Well, the damage was done, and the open-air slaughter of one stupid sucker couldn't be far in the future. I cast a hunted glance behind me, and shuddered. Like signal lights on a coastline shrouded in banks of mist, demonic eyes were blinking among the dark thickets of young evergreens. God Almighty, was there a whole pack after me? Or was it 'just' Crazy Hugo and the mastiff who could double back on their tracks so quickly they were like sheepdogs and seemed to be everywhere at once? My little heart was hammering as wildly as if fuelled by pure cocaine. My paws had become the hooves of a racehorse galloping mindlessly on, its pain numbed by a pain that was even worse. I was beginning to feel dizzy. Everything started going round and round in front of my eyes. I saw the first deep blue shimmer of dawn above the treetops. Morning was breaking.
Then I felt their sulphurous breath on my neck. And yet again I heard the growling, but it didn't sound frightened this time, it sounded full of cold rage. It was finally drowned out by a howl and then abrupt bursts of shrill squealing which couldn't have sounded worse issuing from the throats of the mad. So who actually were my pursuers? Though I was about to offer the brutes my guts for breakfast any moment now, I didn't dare look round again. The sight of them might well deprive me of my reason, and if I was going to die I wanted to do it with a clear head. I owed myself that much. The mad cries grew louder, following one another in quick succession, venting their feelings in a murderous screeching ...
Right ahead of me I saw the thick branch of a rather gnarled tree. It was an arm's length above the ground, like an automatic barrier across the path I was taking, which was covered with ground ivy. And on this branch lay an old acquaintance. That was all I needed in my desperate situation. I identified it by the vast left paw with the last of the moonlight shining on it. The rest of the creature, a body ten times bigger than mine, was hidden in the shadow of the tree, so that the figure as a whole was just a vague silhouette. Only its ears, very like our own, burned themselves into my memory in spite of my distress because of the tufts of stiff hair like brushes growing from their tips. The creature's eyes, staring at me in silence, glowed in the dark like phosphorescent crystals in a coal mine. He was Monster Paw, he meant the end of all my hopes, and he seemed to have a wonderful knack of timing, always turning up just at the crucial moment.
Before I could whisk under the branch and away, Monster Paw rose on his hind legs and arched his upper body like a Titan. What a lovely situation: a bunch of bloodthirsty bastards coming up behind me, hardly able to wait a moment longer to evaluate the results of my tin-opener Gustav's laborious experiments in fattening me up. And ahead of me the presiding spirit of the entire performance ready to jump down and grab the first and most delicious piece. All right, so I wouldn't be a spoilsport and ruin this magical spring morning for the lot of them. I came to an abrupt halt.
Monster Paw came at me with a gigantic leap of such grace that it took my breath away. I saw him stretching out all his limbs in flight, claws extended as far as they would go, as he underwent metamorphosis into an aerial acrobat. I resigned myself to my fate. It was a great comfort to think this perfectly formed monster's carving skills would usher me into a better world. Gave the whole thing a touch of style.
To my surprise, however, Monster Paw's flight lasted longer than I expected. He obviously had some other landing place in mind than Francis Airport. The monster merely whooshed past me a millimetre overhead and then, judging by the squeals of pain, crash-landed right in the middle of my pursuers. They set up a mighty hullabaloo behind me, and I plucked up the courage to glance back. But the dim morning light was giving no secrets away, and I could make out nothing much except for flying tufts of grass and murderous pairs of eyes batting to and fro like juggler's balls on fire. I could hear things, though. The thunderous bellow of Monster Paw, the screeching of my hunters, a sound somewhere between fear and hatred, and all the time a tearing and a rending and a cracking - I could only guess at the bloody spectacle being played out there in the darkness.
