Two-foot scrambled up the guardian tree, swinging from pointed branch to pointed branch, the sap sticking to the pads of her hands. Near the top, she found her goal – a nest of twigs and the occasional stray bit of sheep’s wool, with five eggs inside, one larger than the others. She gathered up all five and put them in her makeshift pouch, then climbed back down to where Four-foot awaited her.
“See, Four-foot? Eggs, just like I told you! You can have these four, but I want this one. It’s a cuckoo, just like me. It doesn’t belong.”
Four-foot devoured his eggs in the manner of his kind, and whined a little when he saw that Two-foot had not yet finished hers. She preferred to delicately poke a hole in one side with a twig or a guardian tree spine, and then suck out its contents. She preferred this way because then none of the egg spilled, and because if she did it right, it left her with a beautiful hollow egg that she could carry around in her pouch until it broke. Her kind were more sentimental than Four-foot’s.
Actually, Two-foot did not know very much about her kind. She knew that they lived in the little wooden hills outside the forest, the ones that made gray clouds in the evening. But though her memories of her childhood with her own kind were vague, she knew that she had not liked it. There was some menace, some danger in her kind that kept her away from those cloud-producing hills, except when Four-foot could not find any food and she had to climb over their thin spiky tree-things to catch a lamb or a shoat.
She thought that she had once been in a sort of giant leaf on the water, but she did not remember much about it. And though she spoke to Four-foot after the manner of her kind and not of his, the only words she could ever remember hearing were, ‘wicked child.’ She thought that meant that someone hadn’t liked her, but she could not say why. It had been before she met Four-foot, she was sure of that. And there had been so much water under that leaf, far more than in any of the forest streams that she and Four-foot drank from. She didn’t entirely know what to make of that image.
If she was called ‘wicked child,’ she wondered what they would have called Four-foot, had they known him. Wicked something else, maybe? But Four-foot was not wicked. There were so many of his kind, who hunted together and sang at night, but only Four-foot was her friend. She usually slept in trees in case his kind came looking for him and were mad at her for being there. He was big and strong and would protect her, but some of them were almost as big, and there were more of them. He had got in a fight for her once, and lost one of his ears. She didn’t want to make him do that again.
She admired Four-foot, who was stronger and faster than she was. But he didn’t know how to climb trees, and most of the spiky tree-things that her kind put up around their animals were too tall for him to jump over. And he couldn’t prick his eggs and suck them out, not that he seemed interested in doing so. In the heat of the day, when Four-foot lay down to pant in peace, Two-foot’s favorite thing was to lie down with her head on his chest, listening to the ban-doo ban-doo of his heart and the heha-heha of his breath. She wondered if he heard the same ban-doo when he put his head on her chest, but of course he couldn’t tell her.
Four-foot stood for a moment wagging his tail at her, and then loped off. He was much faster than Two-foot, but she knew he was just going to get a drink from the brook. She followed him, and drank this time in his manner. It was much more practical for her to kneel and raise the water to her mouth with her hands, but she liked to honor him sometimes by lapping it directly from the stream as he did. Her ragged covering got even muddier and tore a little further, but that was no trouble. Her kind buried their dead in stone gardens still covered with their skins and furs, so it was really no trouble to find more coverings if she needed them. As long as she and Four-foot reburied the bodies, her kind never seemed to notice.
They must be scared of the dark, she thought, because when she and Four-foot stole out of the forest at night, her kind never seemed willing to venture past the openings of their wooden hills. They would stand there with the light behind them, staring out into the dark and calling, “Who’s there?” while she and Four-foot snuck right by on the way to the stone gardens, or to stealing a lamb from behind the spiky tree-things. Two-foot was afraid of the dark too, a little, but not like the others were. As long as she didn’t fall out of the tree she slept in – which did happen sometimes – she would be all right.
When the sun went down today, though, Two-foot did feel a little fearful. Most nights, the warm wind whispered comforting things to her until she fell asleep. Tonight it whispered urgently to her in a language she did not recognize. She lay silent for some time, propped between the branches of a tukka tree, listening to Four-foot’s reassuring breaths below. When she did finally drift to sleep, she dreamt that the wind was trying to warn her about something. She saw her forest as a mere clump of trees within a small garden surrounded by water. A leaf like the one from her childhood bobbed up and down as the waters rose higher and higher. At last the malevolent tide covered the whole land in water, and her lungs filled with its sloshing heaviness. All were drowned, and only the bobbing leaf remained.
