by Lev Grossman
And Uncle Herbert had told her to get off the train, right at the start, and she hadn’t. If she wasn’t sure what to do, she would just have to guess based on what she did know and live with the consequences.
Probably that was an important life lesson she was supposed to be learning from this whole experience. Which was fine, she guessed, though she hoped there weren’t too many more of them.
“Okay, let’s stop,” she said. “Let’s find out what’s going on.”
12
Kate Finds Out What’s Going On
SO THEY THROTTLED THE SILVER ARROW DOWN, AND fiddled with the reversing lever, and applied the brakes, and Kate took her ticket-puncher and straightened her conductor’s hat and went back to the passenger cars.
They were chugging through a pine forest now, and the air smelled pleasantly like their garage had after the time Kate spilled turpentine there. They pulled up at a plain cement platform, and Kate threw the big brass lever that opened the doors.
Something was different. Usually there was a sign on the platform saying where they were, but this time Kate couldn’t see one anywhere.
Six or seven gray squirrels, a huge gray pig, and a couple of brown snakes waited on the platform. On the ground and the branches overhead sat a whole flock of black birds with a slight iridescent rainbow shine to their wings that reminded Kate of an oil slick.
She recognized the birds. They were sparrows—or no, not sparrows, starlings! That’s what they were. None of the creatures moved. They just sat there staring at her.
Then she realized that something else was different, too. None of them were holding tickets.
“So… hi,” Kate said.
The giant pig trotted forward and stood right in front of her. He really was unbelievably big, as tall as she was, and he looked much more fit somehow than your average pig. In fact, he seemed to be completely made out of muscle.
That’s not a pig at all, Kate thought. That must be a wild boar. She’d never seen one in real life. He had tiny eyes and a wet nose and huge upward-thrusting yellow tusks.
Kate cleared her throat. “Tickets, please.”
The boar just stood there in front of her. She tried again.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t ride the train without a ticket.”
“I don’t have a ticket,” the boar said in a deep voice.
“Well,” Kate said slowly, “I guess you can’t ride the train, then.”
“Then I guess we have a problem.”
Kate frowned. She wasn’t immediately warming to this boar.
“I am sorry to have to say this,” she said, “but it more seems like you have a problem.”
“You don’t sound very sorry,” chittered a squirrel.
So that’s how it’s going to be, Kate thought. She folded her arms with more firmness than she really felt.
“I really am sorry, but I don’t make the rules. If it’s that important, why don’t you just go and get tickets and come back? I’m sure we’ll be back here soon.”
That was a fib—she wasn’t sure at all—but she really wanted to bring this conversation to an end. She stepped back into the train and closed the doors.
But the doors didn’t close, because the boar stuck his huge head right in between them. He had large, furry ears and not the slightest trace of a neck.
“I don’t want a ticket,” he said. “I want to get on this train. Now be a good girl and open the door.”
They stared at each other. He didn’t seem to be even the slightest bit bothered by having the doors closed on his head. Kate thought about it: Really, who would it hurt if she let them on? It’s not like she needed their money. (If animals even had money. She wondered again how exactly they got their tickets.) Plus this boar weighed about five times what she did and could probably kill her in about ten seconds, even taking into account the awesome kicking power of her new steel-capped boots.
One of the brown snakes pushed forward between the boar’s hooves.
“Look, I can see you’re in a tough position.” The snake’s voice was calm and reasonable and almost sympathetic. “You’re on a tight schedule. You have to get this train moving. But thing is, we’ve got all day, and we’re not going to let this train go till you let us on. You can’t win, so why not just let it slide and we’ll all be on our way?”
“Trust us,” a squirrel said, “you don’t want to make an issue out of this.”
It would’ve been so easy to give in—giving in was almost always the easiest thing, in Kate’s experience. The only problem was—what was the problem? It felt wrong. This was her train. Uncle Herbert had given it to her, and it was the first thing ever that was well and truly her responsibility. It came with rules, and the rule was that you had to have a ticket. Maybe it was a stupid rule, but that was up to her, not these animals. It was time to decide whether she was going to let herself be bullied.
And when she realized that, she realized that she’d already decided.
“But I don’t trust you. Not in the slightest.” She wished her voice weren’t shaking, but it was. “And I’m not making an issue out of this, it’s already an issue. Get off my train, please. Right now.”
Kate pointed in the direction of “off the train,” in case that made it clearer. She stared into the boar’s tiny orange eyes. She wished Tom were there.
The boar didn’t move. Instead he snorted at her:
“RONK!”
The sound was deafening—like an explosion. She jumped three feet backward out of sheer terror.
“RONK RONK RONK RONK RONK!”
