Morri, Morri, little boy Morri; the middle child, the one that wasn’t expected to fail or succeed. He did what he was told – sometimes – and he told the truth to his elders – sometimes – and mostly – all the time – he spent his days watching his father’s cattle to make sure they didn’t wander off anywhere interesting, which he was expecting to do all his life. Sometimes he picked up rocks and looked at them.
One day, as Morri was looking at a particularly dull and evenly-shaped rock, he heard a very strange and sudden lack of sound. A cow had stopped rustling and huffling and snorting its way along the pasture. Instead, there was a thud. A heavy, meaty, bloody sort of thud.
Morri took his rock and his feet and wandered – cautiously – down the pasture, where he found half the cow. The other half was being wedged into the gullet of something he’d never seen before, which regarded him with annoyed interest. It looked sort of like a hyena, but a bit taller than he was at its shoulder.
It made a noise at him somewhere between a growl and mrrruph.
Morri pondered the meaning of all this for a minute, weighed the balance of what his parents told him to do against what he thought he should do, and reached a compromise: he whipped the rock into its skull at full tilt, poleaxing it, but then he ran home and told his parents afterwards.
“You are obviously not working hard enough if you have enough time to come up with these stories,” said his father. So he smacked him – lightly, with love – and sent him out again the next day with a reminder to be more careful.
The body wasn’t there when Morri checked, and another cow was missing. Just bloodstains remained – cow and something else – and a nasty smell that was emitting from a pile of feces. Morri compared the size of those feces to those of his family’s dogs, then thought for a bit.
While Morri was thinking, he was also listening, which was why he heard the grass rustle and the birds go quiet, which was how he was able to get up the tree before the big, angry hyena-thing ate him. It snarled up at him from below, enough drool to fill a bathtub spilling over its rancid gums, feet shaking the tree to and fro as if it were barely more than a sapling. One eye was staring fixedly at an eighty-three degree angle, just below the very large bruise Morri had given it the day before. It made a very nice target for Morri’s second stone, which was delivered by Morri’s older brother’s sling.
His aim was poor: instead of going through the thing’s eye socket and into its skull it skipped off it, removing eyebrow, eyeball, and fur, but not brain. Morri accepted his failure and ran home again, where he once again informed his parents of the day’s events.
“Your carelessness is as inforgivable as your falseness,” admonished his mother. “Two cows in two days? What are you DOING out there?”
Morri explained himself again, and received a brief smacking. He accepted it, because when you’re family that sort of thing happens, and he took his father’s spear without permission when he set out to pasture the next day, because when you’re family that sort of thing also happens and can come in handy.
This time no cows were missing. Four of them, however, had been partially disassembled and spread around the landscape with considerable effort. Morri had obviously annoyed something.
Morri knew all about annoyance. His little brothers annoyed him, he annoyed his older brothers, and they all annoyed his parents. It was the way of family, which is the way of the world, that the smaller shall always annoy the older. And it was upon this extensive and full knowledge that Morri drew when he swaggered nonchalantly into the middle of the bloodied, cow-strewn killing ground, sat down with his back to the biggest patch of fly-buzzing grass, scratched himself, burped, and laid down casually with the spear dangling loose in his hands.
Two minutes and four seconds later he sat up very quickly without looking behind him, spear overhead, and was immediately buried underneath nearly a thousand pounds of Hyaenodon. This put him in a position for reflection.
“Father,” he said when he finally came home that night, staggering in late, “I have lost four more cows and now understand what I wish to do in my life. And I need your help getting your spear back.”
“You shouldn’t have taken that,” his father sighed. “Where is it?”
“Stuck in a monster’s ribs, through the heart,” said Morri. “It was too heavy for its own good.”
Morri’s father gave another sigh, the sigh of the annoyed, and was preparing to smack Morri again before the boy showed him the tooth he’d brought home.
When Morri ran away from home five years later, it was not much of a surprise to anyone. His mother had packed him some dinner, and he’d taken his father’s spear without permission again. He would be back someday.