When she awoke with a gasp, the wind was still whispering about death. Two-foot climbed down from her perch, still gasping for breath. Four-foot was awake by the time her feet touched the ground, and she held his comforting head against her chest. Did he hear the ban-doo ban-doo there, or was there only the terrible sloshing of her lungs?
“We have to go,” she sobbed, holding him tight. Four-foot whined a little.
When the sun rose some time later, they were already on the edge of the forest. We have to find that leaf, Two-foot kept thinking, before the waters cover everything. But when they reached the treeline, Four-foot stopped. It was not safe to walk through the gardens of Two-foot’s kind during the day. If they saw Four-foot, they would chase him away with sticks, or worse.
“I’m frightened too,” she told him, “but we have to go. Maybe they’ll listen to me if I say you’re my friend.”
She did not really think they would, but she wanted to reassure him. The words ‘wicked child’ came back to her, gloating and nasty. Who had said them to her? A part of her feared that whoever had said those words would be out there, waiting for her among her kind to punish her for crimes unknown. But only her kind had those big leaves, so if she wanted to get onto one, she had to risk it. How could she bring Four-foot with her, though? Her kind did not get on with his, and they would hurt him if they saw him. She would have to hide him somehow.
A sudden noise made her throw herself down in the tall grasses next to her friend. A big wooden thing with a man on top was rolling along the road ahead, pulled by a donkey. Neither the man nor the donkey noticed them, the man because he was preoccupied and inattentive, and the donkey because he was blinkered. Two-foot crawled forward until she was almost at the road, and the man, donkey, and contraption had passed by. At night, she knew, in the rainy season, her kind would drape coverings over their horses and donkeys to keep them warm. A covering like that would be big enough to conceal Four-foot, if he would hold still for it.
A few minutes later, she had spotted the dwelling she wanted. It was one of the larger wooden hills, the ones with bigger entrances that never produced any clouds. The animals slept there. When nobody seemed to be looking, she sprinted across the road and slipped in through the doors. It was coming back to her, in bits and pieces. She had once had one of these wooden dens, she thought. Why had she left?
It was musty in this den, where her kind kept animals imprisoned behind shoulder-high wooden walls. She heard hogs snorting about, but did not see them. The big square animal covers were folded neatly to one side of the door, on one of those wooden platforms that her kind put things on. She thought she had eaten from one once, or was the problem that she had not eaten?
Most of these covers were too heavy – it was so hard to lift one that she could not imagine also carrying Four-foot hidden underneath. Two-foot sorted through the covers, dropping them haphazardly on the ground until she found one that was lighter. With that one tucked under her arm, she walked out the door only to find a big man standing there in front of her.
“Hey!” the man said. “What do you think you’re doing?”
She considered running, but that would have meant dropping the cover, and then she would have had to go through with this whole thing again somewhere else. That didn’t seem worth the effort.
“I need…” she began, haltingly.
The man caught her arm and pulled it, painfully. The cover fell to the ground.
“You need to have your fingers off as a thief, that’s what you need.”
Two-foot did not bother reasoning with him. Her speech was out of practice anyway. Instead, she whistled. The man shook her, thinking that she was only being insolent. He realized too late that Four-foot was bearing down on him from behind, and he had only just let go of Two-foot and turned around when Four-foot knocked him to the ground, his jaws savaging the man’s arm and shoulder. Two-foot had never heard one of her kind scream like that before. It frightened her, because it might attract others, with sticks. So she told Four-foot to leave off and stood surveying the damage to this screaming man’s body.
She was not sure whether he would die. Another animal might last a few hours or a day like this, but her kind could be ingenious. With help, this one might even last a week, or longer if his arm didn’t swell and turn colors. The man stopped screaming and looked up at her, terror in his eyes. Four-foot sat at her side, cleaning the blood off his jaws and fur.
“Keep it off,” the man whimpered. “Oh, please keep your wolf off. Don’t let it kill me! You want money? Here, take my money.” He made an impotent gesture toward a pouch at his side, and then started to sob.
Two-foot took the pouch, which clinked a little. Then she picked up the cover again, and walked away with Four-foot at her heels. A woman with a baby rushed past her toward the man, screaming and crying. Two-foot could still hear their sobs when she got back to the road and stopped to see what was inside the pouch. There were all these round shiny things in there, of varied metallic colors. She was not sure what they were for, or why the man had offered them to her. But they were pretty, so she kept them in the pouch, which she tied around her wrist. Then she lifted the cover over the other arm, whistled to Four-foot, and went on her way. Somewhere at the end of this road she would find one of those big wooden leaves. And in that leaf, her salvation.