Kate had gotten so used to animals talking politely that she’d almost forgotten they were wild creatures. They weren’t tame. They weren’t safe. The boar strained at the doors to get at her. He tossed his head viciously, with those tusks, and Kate cowered back even farther. She’d thought she wanted this—she’d thought she wanted an adventure—but she hadn’t thought at all about how scary it would be! She hadn’t thought about the fact that when you were in it, you didn’t know how it would end! For all you knew you could end up gored and trampled by an angry boar far from home and never see your parents again—
“What on earth do you think you’re doing? Get your fat head out of those doors!”
The voice came from behind Kate.
Kate didn’t dare take her eyes off the boar. But as she watched, an incredible thing happened to him. The boar’s little eyes went as wide as they could go, and his huge, snorting face showed an expression Kate hadn’t thought it was capable of.
It was fear. Kate risked a glance behind her. The voice belonged to the porcupine.
His black-and-white danger-striped quills were rattling and sticking up from his body in a huge, ridiculous ruff. It was like a deadly case of bedhead. He was rude, and sulky, and thoroughly unpleasant, and Kate had never been so glad to see anyone in her whole life.
The porcupine took a step forward. The boar took a step backward—and Kate slammed the doors shut in his big, fat face.
The engine chuffed. The train pulled out of the station. Kate’s knees felt weak. She sank down onto the floor.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
“I did not want him on this train!” She hugged herself.
“You were right,” the porcupine said. “He didn’t belong here.”
The porcupine’s quills were lying back down. He must be able to control them, she thought.
“I’m just glad I didn’t have to quill him,” he said, perfectly calmly. “Takes weeks to grow back a good quill.”
“Does it hurt? When you use one?”
“A little. Like having a hair pulled out. Now, why don’t you come with me to the dining car? You look pale. I’ll bet you haven’t had any lunch.”
13
The Station That Wasn’t There
WHEN KATE GOT TO THE DINING CAR, SHE WAS AMAZED to see the other animals from the library—the fishing cat, the green snake, and the heron—a
ll sitting around a table together, chatting away like old friends. Apparently they’d bonded over the baby pangolin.
He was still asleep, but they’d made a nest for him in a fruit bowl. They were cooing over him and taking turns stroking him.
“Everything all right?” the heron said.
“Fine. No thanks to any of you.” The porcupine was impressively unruffled by his confrontation with the boar. Kate supposed that getting into fights with people was probably something that happened to him on a fairly routine basis. “How’s the baby?”
“Fantastic! This is absolutely the cutest non-heron baby I have ever seen!”
“Shh!” the snake hissed. “You’ll wake him.”
Kate still found herself putting as much distance as politeness would allow between herself and the snake.
“How do you know he’s a him?” Kate said.
All the animals stared at her.
“She can’t tell,” the snake hissed.
“It must be an animal thing,” said the heron.
“Humans are animals,” Kate said a little defensively.
“Of course you are,” the fishing cat said. “But you’ve spent so much time pretending you’re not, you’ve lost the knack.”
The heron tactfully changed the subject. “Did you know that baby pangolins are called pangopups?” she said.
“That’s a stupid name,” the snake hissed.
“They should call them pangolings,” the fishing cat said. “Or pangolini!”
“Baby porcupines are called porcupettes,” the porcupine said with a shudder of disgust. “I don’t see why humans think they get to name everything. They’re not even very good at it. Electric eels—they’re not even eels. In Australia there’s a spider called a sparklemuffin!”
“And what about hellbenders?” the snake said. “Do they bend hell? Not even slightly.”
“I wish I were called a hellbender,” the cat said. “It’s such a wonderful name. Wasted on a salamander.”
“I don’t understand what just happened.” Kate still felt shaky. “Who were those animals out there?”
“Them?” the porcupine said. “Those were invaders.”
“What were they invading, the train?”
The animals all exchanged a look.
“It’s like this,” the heron said. “As an animal, you have a place where you live and a place in the order of things. You prey on somebody, somebody else preys on you. It’s not always pretty, but it keeps everything in balance.
“But sometimes an animal leaves its place in the world and goes somewhere else. Somewhere where it doesn’t fit in. Often it just dies there because the climate’s wrong or there’s nothing for it to eat—but every once in a while it lucks into a situation where it has lots of things to prey on, and there’s nobody to prey on it. What do you think happens then?”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “It gets really fat and happy and dies of old age?”
“It eats everything in sight! Its population explodes till it’s the only thing left!”
“Oh. So those animals who tried to get on the train were trying to do that?”
“Exactly.”
“It’s just bad form,” the snake said. “I hope you quilled them.”
“I should have!” the porcupine said.
“But some of them—I mean, they were just starlings,” Kate said. “You know. Little birdies!”
Everybody hissed and growled and squawked at this.
“Let me tell you a story about starlings!” the porcupine said. “Starlings originally came from Europe. That’s where they’re supposed to live. But then some nitwit got it into his head that North America should have every bird species mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.”
“Who’s Shakespeare?” the fishing cat asked.
“That is actually kind of a cool idea,” Kate said.
