Author: Captain Pigheart

This is the second part of a story – read Part 1.

The hedgehog winced as he saw Eric’s head bounce off the branch and onto the ground. He gave the woodlice a nudge and they crawled back into their bag and went to sleep. Then he had a good scratch to placate his own host of parasites. After that, he knocked back a few drams of the honey ale that the moles had left for him. He yawned, somewhat tired from his oracular activities.

It had taken several hours to persuade the woodlice to drink enough sloe gin for the hedgehog to mesmerise them. Once he’d done that they were excellent instruments of divination, though they needed some encouragement before they started to roll meaningfully. Some fortune-tellers favoured the old liquorice tea bits, or staring into a puddle, but the hedgehog was no mere paw-reader. He had always found those methods not so much unreliable, but lacking some essential quality. He liked to work with life when it came down to it, and you didn’t get much more lively than woodlice, always crawling around and finding new ways to get into your bed or kitchen drawers. Their kind of aimless curiosity was ideal to harness when you wanted to take a peek into the future.

It was certainly one of the clearest visions he’d ever had, although it would take some interpretation. It’s all very good and well watching an obviously bewildered animal haring around the forest (just wait for next Spring), but the vision hadn’t quite revealed what he was running away from. Certainly the weasel was a stranger to the hedgehog, though he had a familiar sparkle about the eyes… Perhaps he was more important than the events he had aimed for. However, it proved that the moles’ calculations had been as precise as usual – which certainly accounted for the intensity of his vision. If only it had been a sight of something more specific… but the sense of threat that the weasel felt was an indication of something going awry.

So what to tell the moles? For a start, find that weasel – he certainly didn’t live in the forest yet (he could be sure of that without checking), but he seemed like one of theirs. Second, work out where the weasel had been- or was going to be – in the vision, when it happened (this was always difficult to explain); there was no point in arguing with the future, but it often paid to be around when the predictions unfolded – how else could one be sure their sight was sound? Other than that, they were clearly on the right path, so they could direct their partners to do more of the same good work. This was always much easier in hindsight, because then you could just compare what actually happened with what you thought was going to happen. Mind you, far too much was done through hindsight, and there was not enough foresight being used elsewhere in the forest. Add second-sight to the equation and it all became a lot more complicated.

Right-o. The Mystic Hedgehog left his private chambers and ambled onto the Tiled Floor with its intricate mosaic of woodland life. The tiles were cold under his aging paws and made his ankles ache; he looked forwards to crawling back into his nest later on. He rang a small bell and three black-robed acolytes appeared, their pink noses sniffing habitually. He could just about see their little, weak eyes in the depths of their hoods.

One stepped forwards with a handful of manuscript and a tiny quill. To them he dictated his prophecy and instructions. He added a few more of his standard prophecies to bulk it out. ‘Watch the skies’ was always a good, and pertinent one for rodents. He also suggested they arrange another meeting with the Order and kept an eye on the Parliament. He always referred politely to the owls even if others didn’t. There was no harm in being civil, and sometimes it paid off richly.

The moles seemed satisfied, and while making copies of the Mystic Hedgehog’s revelations they went off to archive them appropriately. He would make his formal announcement to all the moles the next night, at the full moon as was traditional. Then it was time for another head splitting yawn, a larger scratch and back to bed for their revered prophet.

 

This is the second part of a story – read Part 1 and Part 2.

Everyone just called it home or maybe the Home Forest if they wanted to make it sound a bit grander. Names are applied only if you need to distinguish one place from another. So the birds, bugs and beasts who lived there rarely thought to name it, it was simply ‘home’ for them. Other terms were bandied about by the owls who liked grand names, but they could never agree on a favourite. The slightly more sophisticated jet set of migrating birds called it something else, either ‘Roundtrees’ or more often just ‘The Forest for the Irretrievably Weird’.

There’s something unnerving about flying over a neatly circular wood with its own micro-climate. The weather was only one of many good reasons for a detour. It’s one thing to meet up and stick together when flying thousands of miles, another thing entirely to have regular ‘Lunar General Meetings’ (LGMs) with agenda and minutes. No, the forest was too strange to get involved with. Problem was, if you  got too close you ended up flying around and around it and it took a kind of collective ‘let’s get the hell out of here’ to fly past it. For that reason the forest was well known, and had the geese had maps there would have been a circle marked ‘Here be strange – go around’.