I stepped on the gas and went full speed ahead. Let the forest monsters fight until they could only haunt the place as extinct species in impassioned conservationist pamphlets. What did I care? At least there'd be one pleasing side effect: the serial murders would stop. In spite of my glee at the idea, of course I couldn't help turning my head to look back as I fled, so as to keep one eye on the gloomy spot where battle still raged. And of course I couldn't help meditating on a couple of points either. Why had my spooky pursuers chased me at all, giving me such a nasty scare? If they wanted to finish me off, surely it would have been easier for them to do the deed right away, the moment I entered the forest. Or was I suffering from delusions? Was Monster Paw the real murderer, and had I just happened to help him commit another massacre? But then why had he spared me when I was standing right in front of his nose, first in line for the chop? And why did Alcina have to die? Her demise didn't fit the methods of the murderer, who preferred killings en masse. Was there a real Black Knight after all, a degenerate but crafty creature who thought he'd found an opponent worthy of him when I turned up in the forest?
I bumped straight into him. Him? Well, the Black Knight, of course, who else? Unfortunately, my observations of the battlefield combined with my attempts at deduction had called for my entire concentration, so I'd completely forgotten to turn my head forward again and avoid the danger in time. I didn't know how long I had been running or how far I now was from the combatants. But just as I turned to look the way I was going again, I found myself looking straight into the eyes of the apparition I thought I had seen on the cliff-top, whether as dream or reality. A glance somewhere between demonic powers of suggestion and a curious amusement transfixed me: I could hardly escape it. It was too late for me to come to a complete halt, so we collided with a dull thud and lost our balance. I pushed my opponent over - in the confusion of the moment he was hardly more than a swirling shadow - but he didn't fall to the ground. Something much nastier happened instead.
As luck would have it, the Knight of the Mournful Countenance was standing on the bank of the stream I knew only too well. If you ask me, it deserved first prize for the most importunate brook on God's earth. Before we tumbled head over heels into the water, I noticed in passing that just to put the lid on it, we'd picked the widest and roughest part. The moment we struggled up to the surface again, the current carried us away by main force. Now squealing, now involuntarily testing the water quality, I saw my victim in the distance, paws splashing about in panic. He was yelling for help in a most unknightly way. However, his true shape was still a mystery, because eddies of water kept washing over it.
By now dawn had cast a soft veil of copper and gold over the whole landscape, but unfortunately my sense of aesthetic beauty had temporarily lapsed. So as the sun rose in its full splendour, Hugo and I continued our boatless boating expedition, struggling the whole time to keep from drowning. Sometimes he was under water, sometimes I was, sometimes we were wailing in chorus for someone with a life-saving certificate, sometimes solo for Jacques Cousteau. The grotesque part of it was that a shoal of extremely inquisitive fish of a purplish colour swam along with us throughout this shipwreck scene. We must both have been a pitiful sight.
Finally the current became calmer and the water less deep. My limp body, by now rather resembling a mass of algae, was caught against a rise at the bottom of the stream bed and stayed there, feeble waves washing gently around it. Half unconscious, I opened my mouth and rendered unto the stream the things that were the stream's. Then, smeared with mud and wet as a mop, I got to my wobbly paws and looked around for my fellow accident victim. However, there was nothing to be seen. Perhaps he hadn't survived; perhaps he'd gone to a watery grave. One small step for him, but a great one for Felidae kind. That poor deranged mastiff would have to go murdering solo now.
Suddenly I heard the sound of splashing water. Whipping round, I saw two pointed ears coming up behind a branch that had fallen into the water. Wonderful to rel
ate, however, those ears were apricot-pink, a most unusual colour for a Black Knight. The rays of the sun, stronger now, lit up the head rising from the water so that it looked like a snowball floating against the background of dark green. I knew that head, a bright one in every sense of the word ...
'Ambrosius!' I cried joyfully, simultaneously resolving that if I ever found my way back to Gustav, I must somehow convey to him that I urgently needed a visit to an optician. Our poor colour vision doesn't exactly equip us to discover the Technicolor process, I'll grant you that, but even a mole may be expected to be able to tell the difference between light and dark.(11)
'B-b-bloody hell! The second ti-ti-time today I've had to take a bath in this damn brook!' said Ambrosius crossly, clambering up on the branch sticking out of the water, with some difficulty. He'd turned into a mass of algae too.
