Mungus: Book 1 (17 page)

We were brought two more meals and the spectators never came back.  Only guards watched us.  Saul and I talked about what would happen to us, but neither of us could come up with an answer that was convincing.  If they were going to kill us, why were they wasting food on us?  If they were going to let us go free, why did they catch us in the first place?  If they were going to eat us, what were they waiting for?  If we were some kind of weird zoo, why did the spectators leave?

After running over the possibilities and finding none believable, we fell asleep at a timeless hour.  Our bellies were full, the light was on above us, and despite being trapped we were in much better shape than we had been in when we were out wandering around the forest by ourselves.

A crash woke us.  Something had hit the floor hard.  Saul and I looked out through the bamboo bars and saw that the case of shelves against the wall had fallen down on the huboon guard.  He was crying out in pain, and was unable to move under the weight of the shelves.  “This is our only chance,” I said to Saul.  I didn’t have a plan, but I knew that it was the right time to try to escape.  I ran to the door and with careful fingers I pulled out all six of the pieces of bamboo.  I shoved the door open and took off down the dirt corridors.  My brother followed out of the cell, but I didn’t hear his footsteps running behind.

“Wait,” Saul cried.  I halted and turned around.  “Help me!”

Saul was trying to lift the bookcase off of the huboon.  “There’s no time, we have to go!”

“He’s hurt, Walt!”

That brought me back to my senses.  Saul was right; we should help the poor thing.  And besides, I didn’t know my way through the maze of dirt tunnels.  I jogged beside Saul.  We squatted down and picked the book case off of the huboon.  When the shelves were off, the huboon lay on his back, his chest coming up and down under his dirty white t-shirt.  His chest had been squeezed together so tightly that he couldn’t breathe.  I kneeled down on one knee and asked him if he was alright.  He grabbed my fingers with his pink hand, a gentle grasp, and smiled.

I didn’t understand what happened next.  A parade of
huboons came into the room from all angles.  Many of them were clapping and screeching.  They were all making some kind of noise and some of them carried trumpets and trombones and they blew in producing untrained notes.  Their human eyes all fell upon us and they made a circle around us.

“What is going on?” Saul whispered.  I shrugged.

The crowd around us grew quiet, but their human faces remained cheerful.  The huboon that had been under the case joined the crowd and then returned to us with cubes of wood.  He handed them to us.  The cubes were identical 2” by 2’ by 2” smooth cuts from trees.  On each side of the wood were certain symbols.  I didn’t know what they meant, but they looked like hieroglyphics.  As we were examining our gifts, the crowd began to leave.  The last member of the crowd beckoned for us to follow with a wave of her furry arm.  The line of huboons was leaving out through the doorway and soon we would be alone in the tunnels of the giant ant hill.

“Should we go?” asked Saul.

“I don’t have a better idea.  If we try to run off, they’ll find us before we get out.  They seem to be happy with us.  We might as well follow along.”

And so we did.  The corridors went around and around with ascending slopes as we followed the line of furry creatures.  I thought that ascending was a good sign.  We continued to go upward for hours, walking until we were totally exhausted under hanging lights.  We passed all kinds of hallways and nooks in the walls where
huboons lived.  They sat around, chattering and talking back and forth.  Whenever we would pass, they looked up from what they were doing and stared at us.  Eventually though, we came to a set of wooden stairs.  We followed the crowd up those and out into the open air.  When we got out, I looked around and saw that I was on what resembled an ant hill three times the size of Glen’s mansion.  The crowd circled us once more and gave us a few more cheers.  Outside, the sun was about to set.  A huboon waddled over to us and handed us our satchel.

“Thank you,” I said, but it didn’t matter.  They couldn’t understand me.

