Stomp huffs shine and tries to love himself.
Sometimes finding hope means babysitting 11 feral Maine mountain orphans.
In the spring of 2023, I experienced a period of grief, and I wrote a few hundred words at a time for ten weeks. I channeled this sadness into a character that is funny, weird, awkward, absurd, and hopeful. I remember that despite the prominent moments of darkness, all of those traits are also me.
In 1921, following the suicide of his wife, a conservationist named Benton Mackaye writes “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning. An article that was likely written in grief inspires 16 years of trail planning and culminates in the completion of the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail. This trail becomes a haven for nature lovers and those with ambition to heal.
It also becomes a channel.
It’s 1937, the logging boom of Northern New England is faded from its former glory. The industry has stripped much of the land of the old-growth forest. The Great Depression is in swing. Despair grows and people look to blame. Fantastical creatures are hunted hard – they are “the other”.
As The Network expands, leaders like Gesuvio the demolitions turtle recruit orphans who have been abandoned and lost. Many of them train to become Shepherds – healers, protectors, fighters of the forest. These Shepherds learn to use the Appalachian Trail as a smuggler’s route and a 2,100-mile clothesline on which they hang the news of the wood. Sometimes these Shepherd trainees look like 11 feral-like children who need a babysitter for a week.
Sometimes this babysitter looks like a grieving seven-foot sasquatch.
1937 – Kahtadin, Maine
“Go on, gip gip gip!” Stomp prodded the moose butt with a dead tree trunk. “Go on, hyip hyip!”
A 1400-pound bull moose pulled Stomp on an old-timey settler’s wagon through a meadow patch and turned over the earth with its hooves and antlers. Stomp had brought all the fixings for a good spring garden party:
· Straw hat with a glob of lumberjack margarine on his nose for sunscreen
· A dainty checkered book about soups and salads
· A rusted can of noxious 1920s black shoeshine
SNEEERRRF.
“Aw, that’s good stuff.” Stomp’s vision swirled. “Stings the nostrils like a good sharp cheddar.”
The moose looked back at him with big brown sleepy eyes. “I don’t think what you’re doing is safe.”
Stomp’s plow moose’s name was Barry. Barry had a falling out with the forty cow elk he had bred and they recently separated. Barry was depressed. Barry did not appreciate being called a plow moose.
“Hyiddyup now, hyahh, plow moose!”
Stomp poked Barry with the log. Barry stared. Stomp gave him another meek little poke. Barry lowered his head a degree and gave Stomp an “I will maul you” look.
“I don’t feel respected right now.”
Stomp hopped down from the little cart, preserved in mountainous Maine since the 1880s. The wood creaked under his weight but held strong. The cart once held men who lived and died working logs. Now it carried Stomp, who left a splotch of fur grease that instantly warped the bench. He was visibly carrying an entire nest of ticks in his fur.
“Come on, Barry. I told you – help me make my turnip garden and I’ll help you get back with Darla, or…Matilda, or…whoever.”
HERRRRRRRR! HRRRRRRRRR! HRRRRRR!
Barry released great throaty bellows that sounded like a raging bear and the mountain echoed back his distress.
“I’m sorry, Barry. You only bred 39 other cows. I can’t imagine why she was upset.”
Stomp walked forward and rubbed a paw along his back. He gazed up above the forest tops to Mount Katahdin, just a half mile off, where he had sat every night previous for two weeks in the grey glow of night and stared into the moon mist.
“They all do this,” lamented Barry. “Lure me in with their bellows and then they disappear.”
“Don’t have to be so graphic…”
“And I knew when Darla let me mount her on the highway that she was different.”
“Okay, that’s good now—no more story. Bye bye, story.”
Stomp patted Barry on the top of his massive head and poked his muzzle. “Bee-boop. Maybe we’ll make a nice salad from my garden and take Darla apology turnips.”
Barry bowed his head. “Thank you, Stomp.”
SNEEERRRRRRRF.
Stomp took another inhale of the shoe polish. Barry gave him a glum look.
“I am concerned for you.”
Stomp dabbed a glob onto his pinky and rubbed it in his gums. “Eyes on the soil, Barry. Don’t judge me.”
It was deep here. Layers of forest insulated deeper layers of forest. The loam was still and muted. Once there were saws and cracking, where felled goliaths boomed in the dense valley. Now robins chirped in the filtered April sunlight and splashed their wings in foliage. Lime green buds of new growth and crisp green leaves sprung from limber branches. Occasionally a long-distance wanderer passed through and made camp along the mountain. Many nights Stomp sneaked into a camp and stuffed their packs with cans of beans.
“Okay, Barry. You just stand there a minute while I mush this manure down with my toes.”
“Yes, Stomp.”
Squish Sqush Squish
A branch cracked.
That’s all it took.
Barry laid himself down in the soil and dunked his antlers into the bushy ferns on the meadow edge and made himself flat. Stomp drifted slow and faded into the shade of a giant oak.
The sunlight played glimmers on the leafed floor. The breeze had been sucked out by a vacuum.
The forest was still.
A glint from a tree gave it away. Stomp saw the arrowhead – it was a child in full mottled green and brown face paint – who knelt motionless in a fern bed, unsure exactly where to point his weapon. Stomp could see them now, 12- and 14-year-olds melted into the trees with crossbows, splayed out in a “U.” Stomp was sure a second contingent of them was now approaching from behind to seal closed the U.
Their approach was fantastic.
And from the back of the guerrilla force, a cloud of cigarette smoke melted thinly into the trees and settled in the lower branches. Wisps drifted to Stomp’s hiding place against the oak trunk. It was an earthen scent, and masculine, and Stomp knew it was hand-rolled from tobacco grown in a troll bog and cured under a blood moon.
Stomp stepped out.
“Shoot if you must.”
The smallest of the group and the only girl, with brilliant golden hair intertwined with ferns, couldn’t hold off. She let loose.
Pheeernt!
