by Jon Scieszka
FOUR
We followed the three girls up a winding path through the jungle. They walked quickly and silently. We had to run, hop, and jump to keep up with them.
“Ouch ... oooch ... ahhh ... eee...” Sam yelped with every step. “My feet are killing me.”
“Invent shoes,” said Fred.
“And I hope they work better than these pants,” I said.
Weird jungle noises surrounded us. Thorny branches scratched us. Sharp stones poked our feet. In five minutes we were bleeding, sore-footed, and exhausted.
The girls hiked along like they were strolling down a sidewalk.
“Are we there yet?” moaned Sam.
“I’m hungry,” said Fred.
“I’m thirsty,” I said.
And suddenly we were there—standing at the edge of a clearing, staring at an opening in the white rock cliff.
“A real cave,” I said.
“Real cavemen,”., said Sam. “Who will gladly make us their leaders, once we bring them civilization.”
Nat-Li motioned for us to sit down outside. Sam and I sat. Lin-Say pushed Fred’s head and motioned for him to sit too.
“Okay, okay. Don’t get so pushy,” said Fred.
Lin-Say made a face and imitated Fred. “O-kay o-kay.”
Jos-Feen laughed. Nat-Li ran into the cave.
We looked around the clearing and listened to the sound of voices in the cave. A blue-gray line of smoke from the volcano above us drifted across the bottom edge of the sun. A very large bird flew in circles high above us.
Fred looked around. “I don’t know, you guys. , This looks a bit strange. Where is everybody? What’s -taking so long? They’re probably trying to decide whether to roast us or boil us. I wish I still had my Swiss army knife.”
“You are so paranoid,” said Sam. “I’m sure Nat-Li went to tell the leader of her clan that she found three magical guys. He’s probably just getting dressed up in his best outfit to greet us and make a good impression. Primitive man believed in magic. So try to act magical.”
“O-kay o-kay,” said Lin-Say.
Nat-Li appeared at the mouth of the cave and called, “Joe Sam Fred.”
Standing next to her was a figure dressed, just as Sam had predicted, in what was definitely the clan’s best outfit. It was a giant bearskin cape, trimmed with feathers and topped with a bear-mask hood complete with what looked like the original owner’s teeth.
“Aha—their leader,” said Sam. “Let me do the talking.”
We stood up and approached the scary-looking bear figure, trying our best to act magical.
“Greetings, oh powerful leader,” said Sam, raising one hand, palm out. “We are men of strong magic.” Sam flexed both arms. “Who have come to give you much knowledge.” Sam pointed to his head. “Fire. The wheel. Music. Cartoons.”
The leader didn’t move or make a sound.
“Very impressive,” whispered Fred.
Sam frowned. “And we, uh ... of course, brought you a ... a ... gift!”
The bear leader stared at us.
Sam snatched Fred’s hat off his head and held it out. “Here is the headpiece of our bears—the Cubs. Baby bears, you know. Little guys. Cubs. Gift. Us. You.”
“Hey, that was my best hat,” said Fred.
The leader took the hat and examined it closely, turning it over and pulling at it. The leader took off the bear-head mask and put on Fred’s hat. And we almost dropped dead of surprise. The bearskinned leader was a woman. But that wasn’t the surprise. The surprise was that she was a woman we knew.
“Joe,” gasped Fred. “It’s your mom.”
I blinked my eyes. Except for the bearskin outfit and prehistoric surroundings, it definitely looked like my mom.
“Mom?” I said.
The leader looked startled for a second, then placed her hand on her chest and said, “Ma.”
“Wow,” said Fred. “Listen, I’m sorry about breaking Joe’s lamp and everything and if you can get us back home and out of this Stone Age I’ll never do anything bad with Joe ever again for the rest of my life I mean it. Do you have The Book? Can you do it? Huh? Can you?”
Ma looked over the three of us like she had something in mind for us. Then she said, “Nat-Li,” and pointed to the cave.
