We only see a woodland walrus again a couple of weeks later, when we four head to Amsterdam and Belgium for a week’s respite from essay writing. It’s a moment of peace—the beginning of October, clear skies illuminating the cows loitering in the field outside, sunrise gleaming through the back window of the bus. Jess and Elizabeth are asleep on either side of me, Isabel’s leaning into my shoulder, and I’ve got music playing on my headphones.
“She’s missing the view,” the French man in front of me says. He’s taking pictures of the Belgian cows and sunrise.
I laugh in acknowledgement. “Yes, it’s beautiful.”
“And amazing how much variety in the woodland life here,” he says. “The cows, the old cows?”
I tilt my head.
“Canal cows?”
“Manatees?” I say.
“No, old cows—forest cows?”
“Oh, right, yeah, a lot of different breeds it seems like,” I say, gesturing out the window.
He smiles and nods, and I feel certain that something’s been lost in translation.
In those next few days, we make it to the little Belgian town, and then back to Belgium, and then back to Amsterdam without much difficulty. One night, though, we’re feeling disoriented and a bit stir-crazy.
“We need to get out of Norway!” Jess proclaims.
“We’re not in Norway. We’re in the Netherlands.”
She concedes the point. Instead of getting out of Norway or the Netherlands, we venture to the canals and wander around, linking arms and laughing, weaving through tourists and over the cobblestones. Jess is eying the canals, though, in a potentially dangerous manner. “Guys. I see something. I want to climb over the canal railing.”
“That, my dear, is not the best idea,” Isabel says, laughing. We follow Jess to the railing, where she’s protesting she won’t fall in, she only wants to climb over, so she’s closer to the canal and can see whatever it is.
“But why?” I say. “Jess, this is a poor idea, at best.”
“Oh, guys, guys,” Elizabeth says, running a few feet up the canal. “I see it now.”
Jess rolls her eyes. “Thank you!”
“What?” I say.
There’s a head in the water, a familiar-looking head crowned with flowers. Streetlights glint off of the surface of the water, and the woodland walrus’s tusks. It’s not ours, though, we realize—this one’s larger, wearing a garland of pink and blue flowers. And then another emerges from the canal, and another, and another. A plethora of walruses and colors and flowers—lavender and rose and tulip and gardenia and moss. It’s a quiet night, admittedly, but no one else is taking any notice of the walruses bobbing in the canal.
“Ah,” Isabel says.
“The old cows,” I say. “Of course.”
We nod at them, they burble a hello, and we politely take our leave.
Isabel poses an answer to the question of the woodland walruses, back home in our little house. “It’s entirely probable that the natural habitat of the woodland walrus has been overtaken by the domestic bovine” she says, which is insightful enough that I copy it down verbatim.
“If that’s the case, then,” I postulate, “we’d probably find evidence in the library.”
“We should check the oldest ones,” Elizabeth says, cradling her teacup. “They’d have something on the top floor of one of the libraries, if anywhere.”
“Cool cool,” Jess says.
We munch our toast in silence, and resolve to visit the libraries the next day.
The next morning, we’re up early enough that we only run into one person on the way out of the gate and into town (yes, good morning, just headed to the library to research walruses native to the English countryside, have a lovely day!). According to the medieval guide that Isabel found last night, most woodland walrus documents originate somewhere between 1066 and 1600, though the Romans, apparently, had been known to draw fields of blubbery, tusked creatures called the “woodland faeries.” These faeries were, apparently, often conflated with the faeries we know today, to the extent that a mostly-defunct theory had circulated upon the publication of Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories,” alleging that the fairies in question were, indeed, woodland walruses. (Tolkien, according to the records we skimmed on the way into city center, refused to comment; however, his close confidantes reported that his relationships with the wildlife of English lore were deep, abiding, and inspiring.)
I determine that I need an oatmilk flat white before we venture into the libraries, so we take a detour off the main road, and slurp some caffeine at our favorite little coffee shop. We crowd around a table in the corner, gesticulating wildly, theorizing about the most likely habitat of the modern woodland walrus, and confusing the coffee shop regulars. Snippets of dialogue are as follows:
“But if they’re living in groves, aren’t they grove walruses instead of woodland walruses?”
“We can’t reclassify them that hastily.”
“It could be an entirely different subset.”
“True true.”
