Feran Wolfpaw

 

PART 2

Three years later, no longer “persons” under law in the United States, the nearest definition that fit Feran Wolfpaw and his fellow human/animal hybrid Recombinants was “vermin.” Purebred humans who beheld Recombinants with disdain wasted no time in treating them as such, and there was little that the animal hybrids could do to stop them legally. The only humans who came to Recombinant aid were the Christians, thanks to Cardinal Booke’s Theology of Transhumans, but Christians weren’t much better off than Recombinants and could do little more than offer a hot meal and a pillow. So, Feran left the USA in a boat he stole and sank it just off the shore of Gun Cay, Bahamas. From there he managed to beg a lift to Bimini. Bahamians didn’t seem to mind Recombinants in their midst, and he found odd jobs enough to get by. He didn’t need much. Like most Recombinants, after the Court ruling forced him into a kind of socio-economic exile, he discovered his animal genes made wilderness survival almost natural. Even foraging the urban jungle was simple. Maybe the purebred humans had something to fear after all.

Only the wealthy tourists gave him a hard time, but he played dumb and they’d sometimes be sympathetic enough for the “poor senseless brute” to hire him as porter. He had left his pride along with his fight on the Supreme Court steps and had developed a shtick that put even the supercilious snobs in a good tipping mood.

He kept a kayak hidden away on the South Bimini coast and spent most clear nights out under the stars on the uninhabited cays. Locals new his habit, and so when the Recombinant Resettlement Treaty was signed, the Resettlement Authority had no trouble locating him when he failed to report to a Resettlement Facility. Feran Wolfpaw, Recombinant-at-large, had turned his back on the world and simply didn’t know he was supposed to.

Feran kept a bottle of Jim Beam buried on every cay he frequented. The afternoon Recombinant Control, under orders from the Authority, found him, he had dug up the half-full bottle of Beam on the tiny island where he landed his kayak and lay back on a straw mat on the sand watching the sky. The sound of a helicopter thrummed from across the bigger islands, and Feran watched, his ears laying back low with his growing consternation, as it loomed out of the west and began flying a search pattern over the cays. His instinct for trouble was going off again. The copter buzzed steadily closer, zigzagging over the islands. Feran became increasingly uncomfortable the closer it got. He stood and shook the sand out of his fur and then went down to the water and pulled his bright yellow kayak off the beach to the line of low vegetation that marked the edge of the shore. He hid the kayak as best he could in a hurry, but wasn’t convinced it was invisible from the air. The copter was getting close, though, and he still had to hide himself. For all he knew they’d already seen him. He grabbed his mat and his bottle out of the sand, rushed up the beach, and practically dove into the hibiscus, Mangrove, Pigeon Berry, and Hopwood, covering himself with the mat where the foliage was scarce.

The helicopter altered its course, veering from its zigzag search pattern into a straight line toward him.

“Dang,” he cursed.

The copter thrummed low and slow over the island, turned, and then hovered directly above. The island was less than a mile across, so the chopper’s occupants, equipped with decent binoculars, wouldn’t even have to move to take it all in.

After about a minute that seemed like an hour, the chopper slowly maneuvered toward the middle of the island and set down in a clear flat space of solid ground and Feran, flat on his belly in the sea oats, lost sight of it. That it was still there was unquestionable — the blades pounding the air continued to throb in his ears, and the scent of exhaust wafted on the air.

Even over the roar of the helicopter Feran heard the men approaching before he saw them. Flight was impossible, and he was sure to lose a fight, so he stood slowly, paws high above his head, facing the direction of the interlopers’ clumsy, crashing approach.

Three armed men in characteristic black and yellow Recombinant Control uniforms pointed three semi-automatic, high-power rifles at him. They immediately took up assault stances and the air rippled with the tension of the seriously determined aggression in their body language. To Feran, unarmed, tail relaxed, paws up, in brown shorts, a green Hawaiian shirt casually open all the way down his furry torso, and his tattered straw hat, the situation was suddenly immensely humerous.

“Put your hands behind your head, furbag!” the nearest officer shouted above the roar of the copter.

“My what?” Feran shouted back.

“Put your hands behind your head!” the officer repeated.

“That’s what I thought you said!” Feran replied. “But I can’t!”

“Just do it!”

