“The owls won’t talk to you,”Grindl said. “They’re too feral.”
Grindl had come around. Scorning knowledge went against her ethics of desire. But we’d learned almost nothing since conjuring the owl symbol with the spilled wildflowers.
“Every owl I’ve locked eyes with looked like they were deciding whether it would be worth it to kill me,” I agreed.
She worried her beak against the corner of her left wing, thinking.
“The Luck of the Glutton,” she said. “He could snare an owl for you.”
Grindl’s revulsion at the owl symbol was instinctual, ancestral. She could not be in the presence of an owl. But she knew someone who could get me an audience.
A toad named Anaxyrus, The Luck of the Glutton, lived under a waterfall on Rock Creek, a narrow glen lined with sycamore roots and spleenwort, saxifrage, yellowroot, and dwarf iris.
I found Anaxyrus exactly where the raven said he would be, saw four golden eyes glaring when I peeked my head under the falls.
I caught him struggling with an ambitiously large mate, his forearms too short to comfortably grasp her the way he wanted.
Anaxyrus didn’t bother to unclasp. He squinted and it happened quickly. The sound of my pulse grew louder. I felt my leg muscles spasm. My vision blurred and I slipped out of my body.
I had entered a dream. A summer morning and I could see myself as a kid, caressing a tiny bone strung on a thread, staring up at a hawk on a power line, waiting for them to talk to me.
“You remember how to make the amulets,” Anaxyrus whispered in my ear behind me.
“When you found a road-killed toad, you would put the carcass in a bag and wait. After a few days, the bones started to separate. Then you put your hand in the bag. If you could pluck a single bone from the bag without the toad grabbing your hand, you could create an amulet for animal communication.”
I’d never made toad amulets as a child. Anaxyrus was doing something with time, with memory.
In the dream, I walked toward the boy pinching the bone between his fingers to get a better look at him.
“Is this how you imagined you could speak to animals?” Anaxyrus’s voice interrupted, louder now and echoing.
I surfaced, the dream faded and we emerged in his grotto again, my hands and feet touching wet stone.
“Are you the Luck of the Glutton?”
“To some,” he toad laughed. “Emissary of Tarrare the Devourer,” he said. “Why are you here bothering me during the clasping moon?”
I couldn’t answer yet. I was still in awe of what he’d done. I could hear him clearly, but had none of the sickness I felt sometimes speaking to Grindl.
“Why did we dream of the toad amulets?” I asked . “That wasn’t real.”
“You wanted to speak with me, and that’s the way you imagined you could. I hadn’t expected the ritual to occur in your past.I didn’t think you could see yourself clearly enough for that to work, but it did,” he said. “Tell me why you are here before I complain to Tarrare that you’re interrupting me. There are mates to breed and craneflies to eat. This part of my life is short and I'll waste no more of it on you.”
I noted he was another acolyte of the Kith, like Grindl.
I described the hand with an eye in and the owl flying with the disc in its talons. I told him I needed to speak with an owl, someone who could explain what the second symbol was supposed to mean.
“Play my game,” he said. “Worship me. Bow and scrape. Feel the power flowing through me.”
The toad cocked his head at his mate who’d been watching us and winked. It seemed all of our commensal animals had this kink, to bring humans low before them in a ritualized way.
I couldn’t do it.
“If you want me to help you speak to an owl, you will play my game.”
Anaryxus ordered me to grovel a second time. I lowered myself to my knees, pressed my belly against the boulder and prostrated before him. I placed my forehead against the cool stone, and closed my eyes.
Then I felt the toads shuffling closer to me. I could feel Anaxyrus’ breathing against my ear.
“Speak your desire out loud,” he said. “Beg for it.”
I hadn’t realized, to this point the toad and I had been speaking without words. I croaked through my dry throat, “I need to speak with an owl. I need to know what the symbol means.”
Nothing happened. I looked up when I heard the Luck of the Glutton releasing his mate. She took a few hops away from him, looking back once before leaving.
I held my breath, waiting for guidance.
The toad sat up straight and stared into the middle distance. Then, he blew an unholy trill. Loud and high pitched, ringing off the stone.
I did not know what to think. I watched the toad inflate the air bladder under his chin again and again. He trilled for ten minutes.
Whatever the toad was trying to convey was lost on me. I worried I’d left my children wandering in the creek downstream too long, so I said goodbye, prepared to leave with nothing.
He stopped me as I turned away.
“I saw what you needed drift past not long ago,” he said. “Look downstream.”
He told me to search just below Rock Creek Falls, to find what he called, a “Mask of the Dreaming."
And if I found any toads smaller than him, males lurking in the shadows of his grotto, he said I should dash them on the rocks.
I didn’t find any, and I wouldn’t have done it.
But I found a row of eviscerated males piled on stones on the creek, their bodies pulled inside-out. And I wondered about Tarrare.
Downstream my boys had found the mask. It was bigger than I’d expected.