By Kaitlyn Collins
In a long stretch of fields, rich with alfalfa and clover, a unicorn lays dying.
He is a young colt, just barely a yearling. His milk-white body is still lanky and thready, legs too large for the rest of him. Despite the anxious stature, he wears his beauty with the confidence that his species is revered for. The humans gather around his herd frequently. Some come with gifts of fruit and sugar, others with offerings of bullets and charcoal. The colt is never scared.
He used to prance near the border, as far as his mother would let him, and flash the beautiful nacre-like shine on his white pelt. He would bare his teeth and whinny in their direction. For the lucky, he would allow them a moment of closeness, enough so they could see the sprawling spirals on his horn. It curved to the sky like a towering oak tree. The people adored it, for he is beautiful.
Earlier, a crowd of men had gathered at the unspoken barrier between the herd’s territory and where humans could roam. Only twenty yards stood between him and his crowd, but no one had ever given the colt a reason to be afraid before. He could see eagerness in their shoulders. They stunk of excitement and metal, as most men did. He didn’t think anything of it as he trotted closer and closer. He threw his head in the air, the tip of his horn drawing circles in the air. It had been a millennium since magic left the earth, but the horn upon his brow still captivated an audience all the same.
He mistook their hunger for worship.
An arrow lodged in the soft meat of his underjaw, grinding his performance to a halt. The arrowhead came to a stop in the bulk of his tongue, Disrupting the start of his cry. The men surged forward. The colt failed to notice the subtle flash of white bone or hear the rattle within their rucksacks. Their dogs cried out madly and ripped up tender foliage.
The colt flung itself back with the sway of a willow tree, a surge of adrenaline enabling his body to tear off after his long-gone herd. His mother, where was his mother? He could not look ahead to see if she was there. The arrow kept his head proud. He didn’t smell her over the stench of the hunt that was set against him.
His mother, his mother.
His hooves pounded against the earth as he flew blindly through the brush. The dirt beneath him seemed softer than ever, throwing off his gait as he fled. He’d gotten a few field lengths between him and the pack; their bellows stayed consistently far. The river roared as the colt barreled toward it. He nearly toppled over an outstretch of roots that tried to wrap around his slender fetlock.
The river was fat with winter’s snowmelt. Usually, the colt and his mother would nose out mouthfuls of soaking moss along the edge of the riverbed, but the current was too strong to try so early in the spring. His mother would nip his flank if he ever tried to paw the bank, her weighty snort sharp in his ear. His mother was not there to inflict the sting on his side. How he wished she were.
The dogs were fast when they could smell him, but would not be fast enough to pick up the scent trail when it was lost at the water’s edge. The colt catapulted himself into the spray. The whitecaps knocked him off his feet in seconds. His side struck the rocks, propelling what little air he had in his lungs out in a drowned wheeze. He thrashed frantically for moments that felt like eons before he managed to catch his hooves in a crag and, using the propelling force of the water, stood.
Freezing water plugged the colt’s ears. He could not tell if the dogs were close, and he did not care to find out. The rocks rattled beneath his feet as he bounded out of the river and into the dead overgrowth that caged in the water. The hands of a thicket tore into his shoulder as if they were working for the men. He pulled and pulled, thinking only of his herd, of his mother, of how he wanted to taste the moss with her again. The arrow’s sting wasn’t enough to halt him, but it was enough to pull him closer. The colt could only scream as the thicket yanked him off course, and he lost his footing once more, disappearing down a slope hidden by a rug of thorns.
Here he lies dying in the alfalfa, awaiting his next life with the copper-caked clover. Tender leaves cling to his body. He makes no effort to stand; the foliage would not have allowed him anyway. He won’t remember how he got there, how he tumbled down and down the hill and never stopped to feel the agony of broken ribs or the ache of his lungs. A final surge of adrenaline allows him to gallop a few stretches further before his legs finally fail and send him crashing to the ground for the last time. If he is not allowed to live his full life, he at least has the satisfaction of denying the men the spoils of their hunt.