“I can’t! I don’t have hands!” Feran grinned. The officer seemed confused for a moment.

“Turn around and get down on your knees! Keep your hands … uh, arms … ah, legs — Just get on your knees!”

Feran turned slowly, his grin spreading across his muzzle, and tried to keep from laughing. He lowered himself to his knees carefully. He knew the drill. A decade of protest demonstration arrests had taught him the routine well.

The officers approached and one roughly forced his arms down and behind him.

“Easy,” Feran said, irritated. “I won’t fight!”

A second officer wrapped a steel collar around his neck and attached a pole to the hasp. The first officer cuffed his wrists. “Stand up!” he said. Feran stood. The officer frisked him and clumsily removed a flask from his front pocket. Feran glanced at the officer’s inquiring expression.

“Gin,” Feran said. “You’re welcome to a hit.”

“I’m on duty,” the officer said with a tone of disgust.

“Then could I please keep it? It’s my traveling buddy.”

“No. Get moving.”

The officer with the pole steered Feran around toward the helicopter.

“Paws,” Feran said as they made their way to the chopper.

“What?” the first officer asked.

“Paws. I have paws. When you arrest Recombinants, ask them to put their paws behind their heads. We don’t have hands.”

The officer motioned for them all to stop and rammed the butt of his rifle into Feran’s gut. Feran doubled over, but the officer holding the pole attached to his collar yanked back and set him choking as the dull, sickening pain of the rifle thrust spread through his abdomen and into his spine. He coughed.

The officer sneered. “Today they’re hands.”

END PART 2

Feran Wolfpaw

PART 1

Feran Wolfpaw stole a private moment to peer into the queerly bright sky above the crowds. The deep blue seemed to flash and flare with an energy all its own as it sometimes appears to do between stray late storms on a hot August day.

“Is Allaria coming?” he asked the tiger/human hybrid Recombinant standing beside him.

The tigress hesitated. Her tail twitched. “No. She’s in Recomax.”

Feran continued to watch the sky to let the disturbing news settle. Another storm was collecting in the north. He tried to piece together how long it had been since he and Allaria split and why the time had slipped away so easily. Allaria loved storms. He wondered if she could see enough sky out her tiny window in solitary to know when there were storms outside. He wondered if she cared, shivering on the concrete cot of the cell, her fur falling out in clumps from the chemical used to kill every hair follicle on the bodies of Recomax life-sentence mammalian inmates. It wasn’t necessary, but it was done anyway to break their wills. They were also not provided any clothing or blankets, just some straw. “Recomax,” the warden was fond of explaining every time he was featured in a news spot, “isn’t for humans.” If Allaria hadn’t been broken to the point of lunacy yet, she soon would be, and then it wouldn’t be long before she found a guaranteed way out. Life sentences were short in Recomax.

Feran swallowed a lump in his throat and looked down the protest line. He frowned. Several demonstrators held “Reco Pride” signs. He told organizers to discourage those — they were too like old 21st century protest signs. Feran didn’t disparage civil rights movements of the past, but the Recombinant Equality Movement was something different. It needed to have its own identity. Opponents of the REM were quick to remind people that the movements of the past were about human differences and that the REM was about non-humans. They claimed the past precedents didn’t apply.

Others disagreed with him. “Any means necessary,” they told him, and proved it with terror tactics employed against friend and foe alike. Feran was no model of morality, but terrorizing innocent people didn’t sit right with him. Recombinants weren’t going to keep their human rights by behaving like animals. Even if, as he often said himself, cruelty were a uniquely human trait, to be viewed as human they would have to be even more humane and more civilized than the pure humans. Fearfulness might look like respect to some, but it is not the same thing at all. A fear-filled enemy, once regrouped, is a stronger foe than ever, willing even for martyrdom.

Feran, standing on the top of the Supreme Court steps at the edge of the Protest Zone, watched the people passing by below. Most tried to ignore the protestors, but a crowd of pure human stock had gradually been gathering in the Plaza to stare, and their expressions were not friendly. Tensions were winding tighter. The heat wasn’t helping.

Occasionally someone on the demonstration line would get up a little courage or ire and shout a slogan, then the rest would join in. Feran raised a paw every time and halfheartedly added his voice, but it wasn’t like the old days. His heart wasn’t into it like it used to be. Too many collarings.

