Creases In The Fog

Upon the conclusion of September, one of many days when the Douglas fir and Sitka spruce dripped with rain, a wail rang out on the trail down to Chestermere.

Fog was pressing against the beach. It played with waves thundering up and down the length of the shoreline, clinging to the sand and crawling forward in inches as a feeble sun began its ascent. The ocean water was dark and swirling. Footprints of the previous day had been long swept away into the Pacific.

Again, a plaintive cry met the air.

Somewhere under the sand a shifting began. It began as a whorl beneath grains that lifted and sifted as a large figure rose above the ground and unwound itself to full length. Four scaled paws heavy with claws spread toes apart and wiggled them into the sand.

With a shimmer of scales beneath weak, watery sunlight the figure shook itself, much like a dog to dry itself, and as the last of the sand flung from him, the Chestermere protector emerged into the dawn. He opened one yellow eye at a time with a snick of leathery lids. He scanned the shoreline.

The dragon was coloured in onyx, with alder leaf shaped scales turning to dark green at their points. He blended with the evening and with the earthen tones of the Pacific Rim, as was his duty, in order to better serve.

He was guardian, custodian, soldier.

Ter was Chestermere.

His ears, flaps hanging on either side of a broad, angled face, lifted to triangles and angled forward. Against the booming of the rising tide Ter strained himself to hear. The squawk of gulls and dripping foliage joined the ocean’s chorus, but it wasn’t what the dragon sought. He unfurled dark wings from his sides and began to tread up to where the forest-line hugged the beach.

Two times he’d heard the cry, and he’d abstained from acting. In similar circumstances the bleat of a fawn or bark of a sea lion had been the reason behind his disturbance. This was an unrecognizable cry, however. Though tentative, his beleaguering curiosity was enough to spur him to find its source.

Ter stepped into the trees and closed his wings tight to his sides. He slipped through the undergrowth with the silence of the well-trained predator, and the birds that caught glimpses of his shimmer of scales turned their eyes and sang up and away. He’d never eaten them, but they dared not provoke him to try. There was a mutual respect between the dragon and the creatures on the beach; they seemed to understand that without him, there was no rain. Without him, there was chaos when humans were left unsupervised. Without him there was no peace, nor Chestermere.

Another wail split the air and Ter zeroed in on the direction from which it had come. The main trail between the parking lot and the beach, somewhere at the half point. He narrowed his eyes and snaked his way towards it.

In a trash can siding the porta-potties of the trail, a human littling fussed. He was paling with the cold and shivering, looking with bleary eyes to grey skies. “Mama,” came his whisper. Ter shuffled up to the chained receptacle and reared onto his hind legs to see. It was early, the joggers and dog walkers wouldn’t be arriving just yet. It was only the dragon and the little one on the trail.

The dragon’s expression softened. Only he would know it; such hard ridges and scales upon his face could only express so much. He flexed one claw forward to touch the little one and it cried again, screwing its eyes tight shut into wrinkles.

It was naked. Young, but not young. Old enough not to be young. Young enough not to be old. Between babe and child.

Abandoned.

Littling, Ter decided.

The littling was too skinny. The dragon had seen children dashing through the sands of Chestermere laughing lustily, their small chests jutting out with the exuberance of youth. He knew what healthy looked like; this wasn’t it. Ter growled, a rumble that warmed the contents of his belly and pooled smoke like spittle at the corners of his mouth.

The dragon had guarded the beach for many years and seen much of human waste and incivility. For all the good they could do, there was an evil lurking in their hearts that when tapped into, had the potential to be the undoing of their entire species. Say nothing of litterers and destruction in the woods. Ter had come across murderers looking to bury their victims in the forest, and insidious souls walking the beach who did not think nor voice aloud their intentions. Ter had felt the darkness in them all, as he lurked beneath the sand.

Although the dragon was Chestermere’s guardian, a small number of times he had found himself called to be the guardian of places beyond his territory. During those times, he had been called to be all judge, jury, and executioner three. Ter had been the unknown saviour of many a destined drowner when humans had been sucked out into the tide. Sometimes he had swam within feet of a soul only to feel the murky tendrils of otherworldly forces within it. Those such times he had swam away without looking back. Such was his duty. He did not feel grief for it.

