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Eventually, despite his hopes to avoid any lowlands, hunger drove him downhill, as in the moist gloom he could see knuckles of cobbleberry vine displaying their sweet green fruit like so much vulgar jewelry. Brrr fell on the treat avidly. The aftertaste of the cobbleberries was tart, reminding him that the berries were in second growth. The spring was moving on.
He became possessed by the notion that time might harbor a hunger of its own, a hunger it fed by gobbling up long strings of minutes, courses of hours, harvests of seasons one after the other. This notion, too, was probably born of watching those Bears in their eternal present, unaware of time passing, unaware of cobbleberry vines forcing out a last, tangy collation of the season.
A few moments later, Brrr wondered if perhaps the berries he’d gobbled down had begun to ferment. His usual gingerish footing became a bit heavier, even clumsy. His head grew dense, and a miasma of undecipherable impressions closed in on him like marsh gas. Not long thereafter he fell to his chin and rolled over onto his back, dozing with open eyes. The stars lifted their myriad eyes to watch him wince over the clenching of his intestines.
If the stars showed, it must be nighttime. No cloud of ancestors on the horizon to obliterate the constellations.
Very few forest creatures were out and about tonight at their nocturnal chores and hobbies. In fact, he could detect no motion but the papery rustling of wind in sedge-grass. No frog dove into the stagnant ditchwater. No mockingbird traced her alibis into the gloaming.
There weren’t even any mosquitoes, which was not only pleasant but impossible, especially in a swamp.
A swamp it certainly was; perhaps a rising one. The small hillock on which Brrr had settled seemed
ringed by a steely salver of water—so calm that the constellations were reflected in it perfectly. You couldn’t make out the seam where the water ended and the sky began. It was more like being aloft among the heavenly bodies than adrift below them. The air was uncolored, characterless, neither sweet nor cold, neither clear nor moving.
Poison cobbleberries? Maybe, he thought, I have died, and so all life around me has died, too, for what proof have I that life should go on when I do not? After all, what kind of a life is it that is not pestered by insects? A perfect one, and since life is not perfect, this cannot be life.
With a sense of calm, or was it a paralysis, he realized the stars were moving toward him, very slowly, growing infinitesimally larger but no more distinct. At first he thought: Maybe these are the ghosts of trees that have rotted in Cloud Swamp, for that’s where I must be, like it or not.
Then it seemed like a host of shimmering midges in a corps de guerre. (Was this where all the insects had gone? Magnetically drawn to the hollow-in-life that a ghost colony might be, filling in the vacuum with the smallest fleck of indivisible yet visible living matter?)
Now they were airily shaping themselves into bouquets, like giant heads on tapering necks, like volutes of blossom on slowly spiraling stems. Nearing and nearing, possessed of both presence and distance.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said Brrr, to himself or to them, or both. Hoping they might be offended and leave.
They began to circle about him. The nearer they drew, the more of a family feeling they took on. Was it because, once a creature became a ghost, it shirked off the differentiations of biological diversity and, uniqueness annihilated, became just shades of life? Footfalls of the past?
“I have the distinct feeling I’m not in Oz anymore,” said Brrr. Now he was speaking aloud to keep up his courage—such as it was.
The specters wreathed themselves around him. As they tightened the circle, their separate margins began to merge. Before he was swallowed up in a blancmange of foggy apparition, he gave out a thunderclap of a roar. It appeared to make no impression on the creatures, but he was glad he could still roar. It meant he wasn’t dead. Presumably.
“Excuse my volume; I have no self-control,” he said. Well, why not talk to the phantoms? He had meant to avoid Cloud Swamp at all costs, but opportunity was presenting itself. And conversation was his only skill.
“Begging pardon for the intrusion. Frightfully thoughtless of me,” he went on. “Is there a spokesperson among you who can answer a question or two? If you’ve time to spare?”
There was a sort of drumming in the air, as if a billion miniature throats were clearing themselves. Languidly the sound resolved, its pitch rising and consolidating toward a common note. But it died out, bearing no word for Brrr upon its pressured breath.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” he said more forcefully. “I am, in actual fact, the King of the Forest.”
No reply. The apparent lack of interest on the part of a congress of ghosts shamed Brrr. It also frightened him. Of course they would realize he was no kind of king at all. He organized his thoughts with more honesty.
“I didn’t come here to disturb your rest,” he stated. “Indeed, I hoped to pass without pestering you. Shall we just nod courteously and say ‘Good-bye’ or ‘Piss off’ or whatever’s appropriate and then breeze on our separate ways?”
The assemblage of ghosts seemed to hover, listening, or drumming its fingers against its forearms, so to speak. Tacit. As yet uninvolved.
“Wait,” said a voice, not Brrr’s, but a normal worldly voice. Jemmsy? The Lion swiveled his head, not certain from which direction the sound approached.
Cubbins blundered down the side of an invisible bluff, snapping the branches of an invisible birch tree to break his descent. He splashed through the vision of ghosts and arrived at Brrr’s side with slicked thighs. Under one arm dripped a wedge of honeycomb.
“I forgot to tell you that you need to offer a tribute if you want to speak with the ghosts,” said Cubbins.
Another little secret about conversation. How did folks learn to get on in this tricky verbal negotiation called chat? How much had it cost him to grow up without the banter of family life?
Still, Brrr was glad to see the boy sheriff. (Out on his own again, the little dickens!) Almost as glad as if Jemmsy himself had coalesced out of a matrix of midges, free of an iron snare, smiling a soft-cheeked hello at his final friend, allowing Brrr to grin back at his first. But Cubbins was decent company, and Brrr felt both enriched and a little traitorous to the memory of Jemmsy to like Cubbins, too, and so quickly.
He said, hiding his gratitude, “How do you know you need to offer the ghosts a gift if no one in your tribe believes in ghosts?”
“I asked Ursaless. She claims never to have seen the Ozmists, but she insists this is the way it’s done by long-standing custom.”
