Looking down at the tracks, Aidan realized that Dobro wasn’t leaving any. There were animal tracks and boot tracks, but there were no barefoot human tracks! Aidan caught up with Dobro and looked closely at his feet as he skipped along. He wasn’t just walking on the tips of his long toes; he was walking on two toes per foot. With each step he dragged his toes, leaving a paired track that looked remarkably similar to a hog track.
“Dobro!” Aidan marveled. He was breaking the trackers’ silence, but he couldn’t help himself. “You’re making hog tracks!”
Dobro quickly raised a finger to his lips but didn’t stop hopping. “’Course I am,” he whispered. “I ain’t going to leave five-toe feechie prints where civilizers can see them. I got enough civilizers in my life already.”
Aidan grabbed Steren’s tunic. “Look,” he whispered, pointing down at the trail, “half of those hog tracks are Dobro’s.” They watched Dobro take a few more steps. His irregular stride—short, long, short, long—was his way of mimicking a four-footed gait with only two feet. Suddenly the two civilizers were more interested in Dobro’s unique skill than in the hunt itself. “Can you do any other tracks?” asked Steren.
“I can do wolf tracks,” answered Dobro. On either foot he folded his small toe over the toe next to it and walked a few steps on the balls of his feet, producing the track of the red wolf—four toes over a single, broad footpad.
“Amazing,” gasped Steren.
“I can do a bunny, too,” said Dobro, “but it hurts a little bit.” He cracked his knuckles, flipped upside down with his feet straight up in the air, and walked a few steps on his fingers. The palms of his hands didn’t touch the ground; his whole weight was supported by two thumbs and two forefingers, his hands only a few inches apart. The flats of his thumbs made tracks like a rabbit’s long thumper feet, and his forefinger tips made the tiny front paws.
The civilizers stood flabbergasted at Dobro’s unheard-of talent. But the feechie was anxious to get on with the adventure. “That’s enough trickifying,” he announced. “Let’s get on to the hog wallow.”
They hadn’t gone another fifty strides before the boar’s tracks veered left and disappeared from the River Trail. “What’d I tell you?” whispered Dobro, pointing through the underbrush to a spot they couldn’t see. “That boar hog is lazying in the greenbog.”
Dobro double-checked the vine rope coiled at his waist, then scampered up the nearest loblolly bay. Aidan climbed the tree after him and motioned for Steren to follow. Steren was right behind, eager for adventure, but when Dobro leaped like a squirrel from the treetop to a nearby spruce pine, Steren stopped where he was. “He’s crazy,” he observed flatly.
Aidan chuckled. “You’re right about that. But he still knows the best way to travel through a swamp. You just follow me. I’ll follow him.” Aidan edged out on the limb, leaped from the same spot Dobro had leaped from, and landed exactly where Dobro landed. Steren took a deep breath, closed one eye, and made the same soaring leap after him.
Flying from spruce pine to magnolia to laurel oak to bay tree, the civilizers grew more and more comfortable with the feechie’s dizzying, exhilarating mode of crossing the bottomland. Here, forty feet or more above the forest floor, they were high above the mosquitoes and other biting, stinging bugs that would usually torment them in the swampy environs of the River Tam. And the air up so high was clearer and almost breezy compared to the heavy air at ground level.
When they paused a moment to rest, Aidan nudged Steren and pointed at the ground. “Look down,” he whispered.
“I don’t think so!” answered Steren. As exhilarating as this jaunt through the treetops had been, he wasn’t completely over his fear of heights. “I’d better not look down.”
But Aidan insisted, and when Steren looked, he saw that the dense, rough cover of hoorah bush and saw palmetto had given way to a rolling mat of vibrant yellow-green. “A peat bog!” he exclaimed. Aidan and Dobro quickly shushed him, for if the boar had gone to its wallow as Dobro had said, he might be close enough to hear.
But Aidan couldn’t begrudge Steren’s enthusiasm. He hardly knew a more delightful place than a peat bog, where sphagnum moss piled layer on layer, blanketing the ground like a bright green blizzard. The mat was always growing, always layering on a new green surface, smothering the layers below, which partially rotted into a black, spongy muck. This bog had been growing for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, a fraction of an inch every year, and the green mat of moss the boys could see from the treetops floated a full three feet above the waterlogged soil that supported it.
