From a distance, the Dwarf Bears appear out of the underbrush like apparitions conjured up from a nursery story, amusing and cozy. Clearly, they’ve concluded Elphie is on her own, and not a decoy sent by some ambushing party to distract them. Still, a semblance to living toys—roles that Elphie has seen domesticated cats and dogs inhabit with relish—dissipates the closer she gets to them. The Ski’ioti are wary. Even Elphie can pick that up, and she’s not clever at reading emotions on the faces of human beings.
Curious.
Elphie hasn’t mastered the art of small talk or shown any indication of wanting to do so. She plunges right in. “I wasn’t sure you’d keep your word.”
“Words are shallow currency with us. But here we are.” Neri-neri is in charge. Lollo-lollo hangs back, his walleye giving him the impression of waiting for some more interesting guest to arrive.
“I want to know something,” says Elphie. “Since I met you, I’ve picked up a little about talking Animals from our governess. I never knew about you. Any of you. I’m so stupid. Right here in plain sight, or nearly. And not a whole lot of friendly chitchat between us and you. So I never, never knew.”
“The world isn’t always an us-and-them proposition,” says Neri-neri. “That said, I trust you haven’t told your tribe that we’re here.”
“Of course she has,” snaps Lollo-lollo. “She’s only human.”
Elphie flinches. What an insult. “Well, my brother and sister blabbed what happened, of course. But I didn’t tell anyone but my nanny I was coming to see you, and even to her, I didn’t say where. I mean, not here. In this cedar grove.”
“You’re telling the truth,” says Neri-neri. “You’re too young to lie convincingly.”
“Well, you said you keep yourself apart. Fair enough. I would, too, if I could. So I paid attention. But you do it so well that I never even guessed. And I’m not an idiot. So if you prefer to be unsociable, why really did you rush over to save my sister when she fell in the water? Not too many Quadlings would do the same for you, I’m guessing.”
“Is this all we’re going to do,” interjects Lollo-lollo, “talk? For this we stuck around? Put ourselves at risk? She didn’t even bring us anything to eat.”
“Sorry about that,” says Elphie. “I didn’t know I should. Anyway, we don’t have much to eat at home, so if I stole it there’d be questions. And you can’t eat questions.”
“No, we can’t,” agrees Lollo-lollo. “But you seem to have brought them anyway.”
“I want to know why you bothered to rescue my sister.”
Neri-neri replies, “It’s a moment-by-moment choice, isn’t it, to choke or to be charitable? But instinct counts for something. Life is life.”
“That sounds, um . . . rehearsed.”
“Oh, you’re sharp. Fair enough. It’s true, we had no precise interest in your sister’s personal death or in her personal survival. It’s just that Dwarf Bears are useful pawns for when human tempers rise and when fear overtakes reason. We thought we’d deter a human death near where we might have been seen. Truly, it’s exhausting always fleeing a mob. Big cats can outrun moonlight. We lumber and we’re small and noisy.”
“Sitting targets for a mob, if a mob is so inclined,” says Lollo-lollo. “The peaceable Quadlings still get themselves worked up sometimes. What fun.”
“Suppose other humans had come running? They’d have known you were, um, foraging.”
Neri-neri screws up her face into a whorl of fur and snout. “Even Lollo-lollo with his vagabond eye could tell that you were doing nothing useful to help her. And—”
“I would do everything to help her, of what I could; but I couldn’t do that. The water, you know.”
“Don’t interrupt. I’m answering your questions. You seemed to us like a strange species of walking bamboo, shrieking. We’d never heard a caterwauling plant, nor one that could jump up and down. I suppose we were more curious than kind. And you were rambling out alone, you three, evidently children without the appropriate guardians. It seemed safe enough for us to risk. That’s being honest.”
“I’m not a plant,” says Elphie, not certain if she should be offended or perhaps wistful. What would it be to be a plant?
“Are you sure?” asks Lollo-lollo. “Seem like a real chokervine to me.”
“What even are you doing here? How do you live, are there, um, a colony of you?” asks Elphie. “Why do you pretend to be animals without the power of speech?”
“Safer that way,” says Neri-neri. “You see, we can pass. You, I don’t think you have that much luck. Unless there are hundreds more of you, all that verdancy.”
“She could pass as swamp muck,” says Lollo-lollo. Neri-neri throws a cedar pinecone at him.
Elphie goes on. “Are you a tribe, a posse? A, a caravan? A nation? I don’t get it. Can you talk to a talking Monkey, assuming such a creature exists? How does it all work?”
“You’re too nosy,” says Neri-neri. “We saved your sister, that’s all you need to know about how we’re organized.”
“Oh, all right. We’re runaways,” says Lollo-lollo. Neri-neri butts him with her snout. “What?” he grumps. “You’re the one who wanted to stick around and talk to her. Isn’t this talking? Let’s get the gassing over with.”
Family strife, Elphie knows it well. “Ooh, that sounds interesting. Being a runaway. From where?”
“None of your need to know,” growls Neri-neri, but Lollo-lollo smiles, if that smirk is a smile.
“If we tell it all at once, we can move on, get out of here,” he says to his companion. “We risk too much to make nicey-nice with a sprog, however nonconformist she is. We’ll get all the chat chattered out of us and then let’s get going.” To Elphie: “We tried to work with men from the Emerald City, though we hadn’t been much use in the building of the big bossy highway. Our paws are the wrong size to handle those bricks. But when the rubies were discovered, whoa, we got noticed. We got hired. We got paid well. We’re harnessable, you know. Wagonloads of corundum. We’re reliable labor. We don’t get mange like the mules they brought from the north.”
