Endling
Endling (n.) The last surviving individual of a species of animal or plant
- National Museum of Australia
How to describe being the last?
It is not something which can be comprehended in the abstract, but rather is only to be understood as a stark, concrete reality. Like the brick wall approaching a vehicle that has been thrumming steadily down the road for three billion years in uninterrupted line of descent. You are the last. There are no more after you. The sheer finality of it difficult to accept. Perhaps it is a mercy that most will never know they are the somber outro to the species. They simply are it, until they sigh away their kind in final breath to the custody of the fossil record. As inevitable as the last sentence of a paragraph, and when the period comes there indeed it is.
He had no name, for his kind were not ones to fill the world with needless noise. Twelve feet tall at the shoulder and six-thousand pounds. He crushed the sedges underfoot. The white bears fled before his scimitar tusks. His head was tall and narrow, a kite shield of muscle and bone. Chestnut ringlets drooping from the muscular crest atop his head, but his ears and shoulders sported long cinnamon tresses that tumbled down his flanks, blowing in the wind or when he shook the flies from his massive head- the odd fruit of one of the many mutations that had accumulated in his herd during their long isolation, and thankfully a benign one.
He would have been in the prime of his life if there were any others of his kind remaining on the tundra island but his only companions were the muskoxen. Dwarf brethren, trunkless, their tusks atop their heads instead of aside their mouths, bellowing to each other in a tongue he did not understand. Sometimes he rumbled or trumpeted in reply. Beseeching them for an answer, one he could hear not through his ears or the pads of his feet, but hear with his heart. His plea unanswered, always. But he would rather march with them than be alone.
Sometimes he would go to the sea and let its mournful roar soothe his loneliness. Let the vibrations of it resonate up his pads and swirl about in his head as though he were still in the womb listening to the distant, all-encompassing rumblings of his mother. His mother. Long dead, her bones bleaching in one of the sedge-draped vales of the island. The grief still made his temple glands leak, wetting his cheeks with their torrents of emotion. He’d gone to caress her bones eight times in that first year, meandering away from the three others left in the herd to be alone with her, to rake his trunk over her molars. Closing his eyes and remembering her- the tender wetness of her trunk, the deepness of her trumpeting, the love in her heart.
That was a decade ago. The year after the last female of his herd died, he found himself on the beach once more. Muskoxen didn’t venture there and to the male they looked like black boulders scattered across the white tundra, silent and inanimate as the distant snowcapped mountains. He stood watching the sea for a long time, smelling the immemorial smell of saltwater, scrinching his trunk in the surf, hearing the water slap lightly against the black sand before drawing back out to repeat the gesture. The underrumble of the sea soothing him, almost like the vanished lifesounds of his herd.
He heard it long before he saw it, and his heart stopped at the sound. He felt it, deep in his chest- the vibration of something that could only come from a living being, but somewhere out in the water. Under the water.
The whale surfaced a scant hundred yards offshore, a vast blue hump sloughing off a second skin of water while she exhaled a geyser of steam from her blowhole. An island unto herself, but an island that spoke to the male’s heart, in a language he understood. The reverberation was strange, the dialect unfamiliar, but there was no mistaking the deeper meaning of this formless current of emotion, the prayer of it, the beautiful sorrow. The whale rested offshore, and the male rumbled softly to her, rumbled out all his grief and loneliness to the newfound friend. The whale rumbled back, her song only occasionally dipping into the audible spectrum above the infrasound they most adequately conversed in. She told him of her long life, of her many calves, and of how in all her travels she had never met another creature such as he. They spoke and sang and commiserated long into the evening, until finally they parted ways, the vast blue back sinking back beneath the sea, broad tail flukes surfacing briefly in farewell. Her sound echoed in the male’s heart long after she departed. He wished his own island would sink with her, if only so they could be together at the bottom of the sea.
He remained on the shore for a long, long time. Heart heavier, lonelier now. One may get used to the silence of loss; to have it suddenly lifted and returned again just as quickly was torture. His glands streamed emotions, his mind seeking to understand concepts complex and unfamiliar. The unfairness of it, the injustice. The sun sank low in the sky and the first stars began to scintillate in the deep blueblack dusk- Sirius, Antares. Eventually he raised his trunk and trumpeted long and mournful out across the waves, begging the whale to return someday. Then he turned and walked back onto the moonlit headland to graze, alone beneath a sea of stars.
The tundra is silent as a starless night. The waves beat down upon the coast, and the mountains are wreathed in mist.