Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler

happy? they wondered. In George Johnston’s book, Introduction to Conchology, he says of oysters ‘in due season, love visits even these phlegmatic things, when icy bosoms feel the secret fire,’ but others in his field had doubts, the happiness of oysters being so hard to ascertain.
     
    Despite such concern and controversy, the result for the animal seems to have been curiously invariable. Benjamin MacDonald’s badger mother was shot and killed by a hunter in the MacDonalds’ front yard. Champion Ira A. Paine won his match by eighty-eight pigeons to Bogardus’s eighty-five. And the great advantage of baby alligators, as Frank Buckland pointed out, was that when they died, usually within a few weeks of purchase, the pet could be stuffed, gilt, and put on a hat for an ornament.
     
    ‘I have just now killed a Large New Falcon, yes positively a new species of Hawk,’ Audubon exulted in a letter to Dr Richard Harlan. ‘. . . I will skin it!!!’
     
    In 1873, the word ecology (spelled oecology) appeared in print for the first time.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    5
    The Story of Su Tung-P’o
     
     
     
     
    We like March
    His Shoes are Purple—
    He is new and high—
    Makes he Mud for Dog and Peddler,
    Makes he Forests dry.
     
    Emily Dickinson, 1872
     
     
     
    Nature was everywhere Chin looked. He was trapped with no knife in an oecology of Douglas fir and hemlock. A dead squirrel lay beside a boulder on the path, its tail stiffened in a final gesture of alarm. Its body had become a village for ants, who settled in thickly, building roads over its back, bridges and homes in its cavernous eyes. Chin stopped, staring for a moment until the ants blurred into black lines that tightened and loosened and tightened over the squirrel. ‘Honorable ant,’ said Chin. ‘Unselfish ant. You build a dream on a dream.’ The trees might have said this same thing to the railway workers. The stones might have said this same thing to the transient trees. Chin looked upward, following the line of a trunk past the small isolated mistakes of lower branches into the full opening of higher ones and beyond, into the sky. The sudden movement of his head made him dizzy and the sky went black. He stumbled over his next step.
     
    He was a young man and his physical condition was very good. He had worked the rivers as a miner; he had driven steel. He could put in ten hard hours and he could do it on very little food. But in the past two days he had eaten almost nothing and thrown part of that up again; he had sustained a nasty head wound; he had killed a man and he had kidnapped a woman. He was tired. He told B.J. it was time to slow down. There were Indians before them and Indians behind. What did it matter how quickly they got to the nowhere they were going? Sarah Canary was so far ahead, he could no longer see her. B.J. responded with an ambiguous wave.
     
    Chin shifted his bedroll from one side of his body to the other, wishing he had two of them. With two, weight could be distributed evenly across the shoulders. Especially if you had baskets and a pole. Your balance was better. And, also, if he had two, then three people would not have to share one blanket when night came.
     
    ‘B.J.!’ Chin called out again softly. ‘Wait for me. Wait there for me.’
     
    B.J. turned around, smiling. ‘It’s sunny!’ he shouted back to Chin. His voice rang and echoed in the stillness. Anyone could hear him. ‘I smell moss. I smell a stream. It’s never going to rain again!’ B.J. brushed his limp, colorless hair back from his forehead and stood still inside a patch of yellow light. Closing his eyes, he extended his arms out from his sides, palms up. He began to turn slowly like a top. The light made his face even paler; it shone like a small moon as it spun by Chin. This was the color of lunacy. Chin had seen this color before. The Chinese faded in this same way when they lost their minds. Probably even the Indians became this bleached, bloodless color.