The Story of the Blue Planet

by Andri Snaer Magnason

  Brimir and Hulda waited a while longer; they fell asleep and woke up a few times, but it was always to the same darkness and no one came to save them. Their tummies began to rumble in unison.

  “They’ve forgotten us.”

  “Maybe they’ve forgotten you, but not me,” said Hulda sulkily.

  “But it’s always noon on our island, they don’t realize how long we’ve been missing.”

  “They must be on the way. I’m going to wait.”

  “I want to leave right now,” said Brimir.

  “Go then! See if I care.”

  Brimir set off into the forest. Hulda remained seated on her own.

  “Wait a minute, Brimir!”

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “No, I’m going to walk behind you, so the wild animals will eat you first.”

  Brimir didn’t answer her, but Hulda followed right behind him. They got stung by thistles and stumbled over fallen tree trunks.

  In the darkness the trees were like ogres and monsters; their branches were long gnarled hands that stretched out to catch them and keep them in the forest. Sometimes they creaked and cracked as if they could talk:

  Creak and crack, crimping Brimir, branches blasted and broke,

  Bleak and black, mangling Brimir, crack, crunch, and croak.

  “Oh,” said Brimir, “this is like my worst nightmare.”

  Sometimes the whining of the wind in the trees was like a ghostly groan from the forest.

  Wh-o-o hiss Huuuldaaaa, who-o-m we’ll h-o-old,

  Here in the eerie, ho-o-owling co-o-old!

  We-e’ll haunt and taunt her, a-a-ll al-o-o-one,

  We’ll h-o-o-ld and h-i-i-ide her, fa-a-r from h-o-ome!

  “Brimir!”

  It was Hulda who shouted.

  Brimir came to a halt. “What?”

  “There’s one thing we should do before we go any further,” said Hulda.

  “What’s that?” asked Brimir brusquely.

  “We should try and be friends again, otherwise we’ll never get home.”

  Brimir tried to look at Hulda but could see nothing in the dark. Nothing except a little tear, which glistened in her eye.

  “Yeah, you’re my dearest buddy, let’s be friends again,” said Brimir.

  “Oh, Brimir, and you’re my very best friend. Forgive me for being so nasty to you.”

  Brimir tried to give Hulda a hug but couldn’t; they were so slippery from the Teflon® wonder stuff.

  The children crept on through the forest. They were still shivering from fear and cold, and their tummies rumbled from hunger, but their hearts were warm with friendship once more.

  They hadn’t gone very far when they heard a ferocious growl behind them. Brimir turned around and looked straight into the jaws of a large brown bear. Its teeth were as sharp as icicles.’

  The Fierce Grizzly

  Brimir and Hulda were frozen with fear as the bear stood on its hind legs and roared. They could not move an arm or leg. At last Hulda managed to stammer:

  “Please don’t eat us, Grizzly, we’re innocent little children.”

  The bear growled in reply. “I haven’t had a bite to eat since the sun disappeared and now I’m going to gobble up every last bit of you.”

  “Oh, no! Brimir! This is our last moment!”

  The children closed their eyes as the bear sniffed their bellies and snorted.

  “Huh, huh,” he growled a little, sniffed again, and then roared. “You’re not children. What are you?”

  “Wh … what do you mean?” asked Brimir.

  “You’re not even humans,” said the bear pulling a face. “You’re something horribly inedible.”

  Hulda’s face was burning red.

  “What do you mean, horribly inedible?” she demanded.

  “You don’t smell like children, you just have a faint scent of butterfly. You’re either plastic children or zombies,” said the bear as he looked around fearfully. His fur stood on end when he mentioned zombies.

  Brimir gave Hulda a nudge, but she took no notice.

  “We’re not plastic and we’re not zombies, we’re real live children,” shouted Hulda, who was now quite furious.

  The bear then roared:

  “No, you’re not. I know the scent of delicious child flesh, and you’re not butterflies either, because they’re in all the colors of the rainbow and fly after the sun once a year. That’s when all the bears fall in love and make cubs, because the flight of the butterflies is the most beautiful thing in the world.”