Nat-Li took Sam’s hand and led us into the cool, dark cave. It smelled faintly sweet, like dried flowers and cooking soup. Small fires lit the huge inside and cast strange shadows on the rock walls. We stumbled along in a line behind Nat-Li to the back of the cave. I could just barely see people around the fires as my eyes adjusted to the dim light inside.
“Joe, I will never again say anything bad about - your mom as long as I live,” said Fred.
We came to a smaller cave off the main cave. Nat-Li motioned for us to go first.
“I can’t believe she’s here to save us.”
“I don’t know, Fred,” I said. “I don’t really think that’s my mom. She seems a little ... different, you know?”
Sam, Fred, and I stepped into the smaller cave.
“Oh, she’s just doing that because she has to pretend she doesn’t know us in front of everybody else.”
Then we heard a wooden clunk sound behind us.
We turned around and saw Nat-Li, Lin-Say, and Jos-Feen smiling at us from the other side of huge wooden bars that had been roped together.
“We’re trapped,” yelled Fred. “Let us out, you cannibals!”
“O-kay o-kay,” said Lin-Say.
Jos-Feen and Nat-Li looked at us in a hungry sort of way.
“So much for social taboos,” said Sam.
Fred and I shook the bars. They didn’t budge an inch.
Ma stood with her arms folded across her chest and her new Cubs hat sitting crazily on the top of her wild hair, eyeing us carefully. She looked like she definitely had something in mind for us.
FIVE
We were prisoners in the cave. But something was funny. No one was really treating us like prisoners. We were more like guests of honor.
Nat-Li brought us shirt-and-pants kinds of things made out of skin and fur. Jos-Feen brought us hot vegetable soup in wooden bowls.
“This isn’t so bad afer all,” said Fred, slurping. down the last of his soup. “I guess they don’t need much of our help with fire, cooking, clothes, and all of that civilization stuff.”
“So why are they keeping us in here and treating us so nicely?” said Sam.
I had an idea why, but it involved human sacrifice and wasn’t very appetizing. “Let’s think,” I said. “A picture of a cave painting got us here, so a cave painting can probably get us home. We’re already in a cave. All we have to do is find the painting.”
“How about back there?” said Fred, nodding toward the shadows at the back of our cave.
“Prehistoric people believed paintings had magical powers to control things like the animals they hunted,” said Sam. “They wouldn’t put us in the same place as their most powerful magic. The painting is probably somewhere out there in the big cave.”
I looked out through the wooden bars. The main cave was as big as Grand Central Station. And it kind of looked like it too. The side walls curved up into the darkness. It was too dark to see if there were any paintings on the walls.
“If I had my saw we could be out of here in five minutes,” said Sam.
“If I had my F-16 we could be out of here in five seconds,” said Fred.
I watched groups of people moving from fire to fire. That’s when it struck me.
“Hey, you know what’s strange?” I said.
“Yeah. Sitting around in a cave dressed like Fred Flintstone is pretty strange,” said Fred.
“No. I mean about these people. They’re all girls. I haven’t seen one guy yet.”
Sam looked out the bars next to me. “You’re right. No guys. Maybe they’re some kind of cave Amazons. But I’ve never heard of that before.”
“You haven’t heard of a lot of things before,
” said Fred. “Like time travelers losing all their clothes. Do Amazons eat people?”
“Not to my recollection,” said Sam, adjusting his glasses in that scholarly way of his. “But now I would recommend that we definitely escape as soon as possible because Amazons were not really fond of guys in general.”
“That settles it,” said Fred. “We’re out of here.” And he started tugging on the bars.
Sam picked up a stick and started scratching in the sand as he mumbled to himself. “If one of us can saw through half a bar with a sharp stone in 20 minutes, and we’ need to saw through 4 bars to escape, it should take us ... 20 minutes times 4 bars times 2 halves ... 160 minutes of sawing. But if we had 3 sharp stones and all 3 of us sawed at the same time, that would be ...”
“Maybe I could show them the straw trick and impress them enough so they’ll at least let us look around the cave,” I said.
