Content warnings

Animal death. Sickness. Disaster. Missing person.

Something had eaten Jana’s chickens.

She stood in the cold red dawn with the smell of blood and cypress sap rich in the air after rain, transfixed in horror.

If a jackal had come by, or a wild cat, or even a honey badger, she would not have begrudged it a meal. Wildlife was scarce enough. But the breath caught in her throat, and she couldn’t hold back tears. The shock danced through her body and took hold of her. The misty brushwood forest behind the little coop on the hillside blurred as her eyes filled up with tears.

Blood and broken eggshells, multi-colored feathers and fluff and bones littered the grass just outside the coop. She blinked, gasped for air, looked back again. She was wrong.

Something had not eaten her chickens. It had taken the six hens and the little calico cockerel, one by one, without so much as a cluck to alert Jana as she lay sleeping in her house just a hundred yards away, killed them, ripped each of them apart on the buffalo grass, and left their broken bodies, blood, and scattered feathers to mark the butchery. It had not eaten them afterwards.

The door to the coop stood wide, flung-open. The wood-and-mesh coop itself was predator-proof, but Jana had never put a lock on the latch. People didn’t just come by, not this far up in the mountains. But whatever had done this had lifted the latch, as a person might do.

Jana’s guts went cold. What if some people—scoundrels—from the broken remains of civilization were out there, right now? She scanned her surroundings, but saw only wisps of morning mist, the familiar grassy farmland beyond her yard, the dwarf forest that marched up the hill. What if they meant Jana—and the rest of her sleepy, self-sufficient little community—harm?

But why would they kill the chickens, and waste the meat? Surely anyone who came trekking into the mountains from the fallen city or beyond would be hungry above all else.

She scanned the terrible scene in front of her, the blades of grass slimy, red-black. These chickens had never been for killing. Jana traded eggs for fresh-baked bread and the occasional quarter-part of a meat chicken, reared by her neighbor down the road. She had never known what death smelled like. She clamped a hand over her nose and mouth, feeling sick. A deep red rage roiled up inside her.

The broken body of her cockerel seemed to show a way to the forest. The bloodstained red-and-gold feathers were dispersed in a path which led into the underbrush. Something human-sized could not possibly have gone under there, but Jana saw a tuft of fur, caught on a twig; the faint imprints of claws in the mud.

At a trot, heart pounding, she ran down to the garage. Her car, stationary now since all the gasoline had run out, stood like an abandoned exoskeleton amongst the more useful things, fertilizer and gumboots and gardening tools.

There, hanging in place amidst the trowels, spades and rakes, was the garden machete, which could cleave corky underbrush, root and branch and forest stem. Jana had never needed to use it.

Until now. She took the machete from off the wall, gripped it in her right hand and loped back up the hill.

It was not quite a year ago, during Jana’s last summer holiday from university, that the chickens had arrived. She remembered her mother’s excitement—“Jana, look, we have chickens!”—her own indifference. Her mother exclaimed over the seven pullets, installed them in the sturdy coop she’d built beforehand, doted on them.

Jana texted her university friends, stayed in the house, read a book. When she emerged in the late afternoon, the seven pullets were clucking and strutting around outside. She rolled her eyes, “Yeah, mom, that’s nice I guess.” She groaned when her mother asked her to help collect eggs.

She remembered her mother’s delight, a week or two later, when it transpired that one of the pullets was in fact a cockerel. Now, they could have an expanding flock.

Close to the end of Jana’s holiday, her mother left to go into the city. She had a checkup scheduled at the hospital, other errands she needed to run, family to visit. Jana promised to feed the chickens and was glad to stay. She had never minded being alone. Since the two of them had moved out here eight years ago, she’d often been left home alone. When she was younger, her mother would ask the next-door neighbor, a cheerful Griqua woman named Cindy, to check on her in the afternoons and help her make meals.

She’d hugged her mother, and not known that it would be for the last time.

She remembered the little car disappearing down their stone-cluttered driveway as she waved, whilst the chickens clucked contentedly about her feet. The intrepid little calico cockerel with his harem of six, all of them gone now.

A thorn-bush rustled in front of her, and Jana stopped dead in her tracks, suddenly aware of the noise of the machete, the creaking chop of shearing brush, and the vast loneliness of the wooded mountainside. As a child, she had explored what paths there were up here, but the trail she followed now was only for the wild beasts. She was forging her own path, shearing through branches and bushes that had grown undisturbed for a century.

A streak of black flashed from the undergrowth. She leapt back, heart in her mouth, only to see a cat emerge from the brush and leap up onto a great sandstone boulder as if standing sentinel. It gazed at her and blinked luminous orange eyes, slowly, lazily.

Jana let out a breath. It was Cindy’s cat, of course. The black devil, some of the locals called it. Jana had never warmed to the cat, for it wasn’t friendly and didn’t answer to any name, and lately she’d worried about it attacking the chicks that her hens were incubating, but she’d never thought there was anything particularly supernatural about the animal.

But now, it was looking at her as if warning her not to go further, that she might be trespassing some kind of boundary if she did. The sandstone boulder, slightly higher than Jana’s head, had always stood here like some kind of gateway into the unknown, and Jana struggled now to remember whether she had ever explored past it.

She was being stupid. She shook her head and took a step up the trail, coming up past the boulder. The cat hissed in her ear.

Jana jumped and rounded on it, but the cat didn’t stay. It let out another protracted, malevolent hiss and fled, disappearing into the mist downslope like a swirling blot of ink.

And all around her, vibrating like a steel drum in the hollowness of the brushwood forest, was the sense that she did not belong up here. That she was trespassing on something else’s territory. Violating a sacred ground which existed outside of her domain, which belonged only to the woodland scrub and the vastness of the mountain range.

