The Gmu

In the temperate sunflower forests of southern and central Serinarcta there lives a shy and retiring creature known as the gmu (pronounced "moo"). His kind is common across most of this continent but in ranges scattered and patchy, wherever the forests grow tall in patches between slow-moving rivers and bogs where he finds his preferred food - water plants. He feels for them in murky pools and silty streams with his feelers, four long, prehensile appendages surrounding his snout, that can each coil around the stems and tendrils of the plants and pull them up to be chewed. His plumage - covering him densely save for his bare face, is composed of two layers, the outer thick, brown, and wiry, like elk hair, running down from his spine and well-suited to shed rain, overlaying a thick, fluffy layer of snow-white down that provides insulation on cold winter nights. Long on his back and neck, his coat thins to a thin velvety coat of hairs along his legs. His feet are scaled only on their undersides and his three toes long and spreading, perfectly shaped to spread out his weight over wet muddy soil.

The gmu is a large and bulky animal, as tall as a horse, yet he is very rarely seen. He relishes the swamp and the marsh, the thicker and muddier the better. He avoids the open grasslands, too exposed for his liking, and the cold needle-leaf forests to the drier north where he finds little of his liking to eat. In the early morning hours he enters the clearings, where his choice water vegetables grow most densely, and eats his fill until the sun becomes too bright and the cool, dark woods beckon him again until the evening. He is intelligent but solitary, contemplative and retiring by nature. He walks with a deliberate attention to his surroundings, each movement slow and purposeful. His eyes are soft and expressive, more mammal than bird after millions of years slow change, but carry a constant expression of worry - even at the best of times, he appears wrought with concern over something, a threat that even he may not know by face, but is driven by a powerful instinct to avoid. A sudden crunch of the leaves sends him sprinting into the woods, carried on long, muscular legs in long strides that seem to carry his bulky body weightlessly over the ground, as if he were hovering just over the ground and not running at all. After a few meters, he stops and peers back with his long, shaggy neck outstretched. His nostrils flare, his pupils dart left and right, revealing the whites of his eyes. He spreads the fingers of his snout outward, tasting the air with patches of scent-receptive tissue on their inner sides. A false alarm. With an air of embarrassment, as if bashful of his unwarranted flight, he sidesteps quietly away into the thicket as the source of the sound - a small bird who had been picking through the litter for fallen nuts - looks on with mild curiosity for just a second before returning to the ever-present order of survival.

above: a gmu wades through a still forest pool early in the morning, grazing water plants found just under the surface. A vesper ant zips past on the hunt for prey, flying lower over the water in search of smaller insects to snatch up, while a pair of tribbats have recently woken from their den in a hollow tree and now prepare to take flight in search of their own prey - larger, less agile insects and small animals that climb within the forest's branches. For a fleeting moment, four different life stories converge at the woodland pond, but as the day progresses, only the vesper will stay here; the shy gmu will soon retire into the shady depths of the forest, while the tribbats will melt away into the thick foliage of the high canopy. where only their shrieking cries that occasionally pierce the trees will portray anything of their presence to life on the ground far below.

~~~

It is spring now in the forest, and soon the gmu's mind is taken off the bird and onto more pressing matters. Normally, this would be hunger - or, perhaps, if he had been traveling for some time in the dry uplands, thirst. But now, the gmu feels something else stirring inside him, a feeling distinct from those he has so far known. Neither hunger, nor thirst, nor fear, another primal instinct is welling up in his body. After four years, he has become a sexually mature adult. Strangely alluring smells on the breeze and along the ground and the trunks of the forest begin to catch his attention; they are of his kind, but unlike the marks of the rival male who passed through his territory yesterday, he doesn't feel compelled to mark over these with the scent gland under his chin but rather, to follow them to their source. He follows the scent the scent marks of a receptive female, which beckon to him in a way he does not understand, but doesn't need to understand. He follows a trail through the undergrowth along a stream, reading scent marks along the trees every few meters like street signs. As he goes along, the signs become stronger, fresher. A female has been through here just a few hours ago. His excitement rises as the scents grow more intense, until he is compelled to crane his neck and crow - a haunting, bugling whinny of a call, followed by a very low roar like the lowing of a bull - the mooing courtship call that inspires the common name of his kind. The alternating whinnies and moos carry through the woods and reverberate off the trunks as far as two miles away. After a few moments, the gmu falls silent and waits for a reply, his head cocked slightly to one side.

A whinny and a moo just like his own, but higher-pitched, soon rises up in response from the woods ahead. It compels the bashful gmu to charge ahead, down the cleared, hard-packed trail - a path made by himself and the other gmus that share his territory as they move through the undergrowth between their preferred grazing patches in the stream and the thickets in which they retire to rest and digest during the middle of the day. He glides again on his long legs, his back remaining totally horizontal as he strides toward what he registers instinctively as a female's plaintive mating calls. Normally he would rebuff contact with others like himself, preferring a peaceful, solitary life, but something inside him now screams for companionship. He trots between thickets of bushes and tall grasses that, in conjunction with the twists and turns of the game trail, block his view for all but a few meters ahead. He cries out, telling the female somewhere up ahead that he is coming, and she calls out in response. The scent becomes stronger and stronger until it is overwhelming. The mind of the gmu is overtaken with sexual excitement, until even his natural wariness is pushed aside.

He is thus totally taken off guard when the tall grass the side of him erupts onto the trail and cuts off his pursuit, as cluster of constricting talons grab hold of his neck, as they dig into his flesh, as he struggles to breathe, and as the gnashing jaws close like a vice over his throat. Unable to breathe, he struggles and kicks out; he wants to scream, but cannot find his voice. His fight is honorable, but in vain. In seconds, all goes dark for the gmu.

For four years, he was alert and avoided the evil that he knew lurked in the woods, lunging when its prey least expected it. Today, the gmu let lust cloud his judgement. He lost the fatal game of hide and seek with that evil, a sinister predator that stalks the forests of Serinarcta, picking off unwary terries and circuagodonts. Today, a fierce predator unlike anything to come out of Serina in any prior epoch will feast, while its prey's would-be mate continues to cry out for a reply that now will never come. The two will now never meet. The male will never tenderly caress her face, bring her choice tidbits, or spend a week courting before mating on a quiet moonlit night. They will not settle down to raise a family, alternating to sit on a big white egg or, later on, lead about a curious little stripey-patterned chick through the forest. The female, if she is fortunate, will still do so - but with another male. With its hunger soon to be satiated, she will not need to fear what killed this one for at least several days... but there are always others like it out there, so she should never drop her guard.

The gmu is so cautious because those that are not don't survive for long.

Not in these forests.