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25. THE SQUIRRELS
They continued their glide watching, watching.
Always watching. The dark corners where moaned the empty shadows pressed upon their backs and made them anxious. And tired. The gloomy, chilled and stagnant air forced the sailors into the cabin for a long while.
One or two more days passed—it was becoming difficult to tell time, and it was beginning not to matter. Another secure beach of the Re-Legion waters had been found, and the Beast was parked. Elfen and Freegirl, lying on bunks, faced each other to play cards and make conversation.
“Why did she help us, Elfen? Why did she want us to know?”
“I guess being sick does not include being inhuman, although I have never heard of any stories like hers.”
The game for which they shuffled the deck was called Hearts. Elfen was having strong scores and winning. Freegirl was somewhat preoccupied and very unsettled, but she nodded.
“Did you catch her name?” added Elfen, before playing one of his last cards.
“I heard everything,” answered Freegirl with melancholy. “Nolife…”
The youth suddenly announced she had a strong card, and finished the game with an unexpected win.
Slamming her power card onto the pile she exclaimed, “Indeed she has no life!” The girl was being jovial, but with a serious feeling. Holding still on the outside, while generating a quiet rage on the in, she slapped the rest of her cards on the table.
“Who would want to live in this? This…cold, lurking cave…” Elfen asked the question innocently, like a little child. He was scooting on his belly, on his comfortable fur bunk, while he received a new card pattern.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she replied. “It’s not so terrible. I live in a cave—in more than one cave, actually.” Then she snickered slyly, as if she was thinking how the card game points were starting to favor her. She peeled the last card onto the wooden table.
A table between them held their pillows that cushioned their elbows, while their stomachs and thighs lay flat on their bunks perpendicular to their beds. The lower half of their legs were bent at the knees, toes pointed upwards against the cabin wall.
Freegirl continued. “I mean…if you could see rays from the Fireye every day, and walk outside to feel the weather and the air, living in here would not be much different than living in any other cave.”
“I’ll take the emptiness of the sky and the outdoors any day. Caves are for the lazy ones, like our friends the cats.”
“You have never been to Mount Gold,” said Freegirl, taking a card from the pile. “The seclusion of a cave embedded inside of Mother Nature is sooooo cozy.” She snuggled into the sweater she wore.
“Ahhh yes…Mount Gold,” reflected Elfen. “I saw her once from a distance while heading down the Whisper Waters toward the Sea You. She is awesome. I could see gold shimmering rays through the valley.”
Freegirl almost unleashed a burst of tears for her home, but forced her self to be calm—a difficult task, for where she was now, a repugnant odor smothered her memories.
Beautiful places and golden rooms, light that danced into the day, and into the night, and sang the night back into the day again. Light. She remembered light, as her soul trembled for its return.
But she carried her mind back into the card game, as she listened to Elfen speak of the ornaments he had seen at Save the Lake, golden ornaments made by Freegirl’s clan.
They had so much fear inside them, unnatural fear experienced by no one they've ever known. They deliberately avoided the subject of the corpse on the skewer.
Freegirl was reminded by her recent memories—the importance of her mission, and who she was. She had a pressing urge to tell Elfen the truth of her journey, but she knew what he was witnessing inside the Re-Legion was more than enough. She focused intently on the cards in her hand to keep her mouth from revealing unpleasant information.
“That very day, now that I think of it, the day I saw Mount Gold reigning over the valley, a family of squirrels came to the river where my partner and I were sitting… right up there on that deck, sailing downstream.”
Elfen pointed to the ceiling of the boat’s cabin referring to the deck above them. “Imaaagine it! A whole family—must have been about five of them—came to the river. But they didn’t drink—not until much later. They just jumped around and chittered, and followed us downstream. They stayed with us one entire day, and the next morning they disappeared. We couldn’t believe it!”
Elfen picked a card and said with a funny face, “Yesss!” His enthusiasm was contagious. “The squirrels did not leave, even at night when the other animals came to the river’s edge to drink. They went into a tree, and we could hear them chattering until dark.” Elfen discarded. “It was almost like they were watching us,” he finished his turn.
“Funny about those squirrels. A strange thing happened to my aunt once. A squirrel had gotten into her bed, and had babies. The amazing thing was that it chewed into the wooden gate covering the entrance to her cave, and for days, no one knew where the wood shavings and the newly opening hole in the door were coming from. Then, several days after noticing the destruction of the door, my aunt came home and found the squirrel on her bedfurs with a nest of babies. My aunt housed them, and eventually fed the babies, because the mother squirrel disappeared one day—became a Predator’s dinner, no doubt.”
Freegirl took a card and became momentarily confused and indecisive. “From that day, my cousins and aunt, and uncle have been known as the Squirrel People. They usually have one or two around their caves.”
“Pets are wonderful,” noted Elfen. “But, you know, it’s hard to travel with pets.”
It was hard to travel with anything, thought Freegirl. All travel, she decided, was too difficult and taxing to the mind and the body.
The sailors were feeling relaxed. They climbed the ladder to the door, to take a look at the cave walls. What could be happening out there now?
It was quiet on deck. As much as Freegirl wanted to tell him who she was and where she was going, she kept quiet. She sighed in her silence.
How much longer do I have to pretend? thought she. How much longer do have to be unreal?
Freegirl and her skipper went back into the cabin, folded into their private stretches, and breathed in still posture.
Contemplating on beauty and peace, they used every ounce of their Will to shut out the sick memories of the cannibals.
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