“The world’s a big place, but there’s only so much to see in it that’s worth seeing,” said Morri’s father. “He’ll come back soon.”
“Besides,” his mother added, “he’ll miss the cows.”
Morri, Morri, Quick Morri; jogging across the plains and through the forests and into deserts, always looking for new people, new places, new things to hunt. He wandered north from the far south, and he found that some of what his father said was true: there was an awful lot of world out there, but not so much that was truly strange. He saw leopards and lions, he saw elephants, he saw hippopotami. He met a lot of new people, and killed many things that attempted to eat him (their hides made up his clothing, their teeth covered him like hairs), but he didn’t find anything like what he’d found in that cattle pasture as a little middle child.
Then he came up to the town on the lake by the sea one day, all alone. Some bits and ends of furs and teeth from his hunts gave him a dinner and a half, and an open ear gave him an interesting story: a monster lived in the lake, a creature that ate whatever came too near for water or for fishing. A few sheep a day had placated it, but it grew more restless and hungry of late, and they found themselves contemplating a change.
“Maybe the headman’s daughter,” suggested the farmer Morri was conversing with. “That might do it.”
“Why?” asked Morri.
The farmer shrugged and scratched his beard. “Well, it’s angry with us or it wouldn’t keep on trying to eat us. It’s got to be angry at someone, and he’s the most important person around. It’s got to want him to pay for this, and what he values most is his daughter.” The farmer gave another shrug, arms akimbo in the culturally universal gesture of well-that’s-about-it.
“When does this monster feed?” asked Morri.
“Around the evenings and mornings, usually. And the nights. Not too safe down there come daylight either, so you be careful.”
Morri listened to this advice, borrowed one of the farmer’s sheep without permission, and trussed it next to the lake. Then he took his father’s spear in hand and waited, waited, waited all night, with a little ember in hand and a torch at the ready.
Finally, he heard a crunch, and that was all he needed to ignite the torch. The sheep was gone, and for a moment he thought without a trace – ‘till light shone back at him from the lake. Two beady eyes looked back at him, ghostly-glowing in the dark from the water. He’d seen that reflective gaze before: crocodile eyes. But they were just a bit too big, and that little moment of confusion was all he needed to feel before they came hurtling at him faster than a blink, quicker than the sound of the slapping waves that formed beneath its body.
Morri was quick, but not quick enough: the jaws found him. Morri was strong, but not strong enough: the beast’s teeth grasped tightly around his midsection. Morri was cunning, and that was just barely enough. All of the teeth of his prey that coated his turned and tore at his enemy’s mouth as fiercely as they would’ve in life, forcing a flinch and a start just as the thing in the lake was ready to bite down, shrinking away from its prey with a rattling hiss.
Morri flung his father’s spear prone, at a bad angle, left-handed. He was quite proud of this because it still sunk straight through the thing’s right foreleg and into the mud, clean as a whistle. It bellowed and snapped its jaws, and it was just when it was mid-snap that Morri grabbed hold of its mouth and began to squeeze.
There are ways to overcome crocodiles with your bare hands, difficult though they are. Keeping a firm hold on the animal’s mouth to keep it from opening helps, which was good for Morri. Being able to blind it is extremely useful, which was good for Morri because that was what both his feet – wrapped around the animal’s neck – were attempting to do. Fighting it on land is helpful, which was good for Morri. Having some way to prevent it from spinning about and over upon itself is necessary, and Morri’s father’s spear was a great aide in this. Finally and most importantly, many if not all of these careful tricks are used on crocodiles that are less than thirty feet long. This was not good for Morri, and that was why when the villagers came down to the lakeshore in the morning they were not surprised to see his legs sticking out of the animal’s mouth as it lay on the shore, spear still-embedded in it.
Then the legs kicked. That spooked them pretty good.
