The Gift of Life

Bright red is often a warning colour. Yet that fattened lamb was a faker, for I had seen him shed his scarlet skin to reveal the tender meat beneath.

*

My hunt began upon catching the scent of deer one winter’s night. This confounded me on two accounts: one – its taunting traces had come unmistakably from deep within the urban desert, two – it had descended from the heavens.

I admit, I knew little of the pigwalkers who build those wastelands of stone and smoke; long had I slept beneath their ancestors, lying in wait for prey of sufficient challenge. However, with just a cursory glance upwards at that gargantuan swine, conveyed through the sky by deer, of all creatures, I knew that I must investigate.

Bursting out from my subterranean labyrinth, I slithered from shadow to shadow, keeping my eyespots fixed upon the sky. It did not take long for him and the deer to land atop a stone structure with a smoking geyser in the centre of its roof. I lay motionless close by, in order to observe that beautiful bloated beast.

Only now did I comprehend the true nature of my prey; he may have smelled like an elder pigwalker, coated in the stale sweat of exertion, but this was merely a well-crafted illusion. Likewise, his exterior resembled that of a pigwalker from afar, but up close I saw that his peach skin appeared shiny and inflexible, like chitin.

Cautiously, I oozed my way up the stone structure he stood upon, eager to sneak a better look.

The deer must have carried him through the sky in the wooden nest he now sat within. Peering over it, I further examined my prey. Like the pigwalkers, his outer coat of fur had been scavenged from other creatures – though truthfully I know not what creature’s fur is such a sickly, cloying red. He was as bulky as a megatherium, and his locomotion was clumsy and sluggish.

From underneath the fur he had appropriated, I saw two infants of his kind; they dangled from underneath him by their still-attached umbilical cords. These newborn calves did not cry out for nourishment; rather, they employed their little fingers meticulously upon the construction of complicated pigwalker tools. They, too, resembled the pig-skinned simians, albeit their ears were overly long and angular. From this I surmised that the gargantuan distended stomach of the mother cow himself must have been continuously pregnant with those little worker drones.

These incongruent, insectoid characteristics revealed to me that the megafauna I was hunting could not have been a pigwalker at all. I came to believe that this Queen Pig must be a pigwalker mimic, as a parasite might mimic the appearance of its host.

By this point, he had made his way over to the geyser of which I had spoken. Curiously, I witnessed him squeezing his immense bulk into this smoking tunnel, dragging with him an animal skin filled with intricate shapes, whose impressions I took to be tools of some kind. He attempted to crawl down, head first, into the hot fumes, oblivious to my slithering, viscous mass encroaching upon him.

Unfortunately, I had underestimated the degree of mutualism between the Queen and his “reindeer”. I had also been far too entranced with the Queen to notice that, just as he was a pigwalker mimic, these were actually deer mimics, and dangerous ones at that. Those cervine facsimiles began to growl like sabretooth tigers, and up close I espied their bulging compound eyes and exposed canine teeth. Their twin sets of wings hummed a din louder than even their roars, and they looked poised to tear me to shreds.

They lunged upon me. Many of their teeth pierced straight through my viscous pseudopodia, smashing into the stony exterior of the piggy den and shattering. They howled in pain at their bloody maws, and upon their ruined teeth my sundered “innards” began to multiply as biofilms; thus began a process of death by tooth decay, in a sense.

In their confusion, I reformed myself and circled round them, secreting a glue with which to ensnare their pseudo-hooves. and ejecting acids with which to dissolve their powerful wings. They struggled, and fitted, vexing me a little. Ultimately, however, their damaged and sealed maws could do me no further harm, and their bubbling, melted wings could offer them no escape. It had been my victory.

I took my time enveloping the pseudo-deer, for their reckless charge had cost me fluids and damaged my organelles. The Queen would escape for now, but the deaths of his flying symbiotes would impede him.

Once my main body was satisfied, I abandoned their half-eaten carcasses and flowed as fast as I could towards the scent of the Queen. I admit that it had been reckless of me to pursue the Queen in my weakened state, but burning curiosity had consumed me, and my frenzied thoughts were only of digesting such intriguing prey.

His movements were unexpectedly stealthy, betraying no audible clue of his presence. This was likely how the pigwalkers never roused at his invasions into their dens. However, since my eyespots are attuned to the darkness of deep underground, with some luck, I had managed to spot the waddling gait of the mimic’s hefty form. Blending and seeping into the snow, I circled round him, and watched as he continued to climb up and into dens, hiding tools within them – perhaps as a squirrel might bury nuts to uncover later. That brainless broodmother was storing his drone-progeny’s creations prior to the worst of winter – was this a hibernatory behaviour?

It further fascinated me how this bumbling animal had no sense of danger. Likely, his instincts had been only to trust in the protection of his buzzing chimeric companions, and thus I would have no trouble in calmly waiting for him to simply stumble into my stomach.

I gathered myself at the front opening to the den he had crept within. As I had surmised, that clueless insect stepped straight into my amorphous mass. His wings emitted shrill chirps and he flailed about as best he could, but to no avail. He had now abandoned all pretenses of mammalianness; his face covering cracked open to reveal a drooling proboscis, which flicked around in circles as he attempted to coat me with weak digestive fluid. Unfortunately for him, my digestive fluids were far stronger.

It took me some time to fully engulf the Queen and his still-attached infants, but my hunt was effectively over. When I had fed to my full capacity and expelled the tools his children had fashioned, I fancied that I would carry out the dream of my prey, and enjoy a much-deserved hibernation. Thus, I descended back into the heated bowels of the earth.

Truly, this had been a day to remember. In the coming years I again ascended above ground. To my glee, this seasonal event had not been a coincidence; every year I see those large pigwalker mimics performing the same bizarre and seemingly unnecessary task. To me, this winter day has become the most wonderful time of the year – a day for limitless consumption.