“No, it isn’t! It isn’t ‘cool’! It was a catastrophe! This nitwit released sixty European starlings in New York City, and they mated and bred, and now they’re all over America. There are two hundred million of them!”
“Okay, but what about those squirrels, though?” Kate said. “Little furry gray squirrels!”
“Oh, they went the other way round,” the porcupine said. “Gray squirrels are from America. But then a tourist brought a few home to England because he thought they’d look nice on his country estate. Nice! They have a high old time in England. They eat birds, they kill trees, and they’ve driven the native red squirrels practically to extinction.”
Kate thought about that. It didn’t seem like anybody involved had had such bad intentions, really. They were small gestures. She still thought the Shakespeare thing sounded cool. But then look at what had happened! Everything that was so neatly balanced was ruined. Couldn’t they send the animals back where they’d come from and start over? she wondered. More carefully this time? But how would you catch two hundred million starlings? She doubted she could even catch one.
Or a squirrel. There was no going back. The balance was lost forever.
She sighed. At any rate, she could keep them off her train.
“So what are all the other animals doing here?” she asked. “The ones who have tickets. How do you get tickets, anyway?”
“Oh, they just appear,” the heron said. “I found mine in my nest when I came back from hunting.”
“Mine was inside a fish,” said the cat. “I almost ate it.”
“My ticket was growing from a tree, like a leaf,” said the snake. “Whoever runs the trains must issue them. Or maybe the tickets just issue themselves.”
“But why?” Kate asked. “I mean, why do you need them? You’re not invaders, are you?”
“Course not.” Suddenly the heron sounded oddly embarrassed. “We’re just—you know. We’re migrating. That sort of thing. You know how we animals do that.”
Something about the silence that followed made Kate wonder if she was really getting the whole story. But the train was slowing down again.
“All right,” Kate said. “Excuse me, I think the train needs conducting.”
Walking forward to the passenger cars, she looked out the window and got a shock: The train was now traveling over open water. Miles and miles of gray waves, with no land anywhere. The air was cold and tasted like salt, and she put her conductor’s blazer back on, then went and got the winter coat too.
The train slowed and stopped, right there in the middle of the ocean. She looked around for a station, but there was nothing except water. Swells sloshed around the train’s wheels. Was it a mistake? Had they overshot the platform somehow? She leaned out as far as she could and looked forward, then back. Nothing.
A chilly wind ruffled her hair. She could see her breath in the air.
And what were the train tracks resting on? She looked down but she couldn’t see that, either. Pontoons? Some kind of underwater ridge? She had that same creepy feeling she had at the last stop: Something was off here.
We should go, she thought. She closed the doors—but as soon as the train started again, she heard a shout.
“Wait!” It was Tom, somewhere way down at the other end. “Wait! Stop the train!”
What now? Leaning out, she could see him standing on the flat car, waving frantically and pointing at something in the water. Kate ran back to join him.
He was crouched down, peering over the edge of the flat car into the ocean, so Kate looked too.
“I just saw it,” he said. “A second ago.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It was—”
Something big and white came rushing up at them from underwater. Kate was so shocked she fell over backward. For a second she was sure it was a great white shark leaping out of the water to devour them both in one mouthful.
But that didn’t happen. It wasn’t a shark. It was a polar bear.
The poor thing looked exhausted—she was desperately paddling to keep her black nose above the water. With
the last of her strength, the bear lunged upward and got her head and paws onto the edge of the car.
Kate and Tom grabbed double handfuls of her cold, thick, wet fur and pulled as hard as they could. The bear managed to get a hind foot onto the car, and Kate pulled on that, too. They heaved and heaved, and for a good minute there it felt like the poor thing would never make it, but finally the bear rolled and scraped and lumbered the rest of her body up onto the flat car, and all three of them collapsed, breathing hard.
Kate’s shin burned where she’d skinned it on the edge of the car. The polar bear was sopping wet, and even though she was incredibly heavy, she looked strangely thin for a bear. You could practically see her ribs. She didn’t move. Kate wasn’t even sure she was alive.
“I sure hope you have a ticket,” she said.
14
Tom Was Right
KATE RAN OFF TO THE PASSENGER CARS TO RECRUIT ANY animals who might be strong enough to help move the polar bear. She came back with a mountain lion, a couple of fellow bears, and a squad of very determined badgers, and together they rolled the polar bear onto a blanket and dragged her into the shelter of an empty boxcar. It probably would’ve been impossible if the poor thing hadn’t been half-starved.
She did have a ticket, though, clamped in her powerful jaws.
Kate very carefully extracted it and punched it. She couldn’t help but think that something had gone badly wrong here, but she wasn’t sure exactly what. She got some towels and more blankets from the sleeper car, and together she and Tom dried the bear and got her as warm as they could. Finally Kate fetched a heaping bucket of fish and a big bowl of water from the kitchen and left them on a tray by the bear’s head for when she woke up.
Kate put a wary hand on the polar bear’s cold shoulder. Her fur was coarse and wiry.