'I'm terribly sorry, my dear fellow! I thought you were the Black Knight. Anyway, I only saw you at the very last minute, when I couldn't stop myself. What they elegantly describe as a chain of unfortunate circumstances. How come you crossed my path?'
We both shook ourselves vigorously and waded to the grass of the bank, which was speckled with daisies. Early in the morning as it was, the sun had already switched on its incubator heater, so at least it wouldn't take our fur too long to dry off. Ambrosius lay down on the grass and sneezed.
'Th-th-three guesses. You shot away from that roof so suddenly I thought for a moment some hand had pushed you off. Then I guessed your su-su-suicidal intentions. I had to st-st-stop you. But how? I couldn't find you in the forest, or big bad Hugo either. He s-s-seems to have gone another way. So I prowled around for a bit until I suddenly saw you galloping towards me like a fu-fu-fury. What happened?'
Briefly, I told him about the amazing proliferation of murderers and monsters in this enchanted forest. At the end of my account, Ambrosius looked rather at a loss. But at least his apricot-coloured fur had completely dried off in the meantime, and reflected the strong sunlight so brightly it hurt your eyes to look at him. He now resembled an angel of light touching down for a rest in the Garden of Eden after a flying visit to this world of sin.
'What you tell me sounds co-co-contradictory, Francis. There's no reason to suppose that you were ch-ch-chased by the real murderers, or that the creature you call Monster Paw has anything to do with the whole gory business. In fact there are some indications that in your bl-bl-blind pursuit of revenge you disturbed some kind of innocent forest creatures out hunting. No wonder they reacted with in-in-indignation and wanted to teach the intruder a lesson. As for this M-M-Monster Paw of yours, you probably woke some old fox from sleep and he lashed out in panic. No, my dear fellow, your experiences, pe-pe-peculiar as they are, don't rule out the Bl-Bl-Black Knight theory. Far from it: they show how cleverly Crazy Hugo and the mastiff go about their nasty sneaky business, leading even a br-br-brilliant detective up the garden path.'
'So I was on a hiding to nothing, right? Oh, shit! There's a deadly juggernaut flattening the landscape, and here we sit no wiser than before. What do we do now?'
'Wh-wh-what we decided, of course. We qu-qu-question the forest folk and add up the results. Then we'll find where the murderer's hiding out and call the Co-Co-Company of the Merciful to our aid.'
'I rather doubt whether a wild boar, say, is going to stop and let us interrogate it.'
'We'll make our inquiries on the h-h-hoof.'
'And supposing we're successful, do Hugo and the mastiff get a proper trial? It all sounds pretty weird to me. The bear as wise old judge, the fox as a real shyster of a defending counsel, the beaver as stern state prosecutor. If they ask me nicely I'll be happy to take the part of executioner myself!'
'There are no b-b-bears in this forest any more, Francis. They were wiped out centuries ago. Just as our brothers and sisters on the farms will soon be wiped out if we spend much longer sitting here ma-ma-making silly jokes.'
I agreed, though I thought the whole idea a sheer waste of time. But time was the one item of which I had ample supplies just now. Or was I wrong about that too? Now that things had calmed down, I remembered my vision of my own death again, and suddenly I felt sadder than ever. Nor could I take any real comfort either from Ambrosius's encouraging remarks or from the possibility that my vision had only been a bad dream. My infallible instinct told me it was going to come true very soon. It was like a curse. Could I escape by creeping into a hollow tree-trunk or asking for shelter in an Animal Refuge and begging them not to give me away? For how long, though? Wouldn't my fate catch up with me wherever I went? The answer was probably yes. There was no escape. My time was up, like the time on a clock which is bound to run down at some time, its hands coming to a halt. That's life - or death!
However, I could at least try to bring a particularly evil murderer to justice before I shuffled off this mortal coil. That would allow many innocent creatures to live on in peace. I would do them this last service as my bequest to them. And with these good intentions, I went on through the forest with Ambrosius in search of relevant information. First we met a Tengmalm's owl sleeping off his murky nocturnal activities on the airy heights of a thin pine branch. He had a large head with a round, brown-bordered mask, and the grey plumage of his body was fluffed up. We positioned ourselves directly under the branch, and Ambrosius began a monotonous chant made up of only a few sounds. It sounded to me more like a nasty throat infection than a language. The bird opened his bright yellow eyes, cast us an incredulous glance and began muttering away, nodding his head back and forth. This got him into such a state of excitement that at its height he unblushingly relieved himself.
