by Rick Johnson
“WooSheep Bottoms is the home of all sorts of beasts,” Vernerdta Otter, the mother of Winert, explained as she led Helga through the serving line. “The Bottoms got its name from the first settlers, who were WooSheep. But over the years many other beasts of all kinds have settled here and been welcomed. We all came here for the same reason—so, even though we’re Otters, Sheep, Coyotes, Ducks, Foxes, Rabbits, we live together in peace. We’re all WooSheep, because it’s our home, not because we’re all Sheep. Nobody cares about that.”
“Why does anyone come here?” Helga asked. “The land all around is so barren and forbidding. You must not get many visitors?”
“We’ve seen only a few strangers in many years,” Vernerdta replied. “It’s very rare that anyone crosses the Great Barrens and survives. We are happy to have visitors, but we’re also glad they are rare. We like being protected from the outside world. Our life is happy and simple. We have all we need.”
Helga was quiet in her reflections as she filled her plate with the luscious food, which was spread out on long tables. Sweet Meadow Greens Salad with Roasted Sunflower Seeds and Dried Cherries, Pecan-Crusted Pan-Baked Crayfish, Thrice-Whipped Cream Cheese Soufflé with So-Hot Pepper Sauce, Trumpet Rolls and Butter, Mulberry Pie, Apple-Pear Turnovers, and Watermelon. Everyone also took Glory Bars that were being distributed in beautifully wrapped packages to each person. The scrumptious sweet was unlike anything Helga had ever tasted before. A crisp, golden pastry crusted with nuts was filled with creamy nougat filling and blackberries at the center.
Helga found a seat next to Burwell and Bwellina, who were stuffing themselves happily. Vernerdta was showing them how to extract the sweet meat from the hard shells of the crayfish. Helga was watching this with great interest, when her ears suddenly heard something that made her nearly drop her fork.
Annie and Breister’s Search
Breister lay in the Golden Grotto staring up through the LuteWoo, as the light gradually failed. Night was coming in the outside world. As the gloom deepened into the most complete darkness he could imagine, the only remaining light was the distant twinkling of stars he could see through the LuteWoo. They seemed so tiny and so few that the outside world was almost more a hope—even an illusion—than reality.
“Hang onto your mind, Breister, hang on to your mind!” he urged himself. As he lay in the darkness, the eerie knowledge of how easy it would be to lose contact with the feelings and perceptions of the outside world touched him like a cold hand. “If I stay here, soon, very soon, that world will no longer exist for me. It will be a dream. Even now I feel its reality slipping away from me. WooZan is right. If I stay here, the only hope is to join the WooPeace. I will go mad living down here by myself. Either I escape or join the WooPeace...But the WooPeace is not a life. I must find Helga.”
Breister sat gazing at the small patches of starry sky that he could see through the skylights far above. Most were too small to be more than dim pinpricks of light, but a few were brighter and could be seen passing across the opening. His mind returned again and again to the same question: “If the cave is open to the outside world through those skylights, why does no one find the openings? Surely over the years some beast must have seen them? If someone sees them, why does no one come here from the outside?” Muttering the question to himself over and over, Breister was baffled. Was there truly no way out?
Immersed in these endless wonderings, he heard a faint swish. Breister could make out the eerie light of lanterns mounted on a boat. They glinted off of the water as the boat approached. Here and there the walls of the grotto sparkled in the glow of the lanterns. Soon WooZan had arrived with a passenger in her boat. A Cougar! In the faint light, it was hard to be certain, but it certainly looked like it might be the partner of the Cougar who had fallen in the river with Breister. Breister immediately stood up and took a coldly distant stance.
“You know the Woonyak, I see,” WooZan commented. “You hate her. She has wronged you.” Again, the uncanny ability of the Sheep to anticipate Breister’s thoughts annoyed him.
“Hunjah! Do not be annoyed with me, friend,” WooZan said. “It is not my fault that our folk have existed so very long that we know the feelings of the Woonyaks that fall from above. I see your look. I see your tense muscles. It can only be hate. Hate comes when one feels wronged or when one is ignorant. You are not ignorant. You see it is not so difficult. Hunjah!”
