by Peter Cox
I could hear Sam holding back a laugh behind me, with a snort or two.
Genevieve shot her an icy look. Her pride had taken enough of a beating for the day.
“Of course,” she lifted her nose high. “I was going to tell you. After all, I don’t need any humans to be informants for me. I’m good enough at what I do without your help. I was just teasing, that’s all sweetie. A little feline repartee, you know.”
“Of course. Repartee. I knew it all along.” My sarcasm was thicker than cream, but cats don’t get sarcasm. They’re known for their lack of a sense of humor, actually.
You probably suspected that.
“Let’s see…ah yes,” she returned to her curled up position. “Franklin saw that little weasel running from the woods early this morning. You know something’s up when he runs out in daylight and in the open. He loves the shadows, that one. But there he was, as bold as you like, as bold as a dog begging at the table. You want to know what happened in the woods last night, ask the weasel.”
“Thank you Genevieve. Good news, as always.”
“Any time dear. That’s what I’m here for. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I could use a nap. It’s been a long day.”
It was only 11 a.m., but I didn’t argue.
We left the way we came, and headed back for the woods, while I relayed to Sam what Genevieve had said about the weasel.
“A weasel, huh? I’ve never been that close to one. Are they dangerous?”
I looked at Basset for the answer. I’d never met the neighborhood weasel. Basset had always said I wasn’t ready to.
“Oh yes. Definitely,” Basset answered. “Always be careful around a weasel.”
Dealing with a weasel can be tricky. And “dangerous” is just the beginning.
Chapter 11
THE WEASEL’S GAME
“What’s the weasel’s name?” Sam asked.
“That’s the thing about weasels. No one knows his name. You’ll see.”
We reached the edge of the woods, and I let Basset lead the way. He quickly took us to the left, down a path that no human eyes could see, but that a dog’s nose could follow without pausing.
“How did you do that earlier?” I asked Sam. “How did you know how to deal with Genevieve? You could only hear half the conversation. My half.”
“I was able to figure it out,” she said with one of her patented shrugs. “It was easy enough to spot the cream on her whiskers, and then I just had to mention it to her the right way. I was just following your lead.”
“You’re good at that,” I said. “Figuring things out I mean.”
“I guess.”
As we walked I explained weasels to Sam.
My first day meeting all the village animals, Basset told me which animals to steer clear of, and the one he spent the most time on was the weasel.
He didn’t tell me they were particularly dangerous, but he told me to steer clear just the same. They’re more trouble than they’re worth.
Weasels are pathological liars.
That’s something most people don’t know about weasels.
Also that they can talk. Most people don’t know that either I suppose, making it hard for them to know weasels even can lie, but there you have it.
It’s a game to them, Basset said. A weasel won’t even talk to you if you aren’t joining in the lying game. That’s how you earn a weasel’s respect: lie. A lot.
But you have to tell the truth at the same time, bury it deep so the weasel has to dig to find it.
The trick is to know what’s a lie and what’s the truth.
It’s a dangerous game.
Before long we came to an old rotten stump, covered in moss and mushrooms. Underneath was a tiny hole: the weasel’s den.
There was no way to tell if he was home or not, and I wasn’t about to stick my head in the dark hole to find out.
We just had to hope he’d want to come out and play.
“Weasel? Weasel, are you home?” Basset asked. “It’s me…um…Bass…et. Dang.”
Basset’s terrible at lying.
A long red snout poked its way out of the hole, followed by the rest of a pointed face and two shrewd eyes shining in the gloom.
“Poor show, Basset my boy,” the weasel said, slinking the rest of the way out of the hole and perching himself at the entrance. “You never come to visit, and I can’t even begin to imagine why.”
Each animal has a distinct voice, even though their mouths don’t move. The weasel’s voice sounded like a cockney British accent, and he whispered like he was trying to get your attention in a back alley to sell you something shady.
Basset was embarrassed by his failure to start with a good lie, but he quickly raised his head and sat up straight.
“You know full well, ‘my boy,’” he responded. “I don’t have the time or the taste for your games.”
“Oh, tut tut. No fun at all, is he children?” The weasel asked, turning to look at me. “Oh, if it isn’t the boy who can hear! I’ve heard so much about you! Even came to visit yesterday and introduce myself, but you were out and about I suspect.”
That was clearly a lie. The game had begun.
“Nice to meet you,” I said. Good to start off with a lie right off the bat. “My name’s Nate, and this is my friend Pennywhistle Thistlebranch.”
The weasel looked impressed.
“Nice to meet ya’ children. A right pleasure indeed. The name’s Everglade Amsterdam,” he swiftly bowed with a flourish of his front paw.
That was a lie, and Basset and I knew it.
Every single time he’d introduce himself the weasel would use a different name: Eustace Chiselbottom, Cherith Wonderstone, Hummingbird Saltalamacchia… he whipped them out so fast he must have made a list of hundreds of names and memorized it.
Or he was really good at lying.