“Uh-oh,” said Fred. “Forget the math and the magic. It looks like we’ve got visitors.”
The main entrance to the cave was suddenly lit by torches. Ma, Nat-Li, Lin-Say, and Jos-Feen led the pack of cavewomen over to our cage. The flickering torchlight cast evil-looking shadows on everyone’s face. Ma smiled and gave us the same look I’ve seen Fred give a slice of pizza.
Ma motioned. The wooden bars swung up and into the darkness. The cavewomen surrounded us and we followed Ma toward the entrance.
“If you see a cave painting, make a run for it,” I called over my shoulder to Fred and Sam.
“Shhh,” said Fred. “Don’t give away the plan.”
Nat-Li, walking next to us, smiled.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Sam. “They can’t understand a word we say. We could tell them we were planning to run away,or we could tell them the Pledge of Allegiance. It would all sound the same to them. Okay, Lin-Say?”
Lin-Say nodded and smiled, “O-kay.”
Fred started thinking. You can always tell when Fred’s thinking because he sticks his tongue out.
“They don’t understand what we say ... but they do understand how we say ... I’ve got it.”
We approached the entrance and saw the reddish orange light of sunset across the sky. Someone was slowly beating a drum.
“The oldest trick in the book,” said Fred smiling.
“Not the old What’s-that-on-your-shirt? gag,” said Sam.
“No, no,” said Fred. “The old What’s-that-behind-you? gag.”
The drum beat louder and a little faster.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“They won’t understand what we say, but they will understand how we say something.”
“So?” I said, trying to ignore the drumbeat.
“When I give the signal, we all point to the left, look scared out of our minds, and yell, ‘Oh, no! Woolly mammoth!’ ” said Fred. “They turn to look left. We run right.”
Nat-Li, Lin-Say, and Jos-Feen walked next to us, watching Fred closely and listening to every word.
“That is so stupid,” said Sam. “It will never work. It’s too simple.”
“Do you have a better idea, Archimedes?” said Fred.
Ma led the way out of the cave. The sky glowed an amazing orange and purple in the west. A full yellow moon was just beginning to rise in the east. Two women pounded the beat on a huge drum. A crackling fire blazed in the middle of a circle of stones. The flames shot up ten feet high and sent sparks flying up out of sight. The drum beat faster. I looked at Fred. The drum beat faster. Sam looked at Fred. The drum beat faster. Ma raised her hand. The drum stopped.
In the sudden silence, Fred nodded his head.
Fred, Sam, and I pointed to our left and all together yelled, “Oh, no! Woolly mammoth!”
And, believe it or not, everyone looked to the left. We looked at each other for one surprised split second, and then ran for the woods on our right. We crashed blindly through dead sticks and a tangle of vines and bushes. The dim light grew even dimmer under the trees and giant ferns. We heard the cavewomen’s surprised yells behind us. The drum started pounding again.
We dodged around black shapes and under hanging things we could only half see, running until the drumbeat began to fade. We turned to avoid something large and dark in front of us and suddenly found ourselves running in midair.
We landed hard.
Everything went black.
SIX
Ohhh, my aching head,” moaned Sam’s voice.
“Aaaahhhh,” groaned Fred’s voice.
“We’re alive,” I said.
“Are you sure?” said Sam. “My head is pounding. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. And I can’t see a thing.”
I tried to move but couldn’t. Something was weighing me down.
“You can hear, can’t you?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“So we’re not dead.”
“But it sure smells like something died,” said Fred.
I gave a sniff. It smelled like two or three things had died ... and taken their old sneakers off at the same time.
“Maybe we are dead,” said Sam. “Maybe this is what being dead is like—all dark and quiet and smelly.”
Fred and I thought about this for a few dark, quiet, and smelly moments. It was not a comforting thought.
“What’s that noise?” said Fred.
We strained to hear a faint murmuring sound.
“Sounds like human voices,” I said.
We listened again.