“We’re people, too!” someone shouted. The line lit up with voices. Feran raised a paw-fist. “Persons! Persons!” he chanted along with the others into the thick, muggy air.

Eventually enthusiasm waned and the shouting faded and broke apart on the torid stillness into the fervent, unintelligible chatter of countless independent conversations. Feran went quiet before the others. Something on the breezeless atmosphere made his hackles bristle. An instinct born of experience gave him an uncanny prescience of trouble on the horizon. The hide on his snout wrinkled in a grimace. A black car slid slowly to a stop at the East Capitol intersection and turned onto First Street. Yellow lettering along the side flashed “Recombinant Control” in the hot sun as it leisurely crawled toward them.

“Go back to the zoo, beasts!” Feran’s attention snapped quickly to a husky 20-something in jeans and an old white t-shirt. The man glanced at the car and then his arm went back and he hurled something. It hit a canid on the front line in the head and he fell backward. Several of his fellow protestors nearby either dodged his fall or caught him. Feran didn’t care: he knew what was going down. Thunder rumbled and a grayness entered the air. Feran leaped down two steps toward the center of the line. He whirled on the step to face the protestors, ears forward, tail rigid, paws out in front of him.

“No!” he shouted. Too late. The tension in the air erupted in a ranting rage of fury. The protest line wavered from end to end, its energy building, straining in vain to restrain itself behind the Protest Zone cordon. The courthouse, with the sun sinking behind it and 12 justices inside deciding if Recombinants were really “persons” under law, loomed darkly, dwarfing the steps and the protestors. Feran felt it like a faithless David before a Goliath. Faithless. He’d become almost too cynical to care enough to fight anymore. The sky grew grim. Lightening flashed in the black clouds behind him.

“No rights for non-humans!” someone behind him shouted.

“Stop!” Feran shouted above the rising din. “This is just what they–” He saw a peculiar flash on the bared fangs in dozens of Recombinant muzzles. It spread and washed out the world in a gauzy curtain of white, and voices grew faint — all except his, which he realized was screaming — and then the protest line bulged and broke and paws, some shod and some bare, pelted all around him. He became aware of pain throbbing in the back of his skull and his head began to ache. The storm rolled in, the wind howling, and the blue sky and all Feran’s world went dark.

When he woke, he was on the floor of a paddy wagon, hedged in by furred feet of other protestors sitting along the walls. He tried to raise his head and winced. He put a paw up to feel his skull where it had been struck and found a hasp and a chain at his neck. Collared. He looked down his body where the chain passed under it and followed the dull, gray links to a collar identical to his around the neck of the tigress. She glared — not at him, but to say they’d been had.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

Roughly 24 hours later, Feran and the tigress walked out of the police station. When he stepped out on the sidewalk, Feran Wolfpaw, duly registered 3rd generation Homo Sapiens/Canis Lupus genetic hybrid, began a new life in the USA, nation of his birth, a “person” no longer.

END PART 1

On Friday my 8-year-old was doodling out of an Ed Emberley book and having a rollicking good time putting this together:

I ran across it a couple of times over the weekend, and by Sunday noon, looking for something fun and easy to relax with, I could take it no longer.  I had to do my own.

If you don’t know about Ed Emberley art books,

they are full of little doodles of things in an step-by-step instructional format.  Each little doodle takes only seconds to complete.

The real fun comes in the embellishments.

 

So I sat down and played around with some doodles for an hour or two:

did a little massaging on the ‘puter:

 

and then went to work on my real goal: an amped  up Emberley shadowbox vignette.  And here it is!

From left to right: Dancer, Gubbles, Uncle Howlard, Mumsley, and behind him Doctor, Pippy, Foxxy, and Hazel.

By the way, the picture on the wall is a reproduction of a watercolor of a beastly fellow by the name of Uncle Cato.  Uncle Cato’s portrait was painted by the versatile and multi-talented Jeanette Andromeda, the brilliance behind HorrorMade.com, among other many enterprises.

The little vignette is not finished.  I’ll probably keep it on a corner shelf and keep adding little things — some furniture, more wall-hangings, etc. — when I need a relaxing distraction.   But now you know the kind of things that fill a lazy Sunday afternoon around Graowf’s den.