The arrow buzzed Stomp’s ear and stuck firm in the tree behind him. Stomp turned and unscrewed the arrow from the broadhead and walked it forward. In the middle of the fern bed, a lumpy hulking creature enveloped in drapes of moss stood up. Even its face was draped over with stringy weed - the cigarette smoke curled through and the enormous creature with an oval back pulled aside the strands.
“Fine day for an ambush,” he boomed.
It was Gesuvio the Turtle.
Stomp got giddy and pressed his palms together like a DIY interior designer who just found the perfect “Wine Life” sign made of salvaged wood on Pinterest.
“Oh, G, what wonders have you brought me?”
“Nothing that you sniff, snort, or metabolize sinfully.”
Gesuvio moved amongst his guerrilla force of tweens and physically adjusted the positions of his students:
“Sunflight, you’ll remember next time to charcoal your broadheads. And your contours need to align with the ridge flow—never lay perpendicular. Cornflower, loose your arrow in a true ambush and you’ll get your peers scalped and butchered, or worse.” Gesuvio walked up to Stomp and stood wide with his broad, leathered claw feet. He looked him even in the eye. “And you.”
Stomp still held his hands pressed together with a big idiotic smile. “Me?”
“You—look at you.” Gesuvio poked him in the chest. “What have you done with yourself?”
Stomp’s grin faded.
Barry the plow moose poked his enormous muzzle out of the ferns. “He has been huffing shoeshine. I am concerned for him.”
“Shut up, Barry!” Stomp brushed his paws down his chest. “I’m farming turnips.”
Gesuvio’s voice was deeper than thunder and scarier. “Hiding out in the forest while others fight.”
“Am not.”
“Smelling like you raided a turpentine factory.”
“I didn’t.”
“Walking around full of ticks.”
Gesuvio reached a flipper and brushed a hand against the visible nests of ticks that were actively ballooning under Stomp’s armpits.
“I’m giving them a ride. Ticks need transportation, too.”
Mournful little parasite squeaks arose as Gesuvio began plucking at them. “You’ve let yourself go.”
“I have not. I’m doing my best.”
Gesuvio turned Stomp around and undid the satchel straps of the pack he never wandered without. He ripped out empty tins of shoeshine and tossed them to the children. “You’re fucking up.”
Tears streamed down Stomp’s face and he put his paws over his eyes. Now he was crying in front of the guerrilla children.
“I’m trying my best,” Stomp sobbed. “You could have come alone.”
Gesuvio put both flippers on Stomp’s shoulders and Stomp looked up.
“Stomp, friend, I need you.”
The children watched in berry-smeared face paint, cross-legged, studious, with wide eyes. The campfire flickered against their faces. They were in a semi-circle and sat on logs and rocks and hunched forward. A feral boy named Mogli scampered up next to Stomp and rested on his haunches. Stomp sat with his back against a tree, shirtless in buckskin pants, and looked down.
“Arf!” The boy barked at him. “Arf!”
The children were orphans. Castaways. Scrap rat outcast children of transient loggers and impoverished folk swallowed by mountains. Stomp watched Gesuvio smoke a cigarette. The children watched Stomp.
He lifted a foot up and sniffed it and pulled a splinter out of his big toe with his teeth.
“Poacher men have set up camps across Appalachia into the Northern corridor.” Gesuvio wiped a piece of tobacco from his beaked mouth. “They are recruiting followers through a campaign of fear.”
“Don’t wanna hurt nobody.” Stomp sucked a little dab of black shoeshine from his pinky finger. “I’m working on myself.”
Gesuvio reached out and lowered Stomp’s finger out of his gums. “I need you to set an example.”
“Stomp wants to grow turnips in peace.”
“I’m meeting Lighthouse Shepherds to blow a bridge. Two weeks I’ll be gone. You will watch the children.”
“Huh-what?” Stomp counted them up: “Stomp knows how to watch 11 less than 11 children.”
“Stomp will care for these children. Stomp will stop talking in the third person.” Gesuvio grabbed him by the scruff of his neckbeard and he fired up. “You are yet needed in this world.”
Stomp picked up a hot coal from the fire and let it scald into his hand just to feel the burn. “I can’t. Everybody leaves.”
Gesuvio plucked the coal from his hand and gently tapped his cheek with a flipper. “You will. And they won’t.”
Stomp stared like a pouty dog at the glowing coals and leaned down—
“Don’t”. Gesuvio slapped his hand away. “In two weeks, I’ll return. I trust you.”
Gesuvio sat atop the back of Barry like he was a pack mule. He had slung packs of victuals and homegrown TNT in saddlebags on Barry’s back. He slapped a flipper.
“Go on, Barry Moose. Giddyup now, hyahh!”
Barry shook his head and his velvet ears flapped back and forth. “I don’t feel respected right now.”
“Come on, children!” Gesuvio boomed. “Help Uncle Barry give your turtly papa a sendoff.”
All 11 children rushed through Stomp’s half-tilled turnip patch and began poking and smacking 1,400-pound Barry.
“Giddyup, moose!” they yelled. “Giddyup!”
Barry trudged forward and clip-clopped into the brush. “I miss Darla.”
Gesuvio disappeared into the foliage, a giant on the back of a giant. “Two weeks!” he spat out. “Teach them what you know.”
Stomp turned and 11 smudge-faced outcasts stared up at him stoic with crossbows in their arms big as siege engines. The kids wore rucksack camouflage – potato sacks that had ferns and weeds sewn into the burlap. They all were sheathed with daggers. The girl, Cornflower, scowled fiercely and spit.
“And Stomp!” Gesuvio’s voice cut back through the foliage. “Whatever you do, give them no sugar.”
The single-file path up the mountain was grown over with lush four-foot ferns. Vine tangles spread their tendrils across a moss carpet that coated every trunk, rock, and log. The children followed in silence. The indignant blond one that shot at Stomp with a crossbow shuffled her feet up the path in soft slippers.
“Don’t drag your feet.” Stomp looked back. “You’ll wear the bottoms out.”
“Eat fuckin’ shit, booze dog.”
Stomp snapped his head forward and kept trudging. “Suit yourself, ya little orc.”
