Amphibian (24 page)

Dear Lyle,

I am not sure why you don't like me. All I know is that sometimes when you are doing mean things to me, I wish I were a shingleback lizard that has a tail that looks like a head so that you won't attack my brain.

Then today you pulled my chair back in the gym and I fell, and the back of my head hit the floor and it hurt a lot. I figure I'll have a big bump there for a while.

I didn't lose any money because of my injury but because you rattled my brain in my skull, I may have forgotten important things for my future job working with animals. This may someday cause me economic and social hardship.

Yours truly,

Phineas Walsh

p.s. And please leave the other kids like Bird and Gordon alone too.

I looked at what I had written. I read it over again. And then again. On the fourth time through, I thought about what Lyle would think as he read it. I tried to imagine him sitting in his desk and reading each word I had written. I tried to imagine what he'd be thinking and what he'd be feeling and then what he'd do. That's when I saw him laughing so hard the snot thing happened again.

I tore up the letter and threw it in the garbage. It was a stupid idea.

It's a stupid idea because Lyle will never stop being cruel just because he knows it hurts someone. It's the hurting-someone part that he likes. My grandmother says she's never found a person who is purely good or purely evil. But she's never met Lyle.

After I threw out the letter, I walked to the bathroom thinking about victim-impact statements and how I hate Lyle. But when I got nineteen steps away from mom's office, another idea popped right out of the insides of the first idea.

Victim-impact statements won't work with humans like Lyle – but they likely work for normal humans. And normal humans everywhere are harming animals, but mostly without even knowing it. I think most humans would want to help animals if they really knew what was happening.

In fact, helping another species even has a name. It's called interspecies altruism, and lots of animals do it. For example, pods of dolphins have been seen holding other animals up to the surface so they can breathe as they help them to shore. And some people in Africa heard some whimpering and looked around to see an antelope leading a sick wildebeest, with his eyes swollen shut, to a waterhole. One of the coolest examples of interspecies altrusim I saw on the Green Channel was of a mother cat who adopted seven chicks whose own mother had died. Whenever one wandered too far, she'd gently pick him up and bring him back to where her kittens were.

Humans also show interspecies altruism. For example, a few weeks ago on the news I saw a story about how four white-beaked dolphins were trapped in ocean ice for three days and were close to dying. The humans watching onshore just couldn't stand to watch them suffer any longer so a bunch of men, including a teenager, piled into a motorboat to weigh it down and spent five hours making a pathway through the ice for the dolphins. The teenager even got into the water to help one of the dolphins get free and, in all, three escaped. Maybe stories like
this mean that humans just need to be able to see how animals are suffering.

And along with seeing, maybe humans need a way to hear too. Maybe they need a translator to help them understand animals' voices. Maybe it's easier for people not to think of all the ways animals are harmed when they can't even understand the language of those they kill.

Some animals can speak to humans, but not most. I once saw a show about a chimp named Lucy who was raised by a human family in the United States who taught her sign language. She lived there for twelve years, but when she got to be too much trouble (because she threw things around the house and pooped in people's laps), they sent her to a chimp institute in Africa. All of a sudden she was with other chimps for the first time in her life. She was really scared of a big male chimp who chased her around. When her human family visited, she signed, ‘Please help. Out.'

There have been parrots who have been taught to speak to humans too. One African grey parrot called Alex was taught to speak English. Once when he had to have a medical exam, he cried out to his human companion, ‘I love you. I'm sorry. I want to go back!'

I peeked in on my mother, who was sitting in her rocking chair wrapped up in a blanket, drinking her tea and talking on the phone, likely to her friend Jill. She does that when she's upset. In fact, she's been doing a lot of that lately.

I went back into her study to use the computer. I wanted to see if there were any lawyers who might be able to use some victim-impact statements for animals. I typed in
lawyers
and
animals
and
nature
and came up with two million hits. Most of them were for something called environmental law and eco-justice. I clicked on one of the links and couldn't believe my eyes. There are actually lawyers who sue governments and corporations to get them to stop destroying nature!

Next I typed in the words
environmental law
and then the name of my city to see if there were any of those people around
where I lived. And there were! They were suing a university, the city and the province for paving over wetlands and building big-box stores right near where I live.

I clicked on a link that went to the proposal for the whole project written by a construction company. On the front of the proposal were pictures of a moose, a beaver and a brook. What the heck? Why would they put wildlife on their cover? That doesn't make logical sense.

Then I read the first page of the proposal and it got even weirder. They want to name their development after the wetlands they're destroying. That's like calling a prison Freedom Hall. If I worked in the government and got that proposal, I'd think someone was playing a trick on me like on the show
Prank Patrol
, and I'd look around for the hidden camera.

And why do they call it development anyway? The wetlands are already perfectly developed. How come it's not called destroyment?

I wrote down the address of the environmental lawyers and put it in my pocket. I'm going to make victim-impact statements for the animals of those wetlands – like the frogs that live there. I'll do that for Cuddles.

I'm feeling sick to my stomach. I've been sneaking to Mom's computer and reading about what happens when natural habitats are destroyed. I wanted to read all about it because I want to get my letters just right before I send them to the lawyers.

What I found was even worse than I imagined. I guess that's because I've never thought about what happens when bulldozers clear land. I don't know why I've never thought about it because it's happening all around me almost all the time. Maybe that's why.

On one site a man who drove a bulldozer wrote about white-tailed deer running onto a nearby road where they were killed by cars. He also described how lots of animals were buried alive and that he had to keep emptying his bucket of rabbits and squirrels who leapt into it as he plowed through their burrows and nests.

This explained why I've been seeing lots of dead animals like raccoons, groundhogs and porcupines on the road next to where big stores are being built. They were likely running for their lives when the machines started chopping down their homes. My mother and I even saw the bodies of a mother skunk and four babies all scattered along the highway. They made it across two lanes but then there was a big cement wall that wouldn't let them go any further.

Why don't people come up with better ways of getting land ready for building – ones that don't cause so much death? People have come up with thousands and thousands of ways to do things that make life better for humans, so why don't they think of ways to be less destructive when it comes to other lives? Why don't animals' lives matter at least enough to do that? Why do people kill just because they can?

Thinking of all those dead animals made a picture in my mind. So I am going to draw pictures for my victim-impact statements too.

Dear humans,

I am an owl. When you came, I was one of the lucky ones because I heard the warning sounds. I flapped my wings really fast to land in a tree that wasn't knocked down by the teeth. I landed in that tree and closed my eyes tight and tried not to listen to the yelps and the screams and the shrieks from below.

When finally there were no noises, I opened my eyes. What I saw gives me bad dreams every night: I saw big open wounds. I saw broken trees and flattened land and the blood of the dead and the almost-dead. And then all of a sudden, something else I've never seen before happened – the floor of the earth gave a deep, sad sigh and thousands of bright, glowing lights, some big, some small, floated up, up into the sky, toward the sun.

Truly,

Owl

I drew a picture of what was left of a forest. The ground was red with blood and floating above it all were thousands of bright lights – the souls of all the murdered animals leaving the earth.

Dear humans,

I was a frog. Until you.

Yours sincerely, once upon a time,

Frog

This is where I drew a picture. I drew a picture of bulldozers plowing through a forest and trees falling over and frogs leaping all about. Some of them were run over and flattened, their eyes bulging and frozen in fear.

Dear humans,

I am a deer. When it all began, I flicked up my tail and ran with my fawn as fast as I could away from the sounds of the great toothed beasts and the cries of animals being torn and shredded and buried alive. I can't even describe how afraid we were. All we could do is run, run as fast as we could – to anywhere but there.

But now my fawn is dead. I heard the sound of her body hit something big and fast and hard. I stopped, looked back and walked as close to her body as I could, but a human was running toward her and I had to run away.

My baby is dead. This is my pain.

This is where I drew a pain mark. A pain mark is lots of different shades of red. When pain is small – like when you're hungry but not so hungry you would eat broccoli – the mark is small like a dot on a page and pinkish red. But when pain is huge, the mark is huge and very dark shades of red. The pain mark I drew for the mother deer was dark, dark shades of red that covered the whole page. It was a humongous amount of pain. And it was the pain of the mind – which is the worst kind.

I did my very best drawing for those three pictures. I got out my watercolour paints – the ones I save for special projects. It took
me a long time to get the colours just right, the way they were in my mind's eye and the way I imagined the victims would see them. I made the owl's picture the most colourful because birds can see all the colours humans can see, and maybe more. I made the deer's picture with less colour because deer see less colour than humans. In fact, they see the world a lot like people who are red-green colour-blind. I made the frog's picture kind of blurry to show motion because frogs mostly just see things as they're moving.

Then I folded my pictures along with a letter I wrote to the lawyers explaining why I was sending them and put them in an envelope. Then I took a stamp from my mother's office. Tomorrow I'll put the letter in the mailbox on the way to school.

Today I got an apology note from Lyle. It said, ‘Dear Phin, I am very sorry I accidentally got you hurt. Lyle.' I don't believe a word of it. I know writing me a note was part of what Mr. Legacie was getting Lyle to do as punishment. Whatever.

I showed my mom the note. She agreed that it was too little too late. She said she has a meeting next week with Mr. Legacie about what happened. She made me promise to tell her if anything else happened. Then she popped some popcorn and we snuggled on the couch and watched
Jeopardy!
. It was almost like the olden days – the days before we started fighting all the time. I think this was because we both had the same big important disaster to deal with: Lyle.

I should have known, though, that it was too good to last. After
Jeopardy!
when my mom went to have a shower because she was going out, the phone rang.
Gaskell Brent
. This time I answered.

Brent said hi and asked me how I was, and I said fine. Then he asked me if I was still taking swimming lessons and I got right to the point and told him my mother wasn't in. Then Brent asked me when I expected her and I said maybe not for a few hours. He was quiet for a few seconds and then asked me to give her a message. His message
was: ‘Tell your mom I may be a little late getting to the exhibit this evening but that I'll call her cell when I arrive.' I didn't say anything, and when he went, ‘Phin, are you still there?' I hung up.

When my mother came back downstairs, she asked who called and I said, ‘Nobody special.'

‘What do you mean nobody special? Who called?'

‘Where are you going tonight?' I asked.

‘I told you – to an art exhibit at the gallery,' she said.

‘With who?' I asked.

‘You mean
with whom
,' she said.

‘
With what
?' I asked.

‘What do you mean,
with what
? With a lot of people, Phin, people from work, Jill and so on.'

‘Well,
so on
says he can't make it tonight,' I said.

My mother's eyebrows went up. ‘So it was Brent who called?' she asked.

I didn't say anything.

‘Phin, I can see you're upset. Do you want to talk about it?'

‘You told me you'd tell me if you were seeing that man!' I yelled.

‘Phin, I told you I'd tell you if I ever had a serious relationship with him, or anyone else for that matter,' said my mother calmly.

‘Well? Do you?' I asked loudly.

My mother paused. Then she said, ‘I've been seeing Brent socially. It's not serious, Phin, but like I told you before, I do enjoy his company.'

‘What about Dad's company?' I yelled.