And then, they started to go back into the top of their ant hill.  It was the strangest day that I had ever experienced.  They walked in a straight line until they had all disappeared.  We were left alone holding our new cubes of wood and our satchel.  Once they were gone, we were on our own again as if nothing odd had ever happened.  With each event of the day, I was further away from understanding what had happened.  I didn’t understand why they had taken us, what that weird ceremony was, or what our wooden blocks were for.  The more I thought about it the more it confused me.

“They’re funny creatures,” Saul said.  We both laughed.

We camped that night in a small clearing with trees and bushes all surrounding us.  When we opened up our satchel we found that the huboons had given us some fruit for the road.  “Well that was nice of them,” Saul said.  Saul and I talked about the day and laughed as we lay down.  It was ridiculous, really.  I was still a little uneasy about sleeping out in the open about being taken the night before, but again, found no option.  Saul said, and I thought that he was right, that the huboons had tested us.  The case falling on the guard was a test of our morality.  I was thankful that Saul had made me help him and I shuddered at the thought of what would have happened to us had Saul just ran off with me.

The moon came up and Saul fell asleep beside me.  Just as I had felt small the other night looking at the moon, I felt small that night thinking about the
huboons.  There were whole civilizations out there that I didn’t even know about.  I looked at the stars and felt insignificant.  I felt around my neck and found that the turtle necklace my father had made was still there.  I held it and it comforted me as I fell asleep.

12

The Stranger in the Woods

Eight hot days had passed since we had left the farm.  Sometimes at night, even though I didn’t go to church or anything like that, I would get on my knees and whisper prayers for Lauren and Julia.  I prayed that they were protected.  Julia and Lauren didn’t mean to harm anyone, they hadn’t done anything wrong; they just got caught up in something that was too big for them to control.  I was often kept awake thinking about what had happened to them.

The morning after the
huboons had released us we traveled in what direction we thought was away from the town.  Even though the huboons had let us go, that lake scared us.  We still felt as though we were too close to the Salyer town, and the Theatre, for comfort.  The fruit that the huboons had given to us was eaten quickly but our water supply was preserved by scattered showers.  Saul was hungry and he let me know often.  “When will we ever find food?”  “What are we looking for, Walt?”  “Can we hunt or something?”  My answers to these questions never satisfied him.

One day, as the sun was high and the day was hot, Saul and I were traipsing through the forest.  “We should stop,” I said.  “It’s the hottest part of the day, and I need to think about how to get food.  Wandering aimlessly hasn’t been working for us so far.”

Saul looked exhausted.  He mumbled something, nodded his head, and lay down in the dirt.  I looked around in the trees.  Birds flew overhead, red and blue ones with fluttering wings.  I wished that I could catch one, but didn’t know how.  I had seen squirrels and other varmints scurrying around the forest floor, but I had no way to catch them either.  I thought about hunting methods that I had seen in the movies or read about in books.  I had heard that some people used to hunt with bows and arrows, but I had none and trying to make one would be useless-I had no idea where I would start.  Think.  Please think.  Another thing that I considered was making snares to catch critters that ran through.  Again, though, a lack of experience discouraged me and I went back to brain storming.

Barks rang out in the air from behind me.  Saul sat up and we looked at each other.  His eyes were wide and worried.  Barks echoed through the still air again.  They sounded like they came from the huge,
160 pound dogs that were around Glen’s fences or the huge dogs at the Theatre.  Then we heard another sound, a gruff human voice coming from far off.  “Stop ‘yer yappin and calm down, will ye’?” it said.

“Did you hear that?” Saul whispered to me.

I nodded and turned around to see if I could make out anything.  Saul stood up and got behind me.  We stared in the direction of the noise, but the vegetation was too thick to offer much visibility.  “Follow me and be quiet,” I whispered.  “If I start to run, you follow.”

