Book Review: A Dog’s Purpose

Synopsis: Cute, maudlin, well-told. But also, it’s been done:



This isn’t to say that Bruce Cameron isn’t a good writer or storyteller. He gives a distinct voice to the reincarnated pup in this novel – and I’m a sucker for anthropomorphism.

But it is, truth be told, Garfield’s Nine Lives, with Dogs.

It also appears to be a cottage industry, if the website is to be believed. Good for Cameron et al being able to capitalize.

I’m not cynical enough to say my heartstrings weren’t tugged. And I’m not surprised at the book’s (or subsequent movie’s) popularity, given the market for maudlin in the United States. But maybe part of me is a little disappointed to think a dog’s purpose is “to save,” though I am pleased with the simplicity of it. “To be” might be even simpler, but there’s less of a lesson to be swung with that, I suppose.

And yeah (spoilers) I knew before the book brought him there that the dog was going to end up with Ethan again, and that the dog was going to see Ethan die.

And though it sounds cruel, maybe part of me wanted the stories where the dog was in a bad situation to last a bit longer. We already tend to look at dogs through rose-colored glasses, so maybe seeing the unpleasantness dogs go through would have made for a deeper story, though probably one that would not have sold as well or been as filmable (though Pixar’s Kitbull leapt into that territory and did well with its storytelling).



You’ll see in the sidebar, however, I’ve got another Cameron book in the wings. I’ll give it a go. But probably won’t delve further into the “Dog’s Purpose” universe. One book is enough.

Applying What I Read

About a week or so ago, I wrote about how I thought Temple Grandin’s “Animals In Translation” would be a good resource for any author using anthropomorphic animals as characters.

I don’t know what she’d think of me using her book in this manner, but I did find some useful stuff. Here are a few examples:

You need to know something about animals’ color vision to predict what visual stimuli they’ll experience as high-contrast. The breakdown is pretty simple: birds can see four different basic colors (ultraviolet, blue, green, and red), people and some primates see three (blue, green, and red), and most of the rest of the mammals see just two (blue and green). With dichromatic, or two-color vision, the colors animals see best are a yellowish green (the color of a safety vest) and a bluish purple (which is close to the purple of a purple iris). That means that yellow is the high-contrast color for almost all animals. Anything yellow will really pop out at them, so you have to be careful about yellow raincoats, boots, and machinery.

Clearly I can have a character – and I think just one or maybe two at the moment – have color fixations. No matter what I do, I need to amp up the visual universe in Doleful Creatures.

For a normal human being, almost nothing in the environment pops. That means it’s practically impossible for a human being to actually see something brand-new in the first place. People probably don’t like novelty any more than animals do, but people don’t get exposed to much novelty, because they don’t notice it when it’s there. Humans are built to see what they’re expecting to see, and it’s hard to expect to see something you’ve never seen. New things just don’t register.

Again, amping up the visual world is going to help a ton. My characters have got to notice things that I would not notice. So I’m going to have to think hard about the kinds of things they should notice.

The price human beings pay for having such big, fat frontal lobes is that normal people become oblivious in a way animals and autistic people aren’t. Normal people stop seeing the details that make up the big picture and see only the big picture instead. That’s what your frontal lobes do for you: they give you the big picture. Animals see all the tiny little details that go into the picture.

Again, emphasis on that visual world, and the itty-bitty thing that make it up, not just the big picture.

Every year several ranchers are dairymen are killed by cattle challengers, and it’s my opinion that the best way to prevent dangerous attacks on people is to raise highly social grazing animals like cows and horses strictly with their own kind. They should look up to people as a benevolent higher power. You don’t want a cow directing any cow aggression at humans.

This is why The Lady shows up as a woman when she wants to be highly persuasive. She wants to be seen as that higher power. That some animals – like Jarrod – can see through the disguise to the worm/dragon she is kinda spoils things for her. Hence part of the continued animosity. This is something I need to put greater emphasis on.

In. Dr. [Joseph] LeDoux’s [researcher into the neurology of fear at New York view, this is one reason why therapists see so many fears without any obvious cause in their patients. What they’re seeing are secondary downstream fears that developed after the conscious-content of the original fear was forgotten. Th new fears are like stand-ins, or substitutions, for the old one. This may sound strange, but it happens a lot, especially to people with phobias. As Dr. LeDoux says, “phobics can sometimes lose track of what they are afraid of.”

Another character trait to work with on Jarrod. He’s so frightened of everything he’s not really sure what he’s frightened of anymore.