The path wound up, the kids’ heads down. The mountain gathered a thick mist that camped around their feet and chests. A cacophony of spring peepers and woodpeckers echoed up and down the mountain – a forest orchestra.
They crested the top at 4,400 feet and plateaued. Instead of thinning, the trunks squeezed closer. Low-hanging grape tangles swatted the kids’ faces. Root systems toppled over each other and curled like systems of clasped fingers. The children turned sideways to squeeze past trunks and scampered up over giant stiff roots. Stomp meandered in and out. He knew every step.
Stomp halted and Cornflower ran her braid-knotted head into Stomp’s butt.
He held up a fist. Stomp watched her recover like it didn’t happen and drop to one knee. She peered into the lush alpine silence.
He spoke softly: “What are you doing wrong?”
She looked up. He could see the strands of fern in her hair, waving softly like fine filament. Her pack – a raggedy army surplus pack – was too big – it was like watching a mouse carry a grand piano.
She shrugged. “Fuck off.”
“What do you see?” Stomp prodded.
“Nothing. It’s all mist.”
“Right.” Stomp tapped his eyes. “You can’t see them, and they can’t see you. But they know you’re here.”
A kid in a coal miner’s helmet named John Jacob raised his hand.
“Yes, coal miner kid.”
“We should get height and hide.”
“Wrong, coal miner kid. There’s nothing worse than being treed.”
Cornflower looked up. “We know there’s nothing behind us, but we’re suspicious of what’s out in front.” She nodded her head down decisively. “We should wait and let them make the first move.”
Stomp parted a giant fern so that kids in the back could see. “Patience.”
The mist hung like a still curtain. Out in front on the ridge slope was movement and grumpy snorts. Three—no, four—sets of legs stomped about in the loam. A family of American wildeboars dug with their wide tusks for grubs.
“Come on, little orc children.” Stomp waved them forward.
They passed by slowly on the single-file trail. The male boar smelled musky. Balled-up mud clumps hung from its brisket. He moved to shield his family and grunted.
SNORK!
“Hello to you, pig friends.” Stomp performed a curtsy and kept walking. “Fine day for a scavenge.”
The two little ones chased each other playfully. Their creamy pink underbellies weren’t yet grown in with the coarse oily fur of the mature American wildeboar. One of the children – a stoic, scarred boy named Slate - stopped and knelt. A boarlet ran up and dunked its little head. Slate let the animal run under his hand.
The father turned and charged.
Yeeeeeennnnnn! RONK RONK RONK.
Slate fell back. Stomp stepped forward. The creature was 550 pounds - Stomp dumped him over on his back with the poke of a log.
“Just passing through, compadre.”
The boar roiled up to its feet and indignantly turned. The boarlets played on. The sasquatch and his troupe of lost children faded ahead into the mist.
Far below on the other side of the mountain sat the open clearing of a faded lumber town. Smoke curled from chimneys and the broken line in the trees indicated a dirt road led up the mountain. Stomp led them into thicket with a perfectly cut opening and stopped to look back. He felt a great spontaneous urge to cry and pressed a flat paw against the ache in his chest.
He pulled out a little tincture jar of pine tar that he kept sewed into his pack. He opened it up and stuck the dropper in his nostril.
SNEERF!
“Rugh,” he grunted. He stuck the dropper in the other nostril and growled. “Rooga.”
The children watched.
They wandered left and right through prickers thick as a knotted bird’s nest. Stomp heard a thud and looked back. Cornflower had stumbled. Her skinned knee bled into the dirt. Stomp watched and waited for her to pick herself up. She struggled to untangle herself in a bramble of thick thorns. He took one long step back and held out a paw. She didn’t look up at him.
“I can do it myself.”
She grabbed a clump of mud and packed it defiantly in her knee. Stomp walked on and turned his head back. “I know you can.”
They suddenly opened into an open flat area on a gray-clouded hillside. A weeded clearing was littered with junk, damp with morning dew. Against the tree line rested an old forest-green school bus.
Its tires were sunken into the muck. A large fist had punched skylight holes through the aluminum roof. Ferns and branches sprouted unnaturally from windowsills and the windowpanes were removed. A rusted shanty shed protruded from the backside, assembled crudely with tack nails and two-by-fours. An 1865 Gatling gun was mounted in a window.
A brute tank of a boy named Peterbilt rushed forth.
“Stop!” Stomp held him back. He stepped forward into a foliage shroud and gently parted a curtain. A protective net hung down from the trees and spanned the width of the clearing, made entirely from prickers coated in honey glue that dripped in slow globs.
“Go.” Stomp waved them forward. “Claim a bunk.”
The children scampered around axle pieces and an upturned tin washbin, past a 1927 General Electric refrigerator quietly resting on its haunches, and up the three bus steps into a cave of wonder.
Peterbilt sniffed and the coal miner kid immediately backed out and vomited in the grass.
“Smells like a pickled armpit,” said one.
“Smells like Pa after he gets drunk and shits hisself,” said a boy named Gerald.
Stomp walked up behind. “I live here sometimes.” He walked through them and dumped his burlap sack on an aisle table. “Get used to it.”
They threw their packs and crossbows down. It was dim and damp. A poster from 1933’s King Kong was draped across the ceiling. Frontier rifles and revolutionary muskets and a brace of pirate pistols leaned in corners. Against the wall was a steamer chest coated in moss. Stacked wooden army crates had “RASHUNS” scribbled on the sides in charcoal.
It started with the squint-eyed boy named Peterbilt.
“Hungry.”
“What?” Stomp looked at the indignant bulldozer who wore a motley brown tunic that belonged in Peter Pan.
“Hungry!”
And then the chant began, low at first, and rising:
“Hungry hungry hungry hungry!”
Cornflower stood up on a bus seat and pulled a little dagger from her waistband. She pointed it at Stomp:
“Hungry!”
Stomp walked through the aisle and waved them to the back. “Come. I’ll teach you sugar beans.”