While Aidan and Steren admired the rolling green sea below them, Dobro scouted the area for the hog. Swiftly and soundlessly, he soared from treetop to treetop.
It wasn’t long before Dobro came swinging back to Aidan’s and Steren’s tree. “He’s here, all right,” he whispered. “Follow me.” He led the way across the broad canopies of five gum trees before he gestured for them to be still. Aidan looked to the ground directly below him. There lay the hog on its side, as massive and black as the stump of one of the swell-buttressed gum trees that grew here in the bottomlands. The ground beneath his body was indented and rose around his mass on all sides, as if the hog were resting on a green feather mattress. Even from their perch in the tree, the hunters could hear the hog—a long, snuffling, grunting snore. His huge ear, flat and broad, flapped over his eye like a mule blinder. His legs lurched occasionally. In his dreams he was still running.
Dobro put one hand on Aidan’s shoulder and the other on Steren’s and pulled them in close. “Here’s how it’s going to work, boys: When I give you the sign, we all three going to drop on him. I’m gonna tie him up,” whispered Dobro, “and your job’s to hold him still.” Steren shot a doubtful look in Aidan’s direction.
“Aidan,” continued Dobro, “you catch his left earflap. Sturn, you get the right’un.”
Steren tried to butt in, but Dobro was making an important point and wouldn’t be interrupted. “Once you grab aholt, you got to keep aholt.” He clenched both fists in a gesture of determination. “Like you’re squeezing all the goodie out of a duck tater.” The civilizers had never squeezed a duck tater, but they got the idea nevertheless. “’Cause if you let go of your ear, things ain’t gonna go too well for the feller’s still got holt of the other ear.
“Aidan, you remember Chief Gergo, don’t you?” Dobro held up three fingers in imitation of the three-fingered hand of his chieftain. “His hunting partner lost his holt on a boar hog about like this one.” He chomped his teeth meaningfully and gave the civilizers a slow wink.
“Er, Dobro,” said Prince Steren, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible, “couldn’t we just rope him from here? I believe your rope will reach.”
Dobro gave an exasperated sigh and shook his head. “Where’s the sport in that?” he asked. And without waiting for an answer, he began counting for the jump signal: “One … two…”
Steren jumped up to protest Dobro’s plan, but in doing so, he lost his footing and tumbled out of the tree. Dobro whistled as he watched the prince hurtle toward the moss twenty feet below. “That feller’s so bloodthirsty he can’t even wait for three!” he whooped. By the time Steren hit the turf, he had done a full flip. His feet landed hard on a soft spot in the ground, and he punched all the way through the green moss mat and into black muck up to his armpits.
The boar, of course, was awakened by the commotion and leaped to his feet with a piercing squeal and a roaring grunt. Or he tried to leap. The ground was so springy and yielding that he had to rock his great mass back and forth a couple of times to get his feet under him. Meanwhile, Aidan and Dobro flew out of the tree themselves to come to the rescue of the prince, who was struggling with little success to free himself from the deep peat while the boar decided whether to attack or flee.
Aidan landed just behind the hog’s left shoulder; to his relief, he didn’t go through the moss as Prince Steren had. Aidan grabbed hold of
the hog’s left ear and dug his boot heels into the soft turf. Dobro grabbed the hog’s tail and held on like grim death. But, as Dobro had said earlier, it would take more than two hunters to bring down a hog that size. As the boar struggled to his feet, the ground beneath the struggling pile of hog and human rippled in waves, as if an earthquake had hit the bottomlands. The hog wheeled around, tossing his head in Aidan’s direction, trying to slash his attacker to ribbons. Aidan managed to stay out of reach of the flashing tusks, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep his grip.
Dobro was having a hard go of it himself; he had already been kicked four or five times by the boar’s flying hooves, and they were just getting started. But he wasn’t ready to give up yet. “Squeeze that earflap!” called Dobro over the grunting and squealing. “Squeeze it like a duck tater.”
“Steren!” called Aidan. “Steren, we need you!”