Now, I said you can never assume anything about an animal just by his species, but it’s usually a good idea to suspect something. Assuming and suspecting are different, and could be the difference between life and death.
For instance, you can’t assume a lion will kill you. I mean, there are plenty of perfectly nice lions in the circus, and I’ve chatted with a few. But it’s still best to be cautious around most of them. If I bumped into a lion on the street I wouldn’t assume he was an evil child-eating monster, but I’d be plenty cautious.
You know, because he might eat me.
Thus the caution.
So I didn’t want to be unfair and assume the weasel was a dangerous little critter, but I was cautious.
When he told us his name, Basset and I exchanged a look that said, “yeah right,” but I wasn’t about to accuse the weasel.
They hate being called liars.
Also, they have really sharp teeth.
It’s best to be careful around a weasel. Unless you could use a few extra holes, that is.
Personally, I like my skin the way it is: holeless.
“A pleasure,” I responded.
“So what brings ya children to me ‘umble ‘ome today? I have to tell ya though, I’m running a bit late for an engagement. Me and some chums are planning a good heist of some birds’ nests later today. It always impresses the ladies.”
Not sure how much of that was a lie, but it didn’t really matter.
The social calendar of a weasel wasn’t really what I came to find out.
“We’re here on something similar, actually. I have a flock of birds by my house that I use to carry messages around town for me, but they seem to have up and vanished.”
I was treading carefully now. I was going to say that I used the birds as transportation, that they picked me up and flew me to school in the morning, but that would have been ridiculous.
You have to tell good lies to a weasel.
That’s important.
“And the sad thing is, I needed them to spy on some people over in the downtown,” I continued. “I’m helping with a police investigation, you see.”
It’s also important to build yourself up. What’s the point of a lie if it doesn’t make you look better? That’s what the weasels say at least.
A sharp weasel like this would be able to dig through my lies and straight to the core of my story as quickly as he could reach the yolk of an egg. He’d instantly figure out that I wanted to know about the birds disappearing.
Now I had to dig through his story.
“Of course, of course. The police dogs are always askin’ fer me ‘elp, but I’m far too busy, I tell ‘em. They don’t listen though. ‘We need ya,’ they’ll say. ‘Yer the best at sneakin’ and skulkin’ about.’ Now I know that’s the truth, but I just can’t be bothered at the moment. Perhaps later.”
“I definitely understand,” I said, nodding solemnly. “I was originally too busy to help the police too.” I was scrambling for a good reason that I was too busy, but the weasel was into his own story now.
“Why just last night, while I was doin’ me skulkin’, I noticed the oddest thing. Down by that big crashed spaceship I saw a turkey poacher. Almost wanted to stop ‘im, but I was headin’ to a raid on a black bear’s den and didn’t have the time to go on any adventures.”
Spaceship? Whatever happened to realistic lies?
“Sorry kiddies, but I really must be runnin’,” he said, and before I even had a chance to take a breath he slinked away into the shadows and was gone.
Well that was a bust.
“What in the world did that mean?” I asked Basset.
“Don’t ask me. Talking to weasels always makes my head hurt.”
“What’d he say?” Sam asked. “That conversation was a little harder to follow than the last one.”
I laughed. It was hard for me too, and I had heard both halves of it.
“You think he buried the truth in there somewhere?” Sam asked after I told her what the weasel said.
“I don’t know.”
Basset cocked his head to the side.
“The truth was in there. Weasels don’t just tell lies. That’s cheating. The game is only fun if you can find the truth. What’s the fun of a puzzle if the pieces don’t fit together in the end?”
I told this to Sam, and she nodded her head.
“So we have to throw out whatever’s an obvious lie and see what’s left,” she said, sitting on a nearby rock. She was lost in thought for a few minutes.
“That doesn’t leave us with a whole lot,” I said. “Sounded like most of it was lies.”
“We can get rid of anything he said about his afternoon plans, I think,” Sam said. “The truth is probably about anything he said about last night, because that’s what we asked him about.”
“Feel free to toss out the black bear part, too,” Basset huffed. “I wouldn’t pick a fight with a bear, and that weasel’s ten times smaller than I am.”
“I’m twice as big as you, but I still wouldn’t pick a fight with that weasel,” I laughed.
Basset smiled at me. I guess he realized it was a silly thing to get offended about.
“But I agree. He’s a tough guy, but he’s not an idiot,” I said.
“Okay, so that leaves us with the part about the spaceship and the turkey poacher,” Sam said slowly.
“There are no turkey poachers around here,” Basset said.
“I don’t think that’s even a thing,” I responded.
“Well that part’s obvious, right?” Sam asked.
We both stared at her.
“Ah. Guess not. Sorry.” She looked embarrassed.
“It’s okay, go ahead. I think you’re sharper than I am, and I don’t want to speak for Basset, but we both want to hear what you think.”
“Sure do,” Basset said, smiling and panting at Sam encouragingly.