Stomp held two cans of baked beans in one paw. Then he dropped a heavy brown cloth bag of raw sugar into one kid’s arms. “Hold this.”
“Mr. Gesuvio said we can’t have sug—”
“G is a silly turtle that eats minnows and grass. He doesn’t know a good meal.”
The kid shrugged. A trancelike gleam broiled up in his eyes.
Stomp bit down twice with a single fang:
CHONK. CHONK.
The tin bean lids curled open. A low sliver of thunder rumbled through with a gust of breeze. Lightning flickered. Stomp tore the top from the sugar bag.
“You do it like this.”
He grabbed a fistful of raw sugar and splatted it into the bean can. He picked up a loose piece of straw from the floor and stirred the sugar in. His stomach growled out like a groaning freight train and one child ducked down behind a seat and peeked his eyes up over.
Stomp handed the syrup sugar beans to Cornflower. “Now, you eat.”
She dipped a finger in the can and tasted it. She scooped ravenously with her hand and the other kids followed. Stomp reclined back against the bus wall and watched the kids climb over each other to rip out handfuls of raw sugar and throw them into Civil War army bean rations.
“See?” Stomp folded his arms behind his head. “Now I’ve taught you all how to cook.”
The thunder rumbled. Lightning flickered. Stomp snored peacefully. All was silent.
Something tugged on his chin beard.
One eye flicked open.
Mogli the feral dog boy lay across his chest, both hands gripped tightly around his chin fur, and drool dripped from his chin.
“Shuggy bea – shuggy shug shug bean bean.”
“What?” Stomp awoke. “I don’t understand.”
“Shooga wooga bean!”
Slate popped up in the tiny bench seat on top of him with his sociopathic stare. Then Peterbilt, with his bowling ball body, pinned down Stomp’s legs. Now there were four children on his chest, drooling and entranced.
There was the sound of rooting around in his steamer chest and the clink of metal.
“Get out of my chest!”
Cornflower moved forward slow in the dim light and lightning flickered.
She held a pair of scissors.
Snip. Snip.
Stomp tried to sit up and children tumbled over him like salmon over rapids in a brook.
Snip. Snip.
“Shoo, little orc children. Off with you! Off!”
The thunder rumbled. Lightning flickered.
Snip.
“NARGGGGGGGGGGGGHHH!”
Stomp’s bellow blended in with the thunder and melted into the night.
Properly binding a live human.
The children stood in a straight line out on the grass at dawn in a torrential downpour. Cornflower and Peterbilt and Mogli and Slate and Gerald all stared forward defiantly. Rain streamed down their eyes. A coal fire sputtered from the washbin in the grass. Stomp felt the vulnerable areas where his ears and eyebrows had been savagely trimmed.
They would not be having sugar beans for breakfast.
“Children, it’s a downpour. You’re on a desolate mountain. You’ve been spotted by a local spy and are forced to prevent this spy from alerting his friends to kill everything you love. The most important thing to learn as a ten-year-old is not your penmanship – it’s how to properly bind a live human.”
“We ain’t got no rope!” shouted Gerald.
“Don’t need no rope.” Stomp pointed behind them. “The forest is your resource.”
Stomp dragged forth a body-sized tree trunk and plopped it in the grass.
“Who’s first?”
Cornflower leaped forth and straddled the trunk with both legs.
“Hee-chah!”
She frantically searched around in the landfill weeds and tore up an old length of soil-embedded barbed wire. She wrapped it around the trunk’s legs and necks and hopped up.
Stomp stood back.
“That’s…that’s way better than I anticipated. That’s actually really good.”
Cornflower ignored him and returned to the line. Peterbilt rumbled forth with great speed for his tank-like figure.
“Heeeeee-yi-yi-yi-yahhhh!”
He bounded onto the log and slipped violently. His ankle torqued and swelled like a wild plum.
“Huhwoooowch!” he cried out.
“Your teammate is injured and wailing hilariously, children! What do you do?”
Gerald, the coal-bred scrap-runt from West Virginia, rushed forth:
“Drag Peterbilt to safety!”
Mogli bounced up next to Gerald and they started to drag Peterbilt.
“Ark! Arf!”
Stomp knocked them both into the mud with a slap of the paw.
“Now you’re all dead.”
The downpour drummed off the metal bus roof. Gerald and Mogli lay with their faces in the earth. John Jacob - the coal miner helmet kid - raised a hand:
“We should practice patience like in the woods.”
Stomp pointed. “Continue, please. Someone else.”
Another spoke up: “If Gerald hung back and waited for the enemy to come in for the kill, he could have picked them off with his crossbow and saved P-bilt.”
“There it is. What next?”
Stomp had one foot on Peterbilt’s head. He tried to raise a hand. “Yes, Peterbilt.”
“Now you got a wounded friend and a hostage to deal with.”
“That’s right. A hostage you never wanted in the first place. But now you need information. So…”
Stomp looked around.
Cornflower stood with her fists clenched in the rain. Gerald raised his hand.
“Treat them real nice until they tell you what they want! Or treat them real bad until they tell you what you want!”
“Now that’s a thinking mind.” Stomp felt a measure of vigor come on. “Let’s try both. Kindness, and then terror. Kindness, and then terror. Mogli, please run and fetch a can of beans.”
Mogli scampered to the bus on all fours, panting and snuffing like a terrier on a raccoon trail. He returned with the pint aluminum can of beans grasped in his mouth.
“I…I don’t even know how you’re holding that right now. Your teeth are absolutely going to break.”
Stomp plucked the beans from Mogli and smashed the can lid against a blunt rock. He offered the drooling beans to bum-ankle Peterbilt.
“Here you go, hostage. Nice hostage. Beans for you, hostage?”
Peterbilt looked at the can and Stomp pawed a smear of baked bean syrup around his lips. “Good hostage.”
Gerald again: “The hostage ain’t telling you what you want!”
“Yes,” said Stomp. “We’ve treated Hostage fairly and made them feel comfortable. To let them know we mean business, we must burn their feets.”
