The Duck That Hunts With Its Eyes Shut

The creek smelled of mud and eucalyptus and something colder underneath, like wet stone. Maya crouched on the bank with her sneakers already soaked. She had stopped caring about her sneakers an hour ago.

Soren's aunt Priya had gone back up to the tents to fix a camera. She had left them one instruction: sit still, stay downwind, and do not, under any circumstances, throw food in the water.

So of course the first thing Maya wanted to do was throw food in the water.

"He keeps missing it," she whispered.

There was a platypus out there. Low and dark and smaller than Soren had expected, a flat brown ripple with a bill like a wet rubber spatula. Every few minutes it dove. Every few minutes it came up chewing. And every single time, it swam right past the little pile of larvae Maya had nudged off a leaf into the shallows.

"Watch his face when he goes down," Soren said.

Maya watched. The platypus rolled forward, and just before the water closed over its head, a set of folds shut tight across its eyes. The ears, gone. The nostrils on top of the bill, pinched flat.

"His eyes are closed," Maya said.

"Ears too."

"He's hunting with his eyes closed." She said it slowly, tasting how strange it was. "Underwater. In the dark. With his eyes and ears and nose all shut."

The platypus surfaced, chewed, dove again, eyes sealing shut as if the whole animal had decided the world above water was none of its business.

Maya pressed her cold hands flat against her cold knees. "Then how does he know where anything is?"

Soren didn't answer right away. He was doing the thing where he watched the wrongness first. The bait wasn't the problem. The bait was right there. The platypus swept past it every time, its bill sweeping side to side across the creek bed like someone feeling for a light switch.

"Sweeping," he said. "Not looking. Sweeping."

Maya leaned so far over the water her hair touched the surface. Downstream, a shrimp flicked off a rock, a tiny muscular snap, there and gone. The platypus, a full body length away, turned its bill and went straight for the spot.

"It didn't see that," Maya breathed. "There's no way it saw that. Its eyes are shut and the shrimp was behind a rock."

"It felt it."

"Felt it how? It didn't touch it."

Soren reached into his jacket and took out his notebook, and his cold fingers fumbled the pencil twice before it caught. He drew the bill, flat and wide. He drew little dots across it. He didn't know yet how many dots there should be. He drew a lot.

"Your bait's dead," he said.

Maya blinked. "What?"

"The larvae you put in. They're squished. You pinched them off the leaf." He looked up. "Squished things don't move. And the ones he's eating are the ones that move."

Maya looked at her sad little pile of bait sitting untouched in the shallows. Then she looked at the shrimp spot, where the platypus was still nosing, satisfied.

"When a muscle moves it makes electricity," she said. Fast now. "Your heart. A twitch. That's real, that's a real thing, my dad has the sticky pads at the hospital, they read the electricity off your chest." She sat straight up. "A shrimp is all muscle. When it flicks, it sparks."

"Tiny," Soren said. "Tinier than tiny. In water."

"But he's not looking with his eyes." She was almost laughing, the cold forgotten completely. "He shut his eyes on purpose. He shut everything on purpose. Because the thing he's actually using is on his bill, and it works better with everything else turned off."

Soren's pencil stopped over his dotted drawing.

"It's an antenna," he said quietly. "The whole bill is an antenna."

They both went still, and out in the middle of the creek the platypus rolled and dove, eyes sealing, and swept its flat bill across the black water, reading the faint electric handwriting of every living muscle down there. A worm burrowing. A larva twitching in the silt. A shrimp's heart, beating.

Maya tried to imagine it and couldn't, and the not being able to imagine it was the best part. She had a nose that smelled toast and a tongue that tasted salt and eyes that saw the sunrise coming up orange behind the gums. She did not have the sense the platypus was using right now. There was no word for it in her own body. She was standing next to an animal that lived in a channel of the world she would never once feel.

"He's not swimming in water," she said. "Not to him. He's swimming in a map made of little sparks. Every alive thing is glowing."

"And the dead bait is dark," Soren said. "That's why he can't find yours. To him it isn't even there."

Maya looked at her pile of still, silent larvae, invisible to an animal three feet away. She thought about all the times she had felt like the only one in a room noticing a thing nobody else could see. Here was a creature that had leaned all the way into that. Shut its eyes. Shut its ears. Trusted the sense that was only its own, the one nobody else at the creek had, and went hunting in the dark with it, and never went hungry.

"Forty thousand," Soren said suddenly, reading nothing, just guessing out loud the way he did. "Or something huge like that. You'd need thousands of little sensors packed in that skin to feel a spark that small. All over the bill." He looked at his drawing, at his careless scatter of dots, and started adding more, and more, until the pencil dust smudged grey under his hand.

Maya slid her fingers into the creek. Cold clamped around them. She held them very still and felt exactly nothing, no glow, no map, no spark, only water and the ordinary limits of her own skin.

Out in the channel the platypus surfaced one last time, chewing, its shut-eyed face pointed at the brightening sky it wasn't looking at.

Then it rolled, sealed its eyes, and went back down into the sparkling dark to read the water.