I was alone in a strange den with strange creatures who looked like me but whose friends had just tried to kill my family.
All of a sudden I couldn’t breathe. Air stuck in my throat like a splinter of pigeon bone. The den was large but the walls seemed to move closer when I wasn’t looking. And now there was no way out!
“Are you all right, Gruff?” asked Kim, cocking her head and looking sharply at me. “Sit down, I’ll get you some juice.”
Sit down. That’s what Mrs. Parker had told me to do when we first came in. Maybe that’s what you were supposed to do when you entered a Legwalker den.
I folded my legs under me and sank to the floor, every muscle stiff with dread. Sitting like this I couldn’t run or leap. I was completely at their mercy.
My heart began to hammer as I noticed both Paul and Kim staring at me with peculiar expressions. Then they looked at each other and broke out laughing.
I jumped up, ready to bolt for the door even though I had no place to go. But Kim put her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry, Gruff,” she said. “We didn’t mean to laugh at you. We were laughing at ourselves, really. Because we didn’t have sense enough to tell you about chairs.”
Although I couldn’t understand all the words, I heard the friendliness in her voice. She was sorry she had frightened me. Paul nodded and tried hard not to laugh anymore, though he couldn’t stop the corners of his mouth from twitching.
“In a house,” said Kim, gesturing at the walls around her, “you sit in a chair. Like this.” She walked over to one of the den’s strange bulky objects, turned around, and sat in it just like I might sit on a rock.
There she got up and gestured at me to try it. It was like sitting on a cloud. I sank into the soft seat and the padded back seemed to sigh as I leaned into it.
“I’m glad to see you’ve made Gruff comfortable,” said Mrs. Parker, reappearing. I looked at her quickly, tensing up again. She smiled at me but there was a strain around her eyes, almost like pain. Her eyes fluttered over my torn deerskins and bare feet.
“Paul, I think you should take Gruff upstairs and run him a bath,” she said. “You’re both about the same size. He can wear some of your clothes. Meanwhile I’ll make some calls and we’ll figure out what to do with him.”
“Come on, Gruff,” said Paul, jumping up.
They had a clever arrangement for getting to the top of the house—stairs, Paul called it.
“This is my room,” he said, pausing before a closed door.
It felt strange to be standing here, already knowing what I would see. I felt guilty about that but proud, too. It was all mixed up.
“You’re going to love this,” he said, flashing me a grin.
He threw open the door and there were all his shiny things.
I hesitated, suddenly nervous again. Just last night I’d been thinking we might be friends, and then Kim had screamed and I’d known I was just a monster. Now, here I was, inside their den. It felt wrong somehow.
But Paul misunderstood my awkwardness. “I knew you’d be impressed,” he said. “Pretty great, isn’t it?”
I remembered a word he’d used when the hunters first brought me out of the swamp. “Coo-ul,” I said. It came out sounding a little like a wolf’s bark, but Paul was delighted. He clapped me on the back and whooped.
Then he led me around the room, showing me his stuff, rattling off names that meant nothing to me—Mars probe, space shuttle, Wright brothers’ plane, Sherman tank—after a while I stopped listening, though I loved looking. I wanted to touch, too, but they looked so delicate I thought my clumsy fingers might crush them.
Still, I wasn’t really impressed until Paul showed me a table covered with tiny pieces. “This is what I’m working on now,” he said, pointing to a colorful picture on a box. “It’s a space station.”
Only then did it dawn on me that he had actually built all these things. I looked around again, in awe.
“Maybe we can work on them together,” said Paul. “I can read you the instructions. Once you learn a little more English.”
Paul’s mother called from downstairs. “Paul, how are you coming along up there? I don’t hear any water running.”
“Okay, Mom!” yelled Paul. He shrugged his shoulders at me. “Bath time. Come on.”
We went down the hall to a small room filled with more strange objects, but different from the objects called furniture. Everything was shiny and hard.
“This is the bathtub.” Paul bent over and water suddenly began gushing out of the wall.
I jumped back in fear, but he didn’t seem alarmed.
“Here’s the soap,” he said, “and towels are in here. I’ll get you a pair of my jeans and a T-shirt.”
He left me there. Steam rose from the rushing water. Soon the big tub would overflow, like some of our swamp ponds did in the spring. But in the swamp the water just ran over the ground. Here there was no ground. I stared in dread, not knowing what to do to stop it. The water rose higher.
It began to lap at the edge of the tub. A dribble ran over. Then a stream.
“Yikes!” Paul dashed into the room and a second later there was quiet. He had stopped the water.
“I should have known,” he said to himself. He turned to me. “You have to get in it,” he said in a loud voice as if I was deaf. He no longer looked so friendly. He sniffed and wrinkled his nose. “You have to take a bath. In case you don’t know it, you smell kind of swampy.” I realized he was trying to say I stunk.
Of course I smell swampy, I wanted to tell him.