The hog was running across the bog now, crazed with terror and fury. Aidan had tried to dig in, but he was being dragged across the trembling turf. The skinny feechie was being trailed along behind the great boar like a flag behind a racing wagon, his feet hardly touching the ground.
Steren managed to free himself from the peat and charged across the greenbog to his friends’ aid. He caught up just at the bog’s edge. The hog had punched a foreleg through a soft spot in the turf and was struggling to free himself when Steren caught up and latched himself to the hog’s right ear. The two big civilizers were able to pin the hog to the turf long enough for Dobro to whirl in and tie the hog’s four legs together. The boar struggled against his bindings, squealing and harrumphing, thrashing his head back and forth, wanting to slash something—anything—wide open. But Dobro’s knots were sure.
The feechie disappeared into a stand of hardwood near the edge of the greenbog and came back with an oak sapling he had hurriedly cut down with a stone saw he kept in his side pouch. “Tote-pole,” he explained, and he began to stick the pole between the boar’s knees just below the bindings, first the front knees, then through to the back. As he worked, he smiled at the civilizers. “Aidan, you got to tell Sturn about the time you come into the feechie camp on a tote-pole, just like this boar hog.” Aidan laughed as he remembered the day he was captured by Rabbo Flatbottom and Jonko Backwater in the magnolia jumble near the Bayberry Swamp.
“Well, boys,” said Dobro when the hog was secured to the tote-pole, “you look stout enough to get this big boy home without no help from a scrawny feechie like me. I’m ready to see my mama. Sturn, it was a pleasure. Aidan, don’t be a stranger.”
With that, the feechie boy disappeared into the forest. And the civilizers contemplated the long trip back to the horses with their massive, bristling, struggling prize.
Chapter Three
The Hunt Feast
King Darrow’s trophy room echoed with the chatter of a dozen separate conversations as the hunting party relived the previous day’s adventure in Tamside Forest. Servants were still loading the tables with side dishes and making last-minute preparations before the arrival of the king and chief huntsmen and the presentation of the game.
A hunt feast was the least formal of the regular feasts held at Tambluff Castle. The feasters—noblemen and servants alike—didn’t wear their usual festal robes, but rather their hunting tunics and muddy hunting boots. Hunting dogs milled about the room, eagerly awaiting their own portion of roast boar, for they had been participants in the hunt, too, and were entitled to a place at the feast.
Lord Cuthbert was the only feaster who had not been a member of the hunting party. The oldest of Corenwald’s Four and Twenty Noblemen, Cuthbert had grown too blind to gallop through the forest. But he was still a regular at the hunt feasts. On this night he sat between Lord Cleland and Lord Radnor, who filled him in on the details of the hunt.
“Oh, I wish you could have been there, Bertie!” Cleland enthused. His eyes were alight with the excitement of the hunt. “There has never been such a boar hunt in Corenwald!”
“We were loping through the bottomlands,” began Radnor, “the king and Wendell out in front, the boar dogs out in front of them.” Old Cuthbert leaned forward in his chair and gazed into the middle distance as he pictured the scene he had witnessed so many times with his own eyes.
Radnor continued. “We hadn’t been in the forest an hour before the dogs began to sing.” Lord Cuthbert smiled wistfully at the memory of the dogs’ throaty howl echoing in the cypress.
“We spurred our horses to catch up to the dogs,” said Cleland, leaning forward in his chair as if he were still in the saddle.
“We found them in a little clearing,” Radnor interrupted, unable to contain his enthusiasm, “and we saw that it wasn’t one hog the dogs had jumped but a whole herd of them.”
“A tribe of them,” agreed Cleland. “A dozen or more yearling pigs, seven or eight sows, and the biggest, blackest boar you ever saw.”
“He looked more like a black bull than a boar, he was so big,” added Radnor. “Except for those tusks. No bull ever had slashers like that.”
Cleland picked up the story again. “So we were pressing this herd of hogs—hard after them—and it was one big tangle, I tell you. There were more hogs than dogs, and the hounds couldn’t agree which one they should bay up.”
Cuthbert listened intently. He imagined himself astride a hunting horse, crashing through the forests and swamps again.
“Meanwhile,” said Radnor, “the big boar decided it was time to save his own bristly hide and let the women and children fend for themselves.”
