"Haarumph!"
"I move we go ahead and get started and stop early for a good night's rest," the bear finished diplomatically.
"Enough! Enough!" the lion cried with impatience. "Get on with it."
"Haarumph!" the owl grunted indignantly but said no more of it.
And the group set out at once, though the mood was as different from that of the morning as night from day. No one spoke much for the rest of the afternoon unless it was about the task before them or some such other official business. They plodded on, becoming more and more tired and dispirited with every step. As soon as the sun neared the tree tops Boston watched for the owl's appearance overhead and signaled him to come down.
"Let's call it a day, Judge," the bear said. "We'll get a fresh start in the morning."
Everyone agreed most whole heartedly with this suggestion, and the group fell nearly in their tracks with weariness. The Sergeant Major dragged the packs from Agamemnon's back, hardly noticing the animal's snarled curses, and then lay down in the brush and immediately fell fast asleep. The others followed suit. Honorashious, who had altered his nocturnal nature to some extent, reconnoitered the area, sailing silently through the forest, before coming to roost in the conveniently situated remains of a tree stump.
The next morning they were full of energy and most eager to get underway. Up before dawn, they saw the sun climb into a clear sky. After a light breakfast everyone rose quickly and made ready to get started.
The Sergeant Major issued arms. With an evil smirk Percy took his sword, a great switch of feathers attached to an inlaid mother of pearl handle. Boston, who was standing behind, stepped forward to receive his weapon. As the lion stepped aside to allow the bear to pass, he turned and, laughing, flicked the tip of the feather sword beneath the bear's great, damp, black nose. Startled, Boston jerked his head back and then frowned with displeasure.
"Sheath your weapon, Lion," he said gruffly and with an opened paw moved the sword carefully away from his nose. "That's no way to handle a sword. You're going to get somebody hurt!"
Each of the others received a similar weapon, graduated in size as appropriate to the individual. Agamemnon and Jupe were generally pleased with theirs–in spite of the many hostile mutterings and curses with which they received them from the Sergeant Major–considering them signs of their acceptance as full fledged combatants. Having received and belted their weapons, the group assembled on the path in the same order as the day before. Boston stood on his hind legs and addressed the owl:
"Judge, I believe that we are standing a short distance from the precinct line, which constitutes the border with the West Central Savannah."
"Haarumph! The precinct border with the savannah does in fact lie not fifteen minutes ahead, Boston–haarumph–though the Seventh Juridical District extends far beyond and–haarumph–indeed–haarumph–the purview of the court will not be strictly bound to any arbitrarily drawn borders of precincts–haarumph!"
"Thank you, Judge, and, believe me, we would never think of constraining the court in any way whatsomever." The bear addressed the group generally: "I would only caution everybody, since we are going into the grasslands now, to stick together in one group and not get separated. It's easy to get lost in that tall grass. Hawg City is out there too. The last thing in the world that we want right now is to get delayed by an incident with those warthogs. Accordingly, Egbert and the Judge have laid us out a course keeping to the south of the city where we shouldn't see too many of them. Keep up a good pace. Judge, as much as is possible I recommend you ride rather than fly in order to avoid giving us away in any way whatsomever. We should hit the Razorbacks by noon tomorrow."
Even Percy agreed that these words of the bear reflected a most extraordinarily excellent common sense, and as Boston dropped down onto all fours, the unit prepared to start.
"Keep yer weapons at the ready t' draw!" the Sergeant Major rasped as the group moved out.
Twisting his head back around on himself, Jupe sneered out of the side of his mouth at the sparrow:
"How can I draw with you on my back?"
"Shet it!" the Sergeant Major rasped harshly. "Ain't ye never heard o' military bear'n afore?"
17. Hawg City
At the foot of the mountain range commonly known as the Razorbacks an extensive network of burrows and mounds lay beneath a blanket of noxious, yellow-brown smoke. The burrows and mounds covered an area of 30 square miles and were interlaced with a complex system of paths, trails, and wide boulevards. Every vestige of the savannah grass, which should have extended unbroken to the very foot of the mountains, or any other traces of vegetation had been worn away in this area and for several miles outside it, where it began to resuscitate, thinly at first, fully recovering to its natural thickness only some miles away. The aforementioned by-ways of the city, formed haphazardly over time by the heavy traffic, extended intricate and intertwining like so many blood vessels through this brown dirt ring before disappearing eventually into the yellow savannah grass at a thousand different points. The city itself, the burrows and mounds, sat in the center of this skein of paths and trails like a cancerous tumor amidst its nourishing capillaries.
The city teemed with activity. Warthogs young and old, male and female, healthy and crippled, large, medium, and small; warthogs rich and poor; warthogs of every conceivable shape, form, color, and size and from every walk of life imaginable crowded the city and its approaches on seemingly infinite errands of business. From the hooves of every animal making even the slightest of movements there rose into the air a cloud of yellow-brown dust composed of parched earth and dried warthog dung. The small, individual puffs of this mixture, which rose from animals traveling singly down the narrower paths, combined on the larger trails and boulevards crowded ten abreast and head to butt to form a general, all encompassing and ever present cloud above the city.
