CHOWCHOW’S STRANGER

The story takes an unexpected turn...

There wasn’t much left on the high hill when the creatures of the wild forest had finished with Chimpwig and the lovely Scarly, and when a rascally young monkey who occasionally responded to a version of the nomenclature Chowchow raced past, he paused, puzzled.

Although young, barely adult if adulthood was measured as it is today, he took a few minutes to contemplate the assortment of ribs and allied skeletal fragments that hungry wolves and boar amongst many creatures of the night had scattered in their frenzy of feeding, and saw a pattern.

It was a chance pattern, a random assortment of bits and pieces that had until recently been living and breathing, but it suggested to him something rather magnificent and he had to pause in order to fully absorb that suggestion.

He went away thoughtfully, treasuring the image that he had seen quite plain and in the open on the high hill, like a severed hand pointing to what one day would be called the east but back then had no name whatsoever, and he concluded it must be a message.

But if it was a message, from whom to to whom? He gave no thought to the random nature of bones scattered in a feeding frenzy.

Then he concluded it must be a message specially to him, and it was down to him to find out who had sent it, and why. Therein would answer the from whom part of the puzzle. The thought was only vague in his untutored mind, not precise as it might be to those who would blessed with increased evolutionary intelligence in the far future, but it was there, and so, without giving a single thought to the risks involved in a solitary mission of discovery into the wild, he set off.

Much of the land in his primeval time was dedicated by nature to forest, and a wide variety of trees stretched, it seemed, round the world. Not that any monkey considered what shape the world might be or whether you could actually circumnavigate it if you walked far enough. No, to them and their simple concepts the world was the world, and whether it had an ending of any kind was the type of speculation it would take bigger minds to contemplate, and that, like many other things, would be in the vastness of the future.

But there was the bony giant finger, pointing, and that was plain as plain. He’d seen it, and knew a little bit about the ancient gods dreamed up by Chimpo, who by then was little more than a hero from a legend, not that anyone had any idea what either heroes or legends were. But Chimpo knew of the gods and their cleverness, and Chowchow saw a fragment of his knowledge when he peered at the randomly scattered bones.

Like most of his tribe he had little idea, when he set out, where he was going, though his little was actually described by an image of the random array of dead bones imprinted on his limited memory.

Daylight was fading and he still hadn’t reached the perimeter (an imaginary line if line it was) of his tribe’s accepted homeland. Beyond it lay other homelands for other tribes and it was generally accepted that they were best avoided because besides monkeys there were all manner of other, more vicious, wild creatures that cared little for perimeters or homelands, but who wandered free, taking what they could from wherever they found it. Not even his own corner of the forest was safe from such predators and many a nipper was lost to its parents if it wandered more than a few steps from its home nest and there was, say, a bear about.

He decided to settle down up a tree, wedging himself in a comfortable fork high enough from the forest floor to be safe from four-footed vagabonds, like wolves. But he was safe from detecting a great deal more than predatory noises, and there was one.

The night was touched faintly by a sobbing and a squealing that was so quiet that only those close to its source might detect that anything was awry. But sobbing sounds don’t emanate from peacefully sleeping souls, and neither do agonized squealings.

Despite everything, that night he was safe, and so next day, at dawn, he continued on his way, always believing himself to be going in the direction indicated by the bony instruction he was following and, of course, deviating from it as many times as there were awkward clumps of trees or dips in the land for him to negotiate, and that was so often as to leave him entirely unaware of where he thought he should be going.

And as he struggled along in that ancient forest, sometimes on feet and sometimes swinging from lower branch to lower branch, he began to suspect that he wasn’t alone in those untrodden wilds.

Somewhere out there, early on that second day of traipsing, he heard a noise, a quiet almost none-existent pathetic little noise.

At first he thought it might be one branch above his head scraping, in the gentle breeze, against another and thus generating a squeak. But it persisted as he trudged or gambolled (according to the nature of the terrain) along. It must be following him.

And then it paused, and so did he, by instinct, in order to hear all the better.

The squeaking sobbed, and in a way it broke his heart.

It wasn’t hard locating the source. After mere moments of searching he located the child. Yes: child! Not a monkey nipper with wide open eyes and chattering teeth, but a child clad in skins and with blond hair so long and glorious it made him gasp in admiration. It was very long hair rather than soft monkey fur, and he loved the sight of it.

He had, of course, not the least inkling of what a child might be, what clothing was, what stuff might be be hanging loosely from the child and covering her (it was a her, he was sure of that), what hair hanging in tresses from the head could possibly mean and why the creature, the child, was sobbing.

He was about to take the precaution of killing it before examining it more closely when it moved up to him, slowly, cautiously, and before he could say or do anything it embraced him with the sort of gentility that reminded him of his mother and her teats way back in his almost forgotten infancy.

And when he looked at it more closely he detected moisture running from its eyes down hairless cheeks.

“Thank goodness I’ve found someone,” said the child in words that Chowchow would never understander even if he lived to be a hundred, “but my uncle made a really fancy machine that sent me here, and I don’t know how to get back home… I’m so miserable, so very very miserable.”

And the child wept openly as it clung to him.

© Peter Rogerson 11.11.19