Bailey let his bow and three arrows fall slackly from his quivering left hand, as his Hat-friend, Jo-whatever-you-say-it, clasped his right hand between his thicker ones, and mumbled his pleas into the night-streaked sky of the dying day. They were literally a two person rock of hope—hope that the Sky Oldies of the Hats would hear the pleas of this Hat-seer and do something to hold back the rising river of squiggling, sucking, slurping, clacking, fish-smelling, air-drinking terror, that clung to every tree, rock, deadfall and dirt patch visible in the half light.
Oh, Hat Oldies, let the sound of my bow and arrows falling not wake their fury.
As Bailey’s bow and arrows fell from his hand as it joined Jo-whatever-you-say-it’s hand, many long, fishy, vine-like arms, hooked with razor sharp mushroom cups reached out, and ever so gently took the bow and arrows. The weapons were then passed back among the hillside of waving appendages, and born off out of sight, into the gloomy murk below.
Oh mud me!
His Hat friend continued to speaks to his Oldies up in the sky, and as he spoke, the darkening forest swayed with muck-bottom life about them. The vine-like limbs of the nasty fish creatures waved like grass in the autumn wind. Their bulbous heads that had eyes floating in oil within made blub-blub motions. The star-shaped sucker foot of each creature emitted a moist sigh as the body and limbs above swayed. The meat-tearing beaks beneath where the head bobbed clacked as if in tune to the sighs. Most terribly, the single sinewy appendage that grew from behind the blub-blub head and seemed to have a toothy nostril on the end of it breathed in their scents, as if drinking invisible stuff.
Oh mudder me, mud is we!
His Hat-friend spoke soothing words into the nighting sky, addressing a daddy and a life-saver and making promises like a runty does to a bruiser who he stole an arrowhead from while the bruiser was rutting it up with a mate.
And the gruesome blub-blub beasts all about, who had seemingly swallowed his bow and arrows, sighed along with Jo-whatever-you-say-it’s Oldie seeking song.
Oh, yuckers!
Bailey and his Hat-friend were now rolling over the sea of waving barbed tongues—that was it. The arms reminded him of hooked tongues! But the hooks were not hooking and ripping. Rather the backs of the hooks were lifting and pushing and the countless creeping blub-blub beasts passed them along down into the night-sunk wood, down into the bleak hollow, across a creek bottom, past some big reeking muskrat holes, and up and out of the woods to another ridge. They were then set back down on their knees like an old wrinkle mom placing down a glass doll ever so carefully.
In an instant the sea of creatures entangled one with the other and seemed to be sucked like so much slurped honey back down into the hollow behind them.
They kneeled before Bailey’s bow and arrows—all four of them, the one which he had sunk into a squib earlier having reappeared, without a bloodstain even—and looked out over a rolling table land, facing inland and upland, toward a place where the woods had been burned away by something meaner and less contagious to the trees than fire. In the middle of the burnt hilltop sat a great white figure, in the shape of a human head. The head, which from this distance seemed small, must have been the size of a Hat meeting house, covering the girth of a clan camp.
The crazy thing about the head was that it was lit up by its own lanterns, and that the face was formed like that of a pretty girl, a real cuddler, but with slantwise eyes.
Bailey blurted, “Ye Oldie Ma?”
The Hat-seer’s voice seemed older, wiser, and as sleepy as that of the old and tired, “No, Friend Bailey, ‘tis the Angle of The Lord. I must go before her and repent.”
With those mystic words concerning some bruiser named The Lord, and his darling sky-fallen daughter, Jo-whatever-you-say-it was standing and then walking, and then hurrying in his plodding way towards the upland burnt place, which would be lost to sight in moments behind the next tree line.
“Wait, me poor fool Hat—ye be lose trace, me be ye get long we.”
Still thrilled to ecstasy that the myriad creatures had befriended and released them rather than having done whatever they surely do to living things when they’re hungry, Bailey bounced along lightly on his moccasin-clad feet, and placed a hand on his Hat-friend’s shoulder to guide him around the briars, boulders, thickets and deadfalls. For a big ole bruiser, even some Hat bruiser with two names, expected a suitor to come for his daughter proper like, without all of the clumsy stumbling noise his new friend was prone to make if left to his own dumb-dumb course.
As one, they traversed the suddenly quiet land of Night, like one person with two minds, and a single destination should, hand-in-hand.