The Psychology of Anthropomorphism. Or Not.

As regular visitors to Yellowstone National Park (we live only 2 ½ hours to the south) we see it every time we visit.

There’s a buffalo or elk on the side of the road, or in a meadow nearby. Visitors, cameras and children in hand, flock to the roadside and begin snapping pictures. The vast majority of them – children included – keep a respectful distance. But there are always one or two of those hundredth monkeys who have to get closer. And closer. And closer. It’s always the adults, sometimes with a very reluctant child in tow. I’ve never seen anyone get gored or trampled, but I have seen enough buffalo and elk look at the interlopers and stomp their hoofs, only to run off, to know there are many close calls.

And I, myself, by choice, have been within twenty feet of a Yellowstone black bear. The smartest thing I’ve done in my life?

No.

But is anthropomorphism to blame? A study published in Psychology Today seems to intimate so. And I don’t buy it. (Of course, I'm doing what every other journalist is doing with such studies: Misinterpreting it in order to write a screed on my own agenda.)

The study looked at how children process information about animals based upon whether they’re exposed early on to fact-based information about them, or whether they’re told cute, cuddly little stories about them instead. (Big admission here: I’m currently writing a novel about anthropomorphized animals and grew up on such novels, so I have an obvious bias here.)

They’ve got some funny things to say in their study:

[T]he results of Study 1 indicate that preschoolers can learn simple biological facts about animals from books, whether the information is presented to them in a context that uses realistic or anthropomorphic language to describe animals. This ability is more robust in 4- and 5-year-olds than in 3-year-olds. This finding is consistent with the results of Ganea and colleagues regarding the learning of simple biological information (e.g., color camouflage) from picture books that varied the type of language (realistic vs. intentional) used.

The results also show that the type of language used in books affects how likely children are to attribute anthropomorphistic traits to real animals. Children were more likely to say that real animals feel human emotions or even talk after listening to stories that used anthropomorphic rather than realistic language. There are two ways to explain this effect: either that the anthropomorphic language increases children’s [sic] tendency to attribute anthropomorphic traits to animals, or that hearing realistic language suppresses their natural inclination to attribute human-like traits to other non-human animals.

So, first they say that it’s possible for children to learn “facts” about animals, whether the information is presented in realistic or anthropomorphized language. That’s fine. They also demonstrate that anthropomorphizing animals may make children more prone to attribute human characteristics to animals than if they read purely fact-based books.

Then, later in the study, they go on to say this:

When children in Study 2 were exposed to books where anthropomorphic images and language were combined they were less likely to apply the facts to photographs of the real animals compared to a book that used only anthropomorphic images. This type of book, which combines both fantastical language and anthropomorphic illustrations of animals, is typical of commercially available books. Our results suggest that this combination may create a story context that is too dissimilar from reality for preschoolers to realize that information important for the real world is being conveyed. As children get older and have more experience with fantastical stories, they may acquire knowledge that information encountered in fantastical books can’t be relevant to the real world, but the current findings indicate that this is not yet the case for preschool-aged children.

This, I suppose, would hold true if children only learned information about animals from books. Maybe that’s the case for many children, who live in situations and in cultures where real interactions with animals aren’t possible or practical. We do, after all, live in a world where many want to be or are by situation isolated from nature, where they don’t have pets, rarely frequent zoos or live in urban centers where the only animals to be seen in their natural habitat may be birds, insects, squirrels, and such.

And part of me wonders how much of the response they’re getting is just because the children are parroting what they’ve just learned, not because one set of information is more important to the real world than the other. What’s in the mind now with kids is most likely what is going to come out when you ask them questions. Thus the odd story of Jesus coming to Earth inside a meteor at a family discussion shortly after our kids saw the original Superman movie.

I grew up reading these kinds of books, and by choice. Ribsy. The Mouse and the Motorcycle. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. They are what I enjoy (though I read many reality-based books these days) and what I want to write as an author.

Am I doing harm by writing such books?

No. And I don’t think the study is saying that, contrary to what Slate might be thinking about it at the moment. But I think it’s disingenuous to think that our preschoolers have to be filled with facts “relevant to the real world” and that reading them books of this nature is harmful to their learning. (Slate gets a bit silly on this as well, linking their article to that of a 12-year-old girl who “petted” a bear attacking her, neglecting in their summation to say that she petted the animal as a last-ditch attempt to stop its attack after she’d already been bitten, run away, and caught again, not because she’d read fuzzy stories in which the bears were nice and liked to be stroked.)

