Story Sampler

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  Umfarg was lost. That was bad. Ogres don’t like to be lost. Lost ogres get angry. Umfarg was angry. Being angry, Umfarg forgot to think about where he was going or where he had been, and he got more lost. Pretty soon, he had no idea where he was or what to do about it. Worse, he was in human territory, and that was dangerous. Not that danger bothered him; it wasn’t like he was afraid or anything like that, but danger made him want to pee, and that reminded him of why he was still looking for the big red berries. That made him angrier.

  “Breathe,” he muttered, not sure why. When he did, all that happened was the smell overwhelmed him. Bad skunk pee smell, covered in good mud smell, is still very pungent. He tried not breathing for a while, but that just made him light-headed.

  Then he broke through the branches into a clearing and stopped. It was one of their clearings. The trees were broken off and gone. The trunks had been stacked up, and there was the smell of smoke—just strong enough to be noticed above the bad skunk smell and good mud smell. There were faint voices coming from in the pile of logs. There were big red berries, lots of them—which was good—right beside the smoking pile of logs that was making all the noise. That was bad.

  The sun was shining. Ogres don’t like the sun. They see better in the dark.

  Ogres are not good at slinking. Every time they try to slink, they stumble into things, grumble, pick up the thing they stumbled into, and throw it. They slink worse in the daylight, when they don’t see so well, and bump into more things. Thrown things make a lot of noise when they land.

  He needed those red berries.

  He tried to slink.

  He tried not to grumble when he bumped into things, but he was already angry. Angry ogres grumble easily. Sometimes they yell. Often they stomp things.

  The first thing he threw hit the pile of logs, and all the other noises stopped.

  He was throwing the second thing when one of the humans stepped out of the pile of logs to say hello with a pointy thing. Umfarg growled in response and, as was customary when meeting someone for the first time, added ample spit and virulent threats of great pain and suffering to his greeting. He moved forward, bumped into something else, growled again, picked the thing up and threw it aside. He didn’t throw it at the human with the pointy thing, though; he didn’t know him well enough for that yet.

  The human, who was quite a bit a shorter than him, quite a bit smaller than him, and a lot less hairy than him, was grumbling in a most friendly manner, approaching Umfarg with the pointy thing out in front of him.

  “Need berries,” Umfarg said, pounding his chest. “Red berries!” He had said it in ogre-tongue of course, and the human looked at him like he had said, “Grgldrgrd. N-Drgrd!” because, well, that was what he had said.

  Umfarg moved toward the berries, which were right beside the human with the pointy thing, and fully expecting the human to let him have the berries. After all, he had asked politely.

  He was just about to the berries when the human leapt forward in greeting and swung the pointy thing at him. Umfarg dodged—ogres are good at dodging when they have to be—and roared, “GRGLDRGRD! N-DRGRD! GNINODR!” The last he added in explanation (it meant skunk pee), but it didn’t seem to translate very well, since the human lunged and swung the pointy thing at him again.

  This time, Umfarg didn’t dodge. He could have dodged—all the other ogres said he was agile—but decided to grab the pointy thing and pull it out of the human’s hands instead. It was a bit risky, but he managed it fairly well and tossed the pointy thing aside as he reached for the red berries. He plucked a couple of handfuls, squashed them together, and started smearing the juice on his body where the skunk had peed on him, letting the juice soak into the mud. After all, the greeting phase was over, and he had told the human what he was going to do.…