The Secret of the Swamp King (2 page)

Dobro thought for a moment, and then his eyes took on an adventurous twinkle. “You know, I ain't been hog hunting in a good long while. What do you say we go catch that rascal?”

Aidan and Steren exchanged a look. “This hog wallow,” said Aidan, “if it's in a swampy place, how can our horses get through?”

“They can't get through!” answered Dobro. “We'll leave them smelly things here. Besides,” he added, “one old hog against three boys and two horses … That ain't a fair fight, is it?”

Steren shot a wry grin at Aidan and held out his spear. “If a fair fight's what we're after, we probably shouldn't take our spears either, eh, Aidan?”

Dobro shook his head and fixed a pitying look on the prince, as if he wondered how such a thick-headed person could possibly make it in the world. “Of
course
we're leaving your cold-shiny spears behind. It ain't right to go after critters that way. Critters can't make sharp things out of cold-shiny same as folks can.”

“Did you get a look at that boar's white-shinies?” exclaimed Steren. He thrust his thumbs out from his jaws in imitation of the boar's razor-sharp tusks. “Do you expect he'll put them away to make sure it's a fair fight?”

Dobro reached over and tapped Steren's forehead with a gray-green finger. “Which would you rather have in a free fight? A pair of long tuskies or that brain of yours?” He gestured at the civilizers' spears. “I ain't gonna hunt the civilizer way.”

“And without Dobro,” Aidan said to Steren, “you and I don't have any chance of getting that hog.”

Steren was still hesitant, but Dobro turned on his funny, swampy charm. “Come on, Sturn,” he said. “Quit your mullygrubbing. Me and Aidan can't catch that hog without you.”

“Come on, Steren,” Aidan urged. “Who knows when we'll have another chance at a hog like that?”

Dobro led the way up the River Trail, following the boar's tracks toward the hog wallow. He walked as silently as an owl in flight. But Dobro wasn't merely walking. He was hopping, or prancing, on his tiptoes—a quick, short step, followed by a long step; a quick, short step; a long step. Steren looked quizzically at Aidan, who merely shrugged. There was plenty he didn't know about the ways of feechiefolk.

Aidan and Steren considered themselves skilled trackers and experts at traveling stealthily through the forest. But the impossibly light fall of Dobro's bare feet—however strange his gait—made them seem lumbering flat-foots by comparison. Aidan looked down at the heavy boot prints he and Steren left in the sand. They seemed thick and clumsy, out of place among the sharp, crisp tracks left by the forest animals that passed that way—raccoon tracks like neat, tiny hands; delicate twin crescents of deer tracks; turkey tracks, sticklike and spindly. Even the massive boar left neat tracks in the sand—paired triangles a little broader than the deer tracks.

Looking down at the tracks, Aidan realized that Dobro wasn't leaving any. There were animal tracks and
boot tracks, but there were no barefoot human tracks! Aidan caught up with Dobro and looked closely at his feet as he skipped along. He wasn't just walking on the tips of his long toes; he was walking on two toes per foot. With each step he dragged his toes, leaving a paired track that looked remarkably similar to a hog track.

“Dobro!” Aidan marveled. He was breaking the trackers' silence, but he couldn't help himself. “You're making hog tracks!”

Dobro quickly raised a finger to his lips but didn't stop hopping. “'Course I am,” he whispered. “I ain't going to leave five-toe feechie prints where civilizers can see them. I got enough civilizers in my life already.”

Aidan grabbed Steren's tunic. “Look,” he whispered, pointing down at the trail, “half of those hog tracks are Dobro's.” They watched Dobro take a few more steps. His irregular stride—short, long, short, long—was his way of mimicking a four-footed gait with only two feet. Suddenly the two civilizers were more interested in Dobro's unique skill than in the hunt itself. “Can you do any other tracks?” asked Steren.

“I can do wolf tracks,” answered Dobro. On either foot he folded his small toe over the toe next to it and walked a few steps on the balls of his feet, producing the track of the red wolf—four toes over a single, broad footpad.

“Amazing,” gasped Steren.