“Maybe the woodland walrus just thinks I’m a really compelling person. Like, Tolkien reincarnated, and a female.”
“You’re so wrong. Shut up and drink your coffee.”
We march through the library gate, scanning our cards, and pilfering the dome. Isabel takes the medieval section; Jess takes the modern English section; Elizabeth takes the ancient Near Eastern section; I take the philosophy section. We sit around the tables, occasionally sending each other pictures of relevant passages. At the end of the evening, we regroup in the bathroom, because talking in the libraries is strictly forbidden, and incurs about the same amount of bemused social shaming as might screaming an expletive in a full movie theater.
“So apparently Anselm and Aquinas both referred to woodland walruses, albeit subtly, in their ontological and cosmological arguments for God,” I whisper.
“Brilliant,” Isabel says. “The medievals wrote a ton about them, Marian devotees used to see them on pilgrimages all the time. And music in the medieval period, particularly Gregorian chants, seem to have been explicitly inspired by these animals native to the areas around the more forested monasteries—‘the animals of girth, who wore flowers upon their heads like the pagans, but that so proclaimed the joy of the Lord through chant, joining us in our morning prayers, that we saw them to be angels rather than demons.’”
Jess nods. “And Lewis and Tolkien were rumored to have befriended a small herd of them in the Oxford countryside.”
“Some of the most prominent Biblical scholars of the time began questioning the Vulgate terminology for Old Testament animals around the medieval period,” Elizabeth explains. “Latin translators started translating the Hebrew words to better fit the medieval worldview, a bunch of the Hebrew descriptions of animals were changed to Latin descriptions of ‘plump, floral angels.’”
I’ll admit that the women coming out of the bathroom stalls shot us some odd looks as they passed, but we were content—we knew the background of the woodland walrus. Now, all that remained was for us to properly meet the one living in our grove.
It seemed unsurprising, now, that the woodland walrus had chosen our grove as its habitat—the area was fairly quiet, resembled the countryside, offered shelter from the droves of nearby students, and we four played a good deal of Gregorian chant on a regular basis.
We were surprised, though, when, before we ventured out to the grove with our offering of tea, toast, and coffee grounds, the woodland walrus knocked on our door. We let her in, fairly shocked, and pour her tea, as she flops over to our dining room table and perches on a couple of the chairs.
She blinks at us a few times, munches on her toast, and, between bites, introduces herself as Heidi the woodland walrus.
“You see,” she says, daintily sipping her tea and shaking crumbs from her floral mustache, “perpetual modernization and industrialization has pushed us woodland walruses to the fringes of the English countryside. Very few people are interested in the frolicking of the woodland walrus anymore. It’s really quite sad.”
She seemed dejected.
“We care! So much!” Jess says, shoving more toast onto her plate.
“We really do,” Isabel says. Elizabeth and I nod, and fetch her more tea.
“At least there’s rain,” Heidi says. “We love rain. It’s good for the blubber. And for flower crowns—I made it myself, actually.”
“It’s lovely,” I say.
“It really is,” my friends echo.
Heidi blushes.
Heidi invites us outside that night, after toast and tea, for what she says is one of her favorite activities. It’s raining—the trees are dripping, and the gravel’s gleaming with rain. She leads us out to the garden; we stand, our clothes slowly soaking through, as Heidi begins to dance and frolic on the grass. We join her, jumping and running around the garden, laughing and whooping and rolling in the grass.
“I call it floral frolicking,” Heidi says.
“That’s apt,” we say.
We lay there, holding hands, heads angled so the raindrops don’t hit our eyes.
“It’s nice to be noticed,” the woodland walrus says. “It’s been a long time.”
The next morning, there are flower crowns on our porch. We wear them all day, confusing the residents of the house next door.
“They’re from our friend Heidi,” Elizabeth finally says.
“She lives in the grove outside of our house,” Jess says.
“She’s a sort of mythological creature,” Isabel says.
“She’s fond of tea and coffee grounds,” I say.
Most people looked confused—but sometimes words really aren’t sufficient. Woodland walruses are the sort of creatures who have to be experienced.
This account is a purely truthful and historical account of recent sightings of the mythical woodland walrus. All names have been changed, except Heidi’s. She’s still watching over the grove. If ever you’re in the English countryside, do drop in on her—she loves tea, coffee grounds, and good company.