Spirit of Life – Introduction

Originally Posted September 22, 2017

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Every day I see the lives of animals saved, and I see the lives of animals perish. I see firsthand what it is like to suffer at the hands of humans and their machines; to be picked up and thrown in a plastic bag, to feel the aftermath of a car ramming my body and leaving me half alive to starve on the side of the road in a puddle of pain, to slowly die surrounded by strangers that try to love me but can’t save me from the virus that ravages through my veins. Humans can’t see me, and animals can’t see me, but I am here. I am the dying spirit of an old connection between nature and these animals that have evolved beyond all others; humans.

Now I live in unusual places, pockets of a dying world that is slowly being replaced by those strange emotionless machines of technology. My favourite place to reside is the Animal Hospital, and I experience many lives there. It is a place in Australia, where the land is flat and the rain never reaches the centre except in brilliant displays of strength and power. There are two sections to this hospital, one where the domestic animals go, and another where the wilder beings reside.

Here there are stories that pull me in, swallow me, and here I see the dying connection between man and the world around it. Here, I live the lives of those around me. Here, my essence lives on in the hearts of every nurse and volunteer. Here, I live and I die.

It was early one evening when I was pulled into the life of another. My blissful sleep was torn to pieces by the tiny hands of a child. My body, new to me for an instant, was feline. I was a skinny pile of bones, and I was weak. I couldn’t run, and the monster had caught me.

He grabbed my leg, and in one foul crack he thrust it against his knee. For an instance the pain was gone, not quite there yet, and I wondered if this was real. Then it hit me, a tidal wave of agony that would never cease. My throat burned from yowling but it was nothing, not even a touch compared to the burning of my breaking body.

He did it again, and again. Those tiny hands connected to a body so much bigger than me. He did that, and his mother stood oblivious at the large cooking pot on the stove, stirring and stirring and stirring. I could smell the food, and for an instant that smell mixed with the pain. Good food, bad boy, burning pain. Then I was lost again, sent into that nothingness that you never recognised until you awoke.

When I did, I was immersed in the not quite quiet of the hospital. There were more humans around me, and in a sudden rage I began to hiss and twist and strike. Their voices rose, but they seemed to be calm, calmer than the murderous screams of the boys rage. They put sharp spikes into my leg and pumped fluid through me until I couldn’t feel, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear. Then I slept again.

That became my routine for many days, maybe even weeks. I slept, and I woke. I ate a little, I got more medicine, more check-ups and prodding. Afterwards the humans would return me to the cell, the tiny white box with one side open to the world, if you could peer beyond the metal bars. There were others here, others like me. They meowed and cried through the night, for attention, for a release from the pain, or for those memories of happiness and warmth that I had abandoned long ago.

It was almost a week later when they took my leg. I hadn’t walked on it, hadn’t walked at all. It was a constant limb of numbness, occasionally broken by the stabbing pain that I had learnt to forget. It would strike outwards, but after it became an ache that never left me. It was the ache that hurt the worst, as I could never stretch, never escape it. Even now the ghost limb aches.

It wasn’t long before I left the life of that kitten. Floating again, I know how her story goes on without me. It hasn’t ended, but it has grown happy. One of the volunteers at the hospital, the lady that brought her in at the very start, took her home. There she gets fed and cuddles and love. She has learnt to live, to chase the birds from the back yard, to play with the old tom cat the lady owns. It took her a long time to understand that these humans were different, that they didn’t want to hurt her, but now she can live. I can live.

It was a feathered body that pulled me from the cat’s mind. Black and white and grey, I was a young magpie barely old enough to be flying free on my own. There were many of us that lived near the city, my family and the rival flock on both sides. Unlike many animals, our home had boundaries, strict lines that we must follow at all costs. If you crossed into another’s territory, you were declaring war on your family back home.

It was this lesson, drilled into me since hatching, that had me go the dangerous way home. I flew across the roaring freeway, seven lanes of trucks and speeding cars and machines that I had to swoop and dodge. It was hard, but I had done it before, and I was hungry. I needed the only food I could find; the tiny mammal that had been hit that morning and left to rot in the blinding sun.

My stomach growled that moment, back as I had flown over that freeway. I had no memory of the accident, other than knowing that I hadn’t landed on the road, but far from that line of white that marked a different boundary to mine. When I became aware of the world again, I was standing, wings drooped and feather’s fluffed like I’d been sick for months. The carcass I had aimed for was flattened, the car that hit us having swerved off the road to strike it’s target.

I sat there for many hours, through the cold night and into the next day of sun. Usually I woke with the sun, bright and ready to fly and eat and soar. Today was different. Today I would die. I knew this, even though my body could still keep going, would keep trying to survive even as hunger and thirst ravaged beneath my skin. I was just waiting for my savour, and as I hoped, he came.

The car pulled over, blinking hazard lights on the red strip of emergency lane that lined the freeway. I never saw him, my mind too caught up in the struggles of my body. When I heard his footsteps, it took a bit for my dazed mind to stir. Even then, my feet wouldn’t carry me, my wings wouldn’t lift me up to the sky. I couldn’t escape him, but it didn’t matter. I never knew it, but he was my saviour.

It was a race from there. I was in a box on a blanket in a van. The van sped down the road, every bump and corner a step closer to my end. There was nothing but pain at that point, the fear having drained from me long ago. Yet as I was carried through the hall into the vet surgery, I became scared. I awoke enough to register the world around me.

It smelt here. It smelt of chemicals and death. Animals that had passed before me, and animals that were sick and waiting to go. Yet there was also babies here, ducklings that peeped and fledglings that chirped, baby joeys clutched to warm bodies as they awaited carers that would act as their mother. I saw them, those beings that I may see some time in my life, or may remain a mystery to me forever.

Then there were the vets, and as they put me under, my broken beak pressed gently into the tiny mask, I saw them. They smiled and joked to themselves, but they were different. They weren’t the same as the silver machine that broke my body and shattered my soul. They weren’t the same as the silver and white and grey machines that surrounded me, artificial monsters that didn’t live. These people cared.

As they checked me over, my little avian body, I was let go. He had passed, that little bird, as he was put under the anaesthetic. His limp body began to cool, the warmth leaving him, and the vet nurse sighed as I watched from above. She felt each bone, each tiny break in his body. She carried him carefully to the pile, the bodies that lay atop the fridge, ready to be studied by people that cared, by people that wanted to learn to help.

When the vet nurse returned, I began to know her. As I watched she got a call, and her Grandfather was dying. His own life was leaving him, and she could feel the huge weight pressing down on her. Every life she had every saved lifted her, but every life she had lost pushed her down. Today the balance was off, and she was sinking.

She still smiled, and she stayed for as long as she could, helped as many as she could. When she could put it off no longer, she left, going to say a last farewell to her Poppa. I stayed, pulling from her mind and from the minds of those around me. I flew up, beyond the hospital and the lives that began and ended there. I could see every life, a brilliant spark of light that called to me. I saw those lights reach out and touch each other, and every time they connected their light grew brighter.

I was alive, because animals and humans still lived. One day the world will be nothing but machines, computers that control every life and then learn to replace life itself. When that day comes, I will die. I will die like every animal whose life I live dies. I will die like the humans who help those animals and the humans who hurt those animals will.

But until then, until those lights cease to exist, I will live. I will forever experience the life of many, touched and saved by the life of another. Every time a puppy is born, I will be there to watch it grow. When a tree martin stands in the midday sun and gets saved from dehydration, I will feel the fluids of life heal my body. Every life, I will live.

And one day, I will die.