“Well, alright,” she was still nervous to share her theory, but she went ahead. “It’s a lie, but there’s truth in it, right? I think he was talking about birds in general when he said turkey. It’s his way of telling us he’s talking about the birds. And a poacher is someone who hunts or captures animals illegally. It’s legal to hunt turkeys here though. So I was thinking, he must mean the person who captured or got rid of all the birds illegally.”
“Of course!” I shouted.
“That’s really smart,” Basset said. “Tell her I said that, would you?”
I did, and Sam got up off the rock to pace some.
“So we know he saw the person who got rid of the birds,” I said.
“And we know it was a person, not some freak weather or something,” Sam added. “Definitely a person.”
“But where?” I asked. “There’s no such thing as a crashed spaceship. Do you think he was only willing to tell us that he saw something, not where he saw it?”
“Maybe,” Sam said. “But I don’t know. Would that be cheating?”
“Maybe not technically,” Basset said. “But it would be a dirty trick. And that weasel has never seemed dirty to me.”
“Okay then,” I said. “We must have missed something in the other parts. The crashed spaceship must have been just a lie. No truth there.”
Sam nodded, and kept pacing.
We went over everything else the weasel had said, word by word, until we were all exhausted and really, really tired of hearing those same cockney words over and over.
Finally Sam sat down in defeat, and banged her head on the back of the rock.
“Ow!” she said, and then quickly leapt up. “Hey!”
For a second I thought she’d been stung by something, but then I saw her face.
She was beaming.
“You said weasels always try to make their lies realistic, or close to the truth, right?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly, trying to see where she was going with this. “But that part about the spaceship’s not realistic at all.”
“Exactly! Don’t you see? That means he was trying to draw our attention to it. So we wouldn’t miss it. He’s saying that’s the most important part of his lie.”
I felt slow, but it was starting to make sense to me.
The weasel was taking it easy on me, either because I was a first timer or because everyone in the village respected Basset so much. But he was telling me which part of his lie was the most important.
“So what does it mean then?”
“I’m working it out,” she said.
“Crashed spaceship. Crashed spaceship. Crashed. Space. Ship.”
She smacked her palm against her forehead.
“Of course!” Sam said. “Sheesh, he’s good at this.”
I laughed.
“He sure is. But I’m not. Care to let me in?” I smiled.
“Crashed. That’s easy, it’s not even a lie at all. Space, as in empty. And ship, as in shipment. The old empty train compartment crashed back in the woods.”
The abandoned train compartment I’d visited a few times deeper in the forest. Of course. Now that she said it, it seemed so obvious.
I felt kind of embarrassed, but mostly I was excited. We were actually on the trail now.
And I had a friend to share it with.
Chapter 12
THE “CRASHED SPACESHIP”
We started running into the woods, excited to see the next part of this mystery, and nervous about what might be waiting deeper in the forest.
Sam knew exactly where we were headed. She clearly knew the woods better than I did, and loved them just as much as I did.
As we ran, I thought about how quickly I had gotten used to my new, weird life.
In fantasy books like Harry Potter, people just seem to go with the flow. “Turns out I’m a wizard, and everything I thought I knew about the world is wrong? Oh, okay.” They take it really easily, and I always thought that was unrealistic.
But it turns out that’s the way it is in real life. When the world turns out to be different than you thought, you can either accept it or fight it. And when the evidence is staring you in the face, you pretty much have to accept it or live a lie.
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Talking animals? Okay. Let’s roll with it. What other option is there?
Was I shocked? Was this weird and life-changing? Of course. But I was going with it.
We came up to the old rail car before long, panting and out of breath.
What we saw didn’t really solve any of our mysteries.
If anything, it gave us more.
The rusty blue car was wide open, as always, but the clearing had used to be clean. There hadn’t been so much as a plastic bag before.
Now there was an old generator, and wires and speakers littered the ground in a haphazard arrangement.
We made our way closer, and I started to notice that there was a pattern. The speakers weren’t just thrown here: they were all placed upright, facing different directions and scattered around, but clearly placed carefully.
And something else seemed off about the arrangement.
Sam and I went to different sides of the car, but we didn’t see anything other than more speakers. We traced a couple of wires, and found they all connected to one stereo system, which was connected to the generator.
Definitely not just tossed here.
Someone had been using this sound system. But why out here in the middle of nowhere? If it had been a party thrown by some teenagers, there would have been all sorts of trash, like broken bottles and crushed cups and who knows what else. But the clearing was completely clean except for the speakers and wires.
Inside the stereo was an old, unmarked cassette tape. I wondered what was on it, but I didn’t know anyone with a cassette player. I wasn’t even sure how it worked. And we could never lug this monstrosity back home. That would have been a conversation.
“Hey Mom, brought home a giant cassette player from the woods. Don’t know why I’d ever want it, but I dragged it home just the same.”
Sam and I stood side by side and watched Basset sniff around.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Not really,” he said. “A few bugs, and a human-type scent but I’ve never smelled it before.”
“Just one?”
He sniffed around a bit more.
“Definitely. One person. Sorry buddy, but I don’t smell anything else.”
“I’m not noticing something,” Sam said. “Something’s wrong here.”