides from which a Royal Monarch butterfly stepped free, and spread its wings to the breeze to dry before lifting off down the path with the little ape in headlong pursuit.

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