  The bear turned around sadly and disappeared in the forest.

  “We are children, we can prove it,” shouted Hulda furiously at the bear.

  “Cut it out, Hulda! What are you trying to do, get the bear to eat us?”

  “WE ARE REAL CHILDREN! WE ARE REAL CHILDREN!” shouted Hulda into the darkness.

  “We are real children! We are real children!” replied the darkness.

  Hulda sat down on a rock and began to cry.

  “Don’t cry, Hulda. We got away from the bear alive.”

  “No, we’re dead, we died when we fell from the sky.”

  “Don’t be silly, we’re alive and kicking,” said Brimir reassuringly, but he tried to feel for his heartbeat just to be sure.

  “Didn’t you hear what the bear said? He said that we weren’t children, but zombies, and that’s why he wouldn’t eat us. Have you ever heard of a bear that didn’t eat children?”

  “Hulda, don’t you understand? We got away because we’ve got the butterfly powder on our hands and we’re coated with Teflon® wonder stuff, which makes us so spick-and-span that we don’t have any smell, just a faint scent of butterflies.”

  Hulda wiped the tears from her eyelids.

  “So Jolly-Goodday’s saved our lives by coating us with stuff that makes bears lose their appetite?”

  “See,” said Brimir. “Jolly-Goodday always saves the day.”

  The children continued walking through the dark forest with the naked branches. They hadn’t gone very far when they heard the echo again:

  “We are real children! We are real children! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!”

  “That was a very late echo,” said Brimir.

  “It wasn’t an echo,” said Hulda, and listened more attentively.

  The sound came from every direction and was approaching them.

  Hairy Spiders and Poisonous Insects

  “We are real children! We are real children! Ha ha ha ha!!!!”

  Brimir and Hulda listened intently.

  “Who’s playing copycat?” Hulda cried out into the dark.

  “Who’s playing copycat? Who’s playing copycat? Who’s playing copycat?” answered the darkness.

  The children stared into the dark forest between the tree trunks and the distant sound of a song reached their ears:

  Eightlegs, Bluebottlecruncher,

  Tanglepegs, Caterpillarmuncher,

  Go spin, yes, go spin.

  Weaverbug and Spinningtop,

  Uglyjug and Slobberchop,

  Go spin, yes, go spin,

  With evil intent.

  Go smell, yes, go smell,

  The butterfly scent.

  “Look at the web,” said Brimir pointing at a large spider’s web stretched between the tree branches.

  “And over there too,” said Hulda.

  “And up there above us as well!”

  Let’s listen, let’s listen,

  To the children prate.

  Let’s weave, let’s weave

  Them a web of fate.

  A hairy spider spun itself down from the highest tree and hung on a thread directly in front of them.

  “Hello, meal, my name’s Eightlegs and I’m going to eat you.”

  Brimir remembered what the bear had said and hurriedly exclaimed:

  “We’re no meal, we’re horribly inedible. Can’t you smell the butterfly scent?”

  “Oh, we most certainly can smell the butterfly sce
nt,” shrieked Eightlegs. “Butterflies are a feast!”

  “Hush Brimir,” whispered Hulda. “We’re children. Spiders eat butterflies, not children.”

  “That’s right, Eightlegs, a silly slip of the tongue,” said Brimir. “We’re children, and spiders don’t eat children.”

  The spider burst out laughing. “Ha ha ha ha!”

  Brimir wanted to continue their journey and blurted out, “Go away you ugly spider, you can’t eat children, so stop trying to scare us.”

  The spider waved its legs in gleeful anticipation.

  “Once upon a time we ate only flies and bugs and weaved our webs at night. But now it’s always dark so we can weave even bigger webs and eat birds and squirrels and sometimes monkeys. Life has never been better and we’ve never been fatter. Ho ho ho.”

  “One small spider can’t eat a child,” said Brimir.

  “But a million spiders will have no problem!” said Eightlegs and laughed.