“I can do a bunny, too,” said Dobro, “but it hurts a little bit.” He cracked his knuckles, flipped upside down with his feet straight up in the air, and walked a few steps
on his fingers. The palms of his hands didn't touch the ground; his whole weight was supported by two thumbs and two forefingers, his hands only a few inches apart. The flats of his thumbs made tracks like a rabbit's long thumper feet, and his forefinger tips made the tiny front paws.

The civilizers stood flabbergasted at Dobro's unheard-of talent. But the feechie was anxious to get on with the adventure. “That's enough trickifying,” he announced. “Let's get on to the hog wallow.”

They hadn't gone another fifty strides before the boar's tracks veered left and disappeared from the River Trail. “What'd I tell you?” whispered Dobro, pointing through the underbrush to a spot they couldn't see. “That boar hog is lazying in the greenbog.”

Dobro double-checked the vine rope coiled at his waist, then scampered up the nearest loblolly bay. Aidan climbed the tree after him and motioned for Steren to follow. Steren was right behind, eager for adventure, but when Dobro leaped like a squirrel from the treetop to a nearby spruce pine, Steren stopped where he was. “He's crazy,” he observed flatly.

Aidan chuckled. “You're right about that. But he still knows the best way to travel through a swamp. You just follow me. I'll follow him.” Aidan edged out on the limb, leaped from the same spot Dobro had leaped from, and landed exactly where Dobro landed. Steren took a deep breath, closed one eye, and made the same soaring leap after him.

Flying from spruce pine to magnolia to laurel oak to bay tree, the civilizers grew more and more comfortable with the feechie's dizzying, exhilarating mode of crossing the bottomland. Here, forty feet or more above the forest floor, they were high above the mosquitoes and other biting, stinging bugs that would usually torment them in the swampy environs of the River Tam. And the air up so high was clearer and almost breezy compared to the heavy air at ground level.

When they paused a moment to rest, Aidan nudged Steren and pointed at the ground. “Look down,” he whispered.

“I don't think so!” answered Steren. As exhilarating as this jaunt through the treetops had been, he wasn't completely over his fear of heights. “I'd better not look down.”

But Aidan insisted, and when Steren looked, he saw that the dense, rough cover of hoorah bush and saw palmetto had given way to a rolling mat of vibrant yellow-green. “A peat bog!” he exclaimed. Aidan and Dobro quickly shushed him, for if the boar had gone to its wallow as Dobro had said, he might be close enough to hear.

But Aidan couldn't begrudge Steren's enthusiasm. He hardly knew a more delightful place than a peat bog, where sphagnum moss piled layer on layer, blanketing the ground like a bright green blizzard. The mat was always growing, always layering on a new green surface, smothering the layers below, which partially rotted into a
black, spongy muck. This bog had been growing for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, a fraction of an inch every year, and the green mat of moss the boys could see from the treetops floated a full three feet above the waterlogged soil that supported it.

While Aidan and Steren admired the rolling green sea below them, Dobro scouted the area for the hog. Swiftly and soundlessly, he soared from treetop to treetop.

It wasn't long before Dobro came swinging back to Aidan's and Steren's tree. “He's here, all right,” he whispered. “Follow me.” He led the way across the broad canopies of five gum trees before he gestured for them to be still. Aidan looked to the ground directly below him. There lay the hog on its side, as massive and black as the stump of one of the swell-buttressed gum trees that grew here in the bottomlands. The ground beneath his body was indented and rose around his mass on all sides, as if the hog were resting on a green feather mattress. Even from their perch in the tree, the hunters could hear the hog—a long, snuffling, grunting snore. His huge ear, flat and broad, flapped over his eye like a mule blinder. His legs lurched occasionally. In his dreams he was still running.

Dobro put one hand on Aidan's shoulder and the other on Steren's and pulled them in close. “Here's how it's going to work, boys: When I give you the sign, we all three going to drop on him. I'm gonna tie him up,” whispered Dobro, “and your job's to hold him still.” Steren shot a doubtful look in Aidan's direction.

“Aidan,” continued Dobro, “you catch his left earflap. Sturn, you get the right'un.”

Steren tried to butt in, but Dobro was making an important point and wouldn't be interrupted. “Once you grab aholt, you got to keep aholt.” He clenched both fists in a gesture of determination. “Like you're squeezing all the goodie out of a duck tater.” The civilizers had never squeezed a duck tater, but they got the idea nevertheless. “'Cause if you let go of your ear, things ain't gonna go too well for the feller's still got holt of the other ear.