Some birds do have more interesting points of view than others. Some birds scan the countryside for their prey, detecting tiny movements in the grasses. Others are a bit more ground-focussed and spend their time tramping heavily to tempt up the worms. Such lives are dull by comparison with that of the bold magpie.

Damien soared high into the air above the forest and settled onto a supportive thermal updraft.

“Ah, joy. The sheer peace of the open sky,” Damien closed his eyes are glided dreamily, “nothing like it for cleaning out the feathers and the head.” Having spent the last couple of weeks frantically building an extension to his nest for an increasingly irritable mate, Damien felt unbelievably free.

“Mmm, no twigs in the beak for me… Aha!”

Damien was just coming up to the forest’s edge when he spotted something glinting at him. Normally he’d have been a little reluctant to cross the border, but a shiny thing was shiny thing was a thing he could take home and have it be his shiny thing. Most members of the crow family spend their time waiting for old or ill animals to die, but magpies are far more interested in shiny things than in their cousins’ taste for carrion.

As Damien left the forest he so distracted by the sparkle that he was taken completely by surprise by the fleet of enraged blackbirds which surrounded him almost immediately.

“Whoah there little fellers!” cried Damien, “what’s got you so riled?” The flock wheeled around him and began to harry him with their tiny beaks.

“We’ll not ‘ave you stealing our chicks!”

“Go back to the weird woods!”

“We don’t want your bumfuzzling kind here!”

“What? What did you just call me?” Damien paused in the air and used his vastly superior wing span to tap the nearest blackbird and send it ground-wards. The rest of the flock continued to spew insults and small insects at him as he eluded them.

“Look, not only are you Outsiders slower and smaller than me, you’re not so bright either. So just pack it in before I have to give you all a good pecking.”

It only took a few more well placed taps to get some airspace, but by then Damien had lost sight of the pretty twinkling thing he’d been after. With a heavy sigh Damien gave up on it and decided to drop in on a new friend again.

 

The magpie alighted on the tin roof of Eric’s house and gave it a sharp rap. Here were pretty things in plentiful abandon – the weasel was at least as discerning as him in his choices.

The door popped open and a tall, scruffy weasel hopped out and stretched luxuriantly.

“How’s it going Damien?”

“Alright, apart from being harassed by some of your idiot neighbours,”

“Which ones this time? The rabbits, or have your lot irritated the shrews again?” Eric hopped onto the roof and sat down next to Damien, who shuffled over to make room.

“You’ve got to get out of here, they’re all crazy.” Damien said flatly.

“You know they’re just annoyed because of all the squirrels and their mates coming out of the forest on their recruiting runs or whatever it’s called.”

“Homecoming – we’ve talked about that. They’re just trying to get everyone back to where they belong, not out here with all these nutters,”

“The shrews are claiming it’s a shrike conspiracy. The squirrels are in collusion with them to provide an infinite food supply.”

“That’s crazy. We’ve got owls and they’re bad enough. I can’t imagine them even tolerating butcher birds in the same forest. “

Eric sighed and even from where he sat he could see the grass swaying which preceded another deposition of locals on their way to challenge one of the intruders.

“They’re just not used to this. We don’t come into the forest, you don’t come out here. Nice and simple. Apart from the foxes and owls of course.”

Damien smirked, “Yeah, it’s always different when it comes to the big boys – not much you can do about them. On the other hand the badgers have been going nuts about the new arrivals.” Anti-forest chanting was now audible form the field. “Look, I’d better be off before that lot arrive. Got anything pretty for a new nest?”

Eric smiled and climbed back inside to return a moment later with a square of blue foil. “It’s folded up, so be careful not to put any holes in it when you chuck it back up– I thought this might be nice when your chicks hatch.”

“Don’t remind me. Thanks though – and I’ll see you soon.” that last was rather garbled as Damien gulped the foil down.

“Yeah, thanks for leaving me with this lot to sort out,” Eric waved politely to the amazingly angry-looking rabbit leading the locals. That’s when Damien decided to play his only card:

“Hey – your grandparents lived in the forest you know – think about it.” Before Eric could respond, he was up and away to divebomb the shrews with a defiant, “so long dullards!” Eric watched him fly off back to the forest, shook his head and went back inside and firmly closed the door.