You know a lot about a thing, knowing what it eats.
Eating is a messy, nasty thing to do. Something takes up something else and tears it apart and breaks it to bits and it thrives on it, just basks in it, all that decay and downfall. You can make it neat and civilized and give it knives and forks, you can talk about palates and umami and all the flavours of the rainbow, you can do that all you like. You can glorify the act of acquiring your food, the hunt, the chase, the kill.
But you’re still eating, and that’s still not very nice. And what you eat says a lot about you.
Hyenas eat a lot of carrion. Those big strong jaws, they’ll crack open bones that anything else would turn its nose up at, get at all that good tasty marrow in there. That’s productive, that’s industrious.
Wars, they eat the young and the stupid and the deceived. They call them in and chew them up, spit out the little shreds of them into unmarked graves and mass burials and now and then, on special occasions, a casket. That’s tricky, that’s cunning, that’s an animal that hides and sneaks and lies to get what it needs because it knows the moment anyone looks right at it and sees it for what it is, it dies. So they make smokescreens, and snag you in ’em.
Particular angles, as we all know, eat lines, usually straight lines. They chew them right out of existence, and they use that to force a few more particular angles into being. Mindless, but real thorough. And since nothing eats them, they’ll probably outweigh real things someday.
Societies eat people, of course. But the people eat them right back. It sort of works if you squint one eye shut and take two steps back and tilt your head just right. Unless one or the other chews a little too quickly.
And humans, naturally, are omnivores. Which is a lot worse than it sounds, if you think about it.
This human here was exercising her omnivorous rights that night, at the foot of that mountain, on a rabbit and some stale bread.
(The rabbit isn’t important, not in this story, so we can forget about her for now)
The human was old and leathery and her hands moved in that special slow way that said whenever she wanted to she could turn them into striking snakes. She was also a noisy chewer, on account of having three and a quarter teeth, and this was one-third of what caused the problem. And she was a good listener, which lead her to hear the faint, impossibly low sounds of the rock groaning under her wrinkled toes, and this was one-third of what caused the problem. And because her grandmother had been a pretty cunning and crafty lady who’d taught her a few tricks about this sort of thing, she could recognize the language as an itinerant and casual shaman (most people could talk to animals back then, which made hunting a bit more awkward, but talking to rocks and trees was pretty damned hard). And that was one-third, four-quarters, and the whole nine yards of what caused the problem.
The mountain was talking. A slow talker, of course, but the old human was patient and waited the half-hour for the sentence to finish.
“What. Are. You. Doing?” asked the mountain.
“Eating,” said the old human. “Everybody does it.”
“Not. Me. What. Is. It?”
The old human thought about that and she thought that made sense, sort of. Mountains didn’t really eat anything, although the rain and the wind and the rocks that spawned them were happy enough to chew them up over a couple of eternities.
(Human eternities aren’t so long as all that, and that’s a fact)
“Y’know, eating,” she said. “You chew stuff up – well, that’s not true, lot of things out there don’t chew – you swallow things, and it keeps you going so you keep doing, well, whatever you do. Talking, laughing, walking, you know, all that stuff.”
The mountain thought about that while the old human stashed her half-loaf of bread and stripped the rabbit bones clean with her favourite tooth.
(The rabbit still isn’t important in this story)
“How. Do. You. Swallow?” asked the mountain, at length.
“Just gulp,” said the old human, and then she added “good-bye,” and was off and away down the trails, leaving the mountain there to ponder that sort of thing over for a few days.
Then it went gulp. Just to see what would happen.
A small tree vanished on its slopes, and the mountain felt full. Not only that, it knew what it was like to feel empty.
“Hm. Mm,” said the mountain.
Gulp. There went another tree, and a very surprised bear that had been sharpening her claws on it.
“Hm. Mm,” reiterated the mountain.
Gulp.
Gulp.
Gulp.
Now this sort of happening can’t go on for long before people start to notice things, and not more than three days had gone by before everybody who lived around that mountain started to meet up and put their heads together.
“Folks been missing,” said the fox. “My handsome husband, he’s been up and vanished. And so did our house. And most of the hill we dug it into.”
“My granddad is gone,” said the human boy.
“That he is,” said the human father.
“And grandma too,” said the human mother.
“My wife’s gone, and our favourite fishing stream, and the trees near the fishing stream, and all the fish in it,” rumbled the big bear. “I am angry. I want to find who did this and beat them until they are black and red. Or white and red. Or brown, green, blue, and red. But mostly red.”
“I am agreeing with you here,” said the human father.
“Who did this, though?” said the human mother. “We need to find out that first.”
“Let’s ask the old crazy human that wanders around these parts,” suggested the fox. “She knows weird things.”
So they went out and after a while they found the old crazy human, who was the same person as the old human. She was fishing, or at least sleeping while pretending to fish. Same thing.
(The fishhook was made from a bit of the rabbit’s old ribs, there you go, but it’s still not important in this story)
“What’re you up about?” she asked, annoyed. “You’re going to scare off my fish.”
“People are going missing,” said the human mother.
“And streams,” said the big bear.
“And dens and hills,” amended the fox.
“And granddads and grandmas,” finalized the human boy.
“Huh,” said the old human. “Could be that mountain, eating things he shouldn’t. Now, what you could try is…”
And that wasn’t as far as she got, but it was as far as anyone else listened, because the big bear said in his loud voice “well, there’s nothing for it but to beat it up. Who’s coming with me?”
“I will,” said the human father. “I also want to beat it up.”
“Right!” said the big bear, and they left and everyone else went home, or the closest thing to it.
So the big bear and the human father went up the mountainside stomp stomp stomp. They put a lot of stamp into those stomps, so the mountain knew they were coming nice and easy. And when they got halfway up the mountain it stirred, and it twitched, and it spoke up and said “what are you doing?”
