The Absence of Wings
Revised to include new stories with an introduction by the author
June 2019
Available on Amazon
The Absence of Wings is a collection of short stories intended to show the world through the eyes of some of the Earth’s most endangered and persecuted animals.
The collection is an ark of sorts, offering a literary refuge for creatures that may one day exist only in story books, fables and myths.
Here you will find, among other stories:
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A mariner snatched from the deck of his ship by a sea wraith
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The lament of a whale dragged onto the killing deck of a harpoon ship
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A caged polar bear whose only taste of freedom comes from a racial memory of the arctic tundra
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A shark that can swim into the sleeping minds of human beings, and
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A dolphin whose only chance of returning to open water lies in the movement of the tides on one particular night of the year
These are stories that will change the way you look at the natural world.
“I've enjoyed and admired the stories of Mark Stewart that I have read: they strike me as fine bonsai pieces, strong in their structure and dense in their grain, full of surprising drama.”
Robert Macfarlane
(Author of The Wild Places, and Landmarks)
Extracts from the Collection
The Absence of Wings
He was born in the season of Spring tides and cherry blossom, and his first memory was of the warmth of his mother’s fur as he lay high up in the tree hollow, his face pressed into the soft down of her belly. Once he ventured outside, he bonded quickly with his avian cousins. Indeed, for a while, he thought of himself as a bird, believing it was only a matter of time before he would be able to fly. Only slowly did he notice the absence of wings amongst his own limbs, and by then he was already as quick and as fleet as the tiny birds that seemed to teleport from one location to another, so fast was their transition from bough to bough. For by then he had found the arboreal web linking tree to tree, across which he moved like a miniature Greystoke among the vines of ivy.
The Moon Fish
The long blue fish swam back and forth behind the submerged bars, gazing at the open ocean beyond the wire mesh. His black coalescent eyes contained an unmistakable sentience, a gaze of infinite clarity as precise and unwavering as the targeting beam on a marksman’s rifle. And right now that gaze was aimed at the only place the blue fish wanted to be.
His sight never left the depths that had once been his home, the vastness that called to him as if a choir of sirens were beckoning to him on the other side of the mesh, from the upturned keels of a thousand wrecks, from a graveyard of capsized galleons. It was a chorus, a spectral emulation of the sea’s own voice, which consisted of witching, necromantic songs cast like nets upon the water to catch the unwary or the unwise. Their song was the only thing that eased the pain of his confinement, like a balm on an open wound.
The Snow Bear
He was born in a snow storm, his bones forged in the crucible made by the turbulent sky and the frozen ocean. And when the storm was done with him he had the strength of the wind and no small measure of its fury. Henceforth, he would always carry the storm with him, ready to discharge its turmoil and its rage when he needed to hunt or to protect himself. And the ice would always be with him too in the shape of two immense sculptured gauntlets that no other creature could match or defy.
His was a world of endless horizons, unobscured and limitless, an open domain in which he was free to travel in any direction for as far as he wished. Not even the great migratory cetaceans, who exchanged oceans as they circled the globe, roamed more freely. The only walls he ever saw were the cliffs formed by the great ice barriers, by the glaciers that flowed imperceptibly but resolutely towards the open sea. Beyond these frozen seas lay only the sky and beyond that the stars. He was a citizen of boundless space, as free as the wind.
