Adventures of a Dwergish Girl

by Daniel Pinkwater

  Praise for Adventures of a Dwergish Girl

  “Adventures of A Dwergish Girl is a book with every single thing I love about Pinkwater novels.”

  —Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother

  “Pinkwater is arguably Pratchett-for-kids, Wodehouse-for-new-millennium-juniors. Or, if you like, Rocky and Bullwinkle in written form, with equally zany illustrations . . . This book is just so darned nice that it could cure your whole day.”

  —Green Man Review

  “Captivating, cool and crazy! This story is an inspiration to us all: Be brave. Have adventures. And, most importantly, follow your dreams.”

  —Sam Lloyd, author of Mr. Pusskins

  “With touches of magic, conversations with ghosts, and a dash of danger in the form of gold-stealing gangsters, Adventures of a Dwergish Girl is sure to delight.”

  —Alane Adams, author of the Legends of Orkney series

  “Richly-drawn, quirky, and mysterious, Daniel Pinkwater’s Adventures of a Dwergish Girl pulls readers into a dazzling adventure, complete with android Redcoats, urban magic, and of course, the very best pizza New York City has to offer.”

  —Susan Vaught, author of Footer Davis Probably Is Crazy

  “Adventures of a Dwergish Girl by Daniel Pinkwater has that rare sense of wonder that makes you feel as if you have entered into a magical kingdom.”

  —Joe R. Lansdale, author of Of Mice and Minestrone

  “Highly recommended. I’m going to buy a hard copy when it’s published so I can throw it at my nephew when he’s old enough to appreciate it.”

  —Welcome to Camp Telophase

  Daniel Pinkwater

  Adventures of a Dwergish Girl

  Other titles by Daniel Pinkwater

  Young Adult

  Wingman (1975)

  Lizard Music (1976)

  The Last Guru (1978)

  Alan Mendelsohn, Boy From Mars (1979)

  Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario (1979)

  The Worms of Kukumlima (1981)

  The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (1982)

  Young Adult Novel (1982)

  The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror (1984)

  Borgel (1990)

  The Education of Robert Nifkin (1998)

  The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization (2007)

  The Yggyssey (2009)

  The Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl (2010)

  Bushman Lives! (2012)

  Series

  The Hoboken Chicken Emergency

  The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (1977)

  Looking for Bobowicz: A Hoboken Chicken Story (2004)

  The Artsy Smartsy Club (2005)

  Magic Moscow

  The Magic Moscow (1980)

  Attila the Pun: A Magic Moscow Story (1981)

  Slaves of Spiegel: A Magic Moscow Story (1982)

  Mrs. Noodlekugel

  Mrs. Noodlekugel (2012)

  Mrs. Noodlekugel and Four Blind Mice (2013)

  Mrs. Noodlekugel and Drooly the Bear (2015)

  The Werewolf Club

  The Magic Pretzel (2000)

  The Lunchroom of Doom (2000)

  The Werewolf Club Meets Dorkula (2001)

  The Hound of the Basketballs (2001)

  The Werewolf Club Meets Oliver Twit (2002)

  Collections

  Young Adults (1991)

  5 Novels (1997)

  4 Fantastic Novels (2000)

  Once Upon a Blue Moose (2006)

  Adventures of a Dwergish Girl

  Copyright 2020 © Daniel Pinkwater

  This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.

  Cover art by Aaron Renier

  Cover design by Elizabeth Story

  Interior illustration by Aaron Renier

  Interior design by Elizabeth Story

  Tachyon Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  415.285.5615

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  tachyon@tachyonpublications.com

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project Editor: Jill Roberts

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-336-1

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-337-8

  First Edition: 2020

  1.

  THERE ARE PLACES in the Catskill Mountains you cannot find. It doesn’t matter if you are a forest ranger, an Eagle Scout, a Native American tracker, or the president of the Sierra Club, you can get close to the places I’m telling about, but you can’t get to them because you can’t find them. I can get to them. I can walk right up to them, and go inside them. That’s because I grew up there, and my people have lived in those spots for hundreds and hundreds of years.

  I am not an American Indian. Not a member of the Munsee Esopus tribe of the Lenape nation or the Minisink tribe either. In fact the native people never lived in the Catskills up to about the year 1790. They’d go there to fish and hunt, or pass through on the way to someplace else, but they didn’t make permanent settlements in the actual mountains, for some reason or other. I’ll come back to that in a little while.

  The Catskill Mountains are big, close to six thousand square miles, they cover five counties, and they’re part of the Appalachian Mountains, but they’re not huge like the Rockies or the whole Appalachian chain, so they’re not particularly unexplorable. They’ve been filling up with people for the past couple hundred years, there are towns, and roads, and railways, big hotels left over from when the Catskills were the place to go if you were a vacationer from the city. If you should go hiking through the wildest forests in the Catskills, places that look perfectly prehistoric, like no human has ever been there, and you wouldn’t be surprised to see a woolly mammoth or a sabre-toothed tiger, you’re still going to find stone walls, and the foundations of old houses. People have been all over those mountains, thick as fleas, for a long time.

