Near the water’s edge, Bardo found the cypress paddle he used to call his beavers. He slapped it flat on the surface of the water, in imitation of a beaver’s tail slapping. Slap! Slap! Slap-slap-slap! Slap! Slap! Slap-slap-slap! It wasn’t long before three deep-brown knobs appeared on the black water’s surface, approaching fast and trailing broadening Vs in their wake.
“Hyah, Sawtooth!” Bardo called. “Hyah, Crackjaw! Hyah, Chip!”
The three massive, glistening, dripping beavers emerged from the swamp and waddled briskly to Bardo, then sat on their haunches in affectionate greeting to the old feechie who had raised them from kits and trained them in the finer points of competitive tree felling.
“There’s my thunder beavers,” Bardo crooned, stroking each in turn. “There’s my trunk snappers.” The beavers arched their backs in pleasure at their master’s praise. “I got ’em when they was wee fellers, and I raised ’em into tree fellers,” Bardo cackled. In spite of his impatience with the whole situation, Aidan couldn’t help but be warmed by the obvious affection between the wrinkled old feechie and his furry friends.
It was comical to see such heavy creatures frisk about in their lubberly way. Even so, there was something nervous and high-strung in the beavers’ manner. Bardo bred his beavers to be energetic and competitive, and while beavers were proverbially eager, these particular beavers went beyond eager to something more like manic. From the moment they got out of the water, they worked their powerful jaws, flashing their huge front cutting teeth as if they couldn’t wait to start gnawing something.
“Pick your trees, Wimbo,” said Bardo, “before Sawtooth commences to chawin’ up somebody’s leg.”
Wimbo looked around at the nearby trees. His gaze soon fell on a pair of nearly identical loblolly bays, each about a foot in diameter, standing some ten strides apart. “How ’bout them two trees?” he suggested.
“My beavers thinks a bay tree’s a stick of sugar cane,” Bardo boasted. “I imagine they ate two or three for breakfast this morning. You sure you don’t want to try your luck on somethin’ a little more challengin’?”
“Naw,” Wimbo answered. He had already unslung the hickory-handled stone ax he always carried on his back and was scraping himself a footpad in the sand at the base of one of the bays. “I reckon these two trees will serve.”
“All right then,” Bardo answered, herding his beavers toward the second bay tree. “Circle up, Sawtooth! Circle up, Chip! Crackjaw!”
The three beavers circled around their tree, and it was all Bardo could do to keep them from tearing into the bark before Tombro gave the start whistle.
When Tombro’s whistle shrilled across the little island, Wimbo Barkflinger fell to with all the passion and determination of wounded pride. Bardo’s beavers had bested him in ten straight contests. They were the bane of his existence. He strained every muscle and sinew, he rotated at the hips, he kept his feet planted. And the chips rained in a steady shower.
The beavers, however, weren’t making nearly so much progress. They attacked their tree with all the enthusiasm their master had bred and trained into them. But they quickly fell back like soldiers repulsed by an enemy.
“Have at it, my champeens!” Bardo urged. “Fling bark! Grind that tree! Chop it!”
At Bardo’s encouragement the beavers launched a second attack. But it was no good. They each made no more than a superficial scrape in the tree’s bark before they went to sneezing and coughing. They curled up their lips and wrinkled their noses so their front teeth protruded even more, a grotesque exaggeration of a beaver’s already ludicrous profile.
Meanwhile, Wimbo chopped away, seemingly unaware of the big lead he was gaining on his opponents.
“At it, my darlings!” Bardo urged. “Make stumps, my princes!” But by this time, the beavers were rooting like hogs, snorting and sneezing in the sand at the tree’s base.
“What’s a matter with them beavers?” somebody asked from the crowd.
Bardo got on his hands and knees, the better to coax along his three champions. That’s when he noticed little balls of pine resin in Crackjaw’s whiskers. Examining his beavers’ tree-the tree Wimbo had selected for them to gnaw-Bardo realized it had been painted all the way around with turpentine and resin. Bardo’s eyes were flashing when he turned them on Wimbo, still swinging away at his own bay tree.
It didn’t take Bardo long to figure out what had happened. Wimbo must have known he would be called on to compete against Bardo’s beavers once again. He had to have known. Every time he came to the Timberbeavers’ home island, somebody urged a timberbout on him. Wimbo, the rascal, had painted this tree with turpentine and pine resin after he arrived the night before. No wonder the wily axman had insisted he be allowed to select the trees himself. Bardo looked at his unhappy beavers who, at his urging, had taken two mouthfuls of turpentine. Looking at Wimbo’s flailing form, fury rose like a red mist before Bardo’s eyes. He pointed his cypress paddle at the axman. “Hyah, Sawtooth! Hyah, Crackjaw! Hyah, Chip!” he intoned. “Chaw him!”
In a feat of athleticism unheard of among beavers, one of Bardo’s darlings-Chip, Bardo later said- jumped three feet off the sand and hit Wimbo square in the belly while the axman was on the backswing. Wimbo went down in a heap, covering himself against the flashing teeth of his attacker. Sawtooth went to work on his shinbone while Crackjaw made short work of the hickory handle on Wimbo’s ax.
When Crackjaw had destroyed Wimbo’s ax, Bardo called his beavers off Wimbo and set them on Wimbo’s tree. The Feechiefen’s greatest axman just watched as the three beavers finished the job he had started. The gathered feechies scattered as the tree thundered to earth. Wimbo had been handed his eleventh straight defeat in a timberbout.
Chapter Four
The muddy faces of the swamp councilors were still alight with the excitement of the timberbout when Tombro called the meeting to order a second time.
“A thousand civilizers,” Tombro began, “crossing the river and coming this way. What you reckon we ought to do ’bout it?”
“Whup ’em!” shouted Theto Elbogator. He shook his fist ominously.
“Drown ’em!” offered an ill-favored she-feechie from Turtle Strand.
“What are we waitin’ for?” whooped a pinch-faced member of Larbo’s band whom Aidan recognized from the Battle of Bearhouse. He raised a spear above his head, holding it with both hands, and ran a lap around the gathering, trying to whip his fellows into a warlike frenzy.
On the warmonger’s second pass, Tombro grabbed hold of his spear and wrenched it from his hands. “Hold on, Sligo,” Tombro said. “The time’ll come for whuppin’, but now’s the time for talkin’.” He turned toward Aidan. “Pantherbane, you a civilizer-used to be anyway. What you think about all this?”
Aidan was slow to answer. “The thought of civilizers in the Feechiefen scares me to death,” he finally said.
The gathered feechies breathed a collective gasp.
“Bless him,” said Aunt Seku. “He’s scared of civilizers.”
“Don’t you worry about a thing, Pantherbane,” Branko Flatbottom called. “We won’t let them mean old civilizers catch you. Your fights is our fights, remember?”
“No,” said Aidan, “it’s not that. I’m afraid that if a thousand civilizer soldiers came into the Feechiefen, they’d never go home alive.”
“Hee-haw!” yodeled one of the feechies.
“That’ll learn ’em!” shouted another.
But it was plain neither Aidan nor Percy took any pleasure in the idea.
“What you boys mullygrubbin’ for?” Dobro asked. “Surely it don’t hurt your feelin’s none to see your enemies whupped?”
Aidan shook his head. “Those soldiers aren’t my enemies… even if they think they are.”
Dobro snorted. “I don’t believe you know what a enemy is.”
Percy spoke now. His tone was unusually solemn. “About a quarter of those fighting men are from the
