“George, you need to wake up,” an unfamiliar male voice said.
“We don’t think he’s going to wake up. Do you really think this is a good idea? We just don’t think he’s going to go for it anyway. Have you read his file? He’s really not the most agreeable animal we have ever met you know,” declared a fast-talking female voice.
“George, we would like to talk with you a moment,” said the first voice in a calm tone.
I felt uneasy that these voices were talking directly to me. I’m used to Fausto being the only one who talked to me like I was an individual and not an animal on display. I feigned being asleep as I tried to figure out what I should do, not that I had a lot of options. I only heard two voices, so I figured I might be safe. I weighed close to two hundred pounds, so I knew I was not easy to move, especially if I wiggled around some. I knew this because a few years ago some people from Greenpeace tried to free me one night by returning me to Pinta Island. I didn’t want to return to my goat infested homeland, so I started flailing around. This seemed to slow them down until Fausto appeared around the corner. He had come back to sing me a song and was just in time to call the authorities. I was grateful that he was there to save me. I’d rather live my days out here with one friend than back on Pinta Island with a bunch of goats.
“George, we know you’re awake and can hear us. We need to ask you a very important question that will affect the rest of your life,” stated the first voice again.
I slowly opened my eyes and noticed a few things. The first was that my enclosure was not my enclosure. I was in some type of jungle that was full of lush green plants with a crystal clear stream that ran through the center of it. The smell of fresh fruit lingered in the air from somewhere in the distance. The golden sun beat down onto my shell, and I noticed that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. For some reason, which didn’t make sense to me, I felt warm and tingly. Not because of the sun, but because I seemed to be content and happy for the first time in a long time. It was a strange sensation, which made me wonder, Did someone drug me while I was sleeping and move me into the jungle?
“No. No one drugged you, and you are not exactly in a jungle,” assured the male voice.
“You’re not in a jungle. It’s more of a ‘garden’. We just wanted to ask you if you want to join us on a mission. It might be dangerous, but it could be a lot of fun at the same time. Do you want to join us? Do you? Do you?” inquired the rapid talker again from somewhere in a tree above me.
“Martha, I think you need to slow down a bit and give George here a chance to …to get his bearings,” he chided.
As I listened to these two dialogs about some kind of mission, I realized something. Somehow the first talker had heard my thoughts and answered my question before I spoke. That wasn’t possible. Now a fresh wave of panic swept away my warm tingly sense of contentment.
“I don’t understand what’s going on. How did you . . . I mean . . . Can you understand what I’m thinking?” I inquired, trying to pinpoint the speaker.
“We can all understand. Here we all can communicate clearly. There are not any language barriers here,” he affirmed.
“Who are you? Where am I? And what do you want with me?” I blurted out a little more panicked than I meant to.
I frantically looked around me to identify who the speakers were and to understand what was happening, but I couldn’t pinpoint them. So I raised my head to get a better look. I still couldn’t locate them, so I rotated my neck slowly to get a look behind my shell. As I did I came face to face with the owner of the first voice, who I discovered had been sitting on my shell the whole time!
“Hello, George. I’m Eldey,” he said.
There, just a few inches from my nose, sat a strange bird standing a little taller than my neck. At first, I thought I was looking at a large Galapagos penguin, but the beak didn’t look quite right. It was also about twice as tall as most penguins that I had seen back at the research station. Its beak was a grayish hue with black stripes. The strange bird’s wings weren’t penguinish either. They didn’t have that firm, flipper look. His wings looked like those of a Galapagos cormorant, except stumpier and tucked back to his sides.
I must have been staring because Eldey continued, “I know this must all seem very strange to you, so let’s just take things one step at a time. My name is Eldey, or at least that’s the name I’ve chosen for myself here. I was known as the great auk. I don’t want to bore or overwhelm you with a bunch of facts about myself. I want to answer some of your questions.”
My questions! Yeah, I had quite a few questions for this three-foot talking bird who could read my mind. “Where am I exactly, and how did I get here?”
“Wow, nothing like starting with the difficult questions. It is kind of hard to explain exactly,” Eldey said adjusting his dark webbed feet on my shell. “You are in the Garden at the moment, but you are not totally here.”
“Not totally here?” I retorted. “What does that mean?”
“As I said, it is not that easy to explain since you are not totally here yet. We want to propose an idea to you; a sort of mission that we need your help completing. We brought you here to explain the plan to you and then give you time to decide whether you would want to join us or not. To simplify things, at this moment you are sleeping next to your watering hole at the Charles Darwin Research Station…” Eldey said matter-of-factly.
“So, this is a dream then?” I asked.
“Not exactly. It is a little more than that,” he said, almost laughing. “You are also partially in the Garden, too, so it is not a dream. You are kind of between two places; the one there and the one here.”