Slasher Annie stepped out of the boat, looking around herself in amazement. Breister recognized the feelings of astonishment that he had also felt on first coming into the Golden Grotto. “You now see that you are not so different, yes?” WooZan observed, looking at Breister intently. “All Woonyaks are the same. Hate cannot last here. If you hate you die. There is life only in the WooPeace where hate is impossible. That is why we bring Woonyaks to the Golden Grotto and then to the WooPeace settlement. The true reality becomes clear.”
Annie looked at WooZan with interest. “The fool,” she thought to herself with some creeping feeling of contempt, “this Sheep is nothing but butterflies and air between her ears.”
“Be careful, friend,” WooZan said, turning and looking directly at Annie. “Ignorance is as dangerous as hate here. Those who have lived here in happy peace for centuries are not the fools. The fool is the one who thinks that the WooPeace is foolish. Hunjah!”
Startled at WooZan’s seeming ability to know what she was thinking, Slasher Annie laughed nervously. “Oh, I wasn’t really thinking you were a fool...It’s just such a shock...to find...such a wonderful place to live!” Annie finished.
WooZan sighed. “You cannot flatter us with empty praise. Your praise, today, is ignorant. You do not know your situation. You do not know the WooPeace. So, you praise out of ignorance. In a few days you will say the WooPeace is a wonderful place to live and mean it. Say such a thing then. Hunjah!”
WooZan reached into the boat and pulled out a bundle of sticks. Slapping the bundle on her legs, the Sheep began to chant in a singsong voice. Sometimes she jumped from foot to foot in high arching leaps. Shortly the singing and leaping stopped and WooZan began to get back in her boat. “Farewell, friends,” she said, paddling away. “I have signaled the Fire Beetles that you are here and asked that they not harm you. You will be safe. You have food and fish-oil candles enough for two days. That is usually enough for Woonyaks to flirt with madness and come to the truth. I will return in two days. You will be ready to join the WooPeace then. Hunjah!”
WooZan had hardly paddled out of sight, when Breister said, “I don’t know who you are, Cougar, and I don’t care at this point. I’m leaving this place. You may come with me, or you may stay here. But I’m leaving. So long as we’re here we’re as good as dead. This place is a tomb any way you look at it. It’s pointless for me to hate you in my own tomb. What good is it? I’m leaving. You coming or staying?”
“Just as you say, this is a tomb,” Annie replied. “It is either a real tomb that we can never escape”—she paused and held a fish-oil candle toward Breister’s face—“or it is an illusion with no more reality than the shadows flickering on your face. We will find out which it is. Let’s go!”
“But where do we go?” Annie continued a moment later. “There is water on one side; vertical, smooth walls on the other; and Fire Beetles above us, even if we could go up. Not promising.”
“Wood Cows look to the virtues of the earth,” Breister observed. “Before you came, I was lying here meditating and listening to the sounds of the rock. I heard many openings in the rock. Let me show you.” Breister took a small pronghorn flute from his pocket. “This belongs to my daughter, Helga,” he explained. “She’s been teaching me to play it. I was playing it here a while ago and noticed that the echoes in this grotto are very interesting—at least to a Wood Cow!” he laughed.
Breister played a series of rough, halting notes from the flute. “You see, I’m not very good,” he commented ruefully. “But listen to the echoes.” He played another series of
notes.
“I don’t hear anything interesting,” Annie said, thinking the Cow was perhaps a bit mad already.
“It’s a Wood Cow art,” Breister replied, “and, if you know what to listen for, it is very clear. The echoes tell where there may be openings in the rock.” Breister played several more notes, listening intently.
“The water is shallow over there,” he said, pointing. “If you don’t mind getting wet, I think we will find an opening a few feet below the surface.” That rock wall over there echoes like it is hollow. There are no openings on this side. But perhaps there are some below the water.”
Although she looked at Breister as if he was, indeed, crazy, Annie smiled at him. “Cougars don’t like water,” she grimaced, “but I won’t count this as water—this is tomb juice, and we like tomb juice even less than water!”
“Why don’t we wait for daylight,” Annie asked. “That will give us some better light to explore underwater. Our candles will be no use there.”