  And it’s certain you can’t find the house I lived in, not just a foundation, but a whole house with doors and windows and smoke coming out of the chimney. You can’t find it on foot, and you won’t see it from a helicopter, a satellite can’t see it, and if you go to wherever they keep the official maps of the whole country in Washington, DC, it won’t be on those maps.

  What is more, if you ask any of the people in Saugerties or Palenville, or any town in and around the mountains about whether such places exist, ninety-nine out of a hundred will say they don’t know what you’re talking about and the hundredth one will lie to you.

  You’re probably familiar with the story of Rip Van Winkle. It was written in 1819 by Washington Irving, but it’s pretty clear he based his story on local legends, of which there are a lot. The important part of the story is this Rip Van Winkle goes off into the mountains and meets a lot of little men, short ugly guys with beards, big heads, and little pig eyes. They’re bowling and drinking homemade gin. They give Rip a few drinks, he falls asleep, and when he wakes up it’s twenty years later. It’s a good story, and not hard to find. You can read it for yourself.

  The thing I’m working up to is this: In the impossible-to-locate place I come from the men are all short, ugly brutes with beards, big heads, and little pig eyes. I’m relieved to say that the females are nice, but the men are fairly-disgusting . . . and there’s bowling and drinking going on. I am not making any claims. I am just laying out the facts. You may draw your own conclusions.

  2.

  THIS HI
DDEN PLACE in the mountains, call it a village, either didn’t have a name, or it had a name and we never used it. We had a name for ourselves, “Dwerg,” because that’s what the old Dutch settlers called us. We called them Engels, meaning English people, which is what we call everyone who isn’t us. Dwerg is a Dutch word, and Dutch people were the first non-native people who settled in the area. There are a lot of their descendants still around. Probably the Dwerg ancestors spoke Dutch way back in time. English is the language we all speak now, with some Dutch words mixed in. Some people say a Dwergish language exists, but nobody speaks it. I think dwerg means dwarf in Dutch, but also suggests gnomes or elves. Gnomes living in the forest are usually on the evil side and dangerous in stories, and apparently the local Indian tribes had stories like that, which would explain why they tried not to be in the mountains when the sun went down.

  I would not describe the people in our village as evil, not at all. I would describe them as boring. Here are the options I had as a girl child growing up: help around the house, look after goats, help growing vegetables, appreciate nature. When I got to be barely almost grown up, I would be expected to marry one of the absolute slob male Dwergs. A girl would not be allowed to work in the gold mine.

  Oh yes, we have a gold mine. We also have a little gold refinery, to get the metal separated from the rock and junk and impurities, and then we make it into lumpy coins. Every family has a cupboard, or closet, full of bags and bags of the stuff.

  I don’t have to mention that girls aren’t allowed to do any of this work, which, while not necessarily all that interesting, might at least be better than goats.

  We use gold, which gets swapped for money, to buy things we don’t have or can’t make. To do this we need someone on the outside to help us. This would be our “Englishman.” You have to have an Englishman, because if some of our goofy-looking bearded Dwergs were to walk into a bank toting a bag of gold coins, it would create too much interest. Remember, I said before that one resident of a Catskill town in a hundred would lie if you asked about us? That might be just an ordinary pathological liar, or it might be our Englishman.

  Being an Englishman for us Dwergs calls for complete secrecy, and it pays really well. Gold, after all. And our Englishman, Mr. Winnick, was particularly important to me, because I chose to go to school. It’s a matter of choice with us Dwergs. We needed special arrangements for girls to go to school. I’m referring to regular public school, outside our weird hidden village. Quite a few girls go, the boys just about never do—education might interfere with their becoming full-bearded, boring Dwerg gold miners.

  I have to explain, the Dwerg never existed who could not cover distance five times faster than an Englishman, and by Englishman I refer not to someone from England, or our clandestine agent type of Englishman, but anyone who is not a Dwerg. This includes making one’s way through forests, and up and down mountains. Also, well-hidden, inaccessible, and some say magically protected, does not mean distant—our village was not so very far from a public highway—and a strong hiker could make it from our village to that public highway in maybe a little over an hour. This means that I could make it to the little shelter where we’d wait for the school bus in under fifteen minutes. This was not your usual school bus, we owned it. The driver, whose name, comically, was Mrs. Driver, either didn’t know, or was sworn to pretend she didn’t know anything about who we were, or where we got on from. And she would deposit us girls at the elementary school, the middle school, and the high school in Kingston, New York.

  Mr. Winnick had created a cover story, last names, addresses, phone numbers which if called would be answered by himself or presumably Mrs. Winnick. Not that such a phone call was ever made. Our made-up identities and details about us were just so the number of kids in the school would tally with the records. In fact it was barely noticed that we were around. Dwergs are good at being semi-invisible. My fake name was Molly O’Malley, which is a nice name, and Molly is my real name. My last name, Van Dwerg, is the same as everybody else in our village, we’re all Van Dwergs. As far as the teachers and the regular kids were concerned, we were just kids from mountain-dwelling families, which exist, and are not really all that different from Dwergs. So, the facts that we were maybe a little undersized, wore old-fashioned homemade clothes, acted shy, and kept to ourselves, did not seem particularly unusual to anyone.

