~~~
After wrapping up their snacking, relaxing for a few minutes more, playing in the spring a bit and throwing some pebbles into the stream that flowed out of it, the boys got ready to go. Rob plopped a red cap on his head that he’d gotten out of his pack, in case the sun was too bright once they got back out of the dense forest. Little Ricky had gotten out some spray-on bug repellent Mom had apparently snuck into his pack and was busy spraying every square inch in a visible oil slick, followed by chasing a few gnats around the spring and trying to spray them mid-air. Robert figured it was best he just let Ricky run the can out of spray than to argue with him. That way it wouldn’t be something else Ricky would blame him for, and Mom would get to yell at him for using it all up himself. That’s a win-win if you asked Robert.
Once the can was dry, Robert called to Ricky, who had suddenly stopped shaking it as if it were a cucaracha. He was staring into a particularly dense patch of scrub oak and ivies. Something had caught him in rapture and he ignored Rob’s first couple calls before responding.
“Hey!” Ricky said, without turning around. He raised one hand back towards his brother and motioned with a come-here gesture. “Look at this!”
Ricky’s gaze was so intent Rob instinctively went to his brother. Sometimes even things little brothers find cool turn out to be pretty interesting.
“What is it?” Rob said as he walked up behind Ricky.
“Shhhhh!” his little brother said, pressing a pair of fingers to his lips and then flapping them violently to emphasize just how important it must be that Rob be quiet immediately.
Robert knelt down beside Ricky on some soft, decomposing oak and maple leaves and then peered into the brushes.
In a whisper he asked, “What is it? I don’t see.”
Slowly Ricky raised his hand with index finger pointed as though he was afraid to spook a deer or a bird or something. Once raised, the little boy’s hand motioned forward, pointing much further into the bush and up the hill than where Robert had originally focused his gaze. Rob wondered what the heck he saw way back in the dark, and then, he saw the eyes.
They were not deer’s eyes. Nor were they anything he’d recognize as a typical animal’s. The irises were reflecting something as though they were a cat’s eyes in the dark, and the pupils were large. However, they were paired like a human’s around a very large and bulbous gray lump of a nose. And the lids and brows were strangely human-like too.
Robert took a sudden inhale and the eyes blinked. The creature’s head shivered a bit to ward off the surprise it felt when the taller human boy made a weird whistling breath. The boys in turn looked quickly at each other in surprise, and then back at the pair of eyes. They were blinking and flicking from one face to the other.
Ricky made the first move. Raising his hand slowly he said in a husky voice, “Hi there!”
“E’t Chi’at!!?” the face attached to the pair of eyes replied loudly in a shrill voice.
It dashed away through the shrubs at their right. If the boys had spoken Mountain Troll, they would not have been able to repeat what Kile had said in front of their mother. But the fact that it spoke at all startled them both into a momentary pause, eyeing the rustle of leaves and a dark shadow hustling past them around the back side of the spring. Then Ricky was on the move.
“C’mon! Hurry!” the smaller boy yelled as he jumped nearly all the way across the spring landing wetly on the edge opposite where they had stood.
Rob went running after taking the long way around the water’s edge.
“Wait, Ricky! I don’t think you should follow it!”
But it was too late. Ricky had dived into the trees and started following the sound of rustling up the hill. Whatever it was that they pursued was quickly navigating the forest. Even Little Ricky, with his ability to weave in and out of the tight trunks of oak, was nearly unable to keep pace.
“STOP, Ricky!” Rob yelled in an attempt to reign in the little squirt. “It’s getting late and Mom would not want you chasing that thing!”
But of course, Ricky did not stop. The chase lasted another five minutes, and at one point Robert nearly got ahold of Ricky’s pack to pull him down as the little boy scrabbled up a pile of boulders. Still the rustling of leaves and the breaking of twigs could be heard at a break-neck speed just above them. Rob’s grab did not connect and he was left with having to find a way up the rocks as well, trailing behind Ricky by a couple hundred feet. Rob nearly lost sight of him before the chase stopped.
The escapade ended abruptly when Robert, trying to make up for distance by lengthening his stride in a more open part of the forest ran straight into the back of Little Ricky. They both fell down and Ricky tumbled and scrabbled against the soft soil forest floor and his brother above him to get out and away in a hurry. Robert was a little slower to rise, having scraped his knee on something when he landed.
“Geez! You spaz, Ricky! What are you doing, you little doofus?” He blurted as he made to dust himself off.
“Shhhh!” Ricky replied as he again flapped his hands in an alarm to keep his brother still. “I lost him!”
“What the heck, Ricky!? What if that was a bear cub? What would you do if you ended up cornering a bear up here?”
The little boy stood up straight and looked Robert in the face and replied matter-of-factly, “I’d play dead. That’s what they tell you to do.”
As he finished dusting off his jeans legs and Ricky returned to looking about the trees for the little monster they’d chased, Rob mumbled, “Sure. I’d like to see what happens if you did.”
But then, a few steps further through the forest, little Ricky froze at what appear to be the tree-lined edge of a very small meadow.
“What’s wro…” started Rob, but Ricky flashed his hands back at him as violently as Rob had ever seen and made a shush.
Robert took a few steps very carefully towards his little brother trying to get to where he could see what Ricky did. Each crunch or rustle of the leaves beneath his feet made him cringe. What if it really is a bear? he thought. Actually, the thought of just about any forest creature being startled by his steps and rushing at them in defense made him very nervous. He’d seen what a possum could do to a cat one summer in Iowa when his pet calico came in with flesh torn and turned down in a two inch strip near to the bone on its hind leg. It was not a pretty sight, nor was it a cheap trip to the vet. Unfortunately Ricky thought it was cool to see the bone. If a bear did come rushing at them and take a bite, he’d probably be the one inspecting his own wounds and getting excited about the shape of the scar it might leave.
In a whisper once he was beside his brother carefully pulling back a couple branches, Rob asked, “What is it you see?”
In response, Ricky slowly raised his left arm and used his index finger to point across and to the right of the small field. There was a rise of boulders on that side that seemed to be an extension of the very steep mountain slope above them. Among the boulders were some movements that caught Robert’s eye.
There, huddled behind a large boulder blocking the whole view of what appeared to be a cave was a squat, grey-greenish little thing bustling about, apparently wiping at the soil around the boulders. It was awkward and shuffled funny on short legs. It likely stood about four feet tall, nearly the same as little Ricky, but its proportions were off, being mostly body and short of arms and legs. Its head was odd too, nearly oval from ear to ear, and the ears themselves were pointed and elongated. Whatever this thing was it was roughly humanoid but it certainly wasn’t any human. While the brothers watched it was quickly swiping the dirt and then throwing about leaves and twigs with hands which included boney, vicious looking fingers spread across the broad palms.
The ugly little creature continued to fuss about with the environments and back into the meadow as it did it also spoke to itself. Or perhaps it was singing. The words were not English but they had a sort of rhythm
to it that was almost soothing. Rob was reminded of the seven dwarves singing “Hi-Ho” or perhaps the flying monkeys in another movie tromping along chanting ‘Oh-wee-oh, oh-weeeee-oh!” As best as he could recall it later, this is what Robert heard:
Chirrup, danwa thang’wa
Chirrup, danway thay.
Chirrup, danwa thang’wa
Chi’tali danway thay!
Though they never did get Kile, the little troll they watched hiding his tracks, to later tell the boys what he was actually singing in his North American Modern Modified Troll dialect, it is not something one could repeat to one’s mother and get away without a soapy mouth during the incident. The little creature had been cursing himself out for letting the human boys see him. It wasn’t so much singing or chanting as it was a particularly adamant degradation of his self-worth. Kile was particularly young for a troll, and particularly small. He wasn’t well liked and his odd fascination with the humans over the last few decades as their homes climbed ever further onto the benches of the foothills and roots of the mountains had earned himself a terrible reputation below ground.
As Robert attempted to move his head about to get a few twigs out of his line-of-sight, one of the branches slipped across the back of his baseball cap and made a leave-shaking sound directly behind him. He groaned under his breath, already knowing he’d blown their cover. The little troll very slowly stood up straight. Then it craned its head around equally slowly to look directly into the two pairs of eyes peering from the shadows of the oak scrub and maples. Then, instantly, he was gone. It was as if the ugly little thing had just blinked out of existence. But as Robert’s mouth dropped and he bobbed his head some more to try to confirm what he’d just seen, or rather suddenly hadn’t seen, he could just make out a cloud of dust slowly swirling into the boulders towards what he still assumed was a cave entrance.
“C’mon!” little Ricky said huskily, and he hopped up and started trotting towards the boulders across the meadow.
“Wait!” said Rob, extending an arm to try to catch Ricky by the shoulder and hold him in place. But it was too late.
Soon both boys were jogging up around the camouflaging boulders and towards the cave entrance. Ricky dropped his pack right there and started trying to peer into the very dark depths of the cave. The entrance itself was only about three or four feet tall, but it was five or more wide at the base. The floor of it and just outside of the cave was flat, and appeared to be carefully laid granite slabs. It seemed this cave was man-made, or at the very least, ugly little troll-made, as everything in the entry way seemed to be very carefully placed and positioned just right such that from elsewhere in the meadow the cave would not likely call attention to itself. Still, if one were to come upon it directly it was unmistakably defined and intentional.
“Look, Robbie!” Ricky said with awe in his voice.
“Don’t call me that,” sniped Rob.
“But look! There’s carvings on the rock!”
At first Robert didn’t see them. But as he peered further into the darkness they glowed an eerie blue color. There where shapes that looked vaguely similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs and pictograms Rob had read about in books but they were more modern looking. Some seemed to be spirals, or unclosed triangles, circles or various polygons with no particular purpose but decoration. None of them completed a full shape but had just stopped shy of completing the diagram. He thought of a musical triangle and how the metal bar that shaped the instrument didn’t quite come all the way around to touch again. The shapes were like that. He couldn’t imagine that any of them could mean anything. They didn’t seem like words or letters. Yet they glowed and even pulsed slightly with the electric blue light. And they covered everything, with a distance of one foot at the most between any of them, they shone from the floor, the walls and even the roof of the cave as far into the hole as the boys could see.
“Ricky?” Rob whispered tentatively, “I think we’d better get out of here…right now!”
The last bit was a hiss and Robert grabbed ahold of Ricky’s pack, suspecting that if he didn’t the little boy would make a dash and that would be his last chance to make him see reason. It didn’t work.
Ricky slipped out of his pack and dove for the floor of the cave a few feet ahead and ran his fingers tracing around some of the glowing shapes.
“What makes it glow?” he asked enthralled.
“I don’t care, Ricky! We’ve got to get home, now!”
Ricky stood up. “No, no! Look, he wasn’t a bear and he’s not going to hurt us.”
“Ricky, let me tell you right now, if you don’t come home I’m going to tell Mom you went rock climbing and that I can’t find you because you wouldn’t stop! How do you think she’s going to act then!” Robert played his desperation in his attempt to get Ricky to leave.
Ricky stood and shook his finger back at his older brother when he responded.
“She’ll say you did a rotten job and you’ll be the one getting grounded!”
“NO, Ricky! Don’t you know what happens if you corner a bear? You’re going to get us eaten! We have to go right noooowwww!”
Ricky took a couple steps towards his older brother and then snatched his own backpack out of Robert’s hands. They were both just inside the entry of the cave and their faces were only partially lit by reflected sunlight from outside and the blue light emanating from within the cave. The smaller boy started waggling his finger again about to tell his older brother just how it was since he couldn’t seem to understand.
“It’s not a bear, Robbie. And I’m not leaving yet until I see where that little thing went. He was talking, Robbie! I’ve gotta find out…”
But the little doofus was cut off. From within the cave an echoing hiss joined their conversation.
“Boysss mussst go!”