He sat silently for a while, catching his breath and letting his lungs clear, only his large furry ears moving. The black nose was wet and running from having inhaled too much soot. Eventually he looked up at them and spoke again in that unexpectedly profound, deep voice.
“Thanks, friends. Not everyone would go out of their way like that to save a stranger, though I had a pretty good idea something like this was going to happen. Darned if I wasn’t starting to get a little worried, though. I’m obliged.”
“What do you mean you ‘had an idea something like this was going to happen’?” Jon-Tom said.
“We can talk about it later. Right now we’re still a mite too close to that fire for my comfort. Let’s walk the walk and I’ll talk the talk.” He rose, tilted his head back to gaze up at Jon-Tom. “You’re a prime specimen, aren’t you? Thanks for your musical aid. You won’t be insulted if I don’t ask for an encore.”
“If my music doesn’t please you, you can always go back down there and talk over your problems with your friends.” He smiled to show the koala that he was only responding in kind.
Their new acquaintance grinned back up at him. “No friends of mine down there. Heathens and barbarians, the cowardly sons of lizards. Hope they run off the end of the world. My name’s Colin. You can introduce yourselves later.” He took a step, stumbled. Mudge hastened to lend him a shoulder, but the koala waved him off.
“ ‘Predate the offer, otter, but I’ll make it on my own. You’ve risked enough on my behalf already. I’ll not be a burden to you.” He retrieved his knapsack and saber from Sorbl, shouldered the pack after sliding the saber into a special scabbard sewn to its back. Despite his short, thick arms he managed to slide the blade straight in without looking over his shoulder. Whoever this Colin was, Jon-Tom decided, he was no stranger to weaponry. If Jon-Tom had tried the same trick, he would have sliced himself from neck to coccyx.
Mudge led them back toward the campsite. “You know more about your ‘appy companions than we do,” he said to the koala. “Think they’ll try an’ follow us? The wizard ‘imself ‘ere says no.”
“Wizard, huh?” Colin gave Clothahump a perfunctory nod, polite but in no way condescending, respectful without being obsequious. “I think he’s right. Heck, it’ll take the bravest among them half a day just to decide to slow down.” Everyone laughed but Jon-Tom. He managed a weak smile.
They were halfway back to the camp when Colin called a halt. “We’ll take a minute here to make sure they don’t follow us.” He turned his back to Jon-Tom. “Upper compartment, left side. A small green bottle. Take care. They threw my kit around quite a bit, and I don’t know what’s broke and what’s intact.”
An uncertain Jon-Tom unsnapped the pack, located the bottle in question, and handed it to its owner. The stopper was loose but still in place. Colin held it up to the fog-diffused light, examined it critically for a moment, then grunted and began searching the ground around them.
“We need some good-sized branches with the needles still on them.” Jon-Tom bristled at being ordered around by someone they’d just had to rescue, but he kept silent as he helped the koala and Mudge collect several healthy evergreen boughs.
“Now what? They’re hardly big enough to hide behind,”
he snapped.
There was a jauntiness to the koala’s manner and a twinkle in his eye that defused any real anger on Jon-Tom’s part. “That’s what you think, man.”
After sprinkling a few drops of the colorless liquid on each branch, he had Jon-Tom replace it in his knapsack. The powerful odor made Jon-Tom’s nostrils flare, even at a distance.
“Do like so,” Colin instructed them. Jon-Tom and Dormas brought up the rear, the three of them sweeping up their footsteps with the branches. Eventually they tossed the boughs aside.
Mudge’s sensitive nose was running, and he wiped at it continuously. “Blimey, mate, wot were in that bottle, anyway?”
“Intensely concentrated oil of eucalyptus,” Colin informed him. “If they do try to track us, they’ll sniff up a nice healthy whiff of that stuff and spend the rest of the day sneezing themselves silly.” He grinned first at Mudge, then up at Jon-Tom.
An interesting character, and that was an understatement, Jon-Tom told himself as he considered their stocky new companion. Not gruff exactly but not given to small talk, either. Straightforward and no-nonsense. He’d be able to find his own way back to civilization without much trouble.
As it turned out, however, that parting of the ways was not to take place for some time yet. As they paused in the shelter of a rake tree later that day, they discovered that they shared something in common with the koala besides a dislike of barbaric hospitality.
He was sitting against the thick, deeply scarred bole, chatting with Sorbl and Dormas. Clothahump was off by himself, meditating within his shell, visiting that sorcerous never-never land that only he could enter. It reminded Jon-Tom of hibernation. The wizard called it taking a metaphysical sighting. He was, he had explained on more than one such occasion, checking their position by judging his relationship to certain stars. When Jon-Tom had protested that it was absurd to imagine one small individual having a personal relationship with several incredibly distant suns, Clothahump had informed him that it depended upon the mental size of the individual in question, not his physical stature. As a result, Jon-Tom was half convinced that the turtle was bluffing him. But it did not make him feel any bigger.
He was sitting slightly away from the tree, using the usually concealed blade of his ramwood staff to whittle at a chunk of dead pine. Wood and grain fascinated him. Maybe he ought to give up the idea of being either a lawyer or a rock guitarist and settle for a contemplative life of carving. Not a very practical vocation to try to make a living at where he came from, he reflected. If he’d lived in greater Los Angeles, Gepetto would doubtless have been forced to go on welfare.
Footsteps sounded nearby. He looked up to see Mudge approaching. The otter wore his usual expression of concern.
“Wot say you, mate?”
Jon-Tom glanced skyward. They had long since climbed out of the fog, and the sky overhead was a brilliant, pristine blue. “Everything seems to be going pretty good, Mudge. We’re not being followed, we’ve managed to rescue a fellow traveler in need, and we haven’t suffered a perturbation in days.”
“Aye, seems as though our luck ‘as changed, wot? That’s just wot I were wonderin’ about.” As he spoke he kept glancing back toward the tree, to where Colin was laughing and joking with Sorbl and Donnas. “ ‘Asn’t the coincidence struck you?”
“To what coincidence do you refer?” He sighed. The otter’s capacity for paranoia was exceeded only by his capacity for drinking, eating, and wenching.
“You just think on it a minute, mate. I’ll spell it out for you. Don’t want you to think I’m jumpin’ to conclusions or nothin’.”
“What, you, jump to conclusions? Why would I ever think that?”
“Try an’ stifle the sarcasm a moment and look at this thing objectively, mate. ‘Ere we are trippin’ merrily along, lookin’ like ourselves for a change instead o’ a bunch o’ purple bugs or somethin’, when we ‘ear this chantin’ and follow it to find this Colin chap all bound up an’ in the process o’ bein’ smoked for a holiday roast by a bunch o’ savages. Wot does that suggest to you?”
“That we did our good deed for the day and that I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re getting at.”
“I’ll try an’ be more specific. We’ve no way of knowin’ for ‘ow long this Colin was a prisoner. Might’ve been for an hour, might maybe ‘ave been for a day. But just suppose ‘e’d been stuck down there for several days. Tis been several days exactly since the last bad perturbation. Maybe whoever or wotever ‘as imprisoned this ‘ere perambulator can’t use it on us anymore. Maybe we’re too close to ‘ome or somethin’. So wot might ‘e do, especially if ‘e’s gettin’ worried about us? Mightn’t ‘e look for some other, subtler way o’ stoppin’ us? Maybe by gettin’ us off our guard first?”