Morri never did remember too much about how he won that one – a long, hard, struggle in the dark that wavered from muddy shore to solid ground and back over and over until somehow he lost his grip and ended up half-in and half-out of a mouth that didn’t want to bite him in half but was just fine with squeezing the air out of him. All he had left to do was put his hands on whatever flesh they could find and squeeze ‘till his fingers were bloodless, and when they pulled him free he still had a death-grip on the thing’s air-pipe.
The thing was twenty-eight feet long, give or take a bit. Its teeth were strangely rounded and blunt, leaving Morri’s coat-of-teeth sadly lacking for repairs. They made a lovely necklace, though.
He stayed for a week, then left when they started talking marriage. The headman’s daughter was nice, but she was interested in someone else and he was interested in something bigger. The world was indeed a big place, and mostly empty, but that just meant you had to look harder.
Morri, Morri, Iron Morri; the wanderer of the world, the man who couldn’t stop moving. They even said he twitched in his sleep, Morri did; ever alert to the prickle of fangs on a sleeping neck or the brush of soft air from a claw hovering above a bed. He had so many names now in the prime of his life, a new one in every village, every town. He’d tried using his own, but people kept mispronouncing it, and now whatever title that first landed on him tended to stick – at least until he started walking again, and let it peel off behind him like an old snakeskin. But other things tended to stick.
Around his neck was his old crocodile-tooth necklace, expanded upon inch by inch, tooth by tooth until it looped four times around his neck in a sort of spiky gorget. A bear that had stood twelve feet tall upright had contributed several canines to it, and a lion of ten in length had helped finished it off.
His body was wrapped in the tanned and battered hides of a half-hundred kills, from the small to the massive, selected carefully by natural wear and tear until only the most durable remained. Claws and teeth were studded throughout it, peeking through as surprising, sharp-edged whiteness against sun-darkened hides and darker skin.
On his body he carried scars, many scars – so many that he looked as though he’d been sewn together. For greater wounds, he’d acquired a few. His nose was half-missing from the charge of a giant furry creature that walked the frozen lands that lay behind him. He walked as strong as ever, but a limp in his left leg marked the passing of a creature he still didn’t know how to describe. It had stalked him through Mongolia for days, on and off, each of them all that the other could find to eat for miles around in the desolate paths they chose. It had taken a bite from him in the end, before the end, snarling. He had been hard-pressed to find more than that from it himself; it was as lost as he had been, as hungry, and as tired.
On his head, carefully modified and hollowed and balanced, he wore the skull of that creature, as a memory and as protection both. It was a full three feet long, and had once held the power to crush bones like twigs.
In one hand he carried his father’s (borrowed) spear. Its shaft had been snapped four times over – once in six places at once by a maddened thing like an elephant but far furrier, a peaceful god that had gone crazed with brain-fever and turned upon its flock – and replaced dutifully each time, on the last occasion by the carved and shaped bone of the giant furred elephant. Its head had been replaced more times than he could imagine, with good, local stone here, with a sharp piece of bone there, once (in desperate times) with simply a ground-down wooden point and a quick fire-hardening. Currently it was attached to his body with a long, long length of rope whose origin was unknown to him and whose toughness was beyond question, affixed into a small, carefully-bored hole in the shift. But it was still his father’s spear, and that’s why he took care of it instead of replacing it. Because he had to return it someday.
In the other hand, he gripped a twin-bladed paddle with whitened knuckles, and he cursed the sea softly in his heart. It had made sense at the time, so much sense. He had gone north, and as far north as he was able. He had travelled west, and as far west as he were able. He had gone east, as far east as he were able, and then as he’d stopped on those cold forested shores he’d learned of stories and mumbles and mutterings of the land that lay just a few horizons away. How could he stop there, and go back to where he’d already been?
Well, very easily. And now Morri cursed that he had to do things the hard way, as he looked down into a blue so deep it was nearly black and sought with frantic eyes a shape that made his little skin-boat (he’d traded three teeth for it, one of them an old one from the crocodile) look as tiny as a piece of wood a child had tossed in a puddle.