'Let me guess - he's saying he thinks the law is a load of shit?' I inquired, glaring crossly at Ambrosius. The greenish droppings had landed on our newly washed heads. The Somali opened his mouth to say something soothing when a new consignment came down and stained our fur yet again. I'd never have thought a little bird could have so much shit in him. Having received this merry greeting we moved to one side, and Ambrosius conducted an extensive conversation with the owl in the bird's own strange, muttering language. I was getting a stiff neck from staring up when the twittering suddenly stopped and the bird, now lighter by at least a pound, flew away, not without bombarding us one last time.
On the way to see what the Somali ruefully called 'some nice clean creatures', he explained that in fact the owl had provided some very useful leads. He said that during his reconnaissance flights he'd often spotted two black creatures, corresponding pretty closely to the description of Hugo and his dog, slinking around human habitations in a suspicious manner. Unfortunately, however, he had never actually seen the dreadful deeds committed himself, and he didn't know where the couple was at present. If he'd fired the same sort of ammunition at them as at us just now, I thought, he might even have prevented the committing of those dreadful deeds.
In a clearing, we met some fallow deer, with the buck busy ensuring the survival of the species. He was mounting a whole herd of hinds, with lower-ranking males watching enviously from a distance, so at first it looked as if it would be difficult to get any sense out of him. But even this imposing creature with his handsome antlers ran out of steam now and then, and Ambrosius interviewed him from a suitable distance. The two of them bellowed deafeningly at each other, but I couldn't really make out whether the lord of the harem was actually saying anything or just advising us to clear out.
When we'd said goodbye and left the roaring buck to his labours, Ambrosius interpreted: he had picked up an interesting clue. The Black Knight, said the buck, preferred to live in caves when he wasn't out raiding. There were more caves in the forest than you might expect, Ambrosius told me. They were usually in rocky cliffs, with cracks in the rock acting as inconspicuous entrances. The reason why many caves in the forest had remained undiscovered was simply that the rocks were overgrown with vegetation which made the entrances practically invisible to anyone outside. They therefore made an ideal hide-out for criminals
.
During our inquiries we also met a pair of ravens engaged in a violent argument. These birds, big as buzzards, with coal-black plumage, powerful beaks and a deep croaking voice, go in for lifelong monogamy - the most frightful thing in the universe, in my opinion, even worse than collecting Swatch watches or listening to Rondo Veneziano on disc. Whoever thought up such an idiotic institution deserves to spend all eternity in the hottest spot in hell, if you ask me. No wonder the pair of them were shooting their beaks off in the heat of their marital dispute. Ambrosius got nothing but furious insults in reply to his inquiry about the Black Knight, and when he tried setting up as marriage counsellor and suggested that a temporary separation can often work wonders, the two of them suddenly ganged up together and pursued us half a mile or so through the forest, croaking angrily.
An old red fox, weak with age and still breathless from the chase, crossed our path. At first he eyed us suspiciously from a safe distance behind a group of trees with the bark rubbed off their trunks. But when Ambrosius told him about the dreadful deeds committed by the horrific pair, in the whining and growling of fox language, Reynard's bearing instantly altered. His eyes got larger and larger, his huge tongue frantically licked up the saliva running down from the corners of his muzzle, and he began to size us up with an increasingly unfriendly expression on his face. As Ambrosius gave him an account of the Black Knight's usual treatment of his victims, a nasty notion seemed to be forming in his mind. Eventually, as my simultaneous interpreter translated it, he merely said we'd given him a brilliant idea, and he raced out from behind the tree-trunks and made for us, snarling. We put plenty of distance between us, which luckily wasn't too difficult, since the robber fox had entirely lost the suppleness of his youth.
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