  Most of the Dwerg kids drifted in and out of school, showing up for a couple of months or a year, and then fading away. I don’t know when the Dwergs decided it was OK for girls to go outside to school, but I think it might have been a bad idea from a Dwerg point of view. Once we got an idea that goats and gold mining were not all there was, some of us, anyway one of us for certain, would get another idea.

  3.

  MAYBE YOU'RE AN EXPERT hiker and mountaineer, or maybe you know one, or will someday meet one, someone who knows the Catskills like their own backyard, and has been everyplace, climbed every peak, and seen all there is to see. Ask that person if they’ve ever seen a wolf. I have. You can also ask if they’ve ever seen a mountain lion, which we call catamounts. I have. I’ve seen plenty of both. There would be no point in asking if they’ve seen a Catskill giant, a guy looking as rough as a male Dwerg and seven or eight feet tall. Well, I’ve seen a couple of those too. They’re pretty rare. And you can ask the expert if they know anything about the Catskill witch. I’m not talking about the historical one who fought in the Revolutionary War and never missed with her musket, but an actual living witch, with powers. Almost nobody knows about her, or knows where to find her, but I do.

  Here’s the thing, it’s a Dwerg thing, in addition to milking goats, and making cheese, and all the usual stupid things, girl-type Dwergs are expected to appreciate nature. This is not about just looking, it’s about interacting. I’ve not only seen wolves, I’ve touched them—or they’ve touched me, brushed against me in passing, like I was a tree maybe, or another wolf. Wild deer will come right up to me to take a treat from my hand, or just to sniff me and satisfy their curiosity. And this may sound like bragging, but you do not get to see a Catskill giant if he doesn’t want you to see him.

  I am fairly well educated—I put in a total of a year and a half at Kingston High School. That’s a lot of learning, compared to most of the Dwergs I grew up with. Also, I’m good at observing things, and thinking about what I’ve observed. I developed a theory that we Dwergs must be, to some degree, supernatural or magical. I mean, that’s what the Native Americans thought, and the early settlers with their Rip Van Winkle stories. It’s a fact that regular people can’t get near wild animals the way we can, or see the things we can see that nobody else gets to see. And all the confusing us with gnomes and elves and such that the people in the towns do . . . that must be about something. Anyway, that was my theory, but try to discuss it with the grown-ups. They want to hear nothing about it, much less will they tell you anything. They want to talk about canning raspberries, or what happened today down in the mine.

  My personal opinion is that Dwerg magicalness was gradually forgotten like the Dwerg language, which may or may not have existed. The Dwergs around me as I grew up were happy looking after goats and making cheese, digging up gold, and gathering together for a good old group hum.

  Little by little, I came to the conclusion that I had to get away from there. I could see my friends starting to think, or not-think, like the adults, and I didn’t want to lose the use of my brain. I was going to have to clear out, and live among the English people for a while, and see what the rest of the world is all about.

  Of course, that meant I would be saying goodbye to my family. When I say “my family,” I mean immediate, mother, father, sibling, and not the general population of the village, every one of whom is a cousin of some kind. And when I talk about how boring it is to live there, and how I wanted to leave, that is not to say that, while boring, life there is not sweet. And I love all the Dwergs. It turns out you can love persons or a place and still find them
or it boring, to the point of unbearable. My home and family, for example, could be any home and any family in the village. My mother is nice, and she is skilled at cooking, and bakes wonderful bread. She is always busy sewing and fixing, and cleaning, and doing. In the evening, after a delicious meal, maybe of vegetables and goat cheese, and hot fresh bread, we sit around the fireplace, my mother sews, my father smokes his pipe, my younger sister, Gertie, practices to be just like my mother. Sometimes we hum. My father starts humming, and my mother joins in, and then we girls do. Finally, we all go to bed. In houses all over the village families are humming and sleeping.

  In the middle of the village there is a big outdoor oven. In the summer, the Dwerg mothers do their baking there rather than bake at home and make the house hot. All year round, we gather near that oven two or three times a week. There’s no set schedule, and it’s at no particular time, but everyone just naturally turns up. The women and girls stand to one side of the big oven, and the men Dwergs to the other. We just stand there, shifting from foot to foot. Then someone starts humming. Soon everybody is humming, rocking from side to side, eyes closed. I can’t say how I know this, since my eyes are always shut, but I have always felt certain that animals come in from the forest to watch us during these sessions. Also, I always feel connected to the moon, and the trees, and other planets in the solar system, and sometimes I feel very aware of the earthunder my feet, and worms, and mosquitoes, and all kinds of unlikely things. The whole business, standing and rocking and humming, goes on for half an hour.

  No one ever says anything about this business, and I don’t know where it all comes from, or if it has a name, or what it’s supposed to be about, or why we do it. I am pretty sure everyone feels more or less the way I do when we stop, and that is peaceful and happy.