The Stranger

Whitecrown woke at first light. A new day arrived, and he would start it like any other. Yesterday was already becoming distant in his mind. He fluffed himself up, shook the frost from his wings, and hopped back and forth in the branches before settling in to groom himself. His busy preening, accompanied by chattering to himself, soon woke his brother who only fell asleep in the early dawn hours. Brighteye was nonetheless happy to see his sibling was in good shape, considering the prior days’ events. The cut near his soft pink eye would heal, and he had groomed his feathers back into workable condition, though they were nonetheless frailer than darker feathers. Seeing his sibling rise, Whitecrown jumped to greet him. He moved in and nuzzled his beak against his older brothers’ cheek, an affectionate behavior, but Whitecrown then fell under the grip of an instinct he was unable to resist. The young white bird began emitting hoarse squeaks, growing quickly louder. He flicked his wings, opened his beak wide, and began begging to be fed like a nestling. It was an instinctive behavior, one that he was really too old to still be falling into, but Brighteye knew that chicks can sometimes regress under stressful circumstances. Unfortunately, Brighteye had eaten nothing in a day and so could not share anything. They would have to find food soon.

Bluetails were generalists. Their sharp minds were used to find choice, highly-nutritious foods in the wide, inedible world. They couldn’t eat sticks or leaves. They sought out fruits, seeds, insects, and basically anything that washed up out of the ocean, including perhaps the most important resource of all - carrion. Bluetails were too small to hunt big game, but were good at finding those who succumbed to the cold and taking their fill of their essence before larger creatures came along. Scavenging was a lifeline here. But without a keen sense of smell, they had to rely on their acute vision to find bodies in the snow. Many mornings they would spend flying out and surveying the territory, hoping to find something that didn’t survive the night. A group could take enough to feed everyone for days before something else came along and took what was left. Just the two of them, it would be more difficult. Still, it would be their best shot.

Whitecrown would follow Brighteye wherever he went. He was still young and in the stage of life where he didn’t have much independence, but it would not always be this way, Brighteye knew. Eventually their dynamic would change. For now though, the two took flight over the thickets and clearings dusted in the nights’ snow. Within a few hours it would melt away and the hardy grasses would be exposed and return, briefly, to the business of sustaining their life in the sunlight before winter came again the next evening. By then the scent of any carrion would attract predators even faster as it carried on the warmer air, and they’d lose their chance at a meal, so time was of the essence.

One of the ways to find carrion would be to follow tracks. Predator’s tracks might lead to a kill that could be stolen from, and the tracks of prey, especially a single set of a kind normally found in a group, might lead directly to a fallen animal that has just died. When Brighteye was a chick he remembered one elder that would lead the whole clan alongside a specific predator creature that hunted in groups. By directing this much bigger hunter toward the other animals it wanted to eat, they cleverly used it as a weapon. The animal would be appreciative of the help, at least enough to tolerate the clan as it took home some of the scraps. Brighteye was fascinated by the partnership, and was very interested in leading his own as an adult. But for some reason, those predators had all but gone away since then. He was no longer sure what they had even been. Already in his lifetime, the knowledge of the cooperation was lost to his kind, no longer relevant and so soon forgotten. Only Brighteye cared about things in the past - or the distant future, for that matter. For other bluetails, it was only worth thinking about if it helped them today.

There weren’t specific words for most of the big land-walking animals that lived in the world anymore, because those still left were not very useful nor very dangerous to bluetails that could easily fly away, or otherwise important except when dead, and then they were simply called meat. Nonetheless Brighteye knew of most of them. He had come across many species, though never viewed them too closely, as they were all even less like him than his own.

The brothers soon found a potentially promising set of tracks, and Brighteye led the flight to see where they led. Three-toes, in a neat line, with no additional toe-counts around it. Not the hulking horn-headed beasts that ate the bushes. These were those of a large herd-bird, one of the flightless biped animals that ate the grass with their long twisting beaks. This set was unusual because it was all alone in the snow. Herd-birds were never away from their groups. It could be old, or sick and dying, and maybe already succumbed. If it was not yet, something else bigger might have the same idea and do the job for them.

When they reached the end of the trail however, what they saw was something Brighteye had never seen before. A huge herdbird was indeed the creature behind the trail, but sick or dying it was not. Rather, it had met up with the tracks of another creature. Wielding a tool in its long beak, it hit the animal once in the head and killed it. He didn’t think they ate meat, but he must have been mistaken. What surprised him more was that he didn’t know that animals made tools. So strange, and so unexpected, did he find the events playing out before him that even though the huge animal would surely eat the entire body and leave them nothing worth picking at, he had to see what happened next. So he descended onto the branches of the nearest thicket, and with his brother coming in for a landing beside him, they watched. The herd-bird itself seemed unsure what it was supposed to do after subduing its prey. It merely stood there, looking down at the body as it bled bright red into the snow, still holding tight to its club. After a minute it snapped to attention, as if broken from contemplation, and looked around, as if it felt guilty. Predators sometimes do that after catching prey, for they fear something bigger coming around to take their food, but something about this animal was different from what Brighteye had seen before. And what could take the food from the biggest of all animals?

For a moment, its eyes met his own, and he noticed this herd-bird was kind of weird looking too. One eye was a different color than the other, a bright blue starkly contrasted to the other, which was nearly black. Over the odd eye it sported a streak of pure white feathers - a little like his brother’s. It didn’t immediately look away - it seemed surprised, and a little unnerved, to see someone else there watching. For a few seconds, the two looked into one another. They were nothing alike - total strangers - but something about the moment seemed to stand out to them both. Soon though, the giant bird averted its eyes back to the carcass. What happened next was what Brighteye understood least. It visibly gestured, using its tool, in the direction of the dead animal, turned to glance back at Brighteye one last time.

Almost as if to say “Oh, you can have it. I don’t want it.”

It then turned and walked away without looking back.

The stranger was gone.

Internally Brighteye wondered. “What kind of predator hunts without eating it?”

But with hunger burning a pit in both of their stomachs, he couldn’t philosophize long on what had just transpired. As the two birds descended upon the fresh carcass to eat, Whitecrown began picking at the hide, so thin and disheveled even his soft, young beak could break through. Brighteye paused again, for he recognized this… thing, from a distant, foggy memory from years before.

This was the animal from his youth, which the bluetails used to hunt alongside. Seeing it now, a gaunt and pitiful thing that now seemed so out of place in this world, he wondered - as he started pecking into its eyes - if it was the very last one. On a deeper level, as he and his brother fed, he felt a harder to place connection to the three-leg creature with the strange toothy beak, that in death now assured his life. A stronger familiarity, yet just beyond his recollection, like a forgotten dream. The weird, and inexplicable sense, that he felt he might have known someone like it once.

~~~

The brothers filled their stomachs until there was no more space, and then they took flight again, feeling reinvigorated. Now that their immediate needs were fulfilled, it was time to try to unravel the mystery. Brighteye led the way, continuing to follow the tracks of the stranger, not knowing what its intentions were or who it was, yet much too curious to let it slip away. The snow would melt soon, and so hide its traces - they had to move quickly before they lost it. If it was in the business of leaving food out lying around it was merely in their interest to follow it along, but its behavior seemed more intentional than that. The gift of the carcass was a windfall that kept them going longer on their journey.

Maybe he could return the favor somehow.