August 13, 2024 - “The Ivory-billed Woodpecker” by Miles Greaves
Which it does not, it was the evaporation of those river-bottom forests, which vanished, like hair from a leg, I remember those trees weeping tears of sap, as the saws neared their bellies, but they were halved anyway, anterior bark to posterior bark, xylem and phloem. And I remember helping shave those forests smooth to the stone, as if with an apple peeler, the flesh, the topsoil, the loam, the bedrock, tubers and moles, fossils and coffins—they curled in front of us like pencil shavings, until we reached the Gulf, and then collectively puffed it all into the Atlantic, and ran our palms over the continent, clean as a desk. Behind us, the yellow land was peppered with Ivory-billed Woodpeckers, who were trying to perch on the now-nonexistent trees, but were hailing out of the sky, and swimming clumsily along the ground, and mewing. Seeing this, some men and some women looked away, as if from their naked father, because these used to be the Lord God Birds, or Diana bathing, or the bare eye of a singularity, or the number i, or the Entertainment, or the sun, as delineated as dominoes, with bills of bone, and a crest like a sail of thundering blood. And so I stepped, bird to bird, and with my heel I pressed each one of their skulls into the earth, as if forcing them to become ostriches, until the species entire lay where they were, like crops, with their tails spiking unattractively into the air.
The Passenger Pigeon used to dim the air with their flocks, days long in the passing. I would see them cresting the mountains like a storm, or static, cooing, and I’d watch the townspeople flee to their pigeon-shelters, while old men, caught in the street, would inhale the birds, or hold their breath, and try paddling vertically through the feathers and beaks, but inhale, always, and settle toward town again. And when the flock thinned, the townspeople would breathe into the old men’s mouths, and pump the birds from their lungs, but it was always the pigeons that they wound up resuscitating, the birds would flap from their mouths and rejoin their herds, dizzy. But I would don fishbowls and pots and wade into the flock, with tennis racquets and golf clubs, and swing, it was like rowing over tar, the pigeons knotted on my clubs, like seaweed. Sometimes, at the instant of their arrival, I would throw mousetraps and beartraps and nails into the air, and sometimes I’d wait behind drills, or industrial fans. I would discharge rifles into the cloud, to watch the brief tube augured into the flock, which would hold momentarily, then close. As the species died, though, the tunnels lost clarity, by the final pigeon it was arguable that the tunnel had been inverted so as to encompass, backward, everything but that last bird, so out of philosophic curiosity I shot it through its canary cage in the Cincinnati Zoo, but there was no lightning, no shift in things.
The Carolina Parakeet would perch on telegraph lines and eavesdrop; pooling the word or two that each knew of English, like “cracker,” or “good,” or “extirpation,” and decode, piecemeal, any communications concerning the genocide of birds. Then, hearing enough, but being unaware of their English name, they tried fleeing North Carolina, but broke their necks in the air above the Tennessean border, like green snowflakes trying to flee their snow globe. The remainder of the parakeets forswore squawking and froze like mimes in the green trees. They might be breeding today had I not begun publicly fawning over women with emerald feathers in their hats, and then women with two emerald feathers in their hats, and then three, until the women looked like emerald bonfires, and postures were ruined, but the fashion continued to mature anyway, until the Carolina Parakeets were skewered and mounted, whole, onto the tops of the hats; and until the body of the hat-proper was discarded, and the bodies of the birds were folded into the shapes of hats, alive, so that the hat would squirm, and squawk. This was the fate of the last Carolina Parakeet, which a milliner stitched into the hat of a young socialite. Its neighbors on the hat, which towered, like a tall brain, had died, like city lights in reverse, leaving only this last ambassador, twisting by a foot from the brim of the hat, for two days, stretching at the socialite’s lunch.
The Labrador Duck died like a rich family leaving a poor neighborhood, it freed the napkin from its collar and left the restaurant, with a valise of its DNA, which isn’t sold anywhere, I couldn’t even lure the duck closer to the shore, to the strangling hands there, because it disdained bread, so I had to wade after them in fisher pants, and even then they wouldn’t move, as if fleeing were undignified, I would just submerge their heads with a single casual finger, as if plugging a leak. One afternoon I looked back at the shore, where the men and women were supposed to be killing ducks, but saw that they were eating from picnic baskets instead, as if the duck supply were exhausted. Then I saw a man, who seemed to realize this too, and I watched him pull a drowned duck from the water, and try wringing it into life, but he couldn’t. And now that duck is endangered anyway, being the final Labrador Duck corpse in existence. The man must, then, keep it dead. Each evening he repoisons it, and before breakfast he reannihilates it with a shotgun, he brooms the feathers into a vat of rubber cement, and adds the duck’s body, and stirs, and sculpts, with the gruel, a fresh duck, which dries on his fire escape, like a pie. When not killing it, the man sits it on a dish of turtle eggs, or clips it to a clothesline, and hoists it between apartments, as if for a walk, or he takes it to the park, to show it living pigeons, in order to shame it.
The last Eskimo Curlew was consumed by hagfish, at the bottom of the Berring Sea; the last Bachman’s Warbler was disassembled by ants, outside of Orlando.
The last man to see a Great Auk breathe was Karl Kronson, who decapitated it with his ship’s auksword, a saber as bladeless as a whiffle-ball bat. The day before the extinction Karl was mopping on a whaling ship. He mopped vigorously up to a coil of rope, and turned proudly, but a ribbon of olive and maroon stains extended in a tract behind him. So Karl upended his mop and squinted into its locks, but he found no tomatoes there, no chalk, no gremlins, so he planted the mop onto a single stain, as if into a whale, and mopped in place, aggressively, until forgetting the time. But when he finished, the stain was as healthy as it had been before the mopping.