It was the silence that unnerved him most, as the shape underneath him grew. On land your prey panted, it gasped, it growled and snarled and hissed as the grass crackled underfoot and the wind whistled through lungs and ears. Here the waves moved as they would, and it was only at the last – at the very last – that sound arrived to mark the attack from below, as the shark seized his boat in a full-body breach, whirling through the air with force beyond imagination. The crash of waves in a giant’s wake as its body left the water.
Morri clung to its nose as it rose, felt his body grow light in the air. No eyes met his gaze: the shark’s sockets were filled with empty white, rolled away and tucked back for protection from stray flippers and sweeps of tails. It did not look upon its prey as they died, and that assumption cost it dearly because its other senses, miraculous as they were, were incapable of detecting Morri’s father’s spear as it drove inside its eye socket and dug deep into the flesh of its cartilaginous skull.
The shark spasmed, and it dove, taking Morri’s father’s spear with it. And as went Morri’s father’s spear, so went Morri, both as a matter of the practical – the tether at his waist yet anchored him to it – and by principle. After all, he couldn’t return the spear if it sank to the bottom of the sea in a dead shark’s head.
This, at least, was soon revealed to be not a worry: the shark was far from dead. Its flight was conducted with the steadfast determination of a long-time survivor, for whom the matter of life-and-death had become an hourly dilemma centuries ago. Flee deeper, its experiences whispered into its tiny mind, flee deep and far, and they will not catch you. Flee deeper.
Pull harder, whispered Morri’s own mind. Larger though it was, it was no less simple at a time like this. Pull harder, so that you can see the sun again, taste the air again, feel a world that isn’t weighing down on you from all sides. The rope is all that matters now – ah, see how it has led you back to your father’s spear! Now you must reclaim it, you see?
Morri gripped the sides of the great shark with one hand, and that was no easy task. He gripped the shaft of his father’s spear with the other, and that nearly unbalanced him. He adjusted, shifted, and shoved with all his weight.
Flee deeper, whispered the shark’s brain. Flee d p r.
Flee d .
F e .
In the end, there was enough intent and purpose left in the shark to keep it steering forwards until it reached the end of its world, and there was enough oxygen left in Morri to hang ahold until it took him to the brink of his. Not enough to wake him, though – no, that happened later, much later, in a seaside shack where a man had kept him alive with fish broth for a week. He spoke a language that Morri didn’t understand, but it was a language he hadn’t understood before, and a cautious sort of trade of debts and repayment took place. On the one hand, the man had kept Morri alive for a week. On the other, it had largely been done with flesh from the shark Morri had killed. And its teeth were valuable, so… they were even. Roughly.
Morri took one of the teeth. His father’s spear, it seemed, needed a new head.
Morri, Morri, Old Morri; the one-eyed crack-shot, the limping man who could outrun a horse. All that muscle still there, just dried close to the bone by endless sun and hardened by the wear of a lifetime travelling against the fiercest winds, tanned in the saltwater spray of half the seas the planet could hold.
He’d walked the world now, Morri had, and seen the corners of the new as well as he’d seen the old. At first south, then east, then south again, and south on and on and down and down past mountains and plains and deserts and forests whose lushness unravelled your senses with a single glance. And everywhere Morri had walked, he had hunted. Oh had he hunted. His father’s spear had been repaired so many times over and over again, it had sunk into so many chests, through so many guts, pierced so many skulls. He had killed lions that made mockery of his conquests in Europe, fought a great bear with a shortened snout and lengthened legs for three days running, duelled with cats with teeth like giant knives and necks like tree-trunks. He had even once stood against an attack of wolves – creatures with stocky limbs and massive bodies, fierce and clever in their assault. His face had met the pack-leader’s jaws that day, and they had left a warning from ear to ear and into his right eye, wherever that was.
Old Morri had seen the world in all its vastness in those fifty-and-then-some years of his, he had. And there were still things he hadn’t yet seen in it, and some things that he had seen that could suddenly turn brand-new in your eyes, at the right moment. For instance, the sky above him had never seemed more intensely blue in his life than it was right now, pinned down in the dirt beneath an angry ten-foot bird. Talons crushed against him, a beak that put an axe to shame hewed against his father’s spear, and the clouds spiralled above so lazily and sparsely in that big blue sky. It made the ocean seem a shamefully small thing.
