The Bark of the Bog Owl (5 page)

It had been weeks since Aidan tacked the letter to the beech tree in the bottom pasture. There it had remained, undisturbed, ever since, as the temperate spring yielded to the heavy heat of a Corenwald summer. After such a promising start—a feechie boy, a panther, a wandering prophet—Aidan’s summer so far had proven disappointing. Life at Longleaf Manor had resumed its normal rhythms almost before Bayard was out of sight. Aidan was back in the pasture with his sheep the day after the prophet’s visit, and there he had been most days since.

In spite of the prophet’s declaration, Aidan’s brothers did not revere him as Corenwald’s great deliverer. He was still their little brother, still inclined toward make-believe,
still likely to bite off more than he could chew. For a little while, they had teased him about his interview with the crazed visitor and his claim to have wrestled a feechie boy and killed a panther. But they eventually grew tired of the joke and paid him no more attention than they had before. The fact that no one ever found any sign of the panther Aidan claimed to have killed certainly didn’t help his case.

Whenever anyone asked what really happened in the bottom pasture, Aidan always stuck to his story. But even he was starting to doubt. Maybe his older brothers were right; maybe he had imagined the whole thing. The lifeless body of a full-grown panther couldn’t just disappear, could it? Perhaps he only knocked the panther senseless, and it came to its senses and slinked away before Ebbe noticed it. If that were the case, Aidan hadn’t slain a panther with a stone, and all this Wilderking business had nothing to do with him after all. He even began to wonder if Bayard had hypnotized him and put the whole thing in his head.

And yet he could not forget the old man’s eyes—not the blank gaze that convinced his brothers that Bayard was a lunatic, but the eyes that brimmed with tears of joy when they first saw Aidan. Those were the eyes of Bayard the Truthspeaker, Corenwald’s great prophet. Also, there was Father, who never dismissed any of this as foolishness. He certainly had his doubts. What sane person wouldn’t? But he knew not to take any word of Bayard’s lightly. He also knew that his youngest son was neither a fool nor a liar.

This was a strange and confusing time for Aidan. All his short life he had dreamed of adventure, of great deeds of heroism. Now Corenwald’s Truthspeaker had looked
into his eyes and told him that he, Aidan Errolson, would one day be Corenwald’s greatest adventurer and hero, the Wilderking foretold in song and prophecy. But Aidan wasn’t overjoyed at the news. It wasn’t just that he doubted the truth of the prophet’s words. The doubt, actually, was easier than belief. It was belief that burdened him with the sense—however unrealistic—that the future happiness of all of Corenwald rested on his shoulders. It was belief, not doubt, that kept him up nights.

Then there was the vague sense that even thinking about the Wilderking prophecy made him a traitor to King Darrow. He didn’t ask for any of this. Even in his most ambitious flights of fancy, he had never imagined himself the king of Corenwald. His dearest hope had always been to serve the king, not to supplant him.

It was a lonely feeling. To whom would the Wilderking look for advice and counsel? Who could begin to understand what it was like to be headed down such a path? Not his brothers. They didn’t believe any of it anyway. Father was as understanding as he could be, but his understanding was limited by his unswerving loyalty to King Darrow. Bayard was no help. He and his goats were nowhere to be found.

He couldn’t explain why, but the person Aidan most wanted to talk to was Dobro, the feechie boy. He had a peculiar sense that Dobro understood him in a way that nobody else did. He thought often of the last words Dobro had said to him: “You got what it takes, that’s easy to see. Even if you
are
a civilizer.”

Most of his spare moments Aidan spent in the forest along the River Tam, searching for any sign of Dobro. He
wandered among the meandering live oaks and spiky saw palmettos, scanning the canopy above to catch a glimpse of a lizard boy swinging from tree to tree. But he never saw anything out of the ordinary. He strained to hear the bark of the bog owl, but all he ever heard was the constant thrum of insect wings and the squawks, twirps, and chitters of the forest birds.

However, Aidan’s walks in the forest served a purpose that he little realized. Every hour he spent in the Tamside Forest perfected his skills in woodsmanship. He had always known every bend in the river, every fallen log, every sandbar a half-morning’s hike upstream and downstream from the bottom pasture. Now he knew every tree, every bush, every fold in the earth. He honed his climbing skills; he could clamber up all but the largest trees in the river bottom, like a natural-born feechie. He learned to tell at a glance which vines were best for swinging and which vines made the best ropes. He learned the ways of the wild boar and the bobcat.

He learned the habits of one animal in particular. An enormous bull alligator had taken possession of a little spit of sand at the river’s edge near the indigo field. Every midmorning for a week, before the hottest part of the day, Aidan had seen the great reptile napping in a little sunning nest it had wallowed out in the sand. It looked to be about sixteen feet long, though Aidan had never gotten close enough to be sure.