A bundle of moppers edged into his periphery, and passed, like a busy cloud of elbows. Behind them, like a clean rattail, the planks beamed, like long ingots. The moppers continued to the distant end of the deck and stopped and waited for Karl with their elbows on their mops. Karl mopped after them, along the border of their pristine trail, dirtying it, which forced him to reiterate and reiterate and reiterate his own inferior mopping. When he reached the crowd, Karl said:
“I finished an hour ago—this is my second time through.”
The moppers laughed.
“And you put back the old stains,” said one.
The moppers laughed.
“That’s harder than getting rid of the original stains,” said Karl.
The moppers laughed.
“No,” said a mopper. “You’re just a terrible mopper.”
At dinner, Karl stared at the table between his forearms.
“Maybe you’re not using water,” said a sailor, but ironically.
“Maybe it’s your mop,” said another sailor, but also ironically.
“At least you’re a good auker,” said someone else, but this was also an insult, because only the most inessential sailors were told to collect auks.
Then the captain came in. His eyes summersaulted over the crew in inexpressible disbelief. He held his arms in front of him, as if trying to hug something, but he couldn’t, so he dropped his arms.
“What happened, Karl?” he asked.
Karl spiked his napkin into his rice and stood. He saluted passed the captain, on his way to the mop closet, as if to reswab the deck.
“Wait wait wait,” said the captain, and he gestured Karl to a stop. Then he handed Karl a saber, as dull as an elephant tusk. “Just kill auks tomorrow,” he said, “and don’t try mopping them.” Then the captain made a gesture of ineffability, and left.
The auks’ last island was a wart of stone on the Northern Atlantic. The next morning, the whaler anchored off that rock and lowered a rowboat onto the ocean, with Karl inside. Karl, who was also a poor rower, rowed towards the wart in a series of semicircles, hearing the crew behind him chant “Auker! Auker! Auker! Auker!” until he could only hear the ocean; and, then, until he could only hear the auks. The planet’s remaining Great Auks had convened on that island, as if it were the only wood after a shipwreck, their weight pressed the island into the ocean, their feces softened it, they congealed and throbbed in aukpiles forty and fifty auks thick, their screaming sent whitecaps away from the island, they were copulating accidentally. Karl killed eleven just docking, and he crushed twelve just stepping onto the island, and as he killed auks the remaining auks ripened, subtly plumper with the increased percentage of the species that they represented. Then Karl walked into the center of the island, and gripped the saber like a baseball bat, and shut his eyes, and swung for several minutes. And as he did, he noticed, only, that the sound of the auks was fading, as if he were turning down their volume. When he opened his eyes, he was standing in a red and white and black clearing of mulch. The remaining auks were teetering in a dome around him, as if Karl were inside an igloo, but then they collapsed, and spilled toward Karl, curious. So Karl shut his eyes, and swung again, and the auksounds faded again, and faded, until Karl sat, panting, on a couch of dead auks. Fifteen or twenty obese auks remained, propelled into the ocean by the melee. They swam, smiling, back to the island, and beached themselves, and toddled across the rock, to Karl, holding aloft their fetal wings, and pressing their ribcages into Karl’s shins.
“I’m tired,” said Karl, “someone else can kill you,” and he kicked them away.
But the auks insisted, like the Zone Hereros, and so Karl stood, and took individual aim, and murdered each of the last auks, including the final auk, by this time as large as a dalmatian. At that, the chanting of the crew came back to Karl, over the water:
“... Auker! Auker! Auker!...”
Mentally, Karl blanketed the “auk” side of the chant with “mop,” but the illusion would not persist. Then Karl remembered that, in the minutes between his birth and his naming, he had cycled through the nearly infinite possibilities of being—alligator, toaster, Ayre’s Rock, Pythagoras—like a blurring slot machine in the crook of his mother’s arm. But then “Karl,” she had pronounced, and he had been fixed, for the duration of language, by “Karl,” in all possible universes.
Karl sat, jealous of the Great Auks, who were now absolved of their personal mediocrity, because there wasn’t a first name among them, so only the Auks were extinct, plural, like losing a color, not a crayon. And this meant that each singular auk, even the least great, was now free to excel at catching fish, or preening, or fending off polar bears—or they could become manta rays, or cubes of granite, or cacti—while even in death Karl would still be a poor mopper, and a poor sailor.
Karl made a similar complaint to me on the day I came for him, to swallow him. He lay on the deck of a ship, bent, like a spider, after falling from the mizen mast. He whispered up to me:
“Now I’ll always be a poor mopper.”
But “No,” I said, “in seventy years’ time you’ll be as unremembered, and as infinitely variable, and as good a sailor, as each of the Great Auks that you harvested.”
And then something similar happened after I swallowed the last of Karl’s species, a sick woman in a waterless cavern. First I savored the sharp taste of the whole of human culture, which stopped existing, and became unrecoverable, at the moment I swallowed her. And then the universe screamed once, as if mourning the loss of humanity, which meant that its awareness of itself would dim—no more equations to define it; no more songs to celebrate it. But within the hour it had flattened back out into nothingness, and by year’s end it was remembering mankind, only, as the species that had been driven into extinction by the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.
Roger T. Peterson, A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America at 188–89 (4th ed. 1980).
Miles Greaves is an attorney living in Sleepy Hollow, New York, with his wife and two young boys. A story of his won first place in Zoetrope: All-Story's Annual Short-fiction Contest, and others have appeared in Tin House, Jersey Devil Press, and Storybrink. When he gets some free time, Miles enjoys birding, playing basketball, and watching “The Challenge” with his wife.
