Lizards don’t scream with pain. They don’t have the mechanisms for making noise. They can’t purr or growl or bark or sing. The one we were watching was not screaming. It should have been. Its mouth gaped dumbly. Its eyes were blank. Its claws twitched and its tail flicked occasionally from side to side. We knew it was in pain though. It must have been.
It was impaled on a metal spike. The point of which was freshly and moistly red.
I felt scared.
Not for the lizard; not for me; but for the girl next to me. What did she make of this? She, who seemed to be made for compassion and humanity. Made from compassion and humanity, even. The girl whose eyes were green, bottomless pools of love and sympathy. Would she be appalled by this?
And the lizard was not alone. A few inches further along the fence, a grasshopper was stuck on a wire barb.
Perched next to it was the bird.
A beautiful, cleanly marked grey and white bird with black wings. Its bill broad and heavy with a fine hook on the end. A bandit’s black mask failing to conceal two dark eyes, lively with mischief.
The great grey shrike.
The butcher bird.
Lanius excubitor according to the textbooks. Lanius from a Latin word lanio, which means ‘to mangle, tear, rip or mutilate’. Like an excubitor – that is, a vigilante or sentinel – this bird perches high up on branches or telegraph wires alert to any movement on the ground: an insect, maybe, or a reptile or small mammal. Whichever, it will soon disappear in a feathery flurry of black and white death. The shrike will eat it there or take it off to it’s ‘larder’, where it will be kept for later, stuck on a thorn or a spike.
I turned to the girl. ‘Pretty gruesome, eh?’
She looked surprised.
‘Why gruesome? It’s only doing what a shrike does best.’
‘Lizard-torturing?’
‘What a very human interpretation. All it’s doing is being a shrike. In fact, when it comes to being a shrike, you can’t beat a shrike. I think it’s quite impressive.’
Her matter-of-factness was scary.
‘You don’t like it, though, do you?’
She looked at me with a puzzled expression. ‘There’s nothing to like. Or dislike. It’s nature. You’re being too human.’ Was this a bad thing, I thought?‘Sorry, I was born human.’
She tutted.
‘My parents were human. In fact, there’ve been humans in our family for generations. Mind you, there’s always been a question mark over my great-uncle Daisy.’
She was ignoring me. ‘Listen, nature is neither likeable nor dislikeable. Nature is just … er, well, natural.’
And so was she. So natural. And so wise. That was scary.
And I was totally in love with her.
That was scary too.