At supper one night, he mentioned this huge alligator to his father and brothers. Father’s enthusiasm was evident. “What I wouldn’t give to have such a beast!” he exclaimed, rubbing his hands together.

Brennus laughed. “What on earth would you want with an old bull alligator?”

“To give it to King Darrow,” Father answered, “what else?” The king kept a large game preserve on the far side of the Tam, and Errol often sent wildlife captured on Longleaf to the Royal Game Preserve, including several wild boars, a mating pair of turkeys, even an albino deer. But the alligators in the moat of Tambluff Castle were Darrow’s most prized collection, and an alligator was the one animal Errol had never been able to give him. Darrow’s alligators came from the southern reaches of Corenwald, near the Feechiefen Swamp. They were mostly fifteen to sixteen feet long. Alligators of that size were rare this far upriver. Errol had never found one on his estate that he considered worthy of Darrow’s moat. But this one sounded like it could be just the thing.

“Next time one of those alligator hunters comes through,” said Father, “we’ll get him to catch that big boy for us.” Longleaf Manor was the last outpost of civilization on the eastern frontier. Hunting parties heading downriver to the southern wilderness often stopped by to visit and swap news. “I don’t think a sixteen-foot alligator is something I want to tangle with.”

Aidan had an idea. It wasn’t a very good idea. It may have been one of the worst ideas he had ever dreamed up, but he decided on the spot to carry it into execution. He would catch the alligator himself. What better way to show his loyalty to King Darrow than to single-handedly capture a bull alligator three times longer than he was tall? If he made such a gift to the king, Father couldn’t
possibly question his loyalty. And maybe even his own doubts on that score would be put to rest.

* * *

The next morning found Aidan crouched among the leafy branches of a fallen tree that slanted down into the river. Below him, the dark water of the Tam swirled in slow eddies around the limbs that dipped and bobbed in the gentle current. By midmorning, it was already unbearably hot.

A great brown cottonmouth snake, as thick as a man’s forearm, wound itself over the tree’s upthrust roots and slithered down the slanting trunk toward Aidan, apparently unaware that he was there. Aidan broke off a branch with his left hand and prodded the big snake off the tree. “Sorry, friend,” he said, as the snake plished into the water, “I was here first.”

Aidan’s right hand gripped a long wooden pole, twice the length of his shepherd’s staff, with a noose of heavy hempen rope attached to the end. The other end of the rope was tied to a cypress tree near the river’s edge. He was a few feet from the great alligator’s sandbar.

Here Aidan had sat since sunup, waiting for his prey to approach. In the growing heat, the excitement of the hunt had slowly dissipated into numb boredom and disappointment. He expected the alligator two hours ago; soon it would be too hot for anyone—even a cold-blooded reptile—to sunbathe. He saw little point in staying much longer.

But just before Aidan gave up, the great alligator came gliding down the current and lumbered onto the gently sloped bank. It made straight for its sandy wallow and dropped down onto its belly with a snort, like a dog’s. Aidan was no more than ten feet away, but he was hidden, and the big alligator hadn’t noticed him.

Aidan had never been this close to such a magnificent alligator. Earlier, he had estimated it to be sixteen feet long, but he saw now that he had not given the creature enough credit. It was at least seventeen, maybe eighteen, feet from its broad, knotty head to its tree-thick tail. The great belly was as round as that of a full-grown horse.

The scars and indentions on the alligator’s scaly hide told a history of many epic struggles with other bull alligators. But now it smiled the toothy, complacent smile of an animal that feared no enemy.

Aidan braced himself against a stout tree limb. He felt for his hunting horn. If he got in trouble, he could always blow it. His brothers were in nearby fields, and all of the Errolsons knew to come running anytime they heard the distress call on a hunting horn. “Let’s see if you have one more battle left in you,” he whispered as he lowered the noose end of the pole toward the alligator’s snout.

The alligator noticed the loop descending, but it did not move. It mistook the brown rope for a cottonmouth and had no intention of surrendering this sandbar to a mere snake. When the noose touched down on the sand in front of it, the alligator hissed warningly and raised up in an aggressive posture.

This was exactly what Aidan had hoped for. With a quick flip of the pole end, he looped the noose over the
alligator’s snout. Only now realizing that it may be in trouble, the alligator made an explosive lunge toward the river. The lurching force tightened the noose around the big reptile’s chest, just above the forelegs.

Aidan had planned to drop the pole as soon as he felt the noose tighten. But he had miscalculated the suddenness—not to mention the force—with which the alligator could move when it felt the need to. When the gigantic reptile hit the water, Aidan was still gripping the pole with both hands. The limb that supported Aidan splintered like a twig, and he catapulted out of the tree toward the snapping jaws of an angry alligator.