I would usually steer clear of books featuring talking animals but the description of this one got my interest, and fortunate for me that it did so as I really enjoyed it. The stories skillfully blend myth, magical realism, and naturalism, and they balance their whimsy with darkness and their darkness with whimsy. Like the best stories they take the reader inside an empathic view out from another’s consciousness, it’s just that here we’re experiencing awareness and concerns that are outside the human sphere, which is a nice bit of something different.

A few notes and passages from my favorites from the collection.

The Hunted, the Haunted, the Hungry, the Tame

A surrealistic story of a sled dog in the Arctic region whose visions of a whale swimming beneath him in the bedrock talking to and tempting him to break from the strict hierarchical chain of command seem to serve as a stand in for the subconscious - its intuitive powers and, destructively, its hidden longing for death.

But Bendiks stood unmoved. The others piled up behind him; there was a snarl in the back. The clamp of a jaw. Bendiks looked back and saw a blur of fur and something spotting the snow. He smelled blood. And still he did not move.

"Move." Enok stepped close to Bendiks and bared his teeth. Drops of his saliva hit Bendiks's face and froze.

"Stay still," said the whale, swimming underfoot. And Bendiks was still. Snow and fog and their own breath obscured everyone's vision. Bendiks couldn't see more than a few feet ahead. And he felt suddenly as though he was surrounded by apparitions. All the other dogs that came before. All the other men. The other whales.

"Bendiks!" Malthe called out. "Go ahead. Bendiks, move forward."

And still he wouldn't move.

A Level of Tolerance

A wolf mother is caught in a version of Groundhog Day that always begins with her waking up, rousing her pups, looking for her missing brother, and ends with being killed by a hunter. The motif seems to suggest the wiping out, and then the reintroduction, of wolves into ecosystems by humans.

But I am mistaken.

The breath, it was mine.

The whining, it was mine.

The trough is empty.

There is no brother here.

It is too late when I realize the Hunter has turned around and seen me. He opens a transparent door at the back of the Machine's den and a narrow, long object emerges. There is the noise. And the echo. Then the pain and the spreading warmth and the whole world that I know turning and slipping away from me, while I lie alone in the empty trough far from my pack and my den.

Imagine that time is a spool of thread that the Unidentified Hunter clutches close to himself. Imagine that he unravels and rewinds it over and over again, undoing things that have been redone. Wolves. Then no wolves. Then wolves again.

The day begins.

Someone Must Watch Over the Dead

A vulture remembers the important role the ancestors played in cleansing the corpses of the human dead exposed in the round towers of India (the Zoroastrian dakhmas). One very old vulture, the Lonely One, is known to have visions of the life lived by the flesh she eats. On a plain a herd of antelope (saiga antelope, a critically endangered species, which locates this story in the Kazakhstan region) have all perished. As the vultures gather, their role in Zoroastrianism expanded to encompass a sort of duty of care over all dead things, our vulture narrator has his own vision.

When I pulled away her skin, I saw nothing but the sun glinting off the exposed flesh underneath. I focused then on drawing it cleanly off her body. On the cloudy membrane that was revealed around her muscle. As though she were emerging from an egg. That my consumption of her body was for her, perhaps, a moment of birth again. I thought of the ritual of this. Of what it always meant for me to do this. But when the hook of my beak pierced the meat of her shoulder, I saw the steppe transform before my open eyes. The open sky became streaked with the wisps of thinly spread clouds, luminous at their edges, where they met the blue expanse.

I felt consumed by a dream, submerged in a distorted world as I pulled away strips of flesh and ate them and watched the saiga returned to an earlier time. No longer scattered along the expanse of grassland, they rose like ghosts. A translucent herd, thousands of them gathered as they once did with their calves. I saw this mother, upon whom I fed, bend her aquiline profile to her calf and nuzzle his face, as he stood unsteady on reedy legs. As I plunged my face into the cavity of her body, feeling the slow seep of her blood dress the skin of my neck, I saw the herd become restless. I felt the heat, the untimely heat, consume the steppe. I felt the saiga fight to give air passage in their lungs.