“Who said that?” said the big bear.
“I was just thinking that as well,” said the human father.
“It’s me, the mountain” said the mountain. “I can speak clear and fast, talking all I want since I started eating all I want. You’re stomping hard down there on my foothills. What do you want?”
“You ate my wife,” said the big bear, “so I’m going to thrash you.”
“And you ate my father and my mother-in-law,” said the human father, “so I will also thrash you.”
“Gulp,” declared the mountain, and that was pretty much that.
Back down the countryside, everybody who lived around that mountain met up again.
“My husband is gone,” said the human mother. “I think he made a mistake when he followed that big bear up the mountain to go give it a thrashing.”
“You can’t solve a problem like that with your fists,” agreed the fox. “Too daft. Too silly. My husband, he always said, you want to solve a problem you’ve got to use your brains, not your fists.”
“Let’s go check in with that old lady and see if she knows what’s what,” said the human mother.
So they checked in, and the old human was found a little while later. She was in a scrub thicket, teaching herself to sing birdsong, which was pretty nice, and she was learning from a crow, which wasn’t quite as nice.
“Oh, you again,” she said. “Still got problems?”
“We need to trick the mountain,” said the human mother. “It’s too big to fight, we need to talk it around it circles.”
“It’s only been able to talk like normal animals since a day or so ago,” said the old human. “I think it might not be good enough at it for that to work.”
“I could talk my husband’s tail in circles five times before supper,” said the fox, “and he was dafter than a birch when it came to anything but stealing meals.”
“That’s a good plan,” said the human mother, right over top of what the old human was saying, “let’s talk it around,” and they left right there, and told the human boy to stay put and do what he was told.
“I’m bored,” said the human boy.
“Me too,” said the old human, and she showed him how to make a game with pits hollowed in the earth and little pebbles.
Meantime, the fox and the human mother went up the mountainside, tramp tramp tramp. They weren’t sneaky, but they snuck up on the mountain anyways because it was so busy laughing that it couldn’t hear them.
“Ha! Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Aha, ha ha!” it said, very carefully.
“Excuse me,” said the fox.
“HA! Ahaha, ha, aha,” continued the mountain.
“We’re here to-” managed the human mother.
“AHAHAHAHAHAHA! Ha. Ha ha,” said the mountain, so loudly that it bowled them head over heels over head again, and then it noticed them as they were picking themselves up and swearing.
“HA HA AHA, gulp,” it said. “Ha. Mmm. Not sure I see the point.”
Back down the mountain, the human boy was bored again. He’d lost four games and won three games and he’d already sorted out all the shiniest pebbles so now the fun was missing. And he was starting to miss his mother.
“Are they coming back soon?” he asked the old human.
She frowned. “Guess not. That mountain must still be eating things it shouldn’t. Troublesome of it.” She scratched herself with her pit-digging tool.
(The rabbit’s thigh. Don’t worry, it’ll have a story where it’s important someday, just not right now, okay?)
“Listen little boy, your mother told you to do what you’re told, right?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the human boy.
“Great. Okay, listen.”
The human boy listened.
“Smart kid,” said the old human. “Right, here’s what we’re going to do. Well, you’re going to do. I think I probably made this problem, so I don’t think I can fix it proper. You’re gonna go over there, just a little ways, and you’re going to stand on that big spiky hill. And then you’re going to wait. And when that mountain finds you, I want you to ask it politely to stop eating things it shouldn’t. Now, can you remember all that?”
“Yes,” said the human boy.
“Good. Now get going fast.”
The human boy got going fast, and was up on top of the spiky hill lickety-split-lightning, which was just as well because the mountain was walking down towards him, rumbling along very slowly in a very fast way that it didn’t quite seem able to stop and definitely couldn’t steer.
“Hello!” called the human boy.
“Ho ho ho!” bellowed the mountain. “Look at me walk!”
“HELLO!” yelled the human boy.
The mountain looked down at him. “Yes?” it said.
“Please stop,” said the human boy.
The mountain considered this. And then it went “gulp,” and down went the human boy, hill, spiky, and all.
And that was where it all went wrong for the mountain, because that was when it learned about indigestion, and it learned about it a lot faster than eating. And much, much, much louder.
The sound it made was very, very loud and most of it was on levels inaudible to ears, human or any other kind, but if you squinted real hard at what you’d heard, it’d probably sound something kind of like
HLLUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGH
But bigger.
And POP POW out came everything out of its top, the rocks, the trees, the water, the bears and foxes and humans and everything down to the very last insect that the mountain had eaten, one after another, tumbling down its sides into a big messy pile.
“Ow,” said the human father, removing the fox’s foot from his face.
“Blub,” commented the smaller bear, wrenching her face free from the stream she had been fishing in a few days ago.
FWOOSH, declared the mountain, and it coughed up some magma. Of course, once it’s out there in the open, it’s lava. Still really hot stuff, though. There was a bit of a rush for the hills, and the nearest one was the spiky hill, which had landed upside down but was otherwise okay.
The old human was already waiting on top of it, and she gave them all a bit of a leg up with those fast hands of hers. She was grinning. “See? All good now. And look, we even got you something new to look at! Needs a name though. Hey kid, you got a name for this thing?”
The human boy shook his head and hid against the human father.
The old human shrugged. “Have it your way then, and I guess that means I do it my way. Well, I’m sure someone out there has something better for it, but I’M calling it a volcano. Unless our volcano here has a better name for it?”
The volcano belched and coughed.
“Guess not.” The old human scratched herself, chewed on her digging bone, and walked away.
And that was that.
“What You Eat,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2012.