A thick black cloud of birds swept over and into the low forest behind the banks of the river. And in the distance, leftover fireworks rockets, though it was day, lagged behind in marking the new millennium. The tin roofs of the older merchant buildings lining the waterway shone in the light in a dull saturated green, jetties and boats lining the lagoon, saurian-like waterbirds further upriver, the sludge moving, though very slowly, a large lizard moving also, through the debris, snaking the way a bee goes by a curvy route through a field of flowers. A black cloud of bats, in the distance, goes through a bottleneck shape as it is funnelled into what the bats feel is a shelter. The shack on the hill crest facing the sea, ‘Mother Tarantula’s,’ that lonely, half-hidden home, stood open. The doors, one in the front and one in the back, ajar, and the windows wide open, too, so the air can come in to clean away the old air inside, the pensive, agitated webs, and all the dust and human smells having something to do with its former inhabitant. The ground around the house had been neatly swept so that it looked very much like a hotel bungalow before the arrival of a new renter. A pyramid of skulls, the skulls of all kinds of creatures that lived in the area, had been neatly stacked into a structure of that shape; they had been taken off the wooden pikes on which they had until recently been the place’s decoration. Now that Old John was no longer around, this skull pyramid, made up of hundreds of fleshless heads, showed that a collector had lived here. A canopy of palm leaves had been made for them on sticks, a kind of roof. Who knows what this was? A competition maybe. Here resides a worthy player in a game in which the proven deaths of lesser creatures show progress. The red spots in the bushes in front of the shack moved indiscernibly as a group of ravens peeled off from a dark cloud form of many such birds and, landing near the bush, snatched some of the poisonous things off with their beaks, not knowing they were toxic, and tossed them up into the air to skilfully have these tiny amphibians drop directly into their gullets. The deadly substance from the red frogs unfolded its effect almost immediately and dispatched a dozen or so birds who, as they toppled over, stretched out their wings, forming a black, soft, feathery carpet that was a warning sign to the hundreds of other birds still flying about curiously, a warning not to eat of the frogs which John, unable to see things well that were small and close to his eyes, had thought for so long to be fruit. But John was a larger organism than these birds and, apart from that, had over the years become used to eating odd flora and fauna, starting with small amounts and then increasing the dose. The birds could not experiment in quite the same way, though as a group they were a uniform being that could spare a few parts for the sake of experimentation, too. And there was also now this carpet of black feathers, regal and symbolic, that the new occupant could walk across. Artfully arranged, a beacon, a reminder that species decorate galleries, prey and predator separated for the convenience of the passer-by, into their creator’s schools of art, schools of thought, branches of life, a multi-armed fungus more universal, not just one species, one that may go extinct or be pruned into something it was never meant to be. Anna now lived in that solitary home, Mother Tarantula, and occasionally she gazed out towards the horizon where an ever so slim grey feather of smoky cloud recalled to her memory the raft from half a century ago with its false fire. The area still had John’s footmarks all over the sand, the troughs that had been formed by his body over the course of fifty years, wherever he had sat. It was Anna who arranged the skulls, taking them off the wooden pikes, unearthing others where they had been kept behind the house. John had been quite the squirrel. She had built a miniature edifice made of them, skull on jaw, perfect masonry. But Anna was not a collector and only made the structure to see what John had accumulated, his investment in terms of effort. Anna had been in the homes of people in Port Town, shaking out beds, arranging things, and opening windows to let the night out. The days of testing were now over. She now knew her creatures by name and habit, every chicken. Anna took into her hand the old pike from the Thirty Years' War and rotated it by rotating the long shaft. She was a lithe Amazon, or see her as a Valkyrie if you prefer that picture, because of her hulking, muscular body, which she could move lightning fast and as smoothly as if she had been the slenderest of gymnasts. Many of those looking up in the direction of the perch noticed the blade’s reflection, circle by circle, the weapon throwing around the sunlight, making the source and centre of the light visible. During the remainder of the afternoon, shouldering with ease a massive trunk with an old puppet attached to its lid, a trunk two men could not have lifted, she carried her belongings up to ‘Mother Tarantula’s’, that hermit’s home, an invitation to the world to fight it out and let the winner of that trial by combat be the king – or queen – of an otherwise meaningless wild.[...]