There were other ways the human parents could have disposed of their young. Ter felt confusion and hunger clouding the littling’s soul. He wouldn’t last long in the cold; humans and their smooth bodies weren’t meant for it. They were meant to create and invent the ways of avoiding it. The dragon plucked the littling from the trash can as gently as a large creature could, scooping his claws beneath him and opening one wing to stow him there. The wing curled around the littling with enough space to provide air to breathe, and less room to roll around.

Ter had never intervened directly. When he’d rescued humans from drowning or other such states of mortal peril it had been through nature itself. A controlled surge of water or rustling of the trees, a clap of thunder or relocation of sand. He had never physically touched them. He didn’t find the novelty of his experience with the shivering littling to be particularly enthralling. It was cold, damp, and little. But he was warm, dry, and larger.

Could the littling not walk? Surely not. He was too thin for his legs to be able to support him. Smoke furled from the corners of Ter’s mouth again. A sign of neglect. Why keep something alive if only to leave it later? For all of the complexity that humans felt the need to be, they missed the simplicity that lay before their eyes. This was a waste of life and a grotesque misuse of their ability to make.

The dragon bore his little burden gently into the forest, and the trail soon looked ever as it had been: quiet, empty, and open.

The first step was to warm the littling. The dragon chuffed in amusement. His breath would do far more than that. To warm a creature so smooth and small would require a mother’s touch. Fortunately, a family of sea otters lived further up the coast with young not quite a year old. He could not be sure they would honour his request for aid, but the mother would know of a way to keep Ter’s littling warm until he knew what he wanted to do with him next.

The dragon darted between the firs in silence, contemplating every step as he walked beneath the morning’s dripping dew. He encountered a whitetail deer around a corner and paused. They each gave a solemn nod, the deer eyeing the slight bulge of the guardian’s wing, and each went their separate ways. The buck had no sense of danger. When the dragon required sustenance, he seemed to feed on creatures of the sea most often. Even if he had required the sacrifice of the deer it would not have been for nothing. The whitetail would have become part of the guardian, and a part of Chestermere itself. It was an unspoken honor.

Further up the coast of Tofino, the dragon searched for the kelp-dominated regions of the upper beaches. He was no longer on his territory. To be sure there was another guardian lurking nearby, likely watching his every step, and Ter maintained a healthy respect for the trails he walked and stayed close to the shore, out in the open so as not to pose a threat.

The littling fussed against him. He adjusted his wing around it and pressed it close to his side so that any warmth of his scales would touch the skin. He glanced in at him from time to time and heard him breathe weak words, barely formed.

When Ter came upon the otter family, the youths were gambolling in the tidepools. The little otters dipped themselves in sea water and splashed around, nipping at each other for play and juggling ocean-smoothed rocks between their paws. Their mother eyed the approaching dragon warily and mewed sharply to her pups to join her. She moved before them to greet the guardian. She eyed his scales and his paws and his claws.

Ter lowered his head deferentially and unrolled his wing to set the littling down. The human toddler fussed and let out a wail that made the otter pups whine in response. The mother otter scurried forward and lifted the arms of the littling, examined him, and looked back up at Ter. He asked her politely whether she could keep the human warm – at least, until he knew what to do.

She told him the pup required human touch, human food. There was nothing she could do besides prolong its suffering through the little warmth she and her family could provide. Best to take it back to Chestermere and bring it into the arms of those who knew what to do with it.

He had suspected as much, and had hoped to find a different answer.

The otter mother was sympathetic to Ter’s disappointment. She offered him the innards of a clam she had cracked open over a barnacle-covered rock.

The dragon slurped it up in an instant, for it was rude of him to refuse after she had offered her advice. He thanked her for her kindness, watched her and her pups wriggle up against the littling to bring colour back to its gaunt cheeks and little frame, and once they had done what they could, wrapped the littling up in his wing once more. The otter mother suggested moss to keep it warmer.