Stomp retrieved a coal from the sputtering fire and strode to Peterbilt. He knelt, the coal burning into his palm, and pretended to press the coal to Peterbilt’s feet:
“Sizzy sizzy sizzle.” Stomp did it again: “Sizzy sizzy sizzle.”
Stomp stood up and brushed his hands. “Any questions?”
A raised hand: “Are we gonna learn to make rocket launchers?”
“No, that’s—that’s unpractical. Now, children – I will teach you how to catch hail with your throats. For sustenance.”
On the other side of the mountain, a sweated rascal with a dried alligator head perched on his topknot slipped his knife into the mouth of a dead bull wildeboar and carved out the tongue. A comrade sauntered up, his brown vest pinned full of wildeboar tails.
“Whoo.” Rocky Boy the mountain poacher knelt and shook one of the boar’s stiff legs. “This one’s a hog.”
“Ya-huh,” said Alligator Hat Man. “The tongue should fetch $3.”
“Yep.”
Two men in dapper suits struggled to stumble through the thick brush. They came up from behind in low-cut top hats and time pieces that hung from chains. They smelled of Fifth Avenue.
“What did we get?” One asserted himself. “Looks like a fine catch.”
Rocky Boy stared up at the businessman. Alligator Hat Man handed him the tongue. Rocky Boy dumped it in a breast pocket. “You don’t ‘catch’ wildeboar, Mr. Wrigley. You either track ‘em and murder ‘em or they track you and murder you.”
The other businessman stepped up. “We’ve been told of their danger up close. They look harmless.”
Rocky Boy jerked up the wildeboar’s lifeless head and ran a finger over the dull long tusk. “They’ll get in yer guts and make yer belly look like noodle soup.” He scrunched up. “Roink roink!”
The men paled and Rocky Boy winked. His laughter echoed out through the forest. Birds took flight.
“Come on.” Alligator Hat Man waved them into the thick. “Let’s track.”
The lathering properties of poison ivy.
The sunbeams splayed dappled shifting patterns on the loam. From a comfortable distance, the huffy wildeboar bull and his family grazed spineleaf moss from trunks. Gerald waved the oily hair out of his eyes and pulled back an imaginary slingshot toward a giant downed log. One of the boarlets hid in the hollow and peeked out as the children gathered in a loose circle. Stomp stood up to his knees in a knotted expanse of poison ivy.
“Children, to evade capture and certain death, you’ll need to go where others will not go.”
Cornflower stood in her usual posture – arms folded and glaring. Peterbilt raised a hand.
“Doesn’t poison ivy itch somethin’ terrible?”
Stomp sighed. “Only if you don’t have a thick, luscious mat of fur to neutralize the oils.”
“We ain’t got that!” shouted Gerald from the back. “Half’s us in bares feet!”
Stomp began pantomiming and jogging in place: “Okay, you’re being chased by men. They’re closing in on all sides. All you’ve got is this nice poison ivy patch and all the men are scared of itches.” Stomp waved them in with a goofy grin. “Come on.”
A couple kids dipped their toes forward into the glossy tangle of oily poison with their black, hardened feet. Peterbilt waded in.
“Hey, this ain’t so bad. Kind of an immediate warm tingle feeling.”
“Yep.” Stomp nodded knowingly. “And you’ll be so coated in good poison oil that nobody will want to capture you.”
Cornflower turned and stormed back toward camp. “This is damn nutjob city!” She reached down and snatched up a handful of wildflowers as she plunged down each footstep. “Buncha dipshits.”
Stomp watched her storm off and turned back. He scrunched up his face with the prickle of hurt like holding back a sneeze.
“Come.” He trudged out of the poison and deeper into the forest. “Let us now learn how to smuggle human cargo.”
How to properly curse your enemies.
A limp straw-stuffed burlap sack hung from an old wash pole like a sad scarecrow. The children were gathered. The mountain mist swirled around their waists and burned off slow with the rising sun. Cornflower sat in the ferns with only her torso showing and the top half of a spear. She husked long shavings down the point with her pocketknife.
“Children, should you capture a hostage – or become a hostage – you’ll need to let your enemies know you’re the baddest baddie to roam the land.”
Gerald’s dirty-fingernailed hand shot up in the back.
“Yes again, Gerald.”
“What if your captor got your mouth all stuffed with skunk scat and ready to skin yer butt with a fork but you don’t wanna get skinned none but you can’t talk none?”
“Well, Gerald, that’s a perfectly logical question and it does happen.” Stomp scratched his head. “Best thing is to go for the strong, silent face of impenetrable angst.”
Gerald nodded fiercely and traced a finger down the charcoal lightning bolt smeared down his face.
“Now, I’ll demonstrate on the straw dummy.”
Stomp walked forward and stared down at the limp scarecrow.
“Hello, kind captive sir. It appears you’ve been defeated soundly. Please leave now with your belongings. Goodbye.”
Stomp stepped back and patted the scarecrow on the head, satisfied with his strong communication skills. “See, and now the captive leaves with both dignity and shame.”
Gerald stepped forth: “Can I try?”
“Yes, Gerald. This is training. Please do.”
Gerald got up in the scarecrow’s face:
“No-good dirt-assed hick hostage with mush-butt and pee in yer mouth.” Gerald spit in the scarecrow’s face. “Your mother.”
Stomp stepped forward quickly and covered the scarecrow’s ears.
“That’ll do, Gerald. Time to learn how to make full-body camouflage out of moss dye.”
On the last night, they built a low fire and watched the distant town lights glow at the bottom of the mountain. Gray mists dissipated into murky slate clouds. Rain splats began to jump down and ricochet off the junkyard metal.
“Be on the lookout, children.” Stomp walked away towards the bus. “Dusk is the most common time for feral child kidnappings.”
In the bus, Stomp watched them from behind a burlap covering that hung down over one window. They talked excitedly and discussed what they learned in two weeks of hard lessons. Forging friendships that might change but never abandon them. Cornflower sat on the outer circle of the fire hunched over something, crafting with her hands.
He let the cover flap down and walked out to the tin shanty behind the bus.
