The echo maker

Caverns carry the sounds of wingbeats. Bats hang on the underside of the cave, mating and roosting, slumbering during the daytime. Beneath them, other cave fauna make their home in the guano. Then, when nightfall arrives, the wingbeats echo off the cavern’s edges as hundreds of hungry hunters fly off in search of sustenance.

There are few who willingly enter caves - few human beings, that is. Echoes make us doubt ourselves, feel self conscious of the footsteps that would, on other surfaces, be silent. But some people study the creatures of the caves, the beings that live within. Some people study echoes themselves; the physics of sound, how it bounces off objects.

There’s a connection between echoes and water - most creatures that use echolocation are aquatic, as electricity travels more easily in water. Fish have an electric sense to make the most of that reality. Mammals that echolocate are usually ones that returned to the sea, cetaceans communicating across oceans. But even on land, caves were formed by water, ancient water. There, too, mammals, the only ones capable of flying, use echoes to make their sense of the environment.

The echo maker, human ecologist, visitor to this world of echoes, entered the habitat, the cavern. So many creatures could be crushed beneath the feet that make those echoing footsteps, no matter how carefully said human points their lamp and watches where their feet land. So many small beings underfoot - centipedes, spiders, beetles; guano is quite a foundation for an ecosystem to be built on.

Certain species can only be found in specific caverns, and the unwelcome human has to be the one to record said species’ existence, count their numbers if possible, try to kill minimally in spite of humanity’s footprint on the planet crushing far less isolated ecosystems than these.

Maybe the creatures prefer not to be recorded or counted, to live unnoticed in the caverns, echo makers but without anyone but other echo makers to hear said echoes. Maybe the human would perish, unpreserved except in skeletal remains. The feat of removing a human in a cave is far more difficult than the feat of recycling beings with exoskeletons. Maybe all that will remain are echoes of a maker, of a person attempting to make a hidden world slightly less hidden.