“It is human voices,” said Sam. He screamed, “Help! Help! We’re not dead. Get us out of here!”
“Uh, Sam,” I said.
“Yes?”
“What if they’re not friendly people?”
“Oh, right. I didn’t think of that.”
“Too late,” said Fred’s voice. “Here they come, whoever they are.”
We held our breath and listened to the noises get louder and closer. Now it didn’t sound so much like human voices. Now it sounded more like animal noises.
“Sounds like monkeys,” said Sam. “Maybe it’s a band of wild apes. Maybe it’s a bunch of hungry cave bears. Maybe it’s—”
“Shhhh,” I whispered. “Maybe they’ll go away.”
And at that very second, the smelly thing covering us was pulled back. Cool air and faint light washed over us. We found ourselves face to face with a big hairy ape.
“Ahhhhhhhhhh!” Sam, Fred, and I all screamed together.
The hairy ape jumped back.
Without the heavy cover on us, we found we could sit up and move again ... though not too swiftly. I still felt like I just stepped off a bad amusement park ride. Our eyes adjusted to the light. I looked around and figured we must have been knocked out all night. We were sitting in a dirt pit covered with a low roof made from a bunch of logs piled on a fallen tree. There was one hole in the roof where we must have fallen through, and another that looked like a small doorway near the ground.
A whole group of hairy ape-men with ragged animal skins tied on them surrounded us. They looked us over like we were monkeys in the zoo.
“Hey, they’re caveguys,” said Fred.
“The same guys we saw running from the girls’ fake dinosaur,” said Sam.
I looked at the scruffy bunch of guys. The biggest one. with the beard definitely looked familiar. He approached us cautiously, making noises that sounded like “Hoot, hoot.” He held out one gnarly hand, black with dirt.
I took his hand and shook it. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Hoot. My name is Joe. Sorry to drop in on your pit—er, house here.”
Dirty bits of hide and fur hung from sticks. Piles of dead leaves covered the dirt floor. And the whole place smelled like a combination of old socks, bad cheese, and public bathrooms. “Reminds me of your room, Fred.”
The bearded guy wiggled my hand and hooted again. The rest of his gang shuffled their feet in the dirt and hooted along.
“Hoot, hoot, to you too,” I said. “Oh, and these are my friends Fred and Sam.”
> The big guy pointed to Fred and Sam. “Ug a ug.”
“Close enough,” I said.
The big guy put his hand on his chest and said, “Duh.”
“No kidding,” said Sam.
“Duh,” the caveguy repeated.
I said, “Duh. Okay, Duh. Too bad about your name, but thanks for letting us use your ... uh, place.” I looked around the pit again. It really was a pit.
“No chance these guys would have The Book,” said Fred.
“Boog?” said Duh.
“Yeah, a book. You know. A thing about this big.” Fred held out two hands pressed together. “With pages. A magic book.”
“Boog. Boog.” The leader, Duh motioned to one of the other men. He started digging under a pile of sticks and dirt in the back of the pit.
“I can’t believe it,” said Sam. “These guys live in a hole in the ground and they have The Book? Maybe they aren’t as dumb as they look.”
The little guy found what he was looking for and brought it to Duh.
“You just never know with magic,” I said.
Duh took the animal skin wrap and handed it to me and smiled. “Boog.”
Joe, Sam, and I crowded around the package.
“Hello magic book. Good-bye Stone Age,” cheered Fred. “I never thought I could be this happy to get back to my math homework.”
I unwrapped the skin as fast as I could and held up a completely rotten, maggot-covered ... piece of meat.
Duh smiled and nodded. “Boog.” He took a bite, rubbed his stomach, and handed it to us again. “Boog.”
Fred, Sam, and I gagged and started crawling for fresh air through the hole in the low roof.
We hit the space between two logs at the same time and all tried to get out first. The caveguys grabbed us and pulled us back.
Duh pointed outside and shook his head, “Ug Caa.” He made a weird face with his teeth showing and his hands in front of him like claws. “Ug Caa.”