‘Bullshit,’ she hissed aloud through gritted teeth. ‘You came into my domain first.’

The hillside did not answer the challenge. Jana rounded the boulder and pressed forward, viciously cutting swathes of vegetation from her path as she went.

The very night her mother left, the entire sky glowed with eerie colors, the air took on the texture and stench of burning rubber, and everyone’s lives changed.

The electricity and phone communications went down, and did not come back up. Corporal Mosedi and his three officers at the police station could not tell any of the distraught citizens of their little village what had happened. No-one came to inform them; no delivery trucks drove from the city to supply the grocery store or the gas station, and by night a strange purple haze hung over the highway.

Terrorists, holy judgement, some kind of natural disaster never heard of before: no-one could say what had happened. People drove to the other small towns, before they fully realized that there was no more fuel coming in, verified that the people living there were alive and well and just as confused. They hesitated to drive the other way, into the haze, to brave the purple twilight and the rubber-reeking fog.

Jana could not reach her mother. She was not alone. Others had been in the city too, that night: fathers, mothers, whole families. None of them came back.

At last, a group of men volunteered to go to the city. All together, in one truck, to save the fuel that wasn’t coming to their tankers anymore.

Two days later, the men returned. Staring eyes in grimy faces, they told of the destroyed city, of fallen masonry and an eerie dust cloud that hovered over the center, making midday dark as purple twilight, of strange creatures scuttling amongst smoking ruins. They were missing a man: Brett, whom Jana knew from high school, had apparently taken a wrong step and fallen into some kind of smoking fissure. He couldn’t be recovered; they left him for dead.

The men had all been healthy, strong, in their prime of life. They all sickened and died within a week of returning. Some of them developed growths in strange places, tumors growing rapidly like bunches of grapes from armpit and groin. Others developed terrible ulcers, open wounds that wept blood and refused to heal. Skin blistered; strange wounds formed and rent open; vital organs died off, taking the rest of the body with them.

Radiation poisoning? had been the question on everyone’s lips, and their weary small-town doctor had rubbed her eyes and said perhaps. She had no experience in that field.

Some people left then, trying to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the blighted city, but most stayed. Jana stayed. This was her home; it was where she and her mother had built so many things and been so happy. Where else would she go?

The trail before her narrowed and petered out, and Jana found her passage barred by an impenetrable tangle of ink-bushes, prickly pears, and moth-vines. The brush forest rose up before her like a wall, and she could only face it in thoughtless defiance, her little blade hanging slack at her side. The hillside and forest seemed to stretch on before her, eternal, uncharted, unknowable. The sum of all her fears.

Jana smelled it. Dirt and death.

She heard it, a low growl emanating from the vines at her feet and rumbling throughout the lonely mountainside until it ended in a tuneless glissando of tortuous notes, a choked-off screech.

She felt it, sudden cold emanating through the air as though the door to a vast crypt had been suddenly flung open.

Something flickered in front of her. Patterns. Stripes. An animal.

It was there and yet barely seemed to be there, even though she could sense its presence so strongly that the very air around her seemed thick with it.

The patterns glanced from her eye, throwing it off like water droplets shaken from a mallard’s back. She was staring directly at the creature, yet she could not say whether it resembled a jackal or a wild cat or a leopard or mongoose, nor even quite how big it was. She had an impression of fur, sharp claws, black-and-white tiger stripes, fangs in a hissing red mouth—nothing else. She blinked her eyes, and the thing blurred in front of her.

It sprang forward, and instinctively she hefted the machete, yelling as if she might be able to spook it.

It hissed and recoiled, glowing yellow eyes following every wavering movement of the blade, seemingly not afraid of its sharpness but rather the aura of its steel. Jana knew this with sudden certainty: the very air seemed thick with the sense of the thing, mind-patterns like smoke in dark water, sentient, thinking, and yet not in a way that Jana could ever understand.

Perhaps it was a mutant from the blighted city, something that had once been a cat or dog, honey badger or mongoose. Or perhaps it had always been here, feeding off the horror it engendered in the indifferent woods.

She knew that it had carried out the slaughter on her chickens deliberately, methodically, and without remorse. She knew that it, in some literal and utterly non-substitutable way, needed that violence, as much as she needed the vegetables from her garden, the fire in the winter, the water which percolated through the porous rocks behind her house.

Anger rose up in her. I should slay it. If that’s what it needs to survive, it doesn’t deserve survival.

She thought of the jaunty little cockerel, and her mother’s hens, and every hope she’d fondly nursed for the future.

She thought of how life had been before, and how it was now, and how little power anyone truly had over any of it.

She thought of the people who had been lost, crushed under the rubble of a falling empire. She knew that nothing would ever bring them back.

Her eyes burned with tears, and she lowered the steel.

She felt the relief in the mist, the cessation of thundering wrath in the air. The creature before her uncoiled and wisped away quicker than smoke, leaving only an aftertaste of bitter almonds and the hunger of survival.

Jana turned and went back down the hill. There was naught else to do. There was a hole in her heart, yet another one, but life would continue.

She left the machete on the grass, not having the will to return it to its proper place, and was wearily turning back towards the house when she heard the sound of a faint cheeping.

Beneath a bush of fynbos sage, where Jana’s stubbornest hen liked to sneak away her eggs, half a dozen tiny fluffy chicks emerged with their mother in tow.

Author’s note

This story was (mostly) written one dark night shortly after my two silkie chickens, Sigmund and Siglinde, were eaten by something mysterious in our backyard. Sometimes nature takes her course no matter how little we like it.

Emmylou Kotzé

Emmylou Kotzé is a spec-fic writer and poet from South Africa. Her work has been published internationally by zines such as On Spec. She lives in a small town near the Maluti mountains, where she writes on themes of queerness, despair and resilience, and our relation to nature.