The Mirung

[wmsvensen]

The Mirung

(From the travel journal of Janusz Kansk)
I know we’re in trouble when everyone goes quiet. I turn to my traveling companion and ask her what’s going on.

“We’re entering gullah territory,” she tells me, and I understand. Gullahs are notoriously territorial and ill-tempered, so it isn’t surprising that our Iwak guides wouldn’t want to attract their attention. At nine meters long and weighing over five tons, our canoe wouldn’t be much more than a speed bump to one.

We row on in silence. Luckily the sun is up, and we can see around us. I wouldn’t want to pass through gullah territory in the dark. The reeds grow tall and thick on either side of us, and every time we hear something move within we hold our breath. At one point we hear the sharp, booming GULLAH! GULLAH! call from which the animal derives its name, but thankfully nothing comes charging out at us. Eventually our Iwak friends begin talking again, and I know we’re through the gauntlet.

I’m in Tam’s Laistun Province, traveling up the Nanshan River with Egato Leng. Egato is a conservationist working in the provincial capital of Phonguoket, and she’s made it her life’s mission to get the mirung off the International List of Threatened Species. If I hadn’t been on board with her goal when I began this adventure, I certainly would have been converted along the way. Egato is a petite, skinny woman in her mid-thirties, with crinkly golden-brown skin, an infectious smile, and a crackling natural energy. She almost feels like a melding of two disparate worlds, with her traditional helmet-shaped Hamur headdress festooned with metal discs and baubles clashing with her thoroughly modern t-shirts and jeans. She’d attended college at Amsant’s University of New Morris and speaks more or less fluent Andrish, which is fortunate since I don’t speak a word of any of the half-dozen dialects used in this region.

Egato’s enthusiasm for what she does practically pours off her. I honestly don’t think the woman is capable of talking about mirungs without getting a big goofy grin on her face, and I usually can’t help getting one myself soon after. She never just talks; she has to animate, enhancing every conversation with wild gesticulations that sometimes border on flailing. After the three days spent getting to know this woman as we navigated the sludgy rivers of mud that pass for roads in Laistun and canoed up the Nanshan I feel like I’ve been brainwashed into loving mirungs nearly as much as she does. I couldn’t wait until we got to the Gon marshlands and I’d have a chance to see one in the flesh.

I pass the time by taking pictures. I shoot our Iwak guides and they flex and pose for the camera, throwing Dioi street gang signs that they almost certainly haven’t earned the right to use. I turn around to shoot Egato and she giggles and covers her face.

We pass through a mangrove forest, where the branches are so low and the water so shallow that Egato and I have to lie on our backs while our guides get out and shove us through. On either side of us the mud is dotted by dark fiddler crabs, waving their brightly colored claws at us and each other. The display brings to my mind the gang signs our guides were flashing earlier, and I can’t help but laugh. Then an armored cricket the size of a small potato drops onto me and refuses to let go of my shirt when I try to sweep it off, and everyone else laughs.

As the trees open up one guide wades on ahead to check for any further obstacles, and a few minutes later we hear him shout back to us in Iwaki. I’m asking what he said right as several big fish come down the stream at us, leaping through the shallow water. Egato shouts as one of the fish jumps right into the canoe, flopping and banging around in an attempt to get back to the water. We both pull our feet in as the other guide falls on it with a knife, stabbing it several times before holding it up triumphantly. He grins and says something, and when we’re done laughing too hard to talk Egato translates: “Dinner!”


Finally we leave the mangroves, and we’re in the Gon. The broad marsh spreads out around us, dotted by aquatic grasses, bulrushes, and cypress trees. Long-tailed dactyls swoop and dip over the water, coming up with little fish snared in their snaggletoothed jaws, and a smooth-scaled, gharial-looking champsosaur with a head like a long-handled frying pan slides off a half-submerged tree into the water as we pass by. Almost immediately we’re surrounded by little blue damselflies. The sun is shining, birds are singing in the trees, and I feel like if I burst into song right here I’d be surrounded by dancing cartoon animals by the end of the first verse.

Both guides are back in the boat now, citing fears of crocodiles. Probably wise, given what I know of these ecosystems. While we don’t see any crocodiles, we do come upon an impressively sized giant rinic. It’s sitting on the bank of a low island, and as we pass alongside it gets up and heads further away from the water.

And then, finally, we see what we’d come all the way out here for: a mirung. We come around a stand of cypress trees and there it is, lumbering through the water in all its shaggy, long-necked, long-armed, hump-backed glory. It really is kind of a ridiculous-looking animal, with its bright red and yellow head, shaggy gray-brown feathers, and weird posture and proportions. The impression I get is of a fat kid laboring under the weight of a heavy backpack, who got his neck caught in a taffy puller. I don’t dare say that to Egato, though.

I look over at her, and of course she’s grinning from ear to ear. Our guides stop rowing and let us coast towards the giant animal, and it just watches us approach with a dumb sort of look on its face. I’m reminded here that mirungs are essentially huge, odd-looking runners that gave up running, and it definitely looks the part. Runners were never known for their intelligence.

Amazingly, the mirung doesn’t budge even as we come up alongside it, and in fact it even comes over to investigate us. The guides and I instinctively lean away from that massive beaked head as it dips down to sniff us, but Egato is braver than we are. She looks like she’s about to cry as the animal’s breath ruffles her shirt, and she even reaches up and strokes its snout as I photograph the encounter.

Eventually the mirung has its fill of us and moves on, and the guides and I share satisfied glances. Such a close encounter was much better than anything I’d come down here hoping to get, and I’m very happy. Egato, meanwhile, looks like she’s just had a religious experience, complete with tears running down her face. I’m pretty sure I just photographed the single greatest experience of her life.

[DATo]

This is a very creative and interesting-to-read story on several levels. First of all your writing is very good: it flows nicely and the descriptions are rendered well; also, the description of the Mirung raises the image of the extinct Dodo bird. It leaves this reader intrigued by the question of where the events of the story are taking place. At first I though this might be a micro-miniaturized world, or possibly taking place on another planet.

I think you made one mistake, though I might be wrong. The line, she’s made it her life’s mission to get the mirung off the International List of Threatened Species. I think you meant "ON" the list.

Nice story, and thank you for sharing!!

[wmsvensen]

This is a very creative and interesting-to-read story on several levels. First of all your writing is very good: it flows nicely and the descriptions are rendered well;

Oh god compliments I never know how to deal with those oh jeez Thaaaanks.

the description of the Mirung raises the image of the extinct Dodo bird.

It's actually a Deinocheirus. (I can't post links apparently so imagine a forty-foot-long bipedal bird-faced camel covered in feathers.) The extinct part is right, though.

It leaves this reader intrigued by the question of where the events of the story are taking place. At first I though this might be a micro-miniaturized world, or possibly taking place on another planet.

I could probably fill an entire thread with a detailed explanation of this setting, but the short version is it's a planet where humans we evolved while dinosaurs were running the show. (Sort of a parallel universe where Earth never existed.)

I think you made one mistake, though I might be wrong. The line, she’s made it her life’s mission to get the mirung off the International List of Threatened Species. I think you meant "ON" the list.

Nope, she wants it "taken off" as in "not endangered anymore." It's already on the list, which is the problem.

Nice story, and thank you for sharing!!

Thaaaaaaanks.

[anakandwal+]

Amazing story!!! Thanks alot for sharing.