It had once been a moonshine still and was now an extracted bus bench that sat between corrugated walls and a window that looked out across the Appalachian range. There was a sanctuary quality to it, like the bus seat was a pew in a church of mountains. Stomp sat on the seat and gazed out to the heavy air. The rain drummed off the roof. He absorbed the sound. He pressed his paw against the center of his chest.
Thunder rolled across the mountain like it hugged the terrain then leapt out into the open and swam across the valley. The tin walls rattled. Stomp’s shoulders trembled and he began to shake. He sobbed silently in the rain and tears pounced down across the hairless spaces where Cornflower had sheared him.
He rubbed one hand across his chest where the hurt sat and knotted. A soft mist sprayed in through the window and blew across him. He inhaled it. The children were muffled but laughing. The fire burst up valiantly as they threw on more wood. It rained harder and the fire grew.
Everything he ever lost rested in his chest.
He shook softly. “I was there for them.” He embraced himself and shook. “They’re leaving but I was there.”
His sobs drowned out the thunder.
Smoke curled from the ashen remains of the bonfire.
The children rolled from their bus bunks. Covered-in-poison Peterbilt awoke and yawned and scratched. Mogli gnawed a grub out of a strand of his long hair. Cornflower sat on the bus steps and wove a fern stem into her golden braids.
Stomp knelt behind the tin shanty in the dirt. He held an army flask. His back was hunched down and his arms worked in spasms. Cornflower approached and saw him, feral in his crouch and growling at the brush.
“We’re all watching when you drink and huff shit, you know.”
Stomp turned his head and looked back.
She had her hands on her hips. “We all hurt, too, but don’t go off poisonin’ ourselfs.”
She walked forward and looked over his shoulder. He wasn’t drinking or huffing anything. His fingers kneaded verdant green ferns and squeezed the clean mountain raindrops into the flask.
“Here.” He handed it to her. “When you don’t have a flask, you do this.”
He searched around in the grass and rooted up a long-creeping fern frond. He stripped the leaves and blew once into the stem:
Whoo!
The frond perked straight out and he bent down to a gathered pool of droplets contained in the palm of a leaf. Cornflower watched. He held the frond out like a straw:
Slurrrpppp!
He threw his head back and gurgled the water. “Oh, great mouthfeel. Very prominent. Notes of cloudburst, fresh stream, and uh…earthworm.”
She watched him with a bemused expression. She knelt down next to him. “Where is your family?”
He closed his eyes and drew a slow draught from the mountain puddle. “Lost.”
“You don’t wanna look?”
He shrugged the worn knapsack from his shoulders and opened it. “I’ll show you something.”
He removed what looked like a Middle Earth horn. It was knotty and crafted from a fire-hardened piece of wood with a hollowed center. Fossilized prehistoric lobopod skeletons were embedded in the surface.
“This is my bark horn. We all get one like a baby gift.” He turned it over. “Supposed to be able to call it on a full moon and find…any of me.”
“Why, it was a full moon last night.” Cornflower got indignant. “Why didn’t you call on it?”
He didn’t answer.
“You’ve never blown on that thing, have you?” She watched him gently put it back in the knapsack and tie close the strings.
He rose on his giant haunches and brushed past.
“Come. Let’s get you and the rest moving forward.”
Stomp held open the great gloppy curtain of prickers and honey. The children dissipated into the tree line as gray-clad ghosts with crossbows. He trudged along behind. Mogli stopped on all fours and turned back to look at the jade-green bus one last time.
“Ark!” He barked out. “Ark!”
“That’s right, little Mogli. Remember it well.”
Mogli turned and scampered forward. Stomp walked into the trees and left the bus behind. It would be there for him, later he hoped, when these memories had time to breathe and burn off with the sun.
“What do you see?”
The ferns were a blockade of textured lushness that tickled their faces. They lay in the squelchy soil that squeezed up under their fingernails and made damp marks on their knees. Cornflower was in the front next to Stomp:
“The same stuff we saw on the way in.”
“So, what do you hear?”
Cornflower listened. The other children strained their heads around and looked up at towering old growth. Drops fell from leaves and made puddles in roots that held water like cups.
“Nothing. It’s silent.”
“Right.” Stomp nodded forward. “No peepers. No peckers.”
Peterbilt was in the back with a black charcoal lightning bolt drawn across his face. “The forest gone underground.”
Stomp waved them forward. They were to meet Gesuvio on this new trail fourteen miles downslope. The Appalachian, Gesuvio had called it.
It was wilderness here to the trailhead.
Stomp felt a tick climb his thigh and held up a fist. He knelt, pulled it from his fur, and gently laid it on a log. As they walked past, Mogli looked around, swiped up the tick on a finger, and ate it.
Electricity stood Stomp’s fur up straight. The children were out in front of him, meandering through four-foot ferns and mountain mist. They were loose and casual. Some of them watched their feet. Stomp strode forward to the front and gently pressed a palm against Peterbilt’s chest.
Everything was still.
They were on the top plateau, ready to drop down the other side of the mountain. The soil was torn up and leaves churned where wildeboars had dug for grub. The trees glistened. Up, up, in the top foliage, the breeze was empty.
WREEEEERRRRRRTT!
The boar squeal was like train brakes raked across rusted prairie tracks.
PROW.
The gunshot was boomy thunder quickly eaten up by the mist. Voices yelled back and forth. A chaos of dog barks sparked up. And more squeals, but high-pitched and young:
Wreerrnt! Wreeeeerrrnnnt!
Prairie wildeboars could run herd-strong on an open plain at 30 miles per hour. Up here in the elevation, a frightened mountain wildeboar might try to hide in a gully or a log hollow. Stomp took the risk and stood up to look.
The bull was on its back - its neck brisket waved in the breeze. Its horns lay tilted to the side. The four legs stood up stiff. The hornless mama boar had herself stuffed inside the hollow log with her back to the kids. She squealed frantically at a pair of brown-coated pointer dogs. A pair of well-dressed hunters in black overcoats with shotguns worked their way through undergrowth that stymied their legs.
