Excerpt From “Keeper of the Flame”, a short novel
(In a nutshell, the book is about a girl looking for her grandmother who disappeared when she was a child. During her travels she meets a guy who knew her and had some writings from her. Thr granny is a bit of a shamnistic chick and has a piece about connecting with animal spirit. The following excerpt describes the girl's attempt to acheive this. Even though her approach is a bit ad hoc and fearful, she is sucessful. I am curious if this flows well and sounds believable enough. Basically does it work for what it is meant to be?)
Sitting on the rock breathing deliberately I stared straight ahead trying to lose myself like I had with the psychic net. But my conditioning was thick. This isn't possible it said. My stomach rumbled, hunger bringing me farther away from my goal and into the daily norm. Thoughts of scrambled eggs and thick slices of bread besieged my mind. I had a mint in my pocket and I placed it on my tongue. The intensity of the lone flavour occupied my focus and my breathing was able to steady and slow without mental interference. I lay back on the rock. A winter sun was beautiful on my skin. My breathing took on its own momentum, my mind reeling out odd, merging thoughts and images floating between dreams and this reality.
Had I slept? I sat up. The brightness had shifted into shades. Cold, I rubbed my arms and wiggled my legs while peering intently into the gloom, waiting and trying not to wait and trying not to think about what I was actually meant to be waiting for. I ignored that teasing sense of foolishness.
The eerie bark of a fox rebounded through the valley and a strong, tangy scent permeated the air. A fox appeared, his reddish tones accentuated by the white of his chest and tail tip. I could see he had an egg in his mouth. He leapt up onto another large, rock across from me and sat there, the egg gleaming in his jaw. I could hear the faint cackle of hens behind me. They were by the house nearing the coop and I would need to close them in soon. The fox must have discovered the wild nest where the hens secretly laid hoping to secure their eggs from our thieving hands.
Closing my eyes, I tried to sense the fox and envision the world from his perspective. I imagined how deeply succulent a hen must smell, how its calls hit my ears with crisp accuracy, and the noises beyond how I could hear them all effortlessly, instantly indentifying them, feeling them, danger, food. Dizziness rocked me. I opened my eyes. The fox was still there. Nausea rose, my head ached. I lay my head on my knees. My body seemed to whoosh one way then back, still a moment, then lurch forwards. Lifting my head again, I hoped that by using the fox as a focal point it would alleviate this awful nausea. I watched the fox greying in the settling gloom, this time concentrating on my breathing as a means to steady my head and free my stomach of the churning.
Aware my mind had enlivened, I considered when this quickening had occurred and then if it really had and I tried to remember my usual way of being. Maybe I'd always sensed things in this raw or rather lucid way, yes that was it, nothing to filter through. No this was definitely new. Immediately that thought frightened me. My focus recoiled, searching frantically for my own familiar way of thinking and detected a density tugging at the outskirts of my awareness. I resisted the tug and instead attempted to pull it to me, loathe to entirely let go of my new state of airiness. Maybe I could combine them. But I was unable to control anything, normality and oddness intermingled and spun through my brain bringing fear than relief and back to fear. I closed my eyes, felt normality, then knowing it wasn’t normal panic shot through me, I opened my eyes, closed them. Breathing, trying to calm myself, the entire time telling myself that my usual mode of perception was firmly in place, it had just receded to the edges to give my mind room to expand. Then I realised that although I missed my usual state of mind, the clarity of this new, overriding state of mind was like a reprieve from the complexity I could feel simmering at some distant reach of my awareness.
The tangy scent weighed heavily in the air preoccupying my thoughts. Then an onslaught of scents, sharp and keen. Aromas were all I was thinking about. Unnerved by my awareness of this olfactory obsession, I tried to focus on something else and the domination of scent receded. Panicked that I’d lost whatever connection with the fox I had achieved, the waiting and trying not to wait began anew. Scent sharpened and swelled through the moment. Was it me I was smelling? The earth? A scent so deep and rich. So pleasing. Yes, of the earth. And a luscious fur, wiry and warm.
Floaty yet dragging hard to the ground, again I got scared and tried to pull out, like out of a nightmare, but the sensual held me firmly. Everything is scent and now also sounds. Whiskers tingle and I taste fur, a rough tongue moving across a potent coat. And hunger, driven by hunger. We're starving. A story, it’s story, his story opens up to me, revealed from another mind, mine and its united.