There is other learning that, perhaps, these folks didn’t study. I consider attributing human characteristics to animals as the first steps to developing sympathy and empathy for animals, notwithstanding the outlandish scenario I started this essay with.

This is a scary bear, right?

Are folks being gored and trampled in Yellowstone because they believe the animals they see are of the fuzzy, cute nature they’ve read in books? Maybe a portion of them are. But I think the bigger problem is that they are in the moment, wanting to get closer and closer to nature in a world where we’re so disconnected from nature that we have lost respect for it, notwithstanding the many real-world, relevant facts we may have learned from them. I can know that bears can climb trees and that they can run both downhill and uphill equally well and that they can outrun me, but in the moment those facts may be overridden by the desire to connect to nature, despite what I know.

And my children, who grew up around books that anthropomorphize, have learned a great respect for animals because we don’t rely on books to teach our kids how they should behave if they see an elk or buffalo or bear up close. We respect nature, because we know what it can do. And when I went to see that bear up the trail? My kids, who love Narnia and Warriors and other such books, stayed behind because they knew the dangers. How much more real-world do we need to get?

Besides, I want my kids to be sillyhearts, while still respecting nature:

Anthropomorphism -- Doleful Creatures

NOTE: Another bit from a story I've been working on for a while. Read another isolated fragment here. Still in its infancy.

The animals of Purdy Farm knew something had to be done.

They gathered in the barn on a moonless night, cattle sweeping the stalls, the roosters herding their harems, the pigs grunting sleepily, the crows lining the rafters overhead.

Adora Belle, a Guernsey cow, was nervous of the crows. They didn’t belong to the farm particularly, they did no valuable work. But Littlebottom the cat and Janos the donkey convinced her they had as much a stake in what went on in the barn as any animal that worked at, burrowed under, flew over or snuffled through the farm. The crows had even managed to talk up the meeting enough in the woods and fallow prairies that a family of porcupines, three bright-eyed raccoons, a moth-eaten badger and a gaggle of field mice were in the barn, clustered close together, eyeing the others with awe and suspicion.

Across the barnyard, past the wagon-barn and the well, Farmer Purdy snored in his cot in the living room, close to the fire. His sleep was fitful. He woke often, to poke the fire, to sit up and cough a bone-rattling, hacking cough into an old spotted handkerchief. As he sat in the darkness, the room illuminated fitfully by the glow from the fire grate, he spotted the pile of paperwork on his cluttered desk. He coughed again, shivered, rolled into his blanket and turned back to the fire, his back to the desk.

“Is everyone here? Is anyone missing,” Adora Belle asked over the cackle of the crowd. The animals settled, a bit reluctantly. A mother mouse tried to shoosh her brood who’d started a game of hide-and-seek in the milking pails and butter churn.

"This is prob’ly all that’s comin,’ Belle,” Janos said. He looked around the barn. It was not as crowded as he would have liked. But so many had gone. The horses. Most of the cattle. All of the sheep. Only one of the sheep dogs remained, a depressed creature who slept in the hay loft and tried, once in a while, to halfheartedly herd the chickens. Someone had even taken the scarecrow Ma Purdy made years back, leaving the fields open to the crows that shuffled on the rafters, trying hard not to relieve themselves on the animals below.

Adora Belle cleared her throat. “We’d like to thank,”

“Kin we dispense with the speeches, miss, and get to th’ point o’ this meetin,” the badger asked. He stopped his own speech with a fit of coughing as the crows chuckled overhead.

“Easy, grandfather, don’t make this speech your last,” a crow shouted. The others laughed.

The badger stopped coughing. “Fine for you flightly young’uns to make fun of an old badger,” he said. “Freeloaders that you are, flyin’ in when the corn and raspberries is ripe, never doin’ nothin’ but eatin.’”

A crow dropped form the rafter, flew a tight corkscrew and landed with a thump on the ground in front of the badger’s snout. “Pretty preachy for a codger who hides in the woods all day, scared of his own shadow,” it said. “Don’t see you hitched to the plow!”

The badger snapped at the crow, making it hop backwards into a startled chicken. “I don’t work here, aye, but I don’t pilfer, either,” he said.

“Gentle friends, gentle friends,” Adora Belle lowed, stepping lightly over the chickens and ducks to the spot where the crow and badger eyed each other. “We don’t have time for fighting. We’re here,” she said, “to stop the Closure.”