“Well placed, Chapman!” shouted the one.
Stomp’s stomach churned like a washing machine filled with jagged scrap metal. Mogli looked up, squatted on his haunches, and watched the shadow of Stomp pass overtop him as if in slow motion. Stomp leaped forward and the ground fell under his feet in waves.
“Kill the mother here and she’ll get stuck, Wrigley.”
Chapman’s mustache was combed primly and he smoked a cigar. Wrigley snipped the end from his own cigar. Inscribed on the collar of their overcoats was:
Barnaby & Co.
“Wait for the trackers.” Wrigley stood with the shotgun against his hip. “Then we’ll sledge open the log.”
The pointer dogs suddenly stopped barking. Their ears perked, and they fled into the forest brush. Chapman wrapped his hand around his ear and cocked his head.
“What?” Wrigley lifted his shotgun up to waist level. “More pigs?”
“No.” Chapman turned again and whipped his vision along the wall of dense forest. A panic closed in. And he uttered one three-letter word:
“Run.”
Branches cracked. The ferns parted. The last thing the two men saw was a floating mass of brown fur and flesh, mid-leap, falling towards them with a grimace that spoke mountains of rage.
Alligator Hat Man held up a fist. His hair was greased back - he had a weasel look about him. Rocky Boy and five other backcountry trackers halted in a spread-out line. They signaled. Six more hunters moved up behind and fanned out around the flank.
The children lay in the ferns and watched.
KRAKK!
Randy peeked his head up. It was Stomp. He had ripped the top from the hollow log to extract the mother and her little ones. His back was turned, breathing heavy, coming down.
Peterbilt looked around. “What do we do?”
Mogli crawled up. “Ruf.”
“Yeah, but there’s 12 of them.” P-bilt patted Mogli’s head. “We’re gonna have to be smart.”
Cornflower gazed around the terrain. Her eyes looked doubly scary painted under with charcoal eyeliner. Gerald crept up.
“We oughta ambush ‘em. Scalp ‘em. Eat their balls and make ‘em watch.”
Peterbilt gave him a look. “You disgust me.”
Cornflower tapped them on the shoulder. “Y’all remember that thunder gun on the bus?”
“Uh huh,” was the whispered chorus.
“And that honey prickle net?”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, here’s what we’ll do.”
Alligator Hat Man conferred with his posse of back-mountain guns.
“We capture it alive, we retire tomorrow. We shoot it, pelt’s ruined.”
“We don’t got nothing to transport a ‘squatch.” This from Rocky Boy with boar tails hung from his vest. “He wakes up, we’ll all wish our daddies and our mummas never got lucky enough to make us. Whoo.”
Alligator Hat Man ran his fingers through his beard and a centipede fell out and scurried away. “Bubba’s got a quart of knockout shine in his pack. Bubba, get up here!”
A one-eyed chubby tracker in an eyepatch jogged up with a swishing glass jug.
“He seven—eight-hundred pounts. He just kilt them Barnaby men. How we gonna get pait?”
“He’s standing there in a stupor.” Alligator Hat Man scratched out another centipede. “He can’t see us.”
“Well, somebody gonna have to monkey-hop on the sumbitch back. I ain’t doing it.”
It was true—Stomp stood still and heaving with his eyes in a saddened glaze. The children had seen everything.
Stomp heard the branch crack too late. The wildeboar ma let out a squeal:
REERRRRRRTTT!
Stomp felt the delicious taste of back-mountain shine against his mouth and its suffocating qualities against his nostrils. Some leechlike man-creature was clung to his back with legs wrapped around him. Stomp swatted numbly and an overwhelming wave of fumes crashed against in waves and took him under.
“Oh my gawt, look at this sumbitch.” Rocky Boy jigged around Stomp. He breathed slow and even. “My great-grandfather seen one in the Revolutionary War but…whoo.” He smeared the sweat from his brow.
“Rocky Boy, get his legs.” Alligator Hat Man stood aback from Stomp’s resting form. “Bubba, you keep that knockdown glue ready if he comes to.”
“What about the boars?”
The semi-circle of men looked at the blooded corpse of the male boar and the sow that guarded her kids against the log.
“Leave them. Another time.”
Rocky Boy stood transfixed as he gazed down and ran his hand across the sweated grit on his face and wiped it on his vest. “Whoo. This thing even wears a pack and pants like it got feelins’.”
“Rocky Boy.” Bubba struggled with Stomp’s pack. “I can’t get this satchel thing from his chest.”
“We’ll cut it off when we get down the hill.”
Two men took each leg, two men on each arm, and the other four held their shotguns inches from Stomp’s head. The men heaved but the forest had grown eerily silent.
The mist curled in and fell on the poachers, so thick they brushed it from their shoulders. The forest seemed to surround them and box them in like canned fish. They passed under an entangled canopy.
RUF.
The throaty growl echoed through the forest. Like an ancient devil of the deep.
GGGGRUF.
The trackers dropped Stomp’s limbs and swirled in their tracks.
“Yi yi yi yi yi yi yeeeee!”
“Woot woot woot woot woot!”
“Grobbledeegrobble. Grobbledeegrobble!”
They were everywhere. Crawling amongst the limbs and through the undergrowth, covered in green and black paint, wiry little fierce-eyed humans disappeared in and out of the tangle.
From his perch on an upper tree branch, Mogli growled into a curled-up tuber microphone:
RUF.
Bubba, the one-eyed tracker with an eyepatch, gulped dramatically.
“Dear Lord, it’s them wildeboar spirits.”
An apparition rose up from a poison ivy patch behind the men, greased-up in moss-dye body paint and charcoal, and the boy swung something toward them on a heavy tripod.
It was Gerald. With a Gatling gun mounted on a rolling axle.
“Time to eat balls, company men.”
Cha-chuk.
THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK.
The shells of the 1865 Gatling gun splattered down leaves and limbs. The men abandoned Stomp and fled. Gerald aimed high, careful to watch his line of fire.
THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK-THWACK.