“Lollo-lollo, are you done? Concentrate for once in your fool life. We were paid well in food and in comfort, but not in liberty,” explains Neri-neri. “Most of our kin were happy enough. But not us.”
“But not you,” Lollo-lollo corrects her. “I was snug and well-fed. But I came away anyway because you made me.”
“Go bite your tongue if you feel like having something so bitter in your mouth. I won’t have it. We’re free, we’re here; today is the day.”
“What day?” asks Elphie.
“Just, the day, the day we have,” replies the boss Ski’ioti. “The day we can breathe, and follow the sun in the sky, and eat and crap and find shade for afternoon sleep, and steal the human food at high noon if we’re lucky. The day to avoid arrows and hippos and poisonous snakes. The day to talk to an uncoiled vine of a human being, and learn something new! Not the day to be yoked to a cart and lug minerals about.”
Lollo-lollo rolls his rollable eye and closes both of them, pretending to snore.
“I suppose I owe you something,” says Elphie. “Look, if I’d killed my sister by accident yesterday, I’d be having a different sort of day today than the one you just describe. So what do you want to know?”
Neri-neri shoves a few bamboo shoots in her mouth and chews thoughtfully. “What are you really?” she says. “Are you a human person? Are you of some other breed we haven’t yet come across? It’s only you we’re curious about. We find that humankind is not very. Kind, I mean. But who are you? What’s your name? I never came across your sort before. I can’t work out what you are. Call it being nosy. Who are you?”
What child of thirteen can answer a question like that, when being thirteen is the apex of isolation? “I’m a puzzle to myself,” Elphie answers at last. “But maybe not any more than you are to yourselves.”
“There’s something inside us that makes us turn out this way,” says Neri-neri. “The thing that was around waiting to house in us before we were born, and that will linger after we die. We don’t know what to call it, and maybe it doesn’t have a name. But it’s different for all of us—it makes a Ski’ioti out of me, not a snail or an egret or a grasshopper. It makes a boy out of your brother. Out of you it makes a secret.”
“My father’s a minister, shall I ask him?” Elphie is feeling pushed about. “He’s got the rule book for why things are the way they are, not me. I’m just a kid talking to Animals. I don’t have the answer to what you’re looking for. I don’t know a thing.”
“Maybe you don’t,” says Neri-neri, “and maybe you do. I can tell you’re fed up with the question. Would you want a banana? We have a few around here somewhere.”
“Limited supply,” objects Lollo-lollo, awake from his pretend nap.
Elphie shakes her head. “You could ask anybody a question like this, it doesn’t have to be weird old me, green from underneath my fingernails to the roots of my scraggly hair. Why not ask a banana why it’s a banana?”
“Same reason you came to us—because you can talk, and so can we. Bananas have little to say.”
“My father says you only think you’re real.”
Neri-neri shrugs. “So what? I think you’re real, and that’s more interesting to me.”
“Why should I interest you?”
“You’re an idea,” says Neri-neri, “that I didn’t have before I saw you. Ideas make us jump. They shift us from before to after. I don’t know who or what you are, or why you look like a walking edge of the jungle, but my sense of who I am changes now because of you. You don’t have to teach me anything—what’s your name?—you don’t have to be anything but yourself.”
Elphie is about to tell Neri-neri her name but she catches in the Dwarf Bear’s offhand remark a rare allowance to be still. Elphie opens her mouth and closes it again. It will not happen often in her life. She will rarely be able to ignore the urge to motor through any given moment with as much commotion as focus. Now she sits in the sun, looking at Bears who are looking back at her. Each is Zoo to the other. Such is human astonishment. It can break over you so softly that, unless you’re being quiet, it can go unnoticed.
For this moment, too rare a moment in her life, Elphie is aware of patience. She has ringed her bare green knees with her thin green arms. The wind plays a few strands of unbrushed hair across her brow. She lets them tickle her. Beyond, down the slope of cedars, Ovvels waits in its hewn thicket of built geometry. The floating pools and gardens adjacent to the small city are spotted with pale blossoms. The wind disrupts the human noise of the small city into unintelligible ellipses. Everything is happening everywhere, and at the same time, nothing much is going on. It is just the old world.
“I’ve given you nothing,” she says at last to the Dwarf Bears. “You stayed behind against your better judgment to interview me, and I’m not worth the risk. Where will you go when you leave here?”
“No one needs to know that, safer that way,” replies Neri-neri.
“When we were working as laborers and being well-fed, we had safety in numbers,” adds Lollo-lollo. “Now we’re a pair of fugitives. Thanks to her notion of freedom. Free to be hungry and on the run. What joy.”
“You have so many questions,” says Neri-neri. “It’s a rarity among your kind. You’ve given us an experience of human curiosity, so thank you for that much. You can’t even name your questions yet, and maybe you never will. Doesn’t matter. Sure, we’re talking Animals, but we’re not geniuses. We’re rural rabble compared to others I could mention! We know nothing of the world beyond our little lives. But some Animals do. There are educated Animals out in the wider world. You’ll find out. You have curiosity in your eyes about this. That’s a present for us to see, we who rarely have spotted anything other than commercial interest in the eyes of our, our employers. If you will. But we are simple sorts. We’re migrants on the run. Find someone else to answer your questions about Animals. We saved your sister but we can’t save you. That you have to do for yourself.”
“And now is the interview over?” asks Elphie.
The Ski’ioti don’t answer. Parlor manners mean nothing to them. They get up and wander off and don’t say good-bye and don’t look back over their padded shoulders. They move along the ridge, under the cedars, like furry boulders out to take the air.