The Dog Star Is the Brightest Star in the Sky

A polar bear, facing starvation, hunts a seal with an arctic fox as his companion.

In one swift motion, the white bear rose from the water onto the edge of the floe, two great paws pushing him until the whole of his body was on the ice. The floe rocked and he dove toward the seal. The fox followed. But it was too late. The seal turned and tumbled into the water.

"Follow it!" The fox cried and leapt into the sea. The white bear dove in after her. But the seal, ungainly on the ice, transformed into something elegant underwater. It slipped away from the white bear in curving spirals. And the bear's coat, saturated by the sea, pulled the speed of his limbs to a crawl. He remembered a dream he had once of running. He couldn't remember whether he was running toward or away from something, but the air in his dream felt like the sea did now. Thick and cumbersome, reining his legs in so that he couldn't move fast enough. He was unable to catch anything. Unable to escape anything. The seal whirled away into the blue, and the white bear was left to return to the floe. He surfaced again with the fox by his side. He lifted one wet paw onto the edge, then another, and then heaved himself onto the surface.

The light above the surface felt as though it would shatter him. So different from the quiet diffusion underwater.

The white bear stood on his hind legs and stretched his body as tall as it would go. He wondered if the first bear had stood like this before he carved out the valleys and wept to fill the sea. The bear's shadow betrayed his hunger. His heavy limbs looked out of place against the concave curves and jutting bones of his torso. Spread out before him was the world the first bear made. Cold, and desolate, and beautiful.

The Open Ocean Is an Endless Desert

A young baleen whale tries to migrate to warmer waters without his mother’s guidance for the first time. He has found a mate, and they discuss the mythical story of a group of whales that left the sea, stood up on two legs, and now roam the land instead of the water. The noise of a ship engine will interfere with the guiding sounds he depends on.

“I am never leaving the sea." She says this every time she hears this story. I don't know whether I can say the same. I know almost nothing of life outside the water. Here with the dim light, and the increasing pressure, and the world all rendered in sound.

But we are together for now. During the day we search for food, and we find it gathered in the water column. I remember the words from the song net telling us to skip the place that is three surface heartbeats from the back of the fin-shaped trench because it is empty now. We visit a few of the other places where we have eaten before. Some of them are empty, and some are not. When I find someplace new, I hum a low krill song into the current before I curve through clouds of it. "Swim two surface heartbeats past where the floating squid was last year, then dive down three deep heartbeats before coming up under the cloud.” I listen to my song join the lattice around us and I feel proud. As I swim up under the cloud, the surface light appears to shimmer in an imperfect circle, as if it is trying to resolve itself into a full moon. The sea around me is a deep and dim blue, and as I rise toward the krill I think of a verse for my moon song. "Hmmm, hmmm, four heartbeats to the moon. Hmmm, hmmm." I take great gulps of the cloud and feel the crimson mist vibrating as it streams through my baleen. At night, after I have eaten, I drift near the surface, slipping in and out of sleep, the song net humming under me, whole and perfect and full of our lives.

( )

This is one of the best short story collections I have read. The author is telling these nine stories from the perspective of animals. It is extremely creative and makes extensive use of magical realism. The stories read like fables or myths, and contain elements of commentary on our society, the environment, the way people treat animals, and connections between humans and animals. My favorites are The Dog Star Is the Brightest Star in the Sky, The Open Ocean is an Endless Desert, and Let Your Body Meet the Ground. There is not a dud in the bunch. It is a wonderful group of stories and highly recommended. ( )

TW/CW: War, animal death, animal injury

REVIEW: I was given a free copy of this book by Netgalley and am voluntarily leaving an honest review.

I loved this book! What We Fed to the Manticore is a series of nine short stories narrated by various animals. While the stories are separate, and unrelated, they also feed into some interesting themes such as: animals vs their environments, animals vs. man, animals vs. climate change and many others. The stories are for the most part heartbreaking – some worse the others, but they are also stories that stay with you and images and thoughts the reader will keep close to them for quite some time. ( )