“You are going extinct, and we all went extinct, and we came here, and we want to go back, and we want to have you help us do that because we want to make sure that we help out the people because they need our help, you know?” said the female voice somewhere up in the tree, which I assumed was Martha whom Eldey had addressed earlier.
“So there are two of you? And you are asking me to join some type of special animal trio for a mission to save the people? Save them from what? Killer bees? Yappy dogs? Their own stupidity?” I chuckled. Another tortoise stereotype was that we were very patient because we are slow. That had never been my experience. We were slow by nature, but not by choice. Conversing with these two was almost as frustrating as talking to Isa and Bella back at the CDRS.
“There are many of us here in the Garden but only a few who are interested in going back and helping the people. Many don’t have the same compassion for the people as we do,” replied Eldey crouching down and leaping from my shell.
“You said that you are a great auk? How is that possible? Aren’t you supposed to be extinct?” I asked puzzled.
“Yes, actually I am surprised that you know that,” replied the great auk ruffling his black and white feathers.
“Well, I have seen a lot of information posted around the CDRS and heard people talking about other animals that have gone extinct. Being the last of my kind, that’s a normal topic of conversation around my enclosure. It’s always been disheartening to hear about the sad end to so many creatures.”
Eldey continued, “I am extinct and have been so for some time, but in the Garden, we are given some ‘options’ if we choose not to be extinct anymore,” Eldey said air quoting with his minuscule wings next to his head.
“How can you be given the option to be extinct? I don’t understand. I mean I’d personally love to go extinct and just end it. It’s so lonely in my enclosure, and I miss my family so much. This is the first conversation I’ve wanted to be a part of in over 40 years,” I said trying to avoid tearing up.
“I know your time at the CDRS has been a difficult one and that you have so much time until your extinction will come, but that is also why we wanted to talk to you about some ‘options’ you have given your unique circumstances,” Eldey stated.
“Yeah, you have lots of options, you know? You can stay here in the Garden, or you can go back for another 23 years, 6 months, 3 days and 46, 45, 44 seconds; if you want. That choice is yours, but if you go back you wouldn’t be able to help out the people or have an adventure with us. Personally, we wouldn’t like being stuck in a small enclosure by ourselves for that long; especially not when you can hang out with all of us doing awesomely helpful things,” Martha yammered.
“Before you help me understand everything that you’re trying to tell me, can you let me know who you are exactly?” I replied straining to locate Martha in the trees above.
Just then, a brown, mossy green dove descended in a circling pattern from a tree at the edge of the woods. She landed right in front of me and began pacing with her coral red feet, head bobbing back and forth at the same rapid rate at which she spoke. I looked into her bright red eyes as she prepared to ramble on.
“Our chosen name is Martha, but then again you figured that one out already. You’re really, really smart, you know? We’re not actually a dove-like you were thinking. We were…or are, passenger pigeons. You probably heard of our kind in all of your extinction conversations at the research station. Did you know that we were once the most populous bird in the whole wide world? A flock of us could take days to pass by one place. We were pretty amazing actually,” Martha said dreamily staring off into space.
I was grateful when Eldey interrupted Martha’s rambling, “Martha talks in plurals as you may have already picked up on. Being the most abundant bird in the world at one time, she is used to big crowds. Martha has trouble focusing on one thought at a time even here. You will get used to it after a while.”
Eldey seemed to sense my uneasiness. “I can see that you are a little overwhelmed by everything that has taken place. Why don’t you and I head over to the brook and talk? I will send Martha to get the others for a meeting later.”
“Martha, please go round up some of the other animals who have expressed interest in pursuing the mission with us,” Eldey said looking at the frantic little bird, “and see if you can try to avoid Inca.”
“We will see what we can do. See you at the meeting grounds in a little bit,” Martha said as she flew out of sight.
“Inca? Who is that?” I asked.
“He is a Carolina Parakeet. Maybe I should not try to exclude him from this mission, because he is a wealth of knowledge, but he just makes so much noise and has a shorter attention span than Martha, if you can believe that,” Eldey joked, trying to lighten the mood. “I honestly think he would be detrimental to what we are planning. He likes to be the center of attention, and he is overly friendly. Those are admirable traits but not when we are trying to stay off the radar.”
I felt so dumbfounded by all that was taking place that I just wanted to lay down. Still, there was an unexplainable excitement in me that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Eldey put his stumpy little wing around me and waddled over to the crystal clear brook that was flowing out of a large rock near the tree line.
“I know how overwhelming all of this must seem, especially since you are still in between both places. I don’t know why, but once you are totally here, things seem to make more sense. Why don’t you take a nice refreshing drink from the brook, get something to eat, and then hopefully I can explain what we have in mind a little more clearly.”
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