When it’s dark, crisp stars crowding the black sky, I edge nearer to the lit up place. The cacklers scent is strong, my stomach grumbles, saliva seeps, I’m hungry. I’m not guaranteed success. Inside that darkened den, the cacklers sleep, quiet now. In the light time, I hear their language, tight rolling murmurs. Rising, dipping clucks and calls. I spot their red feathers flashing between trees. Low down inside me instinct instructs. This set-up is wrong. It’s too easy to catch them. Why do they not flap their wings up to the trees and roost like other birds.
Desire drives me forwards, not careless attack, but cunning, the potent need to eat merged with intention, pushing and mounting. The verge of hunger hysteria become stone cold calculation. Sounds, smells, funnelled into my progress. Only the prey in this pure moment. A passion for satiation. Absorbed with every step, one paw after another, I progress with silence, ancestral stealth guiding me. Fully connected with the solid earth under my toes. The pads pressing, feeling, moving, any approached terrain, weighed up and covered. The heat of the cacklers gathers and lifts, dispersing the aroma of their droppings, a delicious richness, wafting through the opening, spiced with aging straw.
Sometimes I sleep on old straw but always on alert for the lit-up place creatures. The canines that live with them often growl, bark and chase yet I have played with some of them. But the creatures that dwell within these lit-up places almost always radiate a jagged feeling towards me; they yell when we meet, hurtling cold rocks and sometimes fire ones. They have starlight inside their dens; they cannot see in the dark, nor smell or sense or hear. All is lit and loud and shut.
My dealings with other canine are mostly territorial. I accept their hold on their domain and leave if I’m sensed. Though they do not always follow the same rules. They invade my space sniffing and yapping, pursuing me through the undergrowth until defeat is undeniable and then they run back to the lit up place pretending they didn’t want to catch me anyway. As if those over fed, lazy, strange smelling canine could catch me. My ways and theirs are not quite the same, our paths run parallel then clash and diverge. But this jaggedness towards me. That only comes from the lit up place creatures.
I arrive at the den of the cacklers; they sit perfectly in reach of my snout. The barrier is open. The much larger den nearby is starless. I leap and my jaw closes on a warm, feathered neck. Instinct drives, instinct warns, the cackler vocals explode as does that roaring sound of the moving den. The sound heightens, stark light overpowers, pungent, choking scent, roaring cuts off, lit up creatures emerge, shout and chase. I let go of my catch feeling its life still pulsating. And run. Their hostility following me long after I have hidden. Enveloping me like a thick, grey cloud of foul air. I lay panting, a rough sensation this incessant hostility. I stand and shake my body down to the tip of my tail. Images flit through my brain, images sprung from a deep well of knowledge, an unshakable correctness. It is how it is, but now isn’t. Flowing order hitting corners. Instinct dictates, yet a natural state is topside down. This is part of the new way, the way of corners. It’s seeped into every root and soul. Dismal eyes of captured creatures and the stench of their despair. Creatures once like me, but I will never be like them. Some cacklers, the ones who live behind walls, never emerging into air, do not emit a succulence and though hardly alluring would do for a meal, if I could get to them. Their barricaders are consistent. These cacklers know no freedom.
I value my freedom. Value? When did this begin? This notion of freedom. Freedom was never questioned, it had no meaning, no substance to toy with, to take or give, to value. Because it had no opposite.
It’s opposite? Trapped, that’s it. That’s how I feel sometimes, trapped, but not like the cacklers and those other creatures behind walls, their minds must pace and bolt, their bodies in forced inertia. Even the ones stuck behind fences are trapped. I’ve only known hints of captivity and I do not like it. It extracts the wild from you, dulling your senses, denying your nature.
Sometimes I find scraps of strange concoctions left outside near the large den. The flavour delighting me with intense tang and savoury. One time in hiding I waited until the canine had gone inside then scurried over and finished his food. It filled me up, but not long after I’d cleaned the bowl a ferocious thirst overtook me, the moisture in my mouth sucked away like dried mud cracking during the long days of heat. I gorged on a puddle than another, until my stomach bulged and I threw up. Tainted.
Now the cackler barrier is open and the lit up den in darkness. I nab two cacklers and devour them with my mate and litter. Clean taste, thick wetness of blood. Guts and bone. Delicious.
Our communal devouring, our fur touching, our focus on feeding. A rich fulfilment not only in my stomach but my fatherly duties also achieved. This was the order flowing, a moment of perfection, only earth and sky and the soft, pulsating bodies around me. Satisfied, the wee ones sleep and my mate and I sit outside on a rock, our gazes drawn upwards our noses settled with gratified hunger, breathing and digesting. Sky puddles begin landing on us from above and we move back into our den snuggling up next to our kits, immersed in their steady breath and softness. Our thick tails encircling them.