The Pygmy Dragon (3 page)

H
er morning began
by being summarily yanked out of her warm Ape-bed by a disgruntled baby. He wrestled her to the ground, bruising her tailbone. The mother Oraial swatted him off of Pip with a few grunts which evidently meant, ‘Behave!’

Stalking over to her, rolling his shoulders as best he could, the young Ape rose up onto his hind legs and pounded his chest. “Hoo-na-goo,” he roared. Pip grinned. That was his roar? “Hoo-na-goo,” he insisted, thumping his already sizeable chest. Then he punched Pip in her chest.

Until she could breathe again, all Pip could do was watch and wheeze as the mother Oraial chased her baby around the cage, hooting and making low-pitched sounds deep in her throat as though she were a log drum being pounded for a Pygmy dance. Eventually, a cowed young Ape returned to Pip’s side, closely shadowed by his mother. She hoped he was not planning to hit her again.

“Hoo-na-goo,” he said, beating his chest.

This time, he seemed to think she was a jungle flower which could be bruised at a breath. His thick black finger brushed her skin with great care.

“Hunagu?” asked Pip, pointing at herself.

“Hunagu.” He scowled, turning his ribcage into a drum.

The mother Oraial whacked his back with her enormous paw. “Hunagu. Ho-yo-luk?”

“Um–Pip.” She touched her chest.

“Umpip?”

“Pip. Just Pip.” Taking a deep breath, she imitated the youngster by thumping her breastbone. “Pip.” She punched the baby firmly on the shoulder with her good hand. “Hunagu.”

This feat of language learning threw the mother Oraial into a fit of hooting, ground-slapping celebration. Pip and the baby both looked on, bemused. She could learn to speak to them, she realised. They were not animals. They had speech. They could teach her.

Excited, Pip pointed at the bowl of water. “What’s that?”

“Kototo,” said Hunagu, and danced around the cage in imitation of his mother.

From that day on, the Pygmy girl and the two Oraials became fast friends. They shared their food with her–such as she could eat, because their main diet was branches and leaves, supplemented by fruits such as tinker bananas, pink sweet-melons and the purple prekki-fruit. When the prekki-fruit was ripe she would gorge herself at will, and so a hot summer faded into the cooler weather of autumn. The zookeepers occasionally brought her a little meat, or nuts and stale breads which they passed through the barred door, but mostly, she relied on trapping the odd rat that the chief seemed to enjoy tossing down from the zookeepers’ platform above the cage. She found a stone tossed aside by the builders of their climbing frame, which when struck against the wall, produced sparks. She lit small piles of dry bamboo stalks and roasted the rats by skewering them with a sharpened bamboo stick and planting them so that the rodents hung head-down over the flames.

With the onset of the early cold season storms, Pip constructed a shelter made from bamboo stems and covered with leaves and dirt. To her surprise, the Oraials did not enjoy eating bamboo, not even the tender young shoots. The bamboo had been growing madly all summer and now towered halfway up the wall. She cut it by patiently sawing at the tough stems with a sliver of giant coconut shell, and then begged the zookeeper with signs for enough rope to tie it together.

She learned how to speak Ape.

“Pip come wrestle,” Hunagu would command her.

He loved nothing more than to wrestle. His mother would sometimes play-fight with him, but soon she would stop and shake her scarred head, which had been so gravely wounded by the big people who had captured them. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. Sometimes, dark moods came upon her. Then Hunagu and Pip knew to keep their distance. She beat them, otherwise–just as she beat the trees or the walls or the crysglass windows of their cage. In her madness she seemed to feel no hurt.

Pip wrestled with Hunagu because she wanted to keep her Pygmy warrior skills sharp. At over six feet tall by now, he was vastly stronger than her, but after a few painful accidents, he learned gentleness. Pip begged him to fight harder. She made bows and swords out of bamboo. She shot her primitive arrows at the faces of big people who came to her windows. That always cheered her up. She trained endlessly at her knife and sword skills beneath the five moons, using bamboo sticks as she worked through the warrior training exercises that she remembered.

Once, late in her second summer in the zoo, she tried to escape by building a bamboo structure against the wall. But the zookeepers were wise to her idea. Shouting and waving at her to jump clear, they poured oil from atop the wall and fired it. Her ladder burned brightly. Several seasons later, Pip tried to sneak through the second gate, which had been left ajar, but she was caught at once by three zoo workers. They threw her back inside with many words that burned her spirit.

After that, the old zookeeper left and a new, unsmiling big person took his place. He also liked to feed her rats, and once tossed a lethal copperhead viper into their cage, which Hunagu brained with a piece of wood. Pip roasted and ate it. Snake meat was delicious. The Apes rubbed their noses at the smell of roasting meat.

“Disgusting,” Hunagu grunted, scratching his rump vigorously.

Pip glanced up at her friend. He was growing like bamboo. He towered to nearly three times her height now. She counted sadly. This was her third summer in the zoo. Eleven years old.

Thrusting away the pain, she said, “Fleas, Hunagu?”

“Pygmy help Hunagu?”

“Pygmy help,” she agreed, and settled down to groom her friend. Oraial fleas were the size of her smallest fingernail, while their ticks grew larger than the first joint of her thumb. They particularly enjoyed the blood-rich folds of an Oraial’s neck-ruff. “Bend down. Hunagu too tall.”

“Hunagu squash Pip and eat for breakfast.”

“Hunagu plant-eater,” she protested.

“Pip tick-eater.”

“Hey!” Pip twisted his arm behind his back. “Submit. Pip is jungle-king.”

“Pygmy-girl is flea on Hunagu’s back,” he chuckled. For some reason, this maddened Pip. She twisted his arm harder. “Flea grow strong,” said Hunagu. “Oraial jungle-king.”

Suddenly, he reached over with his free arm and ruffled her hair. Pip had braided her thick, matted black hair down her back. His fat fingers snagged in her braid and tore a chunk of hair loose.

Shouting at the unexpected pain, Pip surged upward. For a moment, she saw all as though a crimson moon had risen behind her eyes, and through it, Hunagu’s bellow shook her world. He ripped free of her grip. The mother Oraial clouted Pip, sending her tumbling head-over-heels down the slope of their cage toward the crysglass windows.

Pip rose, spitting mud out of her mouth. Hunagu rotated his shoulder, wincing. Great Islands, she had … hurt him? How? But she had no time to think. The mother Oraial thundered down the slope toward her, bellowing fit to make the ground shake. Pip leaped for her life. A massive paw glanced off her shoulder. The cage spun about her.

“Stop,” roared Hunagu.

The mother Ape skidded to a halt, ripping up grass and bushes as she swung about. The madness in her eyes! A coiling python of fear grasped her throat. The Ape meant to kill her. For a breath, the Oraial glared across at the Pygmy girl. Then, with that deafening roar of a furious Oraial Ape, she charged.

A mountain struck Pip in the back. There was roaring, hooting, screaming, grass and dirt flying in the air. Hunagu! He had pushed her out of the way. Now he fought his mother. The two Oraials ripped into each other. Their bellows shook the zoo. Across from them, the rajal roared, and the flying vervet monkeys in the neighbouring cage sent a chorus of hooting and screeching into the overheated afternoon sky. The big people watching cried out in their strange tongue.

The dust settled. Hunagu lay unmoving.

“Hunagu! No!” Sobbing, wailing, Pip advanced on the mother Oraial. “You kill Hunagu.” She beat the Ape’s flank with her fists. “Bad, wicked mother. You kill.”

Panting, the mother Oraial stared about her as though seeing the world for the first time. She shook ruff. Then her enormous paw came down to cover Pip’s entire back. Pip pressed her face into the well-loved fur, sobbing, afraid, heartbroken.

“I … sorry,” mumbled the Oraial. She shook Hunagu’s shoulder. “Wake up. Wake, please.”

Pip pushed herself loose. Kneeling beside Hunagu, she pressed her ear to his chest.
Thump. Thump-thump.
The drumbeat of his heart had never sounded sweeter.

The madness took her often, nowadays. Pip found that she needed to behave more and more like an Ape, or she became the enemy. She spent hours grooming the mother. It seemed to calm her. She remembered how Pygmies made bamboo flutes. Countless tries and the loan of the zookeeper’s belt knife later, she had an instrument which sounded right. The bamboo had to be an exact thickness, and the holes the right size and spaced apart closely enough to fit her fingers, but far enough to make the correct notes. She tried to teach Hunagu a Pygmy dance. But he had grown moody of late. He writhed at night from pain in his joints–growing pains, Pip told him. He ate mountainously. And Hunagu grew mountainously, too. His shoulders filled out as though he had stuffed them with the sacks of melons which were sometimes given to them for food. He practised thumping his chest and charging at the tree–and a powerful, charging male Oraial was a sight to behold. Several times, he snapped at her. Pip decided to stop wrestling him when he wrenched her neck. He could just as easily rip her head off her shoulders.

Late-season storms dumped flurries of hail on their home. Pip found it harder and harder to remember her jungle and her tribe. No matter how she fought, the memories slipped through her mind like wet river sand through her fingers.

One night, as Pip lay awake outside their shelter, staring at the stars around the looming immensity of the Yellow moon, which filled half the sky, she was surprised to feel Hunagu settle close to her.

“Pygmy girl cold?” he rumbled.

“Cold,” she agreed.

“No fur bad. Big people no give Pygmy skin-coverings. Big people bad.” To her surprise, Hunagu put his arm about her and drew her against his chest. His arm was so massive, it covered her like a blanket. “Pygmy girl look stars, think big thoughts. What think?”

Quietly, Pip told him how much she missed her jungle and her tribe, how she sometimes spoke to the stars and begged them to return her to her home.

“No good with Oraial friends?” he asked.

“Hunagu good. Hunagu mother …”

“Sick.” He spoke like a whisper of wind across the top of their cage. “She sick, Pip. Head-sick and heart-sick. She no live long.”

Pip chewed over this for a while, feeling desperately sad. “How Hunagu know?”

“We Oraial know way of spirit. She soon leave world. Hunagu know Pip dream of world outside man-wall. Hunagu no remember jungle. Pip tell about jungle?”

He didn’t remember his jungle home.

She talked for as long as he listened, watching the Yellow moon recede and the stars shining so thickly above, it was as though handfuls of white sand had been sprinkled across the vast, depthless darkness. She told him Pygmy stories and legends, finding that she remembered them word for word, even now. Her friend’s body was as warm as a cosy fire. Thickly furred, he did not suffer from the cold. She held his hand, her tiny fingers no longer able to fit around his thumb.

“Hunagu grow to adult,” she told him, tracing the deep creases on his palm with her forefinger. “Pip see blue stripe on back. Hunagu have new smell. Male Oraial smell; big-ape smell. Hunagu dream of world outside wall?”

“Hunagu dream of mate,” he admitted, with a wry smile. He squeezed her fingers. “Hunagu dream of jungle-world and vines, world of no walls, where Ape be Ape and Pygmy be Pygmy. No bad-man traders in jungle. Hunagu think Pygmy girl and Ape be friends, good-good.”

Pip had wondered if Oraials ever dreamed. Now she knew. He was sweet, using Pygmy language like ‘good-good’.

“Hunagu afraid,” he added, unexpectedly.

“Hunagu afraid? Hunagu mighty-big-courage.”

Hunagu guffawed heartily. “Hunagu know world-in-walls,” he said. “World outside very big, mother say. Different. How Hunagu impress mate if Hunagu know nothing about jungle? How Hunagu find jungle? Have babies? This big-man place. Jungle far. Look. Hunagu see Dragon.”

His massive arm pointed just above the wall’s lip, toward the Yellow moon. Pip gasped. He was right. It was far away, but the size and shape of that silhouette could not be mistaken. There was something so achingly glorious about the way the dark Dragon rippled across the moon’s pockmarked face, that a tear trickled down her cheek. Here she was, trapped in a big person zoo, and that creature flew wild and free above the real world, the world of cold and rats to eat and walls which kept a spirited Oraial trapped away from any hope of life, or a mate, or children.

“Pip take Hunagu to jungle. Promise.”

Instead of mocking an impossible promise, her Ape-friend said, “When Pip angry, Pip strong-strong. Strange-strong. Hurt Hunagu, once.”

Strange-strong? Pip stared at the great shaggy head beside her, wishing she could read his mind. She remembered that incident. Her friend had put his paw right on the matter. Now that she thought about it, she remembered how her flaring fury had caused her to injure his shoulder. That was definitely strange-strong. How else could a Pygmy girl possibly injure an Oraial? Also, Pip recalled suddenly, she had once ripped the trader’s pole from its moorings.