He can no longer hear the baying dogs, nor can he hear any incoming men. The colt can hear nothing but the gentle hum of birds, the quiet rush of the river that saved him from an earlier fate. Maybe, just maybe, if he tries hard enough, he can hear his mother. She must be crying for him, for her only child. Whether the whinnies he hears are real or a trick his brain plays in his final moments, he latches onto them. He cannot call back to her, with his tongue pinned. He doesn’t even try.
The sun shines down on the young colt, each heave of his lungs causing the rays to catch against his reflective fur. A swarm of small blackbirds dance across the sky in complicated swirls. They used to pick bugs and burrs out of the manes of the herd. As a foal, he used to cry and chase them around the field, angry that they would pull his hair and take it for their nests. His mother had sent one of the yearlings after him, startling the foal out of ever trying that again.
The trees exist just out of his field of vision, watching impartially over his fate. The sky is a shade of baby blue, obscured only by a smattering of thick clouds that would provide the perfect shade to graze in. If it is the last thing he sees, he would not want for more.
It is a beautiful day to die.
The colt’s death is unceremonious. One moment he is sucking in tired breaths, the next he lies limp against the grass. The clouds do not crack and spill rain, the animals do not cry out in song, the world does not fade to black. There is a warmth in the field that hadn’t been there before. It radiates from his horn.
The little birds take notice. They drop from the sky, a sheet of black on the lush green grass. The youngest ones skitter about with apprehension, but the older birds press into the colt’s mane. They pluck thorns and moss from the milky white hair long before it begins to sink into the earth. A few gather the stray strands that will later be woven into their nests.
They will continue this cleansing for hours, undisturbed even as the coyotes and foxes come to stake their claim on the corpse. The scavengers are in no rush. They know what is theirs will come to them eventually. The colt will provide meat for their pups and nutrients for the earth. He will provide for the forest, one last time, the way it provided for him. It was a beautiful place to die.
Centuries pass. His mother is here now. She is an ancient old mare who has just had her final foal, a little filly with a shocking head of white hair and a shimmering cream body. His mother cannot remember why she has come to this field, but she knows it is important that she is here.
In the patch of grass where alfalfa and clover have intermingled for hundreds of years, a colossal apple tree has grown. The crown of the tree is so massive it blocks out the light of the moon entirely. The leaves shake with the chattering of thousands of tiny birds. They chitter and cry, a few swooping down to say hello to an old friend. The filly shrieks and kicks out with her back legs at the attackers, and though his mother is far too lax now to nip the flanks of disobedient children, she gives her daughter a nudge with her nose.
The filly snorts at the birds but follows her mother as she begins the task she has completed for every one of her foals. The two of them stand, mother and child, at a branch that has bent to the perfect height of a full-grown mare. His mother reaches up with her horn and pulls the branch down to her filly’s level. It is rich with fat bright red fruits. While other trees have held their fruits close, this mighty tree always had enough to share. There is an abundance of perfect apples for each animal that traverses this field–enough that there is no fighting below the leaves.
The filly bounces about for a moment, indecision flashing in her eyes before she finally chooses one and pulls it down with her teeth. The mare chooses her own fruit and gently guides the branch upwards for the birds to protect once more.
There is no time to linger here, as the herd continues to travel. Man has not been a threat for a hundred years, but the nomadic group of unicorns still wandered the land in search of more members to add to their herd. His mother whinnies gently, urging her filly toward the hill. The filly does not protest, content with her apple between her teeth as she dances and kicks her way across the field.
The mare stops, then turns back. An arrow sticks out of the thick trunk of the fruit tree, never grown over despite the time that has passed. She watches it with the birds, knowing nothing will happen but wishing it might anyway, for reasons she will never remember. She turns and quietly follows her child, leaving behind one of the last remnants of man.