Isabel swears I’m not thinking clearly, but I keep insisting that there’s this magnificently large, green, blubbery walrus in the bushes outside of the house. We call it the Grove, the section of hedges that curtains our little house from the main house. It’s a lovely place, but crowded. Our little house is far more private, far more quiet—just me and Isabel and Jess and Elizabeth, drinking tea and laughing and writing essays late at night.
Except for this one walrus, she’s there too, I’m certain. Me and Isabel and Jess and Elizabeth, and this giant walrus, who lives in the bushes where we sacrifice our coffee grounds every night. Jess usually makes coffee early in the day, and I usually make coffee late in the evening, so there’s a pretty consistent rotation of coffee-ground disposal, and, since coffee grounds weigh down the compost terribly but also tend to clog the drain, we brave the wet pavement and throw them to the Grove. We perform this ritual sacrifice fairly reverently, barefoot and penitent, aware of the service the Grove performs both in shielding us from the more crowded house and in taking the coffee grounds that we don’t use. Sometimes we wonder if the trees actually appreciate it, but, considering we sacrificed a pumpkin to them a few weeks ago, I think they’re probably quite fond of the four of us.
It was on one of these coffee-ground-sacrificing missions that I first saw the walrus. She blended in fairly well, at the outset (though, to be fair, I wasn’t looking for walruses amongst the leaves, so it may have been my own close-mindedness). It was the eyes I noticed first, shivering in my sweater, tiptoeing to avoid cold, stagnant puddles, fishing the grounds out of the bottom of the french press with a spoon. Just these giant, magnificent, arresting orbs, peeping through the bushes.
I very nearly swore loudly, but cut myself off and glanced back to the door of the house. They hadn’t noticed—they were listening to something on our rather eccentric house playlist, appropriately loudly, and dancing while waving pieces of toast in the air. Not an uncommon sight, far less so than these eyes in the bushes.
It was one of two things, I assumed (because at that point I wasn’t well versed in Anglo-Saxon walrus lore)—either it was a ghost, like the one we assumed probably lived in our boiler closet, or it was one of those elves that haunts academic cities like this one. Something Lewisian, or Tolkien-ish, or something of the sort. I don’t speak Elvish, and don’t really know how to converse with ghosts, so I wasn’t particularly excited about the possibility of either; I was somewhat relieved, then, when I saw the tusks. They were mossy, so I knew that we had to be dealing with some sort of woodland creature, and, when I parted the branches to reveal a giant green head and blubbery, forest-green body, I supposed that ‘woodland walrus’ would be my classification, if I was forced to guess. The flower crown it was wearing confirmed the assumption for me fairly readily.
I stared at it for a couple minutes, and it stared at me. It was, without doubt, giant, though I didn’t really know how large walruses generally were, so it was very possible that it was a pretty standard walrus size. It wasn’t squashing the trees in the Grove, either—it seemed to be hovering contentedly, just above the root system. Hovering, blinking at me, and humming. I turn back to the house, then back to the hovering walrus. The humming’s almost certainly familiar, it’s almost certainly something I know.
“Is that?” I say, tilting my head.
I promise that the walrus nodded.
“You’re singing along to our playlist?”
I promise it nodded again.
“I see.” I nod, to mirror its actions so it feels more at home. I read that somewhere. “You from around here, then? I just wasn’t aware of walruses native to the English countryside, you know? Human privilege and all that.”
It bonks one of the twigs.
“Ah, right. Woodland walrus, then.”
It nods, which mostly consisted of its tusks bouncing up and down.
“That’s a thing?”
It doesn’t look amused, flapping its flipper slightly, as if to say, “Aren’t I a thing?”
“Fair enough.”
It leans down to nibble a few coffee grounds from one of the branches nearest it.
“I’ve got an essay due tomorrow, I’m afraid, otherwise I’d stick around. Can I get you anything, though?”
I still can’t speak walrus, because the human vocal apparatus really isn’t suited for the intonations, but back then, I couldn’t even ascertain when she was trying to talk. So I told her I’d bring her some toast, around, say 2 am, because I’d certainly still be up by then.
I went back inside, made some toast, and wrote my essay until late. At 2 am, I put a piece of toast with raspberry jam outside, by the Grove, when some of my housemates were in their rooms, and one was showering. At 2 am, I made coffee again, just for an excuse to venture back out to the Grove. The plate was empty; there were crumbs everywhere; and I couldn’t see any eyes.
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I didn’t see her at all the rest of that week, but I finally mentioned her, in a very roundabout manner, to Jess and Isabel and Elizabeth that weekend, over toast. Isabel, our resident medieval scholar and literary critic, was my first appeal. We were all of us sitting around the table, drinking tea and talking, when I asked Isabel about medieval walrus portraits. (The medievals, as we’d all discovered this semester, had a tendency to paint spectacularly odd portraits of animals, and give them spectacularly odd names, generally pertaining somehow to medieval religious life. I thought it was worth a shot, at least.) She hadn’t come across anything, she said, so I next turned to Jess, our resident Lewis scholar, and asked her about Tolkien or Lewis mentioning, say, mythological English walruses. Jess hadn’t seen anything either, but at this point, their interest was piqued. Elizabeth hadn’t come across anything either, any Biblical or ancient Near Eastern portrayals of walrus deities, so I, a bit downtrodden, told them that I was quite sure we had a woodland walrus living in the Grove.
“Ah,” they said. They then asked how much sleep I had been getting. I said I’d gotten a full four and a half hours last night, and four hours the night before that, and three and a half the night before that, so I was perfectly fine, thank you very much. They told me to shut up and drink my tea. So I did.
It was two days later when the walrus made herself known to us properly. I’d returned back to the house to find my housemates crowded around one of Isabel’s medieval history books, something about the Anglo-Catholic pagan traditions, if I remember correctly.
“Look. Look,” Jess said. “Look.” She pulls me over to the table, and I lean over, to find there, in one of the footnotes, a telling line of text:
Some Anglo-Saxon sources translate this line, “And the woodland walruses roamed among them, yet, at the outset of the battle, they were scared away, fleeing to the foothills, the groves and the mires.” These sources claim that, contextually, this reading makes far more sense than the traditional reading of “And the woodland bunnies roamed among them.”
“Oh my word.”
“It was just open to this page. I came home, the floor was covered in leaves, and there was a twig marking the page,” Isabel says.
“My word.”
Jess being Jess threw open the door, right then and there, yelling for the woodland walrus and severely startling some of the students returning their bikes to the outpost and heading over to the Big House.
“Just shouting to the sacred Grove!” Jess says to reassure them (they do not look reassured). We all crowd out by the Grove, giggling, and hoping the walrus will show herself; however, we don’t see her. That night, though, when we have the windows open and stacks of toast on the counter, the walrus starts humming again.
It’s a melodic low drone, low enough that the residents in the main house start texting the group message, then texting us—
“can anyone hear that?”
“hey friends! trying to write essays, whoever is playing music would you mind turning it down?”
“hey it almost sounds like the humming is coming from near the bike racks, do you guys have any idea?”
We very nearly texted that it was probably the woodland walrus, but we figured the walrus probably wouldn’t want to be outed to everyone like that, and that they probably wouldn’t believe us anyways. She hummed along for a couple more hours, we set out some toast for her, and determined that it would be our mission for the semester—to figure out who the walrus was, and why she was living in our grove. Little did we know that such a quest would catapult us into ancient mythology, and a long-forgotten time in which woodland walruses roamed the grassy hills of England.