FICTION: Fever Dreams of the Last Giants

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The world wavered before Tadoda's eyes like heat rising from sun-warmed stone. His body burned with fever while his injured legs throbbed with each heartbeat, reminders of his violent journey down the rapids and his desperate crawl through the forest to reach home. 

Three days had passed since the mammoth's appearance had sent him tumbling into the roaring water, and the sickness had taken hold of him like a living thing with claws.

Through the haze of pain and fever, Tadoda's mind drifted between the present moment - lying on furs in his family's shelter while Naida tended to his wounds - and fragmented memories of the hunt that had nearly killed him.

The mammoth. Even in his delirium, the image remained crystal clear: a massive bull with tusks yellowed by age, standing defiant on the riverbank. But something had been wrong about the great beast. Its eyes held a wildness Tadoda had never seen before, a desperate fury that spoke of loss beyond understanding.

His grandfather's voice echoed in his fevered thoughts, telling stories of the time when mammoths moved across the land in great herds, their footsteps making the earth tremble like distant thunder. 

"In my father's time," the old man had said, "you could climb the tallest tree and see their brown backs stretching to the horizon like a living river."

Now, encountering even one mammoth was an event worthy of retelling around the evening fires.

Tadoda groaned as another wave of nausea swept through him. The tainted meat he had eaten before the hunt (desperate hunger had made him careless) continued to wage war in his belly. 

He could hear Naida moving nearby, grinding plants, stoking the fire, murmuring prayers to the spirits of healing. Her presence was the only anchor keeping him from drifting completely into the fevered darkness that called to him.

How many more will I fail? The thought came unbidden, sharp as a flint blade. As one of the tribe's most experienced hunters, he bore responsibility for feeding twenty-three souls. 

But the hunts grew harder each season. The great creatures their fathers had relied upon were vanishing like morning mist.

The massive ground sloths that once grazed in the valley's heart? Gone. The giant beavers whose dams had created rich wetlands teeming with waterfowl? Disappeared. 

Even the American lions that had once ruled the forest - terrifying but predictable in their habits - had not been seen for three full seasons.

In his delirium, Tadoda saw himself as a boy, following his father on his first mammoth hunt. The herd then had numbered more than forty animals, including calves that played between their mothers' legs like oversized puppies. 

His father had taught him the sacred protocols: how to approach with respect, how to take only what was needed, how to honor the spirit of the fallen giant.

The Native Americans who once called Middle Georgia home knew survival techniques that have mostly been lost to time (Photographer Nate Weeks)

"Every creature that dies feeds the living," his father had whispered as they knelt beside their kill. "But when the great ones are all gone, what will feed us then?"

Now Tadoda understood the prophecy in those words. The mammoth at the river had been defending something precious, perhaps the last calves of his bloodline. The desperate fury in those ancient eyes spoke of a father's knowledge that his kind was ending.

The fever brought visions: endless grasslands where no grass grew, rivers running backward, skies empty of birds. He saw his son Aiyana grown to manhood, wandering through forests stripped bare, leading the remnants of their people toward an uncertain horizon.

I must live. The thought cut through the haze like sunlight piercing storm clouds. I must teach him what I know before it's too late.

Tadoda's body convulsed with chills despite the fire's warmth. Each shiver sent fresh waves of agony through his battered legs. The rocks beneath the rapids had nearly shattered his left shin, and deep gashes from submerged branches had left wounds that were slow to heal. 

But it was not just his body that was broken. His spirit was also weighed down by the terrible understanding that he was witnessing the end of an age.

Through swollen eyelids, he watched Naida prepare another dose of willow bark tea. Her face bore new lines that hadn't been there before his accident, carved by worry and sleepless nights. At thirty-two seasons, she had already buried two children: one to fever, one to the hungry jaws of a short-faced bear. Now she tended him with the fierce determination of someone who had lost too much already.

"The plants will help," she murmured, more to herself than to him. But Tadoda could hear the uncertainty beneath her confident words. The old remedies that had sustained their people for generations seemed less effective now, as if the very spirits of the plants were weakening along with the animals they had once healed.

What kind of world am I leaving for Aiyana? The question tormented him more than any physical pain. In his fever-addled mind, he saw his twelve-year-old son trying to track creatures that no longer existed, gathering plants that had withered from the earth, leading a tribe through forests that could no longer sustain them.

The mammoth's trumpeting call echoed again in his memory. It was not the confident bellow of a herd leader, but the mournful cry of the last of his kind. 

Tadoda realized with growing horror that it had been a farewell song, a lament for a world that was already gone.

As consciousness slipped away once more, Tadoda made a silent promise to the spirits of the forest: if he lived through this fever, he would teach his son not just how to hunt the creatures that remained, but how to help them survive. Perhaps it was not too late to change the song's ending.

The fire crackled softly as Naida's gentle hands smoothed another cool compress across his burning forehead, and in the dancing shadows on the shelter walls, Tadoda dreamed of herds returning to the grasslands, of forests thick with life, of his grandson laughing as he watched mammoth calves play in meadows yet to be.

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