For its part the dragon listened intently, its initial casual indifference changing with the telling to enthralled interest. As Mudge rambled on and on, beginning to use his acrobatic body and malleable face to enhance various aspects of the story, the dragon’s smile broadened in proportion. It began to chuckle, then to laugh, and finally to bellow with amusement, its lower body whipping convulsively and barely missing Jon-Tom’s head while snapping the crowns off a pair of small trees. It laughed and shook and trembled with hilarity, and the only reason it didn’t drown in its own tears was that it had no tear ducts.
Jon-Tom found himself smiling, too. Soon he, Weegee, and Cautious were rolling about on the ground, holding their sides. Mudge was hard pressed to retain his composure long enough to finish the extended joke and barely managed to wind it up with a flurry of distorted expressions and a neatly placed punch line. This grand finale resulted in sufficient hysteria to shake leaves from the nearby trees.
Knowing something of the joke in advance, Weegee was the first to recover her senses. She gestured and winked until her companions got the idea and the four of them began, still laughing uproariously, to slink away through the trees. Possibly the dragon saw them but in any event it was laughing too hard to pursue.
“That,” wheezed Jon-Tom when they’d made good their escape and he could finally breathe freely once more, “was the funniest story I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“I know.” Weegee was leaning against Mudge and he against her. “Mudge told it to me one night on the ship to Orangel. I’m sure I laughed so long and so hard that the crew thought there was something seriously wrong with me. I urged Mudge to tell it to the dragon. He made it even funnier this time. That part about the Baker’s College and the traveling lady’s choir always cracks me up.” So saying she fell to her knees with renewed laughter, clutching at her sore ribs. They were all aching from laughing too much.
“I don’t know.” Jon-Tom wiped at the streaks on his face. “I can’t get past the part where the elephant shows up.”
“And the six chimps,” Cautious reminded him. “Don’t forget about the six chimps.”
This provoked a renewed outburst which resulted in all of them rolling about on the ground. When this latest eruption of hysteria was over they were finished, chuckled out, incapable of laughing anymore. Then they picked up their supplies and shuffled off up the trail, unworried by the dragon’s proximity. It wouldn’t be tracking any prey for days. Mudge’s joke had put it in stitches, and it would be some time unknotting its coils.
That night as they were sitting around the campfire finishing their supper Jon-Tom’s eyes locked with Cau-tious’s and he said simply, “The elephant.”
Cautious replied by saying, “Six chimps,” thus beginning the entire round of laughter one more time. Exhausted not by their tense confrontation with the dragon but by Mudge’s joke telling, all fell into a deep and restful sleep.
The next day the trail began to climb, winding its way up one steep hillside only to switchback down the other and then repeat the cycle on the slopes of the mount beyond. By mutual consent there was no mention of elephants, chimps, bakers or any other portion of what had come to be known as The Joke. Jon-Tom didn’t want to lose any more time. The woods through which they were tramping still qualified as jungle, though it had lost some of the steamier aspects of rain forest. Brush lizards swarmed in the trees, dropping down fearlessly to inspect the travelers. Their relative lameness was a sure sign that this region was little visited.
Civilization in this part of the world hugged the temperate coast and left the vast jungle lands alone. At times the narrow trail they were following vanished entirely, swallowed by the dense undergrowth. This did not slow down the seekers. Not with two otters and a raccoon as members of the expedition.
Cautious was chewing on a leaf from a variety of tree that was new to him. “Not so much many kinds where I come from.”
“Far more than where Mudge and I come from, too.” Jon-Tom hesitated. Where he and Mudge came from, he’d said. Was he beginning to think of this world as home, then? The thought should have made him uncomfortable. That it did not was surely significant of something.
“Like that one there.” The raccoon pointed to a tree full of what looked like flattened apples. “Look like benina tree but is something else.”
“You mean ‘banana,’ “ Jon-Tom corrected him.
“What ‘banana’? I mean benina. You never seen benina tree, man? Fruit is bigger and yellow. Peels this way.” He demonstrated. “You eat one, you can’t stop. Want to eat everything on the tree. That why it called what it called. We see someone come back with bad bellyache, holding stomach and moaning, we know he benina tree too long.”
“And I suppose that’s not a mango?” Jon-Tom indicated a small sapling on their left that was heavy with purplish fruit.
“Look like it but really a mungo tree. And that one there look like nielce but ain’t. One next to it got fans like a palm but no nuts, and one here has fruit like shrooms but got branches that look just like a net.”
“Like a what?” Then Jon-Tom felt himself going down under the weight of the falling mesh. Mudge hardly had time to utter an oath while Cautious fought to remove his knife.
“Get ready sell your lives again, friends.”
The otter was struggling with his longbow. “Wish I could, but I’m afraid by now me own’s been ‘eavily discounted for anyone in that market.”
The owners of the net surrounded their captives, pinning them to the ground until their wrists were bound securely and their legs shackled together. The scenario was distressingly familiar. The appearance of their captors was not.
“What the devil have we fallen into?” He stared in amazement at the figures surrounding them.
“Devil double.” Cautious was working on the ropes securing his wrists. “I think they called ogres. I never see one but I heard them described, and brother, these sure fit description.”
“Shit, they don’t look like much o’ anythin’, the sorry slobs.” Mudge peered up at his companion. “I’m beginnin’ to get pretty sick o” this, mate.”
“No more than I am, Mudge.”
“I mean,” the otter continued as they were marched off into the depths of the jungle, “am I bein’ unreasonable? Am I bein’ greedy? All I’d like is to be able to spend one day in your bleedin’ company without bein’ jumped by somethin’ that wants to, kill us, keelhaul us, or cook us. Used to be all I ever ‘ad to worry about was stayin’ one step ahead o’ the local sheriff or tax collector.”
“You’re just lucky, I guess,” Jon-Tom told him dryly. “It really isn’t part of some sinister plot on my part to run into every tribe of homicidal maniacs between the poles.”
“Wish I ‘ad a pole right now,” the otter grumbled. “I know where I’d put it, I do.”
Human ogres Jon-Tom could have handled, but this was Mudge’s world and not his own. Therefore most of the ogres flanking them were grotesque variations of many species and not exclusively human.
On his right strode a snaggle-toothed wolf. One ear grew from the side of his head instead of the top. His left eye was larger than the right and he had puffy, unwolflike paws. Behind him marched a pair of margays, but instead of the handsome, symmetrical faces common to their breed they displayed long upward curving fangs, piggish nostrils and greatly elongated ears that flopped over their foreheads like those of a basset hound. Their whiskers were kinked instead of straight.