“Aidan, you remember Chief Gergo, don't you?” Dobro held up three fingers in imitation of the three-fingered hand of his chieftain. “His hunting partner lost his holt on a boar hog about like this one.” He chomped his teeth meaningfully and gave the civilizers a slow wink.

“Er, Dobro,” said Prince Steren, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible, “couldn't we just rope him from here? I believe your rope will reach.”

Dobro gave an exasperated sigh and shook his head. “Where's the sport in that?” he asked. And without waiting for an answer, he began counting for the jump signal: “One … two…”

Steren jumped up to protest Dobro's plan, but in doing so, he lost his footing and tumbled out of the tree. Dobro whistled as he watched the prince hurtle toward the moss twenty feet below. “That feller's so bloodthirsty he can't even wait for three!” he whooped. By the time Steren hit the turf, he had done a full flip. His feet landed hard on a soft spot in the ground, and he punched all the
way through the green moss mat and into black muck up to his armpits.

The boar, of course, was awakened by the commotion and leaped to his feet with a piercing squeal and a roaring grunt. Or he tried to leap. The ground was so springy and yielding that he had to rock his great mass back and forth a couple of times to get his feet under him. Meanwhile, Aidan and Dobro flew out of the tree themselves to come to the rescue of the prince, who was struggling with little success to free himself from the deep peat while the boar decided whether to attack or flee.

Aidan landed just behind the hog's left shoulder; to his relief, he didn't go through the moss as Prince Steren had. Aidan grabbed hold of the hog's left ear and dug his boot heels into the soft turf. Dobro grabbed the hog's tail and held on like grim death. But, as Dobro had said earlier, it would take more than two hunters to bring down a hog that size. As the boar struggled to his feet, the ground beneath the struggling pile of hog and human rippled in waves, as if an earthquake had hit the bottomlands. The hog wheeled around, tossing his head in Aidan's direction, trying to slash his attacker to ribbons. Aidan managed to stay out of reach of the flashing tusks, but he wasn't sure how much longer he could keep his grip.

Dobro was having a hard go of it himself; he had already been kicked four or five times by the boar's flying hooves, and they were just getting started. But he wasn't ready to give up yet. “Squeeze that earflap!” called Dobro over the grunting and squealing. “Squeeze it like a duck tater.”

“Steren!” called Aidan. “Steren, we need you!”

The hog was running across the bog now, crazed with terror and fury. Aidan had tried to dig in, but he was being dragged across the trembling turf. The skinny feechie was being trailed along behind the great boar like a flag behind a racing wagon, his feet hardly touching the ground.

Steren managed to free himself from the peat and charged across the greenbog to his friends' aid. He caught up just at the bog's edge. The hog had punched a foreleg through a soft spot in the turf and was struggling to free himself when Steren caught up and latched himself to the hog's right ear. The two big civilizers were able to pin the hog to the turf long enough for Dobro to whirl in and tie the hog's four legs together. The boar struggled against his bindings, squealing and harrumphing, thrashing his head back and forth, wanting to slash something—anything—wide open. But Dobro's knots were sure.

The feechie disappeared into a stand of hardwood near the edge of the greenbog and came back with an oak sapling he had hurriedly cut down with a stone saw he kept in his side pouch. “Tote-pole,” he explained, and he began to stick the pole between the boar's knees just below the bindings, first the front knees, then through to the back. As he worked, he smiled at the civilizers. “Aidan, you got to tell Sturn about the time you come into the feechie camp on a tote-pole, just like this boar hog.” Aidan laughed as he remembered the day he was captured by Rabbo Flatbottom and Jonko Backwater in the magnolia jumble near the Bayberry Swamp.

“Well, boys,” said Dobro when the hog was secured to the tote-pole, “you look stout enough to get this big boy home without no help from a scrawny feechie like me. I'm ready to see my mama. Sturn, it was a pleasure. Aidan, don't be a stranger.”

With that, the feechie boy disappeared into the forest. And the civilizers contemplated the long trip back to the horses with their massive, bristling, struggling prize.