All the animals in the barn heard the capital letter, the older ones explaining to the younger ones what they’d just heard. Closure. The word had been whispered, lowed, clucked, squeaked and grunted among animals living on and near the farm since Littlebottom first brought it to them two weeks ago. No one was really sure what it meant, but Littlebottom knew it meant the farmer had retired to his cot, growing more ill by the day. He rose only to stoke the fire, visit the outhouse and to stare forlornly at the papers piled on his desk.

“Aye, the Closure,” the badger shouted. “We wood folk have heard talk of the Closure from yon crows and mice,” he said. “None of us understand much what it means. I know closures when it comes ot tunnelin, but there be no tunnels o’ concern o’ the farmer on Purdy Farm. Ever sicne I closed that one the skunks had dug into the root cellar. Soft livin’ they was lookin’ for, yes, not knowin’ that in my time I seen soft livin’ bring the poison, the traps, the shotgun, I have.”

“Is that what happened to your face, grandfather,” the young crow laughed.

“Nay,” the badger said. “Lost me eye and me ear in a scrap, I did. Just as you’re about to. And if I can’t find yon ear, I’ll go fer the brain! An’ I doubt I can find that.”

“Get him, Chylus, get the ratbag!” the crows in the rafters shouted. A few flew off, circling over the badger and crow, hoping for a better view of the fight. The chickens cackled and ran, crashing into each other and the other animals as they tried to find places to hide. The filed mice lined up on the lip of a pail, leaning forward expectantly. The porcupines stepped nervously from one foot to another, not wanting to witness a fight but unwilling to flee, lest they put an eye out with one of their quills.

“Silence,” Janos whispered. “Silence.”

The donkey joked often to Adora Belle that he wasn’t a donkey at all. Wheezing in his raspy voice, he said, “I’m all hoarse.” But over any din, be it cackling chickens, a gale ripping shakes off the barn roof, the roar of a tractor, all the other animals could hear Janos’ whispers. They quieted. The crows flying overhead made a few more passes, then flew back to their roosts in the rafters. Chylus, eyeing the badger suspiciously, hopped back, turned and flew to a rail on one of the stalls. The badger stared evilly up at him.

Adora Belle spoke. “We haven’t time to fight amongst ourselves,” she said. “Littlebottom will tell us why we’re here. Littlebottom!”

The cat looked up from his perch on a pile of gunny sacks. He stood up, stretched, then leisurely walked to the center of the crowd of animals, tail erect, walking daintily as if on the carpet in the Purdy farmhouse hallway.

“Someone needs to put a quill up that cat’s bottom,” one of the porcupines said. The field mice nearby twittered. They did not trust Littlebottom one bit. They’d lost too many relatives to be friendly with any feline.

Littlebottom glanced at the mice and licked his lips. Then he turned, jumped onto a bale of straw near where Adora Belle stood, turned a few times, then settled on his bottom, his back to the mice and wood folk, addressing the farm animals. “Two weeks ago, while perusing the farm mail, Farmer Purdy stumbled across an envelope which, upon opening brought him distinct physical, and as you all know, mental anguish as well,” Littlebottom said. “This was not, I knew immediately, the same kind of physical duress that overtakes Farmer Purdy when he reads his bills, his bank statements nor even the letters from his sister Patricia, who lives in a townhouse in the city and fills her letters with her absolutely horrid memories of growing up on the farm, questioning him in every letter why he insists on hanging about with filthy pigs and ducks and why don’t you just sell the farm and bring Littlebottom and live with me, well, not with me, but nearby, perhaps on the other side of town where the rent is cheaper and more fitting to a man of your social proclivities. Those letters almost always put him in a rage, and whether it’s cold or not, dinner time or not, he always stuffs them in the stove and scratches around for the matches.”

“Get to the point, please, Cat. We haven’t got all night,” the porcupine father said.

Littlebottom gave the porcupine a sour look, over his shoulder. “I was just getting to the Closure,” he said. “There are four of them, or so he read from the letter two weeks ago. Four Closures. They’re coming from the bank, because the letter came out of the same kind of envelope he gets his bank statements in, except this one had a lot of red lettering on the front that I couldn’t quite make out.”

“Probly cause Purdy didn’t read it,” Chylus said. “That cat’s no reader.”

“What’s a bank, now,” the badger asked. “Never get nothin’ from the banks I know, down at the stream.”

“A bank,” Littlebottom said, not turning to face the badger, “is, well, sort of like a church, I believe. I’ve never been to one. But when Farmer Purdy gets his letters and there’s one from the bank in the pile, he always says something like, ‘It’s from the bank. Lord, what do they want now?’ He always talