by Umair Khan
The Fruit told us what it was and from the knowledge it bore by being eaten for so long, told us of the others who ate it. There was a time when we lived oblivious to your world, so that even as you carved our bodies, used our antlers and bones as tools, adorned and treated yourselves with our blood and flesh, we did not understand you. We knew of you, but as with much else in the cold forest, we did not yet understand.
The Fruit grew all around us, sprouting from the ground in rings and clusters, sometimes appearing in a different guise on rocks. Some of us lost ourselves to its ecstasy, wore our teeth out in scouring it from the ground. You had many names for it: the red mushroom, fly agaric, Amanita; our kind knew it as the Fruit. It taught us to dream without sleep and therein, we saw that wakefulness, too, could be a form of sleep. It shone red in light and dark. We communed with it for so long, much before you came along.
And it became more than food, called to us from under the snow. The wandering lights from the sky, the desolate beauty of the tundra now spoke in us, and we danced. The Elders say all this was willed by the Fruit. That it only revealed itself when it had to be eaten, and when not, conspired in whispering webs in the frozen soil. That it had plans well beyond you and us.
You mistook our ease for weakness and preyed on us as we rollicked. By some carnal law, we had always inhered in the land, you devised ways to thrive by living on it. The Fruit taught us the difference. You could not eat it raw. So, you first came to know the Fruit through us. You used our bodies as a vessel and drank our piss for your visions.
The Fruit traveled far and wide in you and it is said, made its move through your tribes. It let itself be changed by you and sent the change back across our herds. In return, over a vast whiteness of time well beyond the reach of what you call history, it gave us something that had been solely yours. We began to dream words.
It took us a while to chew them right. They were strange, somewhat like the tools you used. They split our union with land and leaf and ice, draped our senses with symbols. They appeared as a trick to us because they had the power to veil what they called out to. This is when we saw how you could mistake the word for the world. How you could cut it open like you never saw it.
Caribou. Reindeer. Signs you made for us that you effaced us with. Sacks full of mere echoes of the real thickened with use into lies. Could a name ever bear the weight of our furred hooves against the ice, against the water? Or relay how the scent of all of us may be carried by the scent of one? It tells you nothing of the joy of interlocked antlers; the rush of bones entangled. Of the thousand cadences of meaning in the brush of fur against fur. Of the taste of furry warmth as it descends in huddled ranks. Of tales churned by the clicks of moving limbs. Of moving together as a way of living. Of movement itself as stillness.
We galloped away but there were always more of you wherever we went. At times, we could hear you, drunk on the piss of one of our kin, raving about us with shame for all that you had done. When the Elders saw this, at first, they surmised that you were changing. Perhaps the Fruit was passing on our pleas of pain through the visions it induced in you. Who knows what it really wanted or if it did it all. But nothing changed. You got it all wrong. Concocted reindeer spirits that you saw as more real than us: ghosts conjured to appease your own image. So like you to twist a thing to serve you. What could visions do when you had become accustomed to blindness?
Then, it is known that from a herd on the brink of collapse, the first Leaper was born. The Leaping art was oneiric and mostly, fatal. One had to be seen eating the Fruit in large numbers by your kind and be taken. Surrender to whatever you chose to do until you drank from us. Through sheer verve, retain the memory of the pain of our ancestors. Become all of us in will even as one was being erased. If done right, a mystic force would magic its way beyond the flesh, and Leap into your mind. It would begin to haunt the seer until it had to be spoken or written or sung. Tongue by tongue, body through body, it – we – would Leap among you.
We do not know if this will change you, for you may see it as an illusion, a hallucination of the Fruit, skilled as you are at ascribing so much to your own imagination. It will not matter. Our lament will still lope through the river of your thoughts, and by the power of the Fruit running through your blood, remain therein forever. This is a promise – the only one us Leapers must keep. For in the flesh, we will have long reckoned with the fate of being gone.
~
Bio:
Umair Khan is a writer and academic philosopher from Karachi, currently carrying out their PhD research at the University of Manchester on questions related to consciousness in the use of psychedelic compounds in psychiatry. Their fiction has appeared in Tasavvur, and they are a two-time finalist for the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction. They live with their dogs and a very surly cat, spending much time thinking about human relationships with the animal world, and the pulsing strangeness in between.
Philosophy Note:
Near the end of Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter, descriptions of the cosmology of Siberian shamans and their relationship to reindeer had a near hypnotic effect on me. Words don’t always reach that far down, but in those passages, they met me in my bones. That night, I dreamt of a reindeer digging through snow in the taiga. Reindeer have been observed acting strangely after eating fly agaric mushrooms and licking psychedelic lichen from rocks; this fact along with the image in my dream became the inspiration for Leapers. This story considers issues related to animal consciousness, the limits and transformative power of language, and the possibility of collective resistance. It tries to imagine how human language might be acquired to describe a perspective rooted in a different body, beyond the human, but also explores how it might transform a non-human way of being in the world.