“Daylight will not help us,” Breister responded. “The water has too many minerals in it. It is very cloudy. We will have to feel our way along anyway. I want to get out of here. We might as well try it now.”
Reluctantly, Annie agreed and stepped toward the water’s edge.
“No, you wait here,” Breister directed. “Let me explore first. I’ll come back and get you if I find an opening.” Slasher Annie looked at Breister doubtfully. “Trust me, Annie. I will come back. It may take me a while, but I will find a way and be back for you. Stay here.”
Agreeing, Annie settled down on the rocky bank of the Golden Grotto’s lake as Breister dived under water. Over the next hour or so, she heard him repeatedly dive-surface-dive again. Then it was silent for a long time. Several hours passed. Annie grew worried, but realized worry made little difference. She was stranded in the Golden Grotto until either Breister or WooZan returned.
At last, she heard a splash and Breister gasping for air! Swimming back to where Slasher Annie waited, Breister panted: “There are ten outlets leading in all directions from the lake, several of them large enough for us to go through. But this cave was hardly designed for travel,” Breister grimaced. “Only one of the ten possibilities shows hope of getting us out of here,” Breister began slowly, before he broke into a broad smile. “But ONE IS ALL WE NEED! Come on, Annie, we’re getting out of here!”
“There is one passage that works,” Breister explained. “We dive down, slip through the opening and then swim for a minute or so before the passage leads into another chamber.” He paused, then took a deep breath and exhaled. “You’ll need a big lungful of air, it’s a very long minute! Stay close to me. It’s easy to miss the passage opening.”
Looking grimly, but hopefully, at each other, Breister and Annie slipped into the cold water. Swimming carefully along, feeling the stone wall, Breister guided Annie to the place in the rock wall where they would dive to enter the underwater passageway. Taking a deep gulp of air, they dived and headed into the passage.
A long minute later, they surfaced gasping for air inside another chamber of the cave system. “This chamber is less open to the outside air,” Breister noted. “It’s cool and damp. The Golden Grotto was a little warmer and drier because it was open to outside air. Here the stone sweats and the air is musty. There’s much less fresh air. Our hope is that this chamber also has some exits that will allow us to go further. There must be some kind of passage...I feel deep sediment and sand on parts of the rock floor. That means it floods periodically from the outside! We’ve just got to keep looking.” Lighting the one fish-oil candle that had remained dry in its waterproof wrapper during their swim, they looked around the rocky chamber. It was much smaller than the previous one, and had no pools of water except for small puddles of water dripping from sweating rock.
Breister settled down and, in the flickering light, again took out the pronghorn flute. Playing softly, he once again listened carefully for echoes in the chamber and considered what that might tell him about passages to freedom. Little did Breister and Annie imagine that some other ears were also listening to the music from the flute.
JanWoo-Corriboo Knows Things
The afternoon sun was warm and a dry wind rustled the cottonwood leaves as Helga strode through the bustling crowd to fill her plate again. But she soon stopped. The WooSheep were packed so tightly around the serving tables that Helga saw little hope of getting close soon.
“Hmm, this might take us a little while,” she said aloud, thinking that Burwell was at her elbow as he had been earlier.
A different, strange voice answered instead. “A little while? Well, at least it isn’t one of those huge monster ‘whiles’ that eat small children for breakfast!”
Helga, startled by the strange answer, whirled around to see who had spoken. There were Burwell and Bwellina standing with bemused looks, and next to them a young female Fox dressed in khaki-colored shirt and breeches. Slightly built, and delicately-boned, the Fox appeared lithe and athletic. The reddish-blonde hair on her head was braided in rows of small cornrow braids running out from under the floppy cap she wore. Her eyes darted actively as she gazed at Helga through broad-lensed eyeglasses with wire frames.
“JanWoo-Corriboo, and pleased to meet you, I’m sure!” the Fox said, speaking so rapidly the Helga could hardly keep up. Moving constantly, pulsating with some internal rhythmic beat, she continued, “You’re looking for the ‘Mountain That Moves But Stands Still’ I hear.” JanWoo-Corriboo paused, looking at Helga, then concluded simply, “I know where it is.”
Helga’s eyes widened in surprise and then she looked seriously at the strange young Fox. “You do? Where is it?” she asked with cautious excitement.