The bird lashed out with its foot again, ready to land a hit that would turn Morri’s ribcage into grist, and he rolled and struck, too out of breath to swear and out of any words strong enough to work. The shaft of his father’s spear cracked against the thing’s ankles and made it wobble – oh, it wasn’t the first blow he’d landed there, not by a long shot – but not tumble or hesitate. It was on him again as if he were a snake in the grasp of a secretary-bird, hissing with every jab, every kick, every darting, flittering motion, a creature that massed more than a quarter-ton moving like it weighed ounces. Wherever its legs didn’t dance its beak swooped, a beak that Morri would’ve needed both hands to lift, a killing spike with the sharpness of a stiletto backed by a muscled neck that could thrust it with the force of twenty men of the sort Morri had been in his youth.
Now Morri was Old Morri, and he was not as strong, maybe. He was not as fast, surely. But oh, but oh, but oh was Morri still cunning, more than ever, and he could think and fight at the same time, all the time.
Morri stumbled, on his bad leg. The bird struck, hopping forward – all that weight, all that weight balanced with perfect precision, undettered by bruising of bone and flesh. And finally – just then, with the timing he’d been hunting for – did Morri’s father’s spear strike home as one leg was completely off the ground.
Now, that made the bird wobble. But its leg was strong and its balance was fine, and it was a mere wobble on its own, when all was said and done. Which is why Morri’s spear rebounded from its shin, loose from his hand, and shot straight at its eye.
The bird dodged that, like it or not – instinct would accommodate no less, and its neck moved without thought – and in doing so, it leaned the wrong way at the wrong time, and fell flat on its back, legs kicking. Undignified, bruising, perhaps even bone-cracking – and thus as good as dead. It would never know, because before it could try to rise Old Morri was at its throat, far away from the kicking talons, too close to the beak for the neck to drive it. His hands were armoured in rhinoceros hide, his gauntlets gripped with sharkskin, and though he was sunk to his wrists in greasy, blood-smeared feathers, he would not relinquish his grip, would not release the pressure as he sunk the full weight and power of his body down into those ten fingers underneath that big, blue sky. Another hunt, and another kill, and all the same, new and old, all the same. Nothing new happened under that sky, for Morri.
They watched one another closely, bird and man. Old stains from past meals caked the tiny crevices of its beak as it breathed and began to stop, inches away from Morri as he strangled it, as they stared into one another’s eyes. Mad, furious eyes, of the sort he’d thought had long ago become a common sight to him, a natural thing. And yet Morri could not look away from what he saw, from what was hiding there in the depths.
There was something very old there in the eye of that terrible bird, oh so much older than Old Morri was; something that stared back strong as it died, completely unbeaten. Something that hated him and everything like him; every daring ape that had once been a rat, every elephant that once had aspired to the stature of a mouse. Something that was waiting and watching and ready for the moment when the hairy things would slip and fall and drop the world into their talons again, forever.
Old Morri looked back into those eyes, and he knew then what it meant to grow old and hard and hateful.
And as soon as he knew that, he was done.
Morri, Morri, a children’s story; a name that wasn’t even his across much of the world, a hundred different people with a thousand different deeds. He was in Europe, in Asia, he’d come conquering again to Africa, he was under the sea battling the greatest monsters ever to slither its waves, he was in a land where no man or woman had ever walked, hunting the very god(s?). Wherever he was, he was hunting, because what else would he ever do?
Morri was out there somewhere, that was sure enough. And if there was an old man living on a long-abandoned piece of pastureland somewhere who happened to share a name with him, an old man with a broken, beaten (but well-repaired) walking stick; well, the world was a funny place, and for all its bigness, you’d often see the same thing more than once.
Sometimes he did miss those cows.