Saul gave a grunt of compliance and we tiptoed on through the woods, stopping occasionally to prick our ears up and listen for any foreign noises.  The only things that we heard were the occasional barking and the man’s voice.  Finally, we scooted up and peered over a tangle of bushes and in between a few trees we saw a house.  The building was made of assorted white and gray bricks, the roof was slanted and wooden, and a chimney rose up out of the top.  We were looking at the back of the house.  To the left was a clay oven and to the right was a great metal cage with a snarling angry dog sitting inside.  In front of the cage stood a man.  It was obvious that he was a Beardsley by his short stature, thick beard, and wide set shoulders.  He was the only Beardsley that I had ever seen, however, to have red
hair.  His red hair was coarse and curled toward the back of his head where it pulled into a pony tail.  His beard ran all the way down to the middle of his torso.  He held a cane and limped when he walked.

The dog was barking at him and scratching at the front of his cage.

“Shhh!” the red haired Beardsley told the dog, “Stop ‘yer barkin’.  I’ll be back in a few minutes, I’m going to get some fire wood so that I can cook yer’ some meat!  Calm down, you’ve got to watch over the house while I’m gone.”

The red headed man then limped off into the forest, using his cane to support his weight while the dog continued to bark.

“You stay here,” I told Saul, and began to tip toe away.

“Where are you going?” he whispered.

“Just stay here, I’m going to try to get us some food.”

Saul looked at me with hungry eyes and then slumped down behind the bush.  The man had said that he was going to try to go and get
fire wood, so I guessed that I didn’t have much time.  I looked over the house.  I wasn’t sure if it was empty, but the man had said, “you’ve got to watch over the house while I’m gone.”  Even though that was a man talking to a dog, I believed that there was no one else to watch over it.  And besides, we hadn’t had food in days and were starving.  I was hungry and desperate.

I ran over the back lawn and the dog went mad, barking, snapping, and clawing at the fence that it was in.  I ran up onto the wooden
backporch and tried the knob to the back door.  It was unlocked.  I looked behind me and saw Saul peeking over the bushes at me.  I motioned for him to stay down and I went inside.

The inside of the house was completely paneled with wood.  A wooden pillar stood up in the middle to support the little home.  I was in the room that served as both the living room and kitchen.  It was a small and yet comfortable room with a bearskin rug, a wooden kitchen table, and a counter with a stove built in.  Pictures and paintings lined the wall and a
fire place sat in front of a leather couch.  I didn’t have to go in far before I found what I was looking for.  Two loafs of bread were still warm on the counter.  I snatched them and was out of there before I had time to find out whether or not I was right about it being vacant.

I sprinted over the lawn and brought the loaves behind the bush to Saul.  I ripped one of the loaves into halves and handed one over to him.  I crouched over and looked out over the lawn.  I had gotten back just in time.  The man with the red hair was just returning,
cane in one hand and a pile of wood under his other arm.  He was whistling a tune as he went.

“That was close,” I said, and I took a big bite of my piece of bread.  It tasted wonderful in my watering mouth.  It was just the right consistency with raisins and various nuts mixed in.  After I had taken a few bites I noticed that Saul hadn’t started eating his bread.  “Why aren’t you eating?”

Saul looked from me to the bread.  His eyes looked horrified.  “You stole this.”

“Haven’t you been the one complaining to me all of the time?  ‘Walt, I’m hungry.  ‘Walt, when can we eat?’  ‘Walt, get me some food.’  Well, now I’ve gotten you some.  Eat up.”

I could tell that Saul still felt uneasy, but his eyes flashed to the bread with desire and he took a bite.  A smile came upon him.  “It
is
good,” he said.

“C’mon, let’s get a little bit further away.”  We walked about a quarter of a mile away from the cabin and then sat down and each enjoyed our food.  The loaves were big, and sharing one filled us both up.  I sipped on my water and smiled-satisfied.  “That was great!”  I laughed in the afternoon air.  “Now all that I need is a nap and I’ll be as good as new.  Maybe we can even try hunting once I’m rested.”

Saul didn’t respond.  I lay down under the shade and closed my eyes.  A cool breeze floated over the air and I felt wonderful.

Then I heard him crying.