“JanWoo-Corriboo knows a few things,” she replied mysteriously. “She knows the hills and canyons all around. She knows the names of the Ancient Ones whose remains lie in the Bone Forest. She knows the story of the WooSheep. She knows how to make hot chocolate and brownies...” She stopped and grinned at Helga. “And she knows about the ‘Mountain That Moves But Stands Still.’”
JanWoo-Corriboo was a prodigy. Barely eleven years-old, she was a brilliant explorer and prospector in the lands around WooSheep Bottoms. “The Bottoms are boring,” she said, with a snort. “Too comfortable. Too nicey-wicey. Too safe. Not enough danger and adventure. I like Rattlesnakes myself,” she said, noticeably twisting a necklace she was wearing. “This is made from the rattles of a twelve-foot-long Rattler I wrestled last summer,” she explained. “I didn’t hurt the poor old fellow, but he did lose a bet I made with him. I bet him his rattles that I could beat him at wrestling. I won. That’s the sort of thing I like.” She grinned at her new friends.
“I’m not too partial to Rattlesnakes, especially big ones! Yep! Yep! Yep!” Burwell stammered. “How about you all go right ahead and tramp around with the Rattlesnakes and I’ll stay here and enjoy the nicey-wicey, boring ol’ Bottoms?” They all roared with laughter as Burwell spoke with a quaver in his voice. Helga knew that Burwell was a brave and reliable friend. The old Bayou Dog would be at her side whenever she was in danger.
“But, Burwell,” Helga said, looking surprised, “I thought you were the one who wanted to see the Ancient Ones! I’ll bet JanWoo-Corriboo can take you to the best places.”
“Yes, that’s all well and good,” Burwell replied, “but I just don’t want to join the Ancient Ones!”
“Not to worry,” JanWoo-Corriboo commented. “Where we’re going, there will be plenty of adventure without any Rattlesnakes!”
Burwell looked soberly at Helga. “Uh, Helga, do you think that’s good news, or bad news?” he asked.
“It’s neither,” JanWoo-Corriboo was quick to reply, “whether it’s good news or bad news depends on what we find. That’s the adventure part that I like!”
“Ohhhh...I’m not going to like this!” Burwell sighed.
The three friends learned a great deal about the WooSheep that afternoon as they planned their t
rip to find the ‘Mountain That Moves But Stands Still.’
JanWoo-Corriboo told them that the WooSheep had lived in the Bottoms for untold generations. The WooSheep were descendents of refugees escaping from another group of WooSheep that lived deep underground in caves.
“The other WooSheep claim to be the only WooSheep,” she said, shaking her head. “They don’t acknowledge that we even exist! The first stories of our folk tell of a great whirlpool in the far off mountains that sucked all things in its power into underground caves. That was the origin of the first WooSheep. Finding themselves unable to escape, the early WooSheep learned to survive underground and made a life for themselves there. They still searched for a way out, but gradually became more and more content with their lot. As the years went by, the WooSheep society became increasingly close-minded. A few brave and free-thinking WooSheep managed to find a passage out of the caves—through the ‘Mountain That Moves But Stands Still’—and they tried to get the other WooSheep to follow them out. But the traditions of the ‘WooPeace’ as they called it were, by then, too strong. No one would listen.”
Helga and her friends were amazed. “There are WooSheep living below the ground?” Helga asked incredulously. “How can that be possible?”
“Oh, you can live there, all right,” JanWoo-Corriboo responded. “There is plenty of fresh water because the big river up in the mountains flows through there. There are fish, crawdads, frogs, and salamanders to eat, and they have bred flightless birds for eggs and feathers and long-haired mice that they shear to make wool for cloth. They are quite self-sufficient.”
“Isn’t there any contact between the WooSheep in the Bottoms and those that live underground?” Helga asked. “Don’t you communicate, at least?”
“Not in the least!” JanWoo-Corriboo said fiercely. “They are lost souls...fools who allow their WooZans to rule over them like tyrants! They get what they deserve. Once in a while, some beast will find an escape route and reach the Bottoms. We welcome these refugees, but beyond this we don’t care what the WooSheep underground do. We do not exist to them, and they do not exist to us!”