“Not very gentlemanly of him,” remarked Cuthbert.
“Maybe not,” answered Cleland, “but I’ve never been run down by a pack of boar dogs, so I won’t say one way or another.”
“He broke off from the herd and came barreling back through the dogs and horses and men,” said Radnor, nearly out of his seat now. “Two of the dogs lunged at him, but he sent them flying. All the dogs stayed with the herd and let the daddy boar run back downriver.”
Cuthbert’s face fell with disappointment. The boar dogs’ cowardice broke his heart.
“Meanwhile, Aidan and Prince Steren wheeled their horses around and lit out after the boar hog,” continued Radnor.
Cuthbert snorted at the very idea. “Without dogs?” he huffed. “What did they think they were going to do with him if they caught him?”
“We’re coming to that,” answered Radnor. “We pressed the chase, and in the end King Darrow managed to kill a couple of the yearling pigs.”
“Well, they’ll be better eating than a tough old boar hog anyway,” Cuthbert remarked by way of consolation.
“But that’s not all,” said Cleland. “When we got back to the castle, Aidan and Steren were waiting for us.”
“And they had the big boar hog,” added Radnor.
“Alive.” Cleland paused for effect. “Somehow they had managed to catch the boar, tie him up, and carry him out of the woods on a sapling pole.”
Cuthbert stared open-mouthed in Cleland’s direction. “Impossible!” he said at last. “I don’t believe you. Two boys can’t catch a wild boar alive. Not without dogs.”
“Hard to believe, Cuthbert, I know,” said Radnor. “I wouldn’t believe it either if I hadn’t seen the hog with my own eyes.”
“They won’t say how they did it,” added Cleland. “They say it’s a secret.”
Cuthbert slumped back in his chair, amazed by what he had been told.
“I tell you, that Errolson boy is something special,” said Radnor. “Every time I turn around, he’s done something I never thought anybody could do.”
“Well, don’t forget,” said Cleland, “it wasn’t just Aidan. The prince was with him too.”
Radnor raised his eyebrows. “You tell me, Cleland. Do you really think the prince would have come back with the hog if he hadn’t been with Aidan Errolson?”
The conversation was cut short by the sound of a hunting horn, the sign that King Darrow would b
e taking his place at the head table along with the chief huntsmen—the hunters who had most distinguished themselves in the previous day’s outing. And to no one’s surprise, the chief huntsmen for this feast were Prince Steren and Aidan Errolson.
As the king and the two boys entered the trophy room, the feasters cheered raucously and stomped their heavy boots. Even the hunting dogs howled and wagged themselves sideways. The courtiers had grown to love Aidan almost as much as they loved their king. In three short years, Aidan had made himself a regular at the head table during hunt feasts. Time after time, his fellow hunters had elected him chief huntsman and seated him at the king’s right hand.
“There’s a surprise!” called one of the noblemen. “Aidan Errolson is at the head table again!”
“It’s the king of the forest!” shouted another. “And King Darrow too!”
The feasters were in a back-slapping good humor, ready to laugh and enjoy themselves, and they laughed heartily at these and similar jokes. King Darrow stretched his mouth into a smile—or something like it—but clearly he was not as amused as the other feasters at this line of jesting. In the past few months, Darrow had grown cold toward the young hero he had brought to his court. He no longer joined in when his noblemen sang Aidan’s praises.
“One of these hunt feasts, we’re going to put King Darrow at Aidan’s right hand!” called another feaster.
Aidan watched Darrow’s eyes narrow even as the lower half of his face continued to smile. He saw the king’s jaw working as he ground his back teeth. Aidan quickly wiped the smile from his own face, hoping to discourage further jokes in this vein.
But immediately after the seating of the king and chief huntsmen came the presentation of the game, and with it came further reason for the king to be annoyed. Two liveried servants brought out the yearling pigs killed by Darrow’s hunting party. Each was arranged in a bed of greenery on a silver platter, and each had an apple in its mouth. The feasters applauded politely as the pigs were placed on the head table in front of the king. They were nothing to be ashamed of, certainly. Two yearling pigs constituted a respectable bag for a morning’s hunt.
The Secret of the Swamp King Page 2