Stomp’s eyes popped open and he sat up.
The gun whirred and smoked and sputtered to a stop. The men fled straight into a giant pricker net stretched across the forest. Coiled, honey-dripping threads wrapped around them like linguine wrapped around a fork.
“Mumma!” Alligator Hat Man yelled to the sky. “Mumma, help!”
Green- and black-smeared charcoal children scurried to further entangle the men. Cornflower orchestrated from a tree limb, her cobalt blue eyes and fern-braided blond hair brilliant against the grey mist:
“Wrap them up good! Get the edges closed in! Make ‘em squeal!”
Stomp stumbled to his feet and drunkenly staggered forward. He got up on one of the trapped men and dry-heaved fumes.
Mogli barked excitedly and jumped down from his tree: “Arf! Arf!”
Stomp loomed over the poachers, Alligator Hat Man and Rocky Boy and the rest. All the degenerate backwash ne’er-do-good debris outcasted into a life of skilled treachery.
“Children.” Stomp addressed them as a group, but he was looking at Cornflower. “You did good.”
Cornflower climbed down from the thick oaken limb. “You’re darn right.”
The men lay still on the ground. Seven feet of fanged hungover Stomp hovered over them. There was flight, and fight, and there was freeze.
“What now, children?”
Gerald stood over one man and prodded him with a stick. “We cain’t really eat their balls ‘cause that would be cruel.”
“Yes, Gerald.” Stomp nodded. “Eating these men’s balls would be cruel.”
“But…” Gerald looked back behind them. “We may have alerted that boar mama about this here plan.”
Reeeerrrrnt!
The long squeal echoed from deep in the forest. A chorus of grunts and squeals chimed in. Two dozen wildeboars rumbled in and out of the undergrowth and trotted up. The bereaved mama placed a hoof on Rocky Boy’s chest and looked down. Rocky Boy gazed up through the net:
“Whoo.”
And Big Mama took a bite. Rocky Boy’s scream was strangled by the forest.
“Come, children.” Stomp summoned them forward. “Let the nice boar folk have their poacher sushi in peace.”
“I heared they munch lobster every day,” said Gerald. “And learnt to cast spells that turn men to horseshoe crabs.”
The troupe crested a ridge and had one hillock to go. Then they would be upon the trail – the Appalachian, Gesuvio had called it.
Peterbilt chimed in: “I heard they teach such good camouflage that you could lay down on a board and a person would think you had splinters and all.”
G would undoubtedly take them down the coast to The Lighthouse in Brooklyn Harbor, to train with Nautilus the sewer orphan prodigy. Stomp patted the spot on his chest right where his affection and pain collided. Then they wandered over the hill and Gesuvio was on the trail, tying a wagon hitch to Barry the Moose. Stomp could hear from the top:
“I don’t feel respected right now.”
“Oh, shush!” Gesuvio boomed. “You’re a 1,400-pound patriarch of the wood. Why don’t you act like it?”
“Darla said I need to express my emotions more. She loves me.”
“Well, Darla’s been with every bull for 200 miles.”
The kids jogged down the hill at the sight of the ungainly moss-shelled turtle. They gathered round and chattered about their experience.
“Poachers!” Gesuvio was swarmed on all sides. “Why, tell me how you handled them.”
“We was gonna eat they balls but Stomp said that war inappropriate, so we caught ‘em and sicked the mountain pigs for dinner…”
Stomp hung back and watched from the hill. He kept a lookout up and down the trail and felt the grumble in his belly. He would have to get on soon, find a town. Rob a bakery.
Gesuvio came forward.
“You lost none of the children to death or dysentery. Good for you.” He patted a flipper on Stomp’s arm. “How are you, friend?”
Stomp felt a pair of tears in his eyes. “I don’t feel better but I know I’m better.”
“Why don’t you come down to the coast? Young Nautilus is a prodigy already.” Gesuvio smiled. “You’d delight to see him.”
“Mm.” Stomp shrugged. “I want to wander. Feel the trees and the breeze.”
Gesuvio patted his arm and turned. “Until again.”
Stomp watched the children, and Cornflower. She would be a wonderful healer, he thought. Someone who carried the pain necessary to be there for others. He turned abruptly and paced off into the woods.
“Hey!”
It was Cornflower. He kept walking.
“Hey, you furred fucker!”
A little hand tried to swing him around and she ran up and turned in front of him.
“What’s wrong with you?” She had her hands on her hips. “You’re just gonna leave like that.”
It was more a declaration than a question. Stomp wiped his eyes. “That’s what you’re all doing.”
She reached up and placed a hand on his chest, and held it there for a moment, then took it away. “People come and go.”
Stomp stared into the forest floor. “Maybe not always.” He wiped a slug trail of snot across his wrist. “Maybe one day not.”
Cornflower retrieved something from her pocket and handed it to Stomp. “I made this. Put it in your memory bag.”
Stomp held his hand closed tight.
“Don’t crush it.”
She turned and moved softly through the ferns that engulfed her. Gerald waved from the wagon. She stopped once more and looked back at him. “You helped me.”
She stormed off and Stomp bowed his head. He held open a big paw and looked at the intricately braided fern that had been pressed gently into a little circle of wood with pine resin.
“Hee-yah!” shouted Gesuvio. “Giddyup, Barry! Giddy-on up now, moose!”
The children all joined in:
“Yeah, giddyup, big Barry! Go on, moose!”
They slapped his ass and poor Barry troddled away down the trail hauling the wagon of orphan children.
Stomp looked out through the trees. A vast expanse of untouched wood breathed. The birds sang June songs. A bumblebee taxi buzzed by on the breeze, carrying a pair of aphids. A chipmunk lay in a hammock made of moth web stretched across two trees. Stomp inhaled a great gulp of sky and strode forth with purpose. He talked to himself as he moved forward:
“I bet they’ve got great waffles in New Hampshire. Vermont! maple syrup capital. Probably great mountain French toast, maybe I’ll live on syrup for a month. Oh, but how about Pennsylvania pancakes…”
END
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