Eritopia

Fleg's Troubles

The next day Fleg scoured the Forest edge for signs of the wolf. After a few hours he picked up the scent, and broken twigs indicated the little man was with him. There were other tracks too, that sometimes left the ground. He assumed they were of the tree-hanging strangers who had murdered his friends.

He followed them for a while, but as dusk fell he sheltered under the trees. He tried to resist, but the dreams still came. As his eyelids drooped and sleep overtook him, he saw a landscape devoid of grass and trees. He smelt a sulphurous stench, as real as if he were awake, and the sensation of heat as if he were actually present. An age seemed to pass as he stood in the centre of that devastation. Water fell from vast fountains, bubbling and boiling into nothing on the hot rocks. As years shrank into moments, the landscape began to cool. The puddles became streams that slipped between boulders and over glassy black sands.

Fleg's imagination took him on an overview of a settling world. Rivers grew from the streams and ran across flat plains. They meandered along, eating into the substance of the earth. As time passed, orange and green lichens exploded like primitive flowers on the rocks. Rosettes of herbs and strands of fine grasses began to colour the sands and the soil. In the aeons condensed into minutes in his mind, the landscape changed. On buckled rock, rubble and solidifying lava, shrubs and trees flourished. Plants were flowering and setting seed, distributing their succession further and further. They met each other in calculated confusion, covering the surface of the world.

Fleg could see, in the distance, something approaching. At first it was a speck on the horizon. He watched it grow into an upright figure, walking on two legs as men did. He was not as astonished as he should have been. He realised it was coming to see him. He couldn't move, or run away; the dream wouldn't allow it. He watched the dark shape approach and soon it was with him.

The figure turned its head to gaze across the valley. A silver line of water flashed and sparkled its way to the horizon, stretching far across the plain.

'This is all mine,' it said, pointing to the landscape.

It walked off, and stood below an outcrop where water gurgled over a ledge into a small waterfall. The stranger stood at the base of it, letting his feet soak in the water.

'It has been a long time,' he said.

'What do you mean, all yours?' Fleg asked the apparition.

'I mean,' said the figure, 'that I created it.'

Fleg didn't understand.

'Plenty of water,' the figure added, 'that's what I like. What about you?'

'Water,' Fleg stuttered.

'Don't be shy. You're still young,' the figure said. The voice had lost some of its hardness. 'It is important to put something of yourself into it.'

'Into what?' Fleg asked.

'The world, of course,' said the stranger, looking back to the river.

The scene dissolved. Fleg was in the Forest again, the sun was shining through branches of a beech tree, and his mother stood over him. He lay on a bed of leaves, he was ill, and she was looking after him. She licked his face and dribbled water into his mouth, fetched from a nearby stream. She didn't speak, but concentrated on his welfare. He lay back, content but feverish, and allowed her to look after him. He was happy again, after all these years, to be in her company. Was her loss and his later discontent only a dream? It seemed so, because this was the reality he wanted.

Later she spoke to him, as darkness fell and they were alone among the trees.

'You have always been a strange one,' she said, in the soft purr he remembered.

'What's wrong with me?' he asked her.

'Oh, something you ate I expect, probably bad meat. Haven't I always warned you about that?' she nipped his nose playfully. 'You know, Fleg,' she stared into the trees. 'There is something different about you.'

'I don't mean to be naughty,' he said, worried she might be angry with him.

'No, no,' she soothed, 'I don't mean naughty. Or even foolish, though you are, with your tricks and your wandering. But you are different, yes you are.'

She started to sing, until he felt himself slipping into sleep.

He awoke and the dream ended. At the same time he heard noises in the echo of the forest dawn. He flipped over onto all fours, ready for action. Travellers on a forest path, he decided, as the sounds faded. As long as they were moving away there was no danger. He didn't want to be found, or interrogated again. He would have to be on his guard.

'Fleg,' his Mother would say when one of the older hyenas had brought him back, a yelping pup, in their mouth. 'Fleg, my love, you are going to end up in big trouble one day.'

He wondered if she would consider this present situation trouble enough. The pack must have assumed him dead or captured by now. What would their reaction be? Not great, he imagined. They would meet, and say he was a no-good hyena, and some would say he shouldn't have been sent in the first place. But others would be quiet, remembering they had been friends since their early years. Would he ever see them again? He held that thought in check. I am only going to follow the wolf, he chided himself, nothing more adventurous than that.

He got up and set off on the trail again, nose low to the ground. He arrived on the Outside. From the trail he could tell that four had become two.

He followed them onto a grassy plain, so different from the Forest. He felt exposed and vulnerable out in the open. Checking around for movement, he sniffed the air for signs of danger. After a while his nose became so confused he couldn't tell what was happening. A third had joined the two. It was a rabbit, he knew that smell well enough. What would these two be doing with a rabbit? He felt the wolf should have killed and eaten it. Then he recalled his howl of disgust at the rabbit the pack had caught in the Forest.

Fleg was at the edge of a huge hole in the ground. The wolf's scent led right it, and then stopped. He peered over the edge. Had the wolf fallen in? There was no sign of him below, nothing else around. Fleg nosed around, running this way and that, snout to the ground. He circled further away until he found something else.

A small depression in the grass. All three scents led to it. He pawed at it and revealed another hole. He peered in, but whatever had been there was now gone.

He sat for a long time, debating what to do. He ambled over to the edge of the land and looked into the vast hole again. The sides were sheer, so steep there was no way down for an animal his size. Shrubs grew out of the wall, their roots clinging in desperation to crevices in the rock. Far below he could see water, and more rocks and vegetation. He went back to the smaller hole. The scents were cold now, they had passed this way at least a day before. He needed to make a decision.

He sighed, pondering the dreams of his mother and the strange figure on the smoking landscape. He sat another night, and slept, this time without dreams. When he awoke his mind was set.

With a last look at the rising sun, he put his snout into the hole and pushed his head in. Loose grasses parted to reveal a hyena-sized tunnel, heading downwards. He gulped and his body followed his nose in.