  More laughter reached them from the darkness like a choir of a million voices. They looked up at the treetops and saw thousands of spiders with hairy legs spinning their way down towards them.

  Let’s spin, yes, let’s spin,

  With evil intent.

  Let’s smell, yes, let’s smell,

  The butterfly scent.

  “Run for it!” shouted Brimir, and off they fled.

  Let’s weave, yes, let’s weave

  To trap and deceive.

  Then sip and sup on blood,

  Sip and sup on children’s blood.

  “Don’t touch the spider’s web,” cried Hulda, “you’ll never get out of it.”

  “No web in that direction,” shouted Brimir, and they ran on again.

  The children ran and ran and were so busy looking all around them they failed to notice the web right in front of them. It was for certain the largest web ever woven in the forest, and they were heading straight for it.’

  The Butterfly Monsters

  “Brimir! Did you see what happened?”

  “Are we stuck in the web?” asked Brimir, opening his eyes carefully.

  He looked round and saw shreds of the web hanging in the trees and a spider choir of a million voices yelling after them:

  “We’ll get you sooner or later!”

  “Jolly-Goodday saved us once again!” shouted Brimir.

  “How come?”

  “Because we’re coated with Teflon® wonder stuff from the waterfall’s roar, misty spray, and rainbow, we’re so slippery that nothing can stick to us, not even the largest and stickiest spider’s web in the world.”

  “Hooray for Jolly-Goodday who thinks of everything!”

  “Let’s hurry on home and thank him.”

  “It’ll be great to get home to all the fun and the sun and the craze for flying.”

  Brimir and Hulda continued their journey through dark forests and over gloomy plains in search of their island so bright and joyful. They crossed frozen lakes and deep valleys and back into forests again and over plains. They sometimes munched on nuts or dug up potatoes, but most often they walked for hours without getting anything to appease their hunger. Occasionally they crossed the path of a lion or a tiger, but the animals of the forest had no appetite for children who didn’t smell of soft meat and warm blood.

  The animals sniffed them.

  “You’re not human, you smell like a butterfly,” said the tiger who was going to gobble up Brimir.

  “You’re not human, you’re as smooth as steel,” said the python who tried to crush Hulda.

  Brimir and Hulda had ceased to be afraid of wild animals. Indeed, the wild animals were now afraid of them, the horribly inedible children, and stories about them spread through the forest. The wild animals called them the butterfly monsters. Brimir and Hulda enjoyed walking calmly past a pack of wolves and catching the glint of fear in the wild animals’ eyes. They slept fearlessly in a bear’s lair or crept up on lions simply to startle them.

  The children came to a glade where a large and fierce leopard was about to eat a sheep. Hulda crept up behind the leopard, which caught no scent of a child and so concentrated on the sheep. Hulda came right up to it, holding in her laughter, before she yelled and pulled the leopard’s tail:

  “Boo! Boo! I’m the butterfly monster! I’m going to eat you!”

  The leopard howled pitifully and rushed away while Brimir and Hulda held their sides laughing. They rubbed their empty tummies before eating up every last bit of the lamb.

  Replenished, they continued their journey. The sky was always clouded over so that they couldn’t follow the moon or find their way by the stars. Sometimes they thought they saw a shining star, but it was only a firefly with its deceptive glowing light. The cries of night owls and bats pierced the darkness, but otherwise the night was songless. The birds had flown away in search of the sun. Abandoned chicks cheeped in their nests.

  The children had been walking for a long time but had no idea for how long exactly because they measured time in days, and the sun no longer circled the planet.

  It began to pour with rain. A thousand woolly and curly lambs in the sky peed over the children. They found shelter in a large cave and lit a little yellow fire with dried leaves.

  “We’ll never find our way home,” said Brimir sadly, “and I’m hungry again.”

  “We’ll find no food in this downpour.”

  They became silent and sat staring at the fire when Hulda had an idea. She walked grinning to the cave mouth and shouted out into the darkness:

  “Lion! We want meat, right now!”

  “Why should I give you meat?” growled the lion in the darkness.

