Max looked into Carol’s eyes, each of them as big as a volleyball. They were the warmest brown and green, and seemed sincere.
“But what do I have to do?” Max asked.
“Do? Anything you want to do,” Carol said.
“And what do you have to do?” Max asked.
“Anything you want us to do,” Carol said. He answered so quickly that Max was convinced.
“Then okay,” Max said.
Max lowered his head to receive his crown. Carol gently placed it on Max’s head. It was heavy, made of something like iron, and the metal was cool on his forehead. But the crown fit, and Max smiled. Carol stood back and looked at him, nodding as if everything had finally fallen into place.
The Bull lifted Max and placed him on his shoulder, and as they made their way out of the tunnel, there were deafening cheers from the rest of the beasts. The Bull paraded Max around the forest, as everyone whooped and danced in a very ugly — drool and mucus spraying left and right — but celebratory kind of way. After a few minutes, the Bull placed Max atop a grassy knoll, and the beasts gathered around, looking up to him expectantly. Max realized he was supposed to say something, so he said the only thing he could think of:
“Let the wild rumpus begin!”
CHAPTER XXI
The beasts cheered. Then they waited for Max to tell them what to do. They knew how to rumpus, but they wanted to make sure they did it to the pleasing of their king.
Max shimmied down the Bull’s torso and began to spin around like a dervish. “Do what I do!” he demanded.
And they did. The beasts were terrible dervishes, clumsy and slow at spinning, but this made it all more entertaining for Max. He watched and laughed as they spun themselves into a mass of dizzy fur and feet, each of them crumpling to the ground.
For the next five or six hours, Max thought of every fun thing he could possibly think of, and he made sure all the beasts did these things with him.
He sat on Ira’s back and made him act like a horse (though Ira had never heard of a horse). He lined them all up like dominoes and ordered them to knock each other over. He made them assemble themselves into a giant pyramid, and he climbed on the top and deliberately caused the pyramid to fall. The beasts were extraordinary diggers, so Max made them dig dozens of holes, huge holes, for no reason at all. Then it was back to knocking down trees — the ten or twelve that remained. It was Max’s task to think of as many ways as possible to knock them down, and to do it as loudly as possible.
Next Max thought it would be good to run up to the closest hill and roll down like giant furry earth balls. So he ran and the beasts followed him up the hill. At the top, he demonstrated how it should be done. He somersaulted down the grassy hill and when he was finished, he saw that Douglas and Alexander had already followed his lead and were rolling down after him. But their speed was about triple his, and they were headed directly for him.
He jumped out of the way just in time, and made a mental note to remind them to be more careful next time they rolled down the hill with him nearby. But just as he was dusting himself off, Carol and Judith barreled down the hill even faster than their predecessors, again directly toward Max. Again he had to jump out of the way, but this time his foot was clipped by the Judith-ball, and he yowled in pain.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, unspooling herself at the bottom of the hill.
“You rolled over my foot!” he said.
Judith looked at him blankly. “And?”
“You shouldn’t do that!” Max said.
Judith gave him a look like he’d just said by far the most insane thing. Max had the momentary thought that he should bash her over the head with a stick or rock. He looked around for something that would do the job. But before he could, Carol stepped in.
“Judith, did you roll over the king’s foot?” Carol asked.
“I don’t know what I did,” she replied dryly. “I have no memory of any of it. Wait, where am I?”
“You know very well what you did,” Carol said, stepping closer to her. “And if you do that again, I swear I’ll eat your head.”
Max, flattered that Carol would come to his defense but startled by the threat, patted Carol on the arm. “That’s okay, Carol. But thanks.”
Judith was aghast. “‘Thanks?’ You say ‘thanks’ for threatening to eat my head? That’s what you’re thanking him for? What kind of king thanks someone for threatening to eat one of his subject’s heads?”
While Max tried to concoct a response, Ira was trying to figure out the king’s point of view.
“So we should try not to run over your foot when we turn ourselves into balls, but then if we do run over you, we get our heads eaten?”
“Yes,” Carol said, relieved that someone had finally figured out the obvious.
“No!” Max wailed. “No. There won’t be any running over feet, and no eating of heads. No eating any part of each other. That’s just the main rule, okay?”
“But what if we want to?” Douglas asked.
“What do you mean?” Max asked.
“I mean, we shouldn’t eat heads, and that makes sense. But what if we find ourselves in a position where we really want to eat someone’s head or maybe arm?”
Again there was a wide murmur of approval over this worthy question.
Max was having a hard time controlling his exasperation. He took a number of deep breaths and explained, as slowly and carefully as he could, the rules under which he wanted his subjects to live. There would be no eating of each other under any circumstances — even if they wanted to — and no running over each other in any way at all, and no …
Alexander interrupted. “But what if someone’s head falls off? That sometimes happens. Can we eat it then?” he asked, eliciting a chorus of approving murmurs.
“No eating at all!” Max roared. “No eating any part of each other under any circumstances. Never. Not even if a head pops off.”
Max wanted to stop talking and start howling, so he ran away, leading everyone to the edge of the island.
“C’mon!” he said, and they all followed.
He did somersaults along the way, and they did them, too. He skipped, and they skipped, too — or tried to. He made machine-gun sounds, and they did their best. And soon they were at what must have been the highest point on the island, a cliff overlooking the ocean, hundreds of feet over the water. When they had all joined him at the edge of the cliff, Max knew there was nothing more appropriate to do than howl.
So Max howled. The beasts howled, too, louder and more convincingly than Max, but he didn’t mind. Nothing could improve upon the moment or spoil it. Max howled and howled and felt more like himself — part wind and part wolf — than he ever had before.
Nothing could spoil the moment, not even when Alexander joined the group, pushing everyone from behind and nearly killing Max. When Alexander bumped the group, the bumping continued until someone bumped hard into Max, and suddenly there was no ground beneath him. He looked down for a split second and saw only the white mess of the sea meeting the chalky rocks below. But just when Max realized that he was in the air, that he was about to fall four hundred feet into the ocean, he was pulled back and put on solid earth. It had been Carol. He was caught just in time and quickly put back on solid ground. Max was too shocked, too disbelieving, to even register how close he’d just come to disappearing from the world of the living. Instead, he planted his feet wide and howled at the sea that had been robbed of his flesh.