The dragon made note to strip a tree of its moss, whatever dry bits he could find, on his way back to Chestermere if he remembered.

“Watch for our guardian,” the mother otter advised Ter cautiously upon his departure, “and keep to the shore. There are bad souls about, and this day has already angered him once.”

The otter pups waved their paws in farewell and crowded around the clam the dragon had eaten from, each jostling to get closer and wanting to touch the object of the guardian’s touch.

The otter mother watched the dragon trail southward while her young squabbled behind her, and once Ter had disappeared, gave the closest pup a nip on the shoulder. Back to the sea, for they had to swim to grow their strength.

Ter’s returning steps to Chestermere were filled with thought. The prints he left in the sand were soon swallowed by the sea and he idled along the shore once back in his territory, checking on the littling as he began to cry again. He was beginning to lose the bit of colour the otters had warmed into him, to Ter’s dismay.

The dragon neared the trail where he’d found the littling close to an hour after he’d first left it. Within the last twenty feet, it began to rain.

The littling’s only hope for survival was the very species that had abandoned him. That much was now clear to Ter. The dragon was a guardian of all, not one. He needed to trust fate. It wasn’t his duty to dwell. He had gone out of his way to do much of that this morning.

Ter looked into his wing, flexing the muscles and wincing as they protested against their straightening. The wing had grown stiff. The littling slipped out onto the sand, and Ter sniffed him gently. He collected moss from trees and nosed them into place around the littling, nosing him to keep him awake and fussing, just along the line where the sand met the trees.

There was a man who liked to run the length of Chestermere, rain or shine. A large man, bald and toque-wearing, with a beard so long that he tucked it into his windbreaker. Ter expected him and he came.

The man with the beard had put on the wrong shoes. They squelched, and let rainwater in through their seeping materials. Thus, he ran slower and less comfortably that morning.

If his frustration hadn’t been enough that day to slow him, the roar of Chestermere’s guardian certainly did the trick. The bearded bald man slid to a stop on the shore, his breath rising as puffs into the ocean fog and misted air, and wheeled. He searched, hesitated, and then leaned into another jog. It had been a trick of the wind. Perhaps an odd sounding thunder of waves.

Perched in the branches above the littling’s bed of moss, Ter shifted his weight and frowned.

The littling was beginning to turn grey.

Ter roared again, slightly more desperate.

The man stopped. This time, he looked afraid.

Of course, Ter was then reminded that humans tended to head in the opposite direction of frightening sounds.

As though he knew that the dragon wasn’t going to be much use, the littling balled up his fists and squirmed, shivering, and began to cry, the same plaintive cry that had awoken Ter before.

The bald, bearded man’s attention was ensnared. His beetle black eyes darted across the shore, out to the water for one reason or another, and then up to where the crying came from. That was a sound recognizable to a man. Of course, in Ter’s opinion it would have been much easier had the black poodle and its freckled owner been walking, pushing and pulling a stroller together, but the rain kept those particular Chestermere residents inside their home.

Keep on, Ter inwardly urged the human toddler. Cry for the life you deserve.

The dragon later remembered the shock of the bald, bearded man’s expression as he wandered up the beach and came across the littling. The shout he had given. The rain collecting within his beard had dripped onto the moss as he had undone his windbreaker and wrapped it fretfully around the toddler, who had finally cried himself of his strength and fallen into unconsciousness. The man had fished something out of his pocket, the device of today, Ter called it, and many people had visited the beach that day in the rain, amidst lights flashing of red and blue.

Ter had taken to the air when the police had arrived. Out of sight, out of mind, not to be known. The guardian of Chestermere had experienced enough of a human’s touch against his scales, and he had meddled enough. He remembered the littling for a very long time, and his wing never forgot the feel of its chilled skin against it.

Upon the conclusion of spring many years later, one of many early summer mornings when the beach was warmed by a strong sun, giggles echoed out along the trail down to Chestermere.

The sky was clear and blue, and the tide was drawn nearly up to the treeline. The sand was warm and dry and beneath it, Ter slept soundly.

Again, the giggles met the air.