  “Should we eat you instead?” growled Hulda, and she bared her teeth. “You don’t know what a butterfly monster can do in a fit of rage.”

  The lion appeared shortly after with a little reindeer in its jaws.

  “That wasn’t so difficult,” said Hulda, and smiled.

  “Some vegetables would be nice,” said Brimir.

  “Mole! Bring some potatoes!” yelled Hulda.

  “What if I don’t feel like it?” was heard muttered from beneath the forest.

  “Then we’ll eat you,” said Hulda, stamping her foot.

  A pile of potatoes came up through the cave floor.

  “I’m still hungry,” said Brimir when they had finished the reindeer and potatoes.

  “Call for food. There’s a delivery service in this forest.”

  “Mink! We’d like some fish!” shouted Brimir.

  “I’ve trouble enough fending for myself,” replied the mink in the darkness.

  “I’ve never tasted mink meat before!” cried Brimir, and he tried to growl like Hulda.

  Soon afterwards a fat and wriggling trout appeared at the mouth of the cave.

  “I’m thirsty,” sighed Brimir after his meal. “I’d like some milk.”

  “She-wolf, we want some milk.”

  The she-wolf came and lay down by the children. They snuggled up to her warm pelt and sucked warm wolf-milk from her teats. Their sleep was passed in wolf dreams: Yellow moon. Black darkness. Red blood.

  The Wildest Wild Animals

  When Hulda and Brimir awoke the she-wolf had gone and the fire was cold. The darkness was so dense one could almost feel it.

  “Bears! Firewood!” yelled the children.

  Bears flocked to the cave, each with an armful of sticks and logs. They built a large bonfire, which Brimir set alight. The fire burned like a little sun and shone out through the cave entrance.

  “Maybe it’s possible to fly in the glow of the fire if the flames are powerful enough,” said Hulda staring at the bonfire.

  Brimir’s eyes gleamed. “Bears! More firewood!” he shouted.

  The bears added a whole tree to the pile. The fire blazed more and more intensely.

  Until at last …

  “I can fly!” cried Hulda. “HA! HA! HA!”

  The children glided like flies around the bonfire, w
ildly ecstatic. Circleaftercircleaftercircle. The flames licked the roof of the cave. The rain pounded down outside. Lightning lit up the forest. Shrieking bats joined them.

  “We are wolf-cubs! We are black hornets! Everyone’s afraid of us! We’re the wildest of wild animals!”

  The dark shadows flickered.

  “Spiders and silkworms! We need clothing!”

  “Why should we spin and weave for you?”

  “Because otherwise we’ll rip down your webs! We are the butterfly monsters, the strongest and most ferocious of wild animals. You have to obey us!”

  The worms span their finest silk, and the spiders wove from it precious clothes in thousands of colors. The children put reindeer horns on their heads and flew screaming around the flames.

  “We don’t have to hurry home. We’re fine right here!”

  “Hyena! We’re hungry!”

  The hyena laughed its cynical laugh and set off into the forest. Shortly afterwards it came with its prey in its jaws and laid it on the cave floor. The children looked horrified at its catch.

  “It’s a child!”

  The child lay motionless on the cave floor, its face deathly pale. It was a boy about the same size as Brimir.

  “Is he dead?” whispered Hulda.

  “Hee, hee, hee,” shrieked the hyena. “I thought you’d want fresh meat and would kill him yourself. Aren’t you the wildest of wild animals? Hee, hee, hee!”

  The hyena ran away laughing.

  Brimir ran up to the child and began to revive him.

  “Is he hurt?”

  “I don’t see any blood.”

  “What’s a child doing wandering around in such a dark and dangerous forest?” asked an outraged Hulda.

  Brimir looked at her.

  “The forest wasn’t always so black. Before we fixed the sun over our island at home it had been almost certainly just like our forest, light green and dark green in turns, depending on the sunshine and moonlight.”

  Brimir gave the boy some wolf-milk to drink. He soon came round, but his face remained amazingly pale.