Each of the byways was bordered by proportionally sized ditches of a variegated, fetid liquid matter. These ditches received small trickles of waste from each burrow as well as any runoff from the traffic, and passing warthogs seemed particularly fond of using them as receptacles in which to urinate. The ditches bordering the larger trails and boulevards took the runoff from the countless smaller ones, and the combined volume of effluent beginning at the center of the city and flowing outward had increased to enormous proportions by the time it reached the outskirts. From time to time the ditches became blocked at various locations with some solid waste matter or other and the putrid liquid would overflow into the street, forming a giant, messy puddle through which the traffic had no choice but to tramp. Special teams of warthogs were dispatched to these locations to clear the blockage by sticking their great snouts into the ditch and routing the clogging material out.
These "Routers," as they were called, exhibited an appearance uniformly and distinctly different from that of the rest of the general populace. Their occupation caused them to be constantly splattered with the contents of these ditches, and their manes, normally a source of great, bristling pride to warthogs, were generally torn, unkempt, and caked with the filth of their daily tasks. At the outer reaches of the city, where due to its great volume an overflow was an especially serious matter, it was not uncommon to see several Routers completely immersed, wallowing in the sludge and swinging their great snouts vigorously back and forth in a great commotion.
Effluent from the city affected the surrounding environment with some dramatic consequences. As noted earlier, the area for some distance past the outskirts lacked any vegetation whatsoever. But the resumption of the savannah grass at an apparently normal thickness hid from view the full extent of the polluting effect of this waste matter. Hidden beneath the grass, and no longer confined to the ditches, the putrid liquid dispersed generally over the area, soaking the ground and forming a marsh-like environment which extended for many miles into every part of the grasslands. As a consequence the savannah outside the city was uninhabitable, and the marsh formed a barrie
r to the city's further expansion. Because warthogs could survive nowhere else, they were effectively stuck in Hawg City for the future.
In addition to this network of sewers the ingenious citizens of Hawg City—for such it was—had devised numerous inventions and systemic processes to provide for the luxury and every comfort of those who could afford them. Water delivery, in some cases to the very burrows and mounds themselves, was universal. The water flowed by means of gravity down small aqueducts and ditches throughout the city from an enormous spring located in the slightly higher center. Inside the burrows and mounds themselves each hog family had such items of decoration and furniture and amenities as they could afford according to their station in life. The typical middle class family burrow was remarkably uniform in appearance and generally lacked for nothing in the way of creature comforts.
Yet, in spite of the satisfaction, if not surfeit, of all their needs, the inhabitants seemed to yearn only the more fervently to possess whatever new bauble or thing the fertile imagination might invent for their ownership. If they must fetch their water from a common cistern servicing a group of eight or ten, nothing would do but that they obtain the water directly to their burrow. If they had three or four roomy dens inside, they must have four or five. An unremitting greed, complicated and egged on by the fundamental, if unspoken, belief that one's intrinsic worth increased proportionally to one's wealth, doomed these warthogs to an existence of eternal dissatisfaction; and because they made up a great majority of the population, their self-perceived deprivation was always a matter of most urgent business for their government.
The great spring, housed in the Hawg City Waterworks mound, was located in the physical as well as the governmental center of the city. All of the many and various burrows and mounds of public administration also concentrated here. The Court Mound, the Capital Burrow, the Legislature, the Department of Attack, even the Bureau of Taxes occupied this area in a pleasingly symmetrical arrangement. In contrast to the chaotic pattern presented by the rest of the metropolis, the orderly paths and walkways among these public structures had been laid out with geometric precision. Great boars and the occasional sow, their manes bristling with pride and their slender tails erect, promenaded with stately pomp along these walkways in twos and threes, their heads bent close together in grave discussion of all manner of business and matters of state of the highest importance and urgency.
There were several magnificent hog wallows in the city's center as well, each frequented by its own special clientele tending to one or the other faction or political view. These were on a much grander scale than those public wallows located in the middle class suburbs, and they admitted only dues paying members whose acceptance a selection committee of long standing members approved. Membership in one of these exclusive wallows was an absolute prerequisite for any warthog aspiring to a position of power and authority in the city. All of the most important issues of the day were discussed, political strategies planned, business deals sealed, and careers made and destroyed, all over a leisurely wallow in the mud.
Outside this central core, the city transitioned abruptly to a crowded district of stores and businesses. Here the byways were even more crowded than elsewhere in the city, and it was here that the warthogs came to do most of their shopping and conduct their daily business. Further on past the business district one entered a blighted area of substandard housing. Many of the Routers and similar such low income warthogs lived in this area. Unlike the middle class suburbs mentioned earlier, the living conditions were minimal. Although these warthogs still lacked in none of the basic essentials of life, absent to a greater or lesser degree were the luxuries common to the middle or upper classes. Their burrows and mounds presented a generally shabby appearance and the cluttered patches of ground outside them sometimes were inundated with sewage from a clogged drainage ditch. Any problems with such public services went immediately to the bottom of the City's list of priorities, and the Routers, so diligently employed in the more upscale areas of the city, seemed not much concerned to apply their skills at home on their own time after a long day at work.
But of all the scenery in this low rent district, by far the most imposing was a governmental structure. For here the warthogs had chosen to construct a great and dreary penal institution. If the doors of this penitentiary were to swing suddenly open and its inhabitants pour forth upon the streets, the population at liberty in Hawg City would increase by fully fifty percent. At one end of this sprawling, four-story mound, a construction project was underway in what was a continuous process of expansion to accommodate yet more inmates, many of whom were at large in the city and only awaiting space in order that they too could serve their time. As one might reasonably infer from the imposing dimensions of their penitentiary, the warthogs valued nothing so highly as law and order. Accordingly, they were especially proud of the prison's great capacity. They considered it a symbol reflecting the highest principles and ideals of their culture, and the enormous proportion of the city's budget they devoted to its maintenance proved that they were indeed serious in their insistence that every citizen adheres to these same high standards.
Even so, but for the violation of a single class of laws the clientele of the penitentiary would have represented a far smaller percentage of the city's population. The behavior which this law would discourage violated the highest moral principles of every law-abiding citizen, and the members of the Hawg City Legislature–who served at the pleasure, as expressed in general elections, of this same citizenry–stridently and publicly professed to an abiding determination to exterminate this behavior, which they severally and personally considered most offensive and despicable. The behavior of which we speak was none other than the pernicious and addictive practice commonly known as "Hawg Hopping."
Most prevalent in this day and age among the younger boars, but to a lesser extent among the young sows as well, "Hawg Hopping" was a practice as old as recorded time. It had many variations, but generally it was practiced as follows:
One warthog lay flat on his belly, preferably half-submerged in the mud of a good sized hog wallow. Another warthog stood to the side. At a signal from the one in the wallow or perhaps from a bystander, this warthog charged at full speed, his snout lowered and just grazing the earth, at the reclining hog. At an appropriate distance he gathered all his strength and made a great leap into the air, flying spectacularly over the wallowing hog, and landing on all fours on the opposite side clear of any mud and without touching so much as the hairy tip of the reclining warthog's erect tail. In a particularly satisfying jump the warthog, while airborne, might whip his body violently from side to side, an invidious grin upon his jowls, eliciting from any bystanders shrieks of delight. Though two or more warthogs most frequently engaged in the practice, a single hog–and this was especially prevalent among hard-core addicts–could perform a variation of the exercise in which a log or other inert device simulated the hog in his wallow, or else the jumper might use nothing at all, relying entirely on his own imagination to produce a partner over which to leap.
The manifold ill-effects of this behavior, inflicting a significant cost upon society, have become well known over the years. From the sometimes life-threatening injuries suffered by jumping hogs, many of them young, who fail to clear the wallow; to the terrible toll of addiction on once robust boars of forty stone shrunken to barely twenty, too frail and exhausted to stand after days and even weeks of nearly continuous jumping; the consequences of this behavior are tragic. And most disturbing of all, the age at which individuals first participate in "Hawg Hops" has decreased dramatically.
The legislature responded to this threat to Hawg City's youth as though it were a call to arms. They imposed swift and severe penalties against the participants in any behavior associated with "Hawg Hopping." Furthermore, so great was the danger to society, the stiff penalties decreed by law allowed no latitude for mitigating circumstances. As a consequence, the guilty rapidly filled the penitentiary
in such numbers that the perpetrators of other crimes must walk free in order to make room for the Hawg Hoppers.
18. A Bourgeois Warthog
Once past the prison and the low rent district one entered the vast, vapid suburbs of the middle class, by far the largest and, electorally, most powerful class in the city. Here the warthogs generally took the greatest pride in their children and, as one might have gleaned already from our earlier discussions, all of their many material possessions. At the first sign of any sluggishness in the sewage flow in this area aggressive Routers appeared immediately to clear it out. The burrows and mounds presented for the most part a neater, more orderly appearance than those in the last district, each occupying its own microscopic patch of dusty bare earth. Conveniently located cisterns, one for every cluster of seven or eight burrows, provided them water, although here and there a warthog family may have scrimped and saved enough to have the water brought directly into their burrow itself. Each family had at least one public hog wallow nearby, and there were even a few wallows which offered the exclusivity and luxury of private membership, though hardly on a scale approaching that found in the center of the city.
In spite of the overcrowded conditions in the City, for these warthogs there could be no greater satisfaction than the reproduction of themselves. The family was sacrosanct. The furtherance of their children and the promotion of their families' fortunes were the fundamental ordering principals of these warthogs' existence. At the same time, however, unlike the lower class of warthog families, each of which typically comprised seven or eight litters, this class was keenly aware of the paradoxical fact that the economic costs of children limited that success and material wealth they so coveted. As a result, in spite of their love for their children, most of this class tended to bear only one or two litters.
The Hollowed Tree Page 10