The Bark of the Bog Owl (9 page)

When Aidan woke up, his head was throbbing and he couldn’t see. He was on his back, facing skyward— at least, he thought he was. At the same time he felt as if he were moving. His wrists and ankles ached. The air was so stuffy he could hardly breathe, and his mouth was tight and stretched. His parched tongue felt furry in his mouth.

Aidan’s senses were returning slowly. He was confused and found it difficult to figure out where he was. It occurred to him that he had been hearing a steady splashing, as well as voices, one near his head and one near his feet. As the fog cleared, the words he heard began to make some sense.

“You don’t reckon you kilt him, do you?” asked the voice near his head. It was a high-pitched, grating voice.

“Course not, Rabbo,” said a nasally voice near his feet. “He’ll be all right … for a little while, anyway.”

Both voices laughed. Aidan didn’t get the joke and wasn’t sure he wanted to. A sudden jolt shook his whole body, and a new ache shot through his wrists and ankles.

At his head he heard a shrill laugh from the voice called Rabbo. “Watch out for that cypress knee, Jonko. The prisoner might not appreciate you dropping him in the swamp.”

“Shut your feeder, Rabbo.”

“You shut your own feeder.”

“How ’bout you make me?”

“How ’bout I take this tote-pole and learn you some manners?”

“Awwww, dry up, Rabbo. We’ll be at the Meeting Hummock in no time. I’ll settle up with you there, where the whole tribe can watch the whupping.”

Aidan was beginning to put the pieces together. Two men named Rabbo and Jonko—feechiefolk, by Aidan’s estimation—were carrying him on a pole between them, the way hunters carry a stag or a boar. His wrists and ankles were tightly bound; they bore his weight as he hung face-upward. His kidnappers had put a heavy bag over his head, probably made from an animal skin, from the smell of it; that explained why it was so dark and why it was so difficult to breathe. He couldn’t cry out because they had gagged him with vines. The fuzzy sensation on his tongue was a leaf from the vine gag.

Jonko, who held the end of the pole near Aidan’s feet, was leading the way. They were slogging through a swamp on their way to a place they called the Meeting Hummock. But what sort of things happened at the
Meeting Hummock? Aidan’s stomach tightened as he imagined the possibilities.

Before long the splashing stopped, and Aidan heard instead the tramp of his captors’ feet on dry land. They were on an island—the Meeting Hummock? Rabbo and Jonko were no longer on speaking terms, so Aidan could glean no more from them. But in the near distance he heard a feechie call,
“Haaawwwweeee,”
and Jonko’s answer,
“Haaawwweeee.”
They were coming up on at least one feechie, maybe more than that.

As Jonko and Rabbo continued on their way, Aidan heard a buzz of voices in the near distance. The farther they went, the louder and more distinct the voices grew. But just as they drew close enough that Aidan could make out a few words, and even a whole sentence or two, the conversation abruptly broke off. Aidan pictured a crowd of feechiefolk watching in silence as he was carried in like a hunting trophy.

Aidan could feel himself being lowered to the ground. The tote-pole was pulled away, though his wrists and ankles were still bound. A voice at his ear, Rabbo’s, he thought, whispered, “On your feet, young civilizer,” and he felt a hand grab his wrist and pull him up to a standing position.

Someone removed the hood that had hidden Aidan’s face. He stood blinking in the afternoon sun; the glare made his aching head pound even harder. When his eyes focused he could see he was standing at the center of a semicircle of feechiefolk. There were at least a hundred of them. Their pinched, gray faces were contorted in various attitudes of curiosity, hostility, and fear. Some fixed
Aidan with threatening stares, baring what few teeth they had like mean dogs. The wee-feechies covered their faces with their hands and peeked out at Aidan between their fingers. Most of the tribesmen, though, gaped open-mouthed at the strange creature brought to their Meeting Hummock. Those in the back craned their necks for a better view or tried to push toward the front row. All their lives they had heard about civilizers; even the tiniest wee-feechies knew to fear them. But except for the scouts and the elders, most of them had never actually seen one.

The feechies were small people. The full-grown hefeechies were barely taller than Aidan, though their turtle-shell helmets added a couple of inches to their height. They were all lean and sinewy, even the youngest wee-feechies. They all had the same gray skin as Dobro. Their hair was thick and coarse, of various colors, but they all had roughly the same haircut: short and jagged across the front, longer in the back, and lumpy all over.

Most of the feechies wore reptile skins. The adult hefeechies went bare-chested and wore snakeskin kilts and turtle-shell helmets. She-feechies and youths of both sexes wore tunics fashioned from alligator skins. Weefeechies wore little loincloths made from possum or muskrat hides. All were barefoot.

Many of the feechiefolk wore various other adornments that betokened their hunting skill: bear-claw necklaces, egret-plume headdresses, boar-tusk bracelets. A few wore capes made from wolf hides or bobcat skins. One youth in the front row appeared to be wearing a panther hide. He was a surly fellow who never even raised his head to look at Aidan.

For several seconds, Aidan and the feechiefolk stared at one another without speaking a word. Two he-feechies stood beside him, one holding each elbow. They were Jonko and Rabbo, Aidan’s captors, and he was glad to have them, for it is no easy matter to stand with bound ankles.

An elderly feechie came out of the crowd and walked toward Aidan. He was a bent and toothless old thing, but many years’ rough wisdom shone from his one good eye. He was Gergo Snagroot, chieftain of this band of feechies. He looked Aidan over from head to toe and back up again, then turned to address the assembled feechies.

He pointed at Aidan. “In case some of you didn’t know it already, this here is a civilizer.”

One of the wee-feechies, her eyes wide with terror, bolted away and ran screaming into the woods. The other wee-feechies weren’t quite so terrified, but they were confused. They had been under the impression that civilizers—if such things even existed—were some sort of monster. But this so-called civilizer didn’t look all that different from a feechie, only a little paler and softer, and dressed funny.

“Ain’t he kind of little for a civilizer?” asked a squint-eyed she-feechie in the third row.

“He ain’t got its full growth yet, but he’s a civilizer, all right,” answered Chief Gergo. “And we got to figure out what to do with him.”

“Boil him,” someone suggested.

“Drown him,” offered a young feechie in a beaver-skin cap.

“Throw him out a pine tree.”

“Feed him to a alligator.”

The crowd was growing more enthusiastic as they warmed to their subject. Aidan suspected that the only thing keeping the mob from doing him some awful violence was the fact that they couldn’t agree on which awful violence to do.

At last Chief Gergo raised a three-fingered hand to silence the crowd. “Hold on, hold on, hold on!” he squeaked. “We ain’t doing anything to this civilizer until I say what we’re doing to him. And I ain’t saying until we’ve had some more confabulation.”

He turned toward Rabbo and Jonko. “Jonko Backwater and Rabbo Flatbottom is the ones what caught him. And I reckon they ought to tell us how it happened.”

“Well,” began Rabbo, “me and Jonko got a hankering for some gopher, so we was ranging around on the sand hills. Jonko’s poking around in a gopher hole, and I’m looking for another one, when I see this little civilizer coming out of the creek bottom, making straight for us.”

“There ain’t no civilizer road around them sand hills,” interrupted one of the feechies in the crowd.

“That’s what I know, Verno. That’s why we was so surprised. Anyway, I give Jonko the skeedaddle signal, and we make for a jumble of magnolia trees and scoot up.”

“We didn’t want no civilizer trouble,” explained Jonko.

“Well, the civilizer starts trooping up the sand hill,” continued Rabbo, “and where do you reckon he decides to flop down and rest?”

“By
my
magnolia tree, that’s where!” answered Jonko. “I stayed as still as I could, but magnolia leaves is so rattlesome, can’t nobody keep quiet in a magnolia tree. I reckon the civilizer heard me, ’cause he starts doing everything he can to see what’s in the treetop.” Jonko mimicked the way Aidan circled and ducked and craned to get a glimpse of him.

“I could see that hiding wasn’t working out,” Jonko continued. “So I decided I’d scare him off.”

Rabbo laughed as he remembered. “Jonko cut loose with the loudest, scariest watch-out bark I ever heard.” He threw back his head in imitation: “
Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo … Ha-ha-ha-hrawffff-wooooooooo.
There ain’t never been a civilizer wouldn’t run home crying when he heard something like that.”

“Except this one,” said Jonko, pointing a thumb at Aidan. “He answers back with a watch-out bark of his own.”

Rabbo was getting more excited as he relived the scene. “Then he cuts loose with a feechie battle yell!”

“A battle yell!” exclaimed Chief Gergo. “How would a little civilizer know the feechie battle yell?”

“I don’t know, Chief,” answered Jonko, “but Rabbo and me both heard it.”

Aidan would be glad to tell them everything if only they would untie the vine gag, which was making his jaws ache. He would tell them all about Dobro and their encounter in the bottom pasture. But none of the feechies seemed interested in what Aidan had to say. Everyone just eyed him quizzically. Everyone except for the young
feechie in the panther cape. He only pulled the hood down farther over his face.

“You not going to believe what happened next,” Jonko continued. “This civilizer starts climbing the tree like he wants to get at me.”

“When I seen that,” said Rabbo, “I give a watch-out bark of my own. And when the civilizer turned in my direction, Jonko swung down and give him a whole mouthful of feechie foot.”

“He done the prettiest back-over flip you ever seen,” said Jonko. “He was still knocked out when we tied him up and carried him off on the pole. We gagged him with vines so he couldn’t holler for more civilizers, though I don’t reckon there would be any civilizers to holler for, that far off the road.”

Chief Gergo whistled. “Sounds like you was just defending yourselves. It also sounds like you wasn’t the first feechiefolks this civilizer had ever seen. Anything else he said or did before you knocked him out?”

“Well,” Jonko began, “he did say something, but I couldn’t make no sense out of it. I don’t speak civilizer talk.”

“What was it, then?” pressed Gergo.

“When he was climbing up the tree, he kept hollering, ‘Dodo,’ and I think he said something about looking for a mudfish.”

“Naw, that ain’t it,” interrupted Rabbo. “He didn’t say nothing about no dodo. It sounded more like ‘Toe Gro!’”

Jonko was irritated. “I know what I heard, Rabbo. He was saying, ‘Toad Row.’”

Rabbo put his hands on his hips and sneered at Jonko. “That don’t make no kind of sense, Jonko. He was saying, ‘Go, Foe.’ No doubt about it.” The two feechies were chest to chest now, each ready to fight for his own misinterpretation of what Aidan had said.
If they would only
unbind me and let me speak for myself, I would happily
clear things up,
Aidan thought. He could tell them that he wasn’t saying “Dodo” or “Go Foe” and certainly not “Toad Row” but “Dobro.”

There was another person in the crowd who could have guessed what Aidan was saying when he climbed the magnolia tree: the boy in the panther cape, who now was hiding his face completely. He was Dobro Turtlebane, and he was terrified of what might happen next … to himself, to Aidan, or to both of them.

Rabbo and Jonko were now dancing circles around each other, glaring and raising their fists.

“I’m gonna jump down your throat and stomp your gizzard!” Rabbo threatened.

“I wish you’d try,” answered Jonko. “It’s nothing to me to swallow a man whole.”

Feechies love few things better than a fistfight. The prospect of Rabbo and Jonko coming to blows made them forget completely about the defenseless civilizer who stood between them, gagged and bound hand and foot. The whole mob pressed closer to get a better look at the two combatants—everyone except Dobro. He moved against the pulsing tide of feechiefolk, trying to get to the back of the crowd where he would be less conspicuous.

But it was hard to be inconspicuous in the press of a crowd. Trying to pick a hole to push through, he stood
right in front of Odo Watersnake. “Move it, Dobro!” shouted Odo. “I can’t see!”

In his haste to get out of Odo’s way, Dobro stepped squarely on Theto Elbogator’s bare foot. “Yow, Dobro!” Theto yelled, and he pushed him into Benno Frogger.

“Stop it, Dobro!” yelped Benno, giving Dobro a push that sent him sprawling into the middle of the crowd, the tail of his panther cape flying behind him. He bowled over four she-feechies and three wee-feechies. Everyone’s attention shifted from Jonko and Rabbo to Dobro. “Dobro!” the crowd scolded, as if with a single voice.