PodCastle 771: Wapnintu’tijig They Sang Until Dawn

* Author : Tiffany Morris

* Narrator : Samantha Loney

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

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PodCastle 771: Wapnintu’tijig They Sang Until Dawn is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG

Wapnintu’tijig: They Sang Until Dawn

By Tiffany Morris

In the time of fever, the marks of the animals changed. Waterbirds shone with new radiance: a bright blue iridescence clung to their feathers, glimmering, soaked with the sacred oil of daylight. Their language changed along with their plumage: the chirrup chirrup from their open beaks had transformed into a lilting sort of caw. A shiver jolted through Pi’tawgowi’sgw. As she worked her way through the swamp, she discovered that the world, her world, was newly alive with alien tongues, each one bellowed with an odd sense of certainty. It was as if the creatures’ mouths had always known these sounds, that these new sounds belonged to them entirely. Each odd caw and chirp formed the words that the creatures had been born to speak. The nighthawks, for their part, now screeched owllike into darkening sky, swooping and diving over the water in search of the tiny silver fish they so loved to devour.

It took special eyes to see the full radiance of the swamp. In weaker times she’d thought of it as her swamp, but Pi’tawgowi’sgw knew it was a place too ancient and vast to belong to her, or to anyone; rather, she belonged to it, sprouted up from the water the way the humans had the land. She had heard it said in their tongue: Weji-sqalia’timk, literally, the place they sprouted up from. She’d watched the one with silver hair threaded together tell this to the small ones gathered around the edge of the water, their eager faces murmuring words she did not know. She belonged in the deep stillness of the water. The many creatures in the water with her were not like her. The humans were, at least, sort of like her — more than the fish that shared the water, anyway.

“Hello,” she called to the frogs.

Their croaking had switched into a soft howl, as if the moonlight had transformed them into new creatures altogether. She swam up to them. They scattered into the reeds in a clamor of long, panicked legs. She waited in place and tried to remember their old language. Finally, it came to her: a soft chirping sound. She greeted them. A small green frog, its leopard spots glowing pink in the dark, blinked at her without recognition. It gave another soft howl and disappeared with its comrades into the gathered shadows.

Pi’tawgowi’sgw tried not to panic. She knew the place, still: this was the swamp where she had lived for so long. She hadn’t somehow been washed out to some other body of water, estranged in a new waterway, not like what had happened to her parents. She clamped her eyes closed and tried to push away the memory of the high, toxic water that had flooded them, that had carried them too far down to the river, how they had been too old and weak to fight against its mighty current. After a few days, after the quiet rolled in, unsettled and suffocating, new human machines had appeared in the water among the drowned trees. Her parents still hadn’t returned. Pi’tawgowi’sgw knew, then, that they had died. They had gone down the waterfall and been killed against the rocks in a mess of scales and blood and frothing water. Slick rainbows of pollution had surely leaked around them, killing fish and bug and frog, all the small bodies thrown together until they could...