* * * * *
Umfarg gleefully squashed the red berries, their juice drenching his body, drowning out the bad skunk pee smell. The red berries smelled, too, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as skunk pee. It was a sweet kind of smell that nauseated him, but he fought the urge to retch. Retching was un-ogre-like. Ogres prided themselves on the fact that he could eat anything. Besides, the berry smell would wash off.
The human who had said hello with the pointy thing was standing close by watching him, but Umfarg ignored him. Even when the human went to pick up the pointy thing, he didn’t pay much attention. After all, they had already finished their greeting, and once he finished smearing the red berries on his body, he would be on his way. What way that would be was still up in the air, since he was lost, but he would leave soon regardless: The sunlight was much too bright.
He had almost finished when he heard the familiar grunting, grumbling, shambling, bull-dozing entrance of his fellow ogres. They growled their greeting to him, threatening to pummel him for leading them astray. They greeted the human with friendly thumping—or tried to: the human ran away before they could finish. That was not a friendly response. Running was for prey, and it always hungered the ogres when something fled from them. The ogres, though, were well-fed for the time being, and humans did not at all taste very well. Too stringy.
Umfarg turned and shouted, “Skunk pee! Red berries!”
A couple of the newcomers shouted “Followed skunk pee!” and laughed heartily. His parents shook their heads, and his father came forward alone to bop Umfarg on the side of his head. “Stomp skunk!” He grumbled before returning to the others.
Umfarg, in pain, accepted the fatherly greeting and finished rubbing the rest of the berries onto his body.
Then everything went strange.
Now, strange is a relative thing for ogres. Some ogres think eating fresh food is odd. Others think peeing on skunks is weird. Ogres who like basking in the sun, now, that’s strange. This was even stranger.
Here they were, politely keeping their distance from Umfarg, when all at once, they started dancing and singing! Now, ogres do dance, and they do sing but only at night, and only on feast days or when they are drunk. Since ogres seldom get drunk (brewing alcohol is a human thing) and since feast days only happen when they find really big prey, this singing and dancing was strange. It was even stranger because the dancing wasn’t normal. They weren’t banging their heads together; they weren’t hitting each other on the chest; and they weren’t grumbling or growling the usual friendly threats. What they were doing was yipping and swatting at their bodies, seemingly at random without any of the normal disharmony.
That wasn’t the strange part, though. Odd, yes, but not strange. The strange part was what happened next: They fled into the woods. That had never, ever, EVER happened before!
Then something bit him. Sort of. It felt like a bite—or maybe an ember burning him? Yes, that was it: he’d been struck by a burning ember. He swatted at it—that’s what you do when embers burn you—but there was nothing there. Then another one bit him. He swatted again, but there still was nothing there. Then a whole bunch of bites all at once, all over him. He tried to swat them all at once and almost fell down. He got angry.
More bites.
More swats.
More anger.
Then he felt something new, something ogres weren’t supposed to feel when there were no dragons around: fear. Something was eating him, and he couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t see it. He couldn’t hear it. But it was there, and it hurt—and not the good kind of hurt, like when you butt heads with a friend, but the bad kind of hurt that left a mark. There were lots of marks. There was nothing there making the marks, nothing there to stomp on, nothing there to smash—and that scared him.
He ran.
Sort of. It was too bright to see clearly, and he banged into lots of things. He careened toward where he thought the other ogres had gone, and made it out of the clearing. Whatever was eating him had followed him into the forest, but it eventually quit chasing after him. He ran a bit further before finally stumbling to a stop against a tree. The other ogres were nowhere to be seen. He was lost. Again.
An hour later the other ogres found him, and his mother thumped him with a fist to his chest. It hurt. Not the good kind of hurt, either. Then she did it again to make sure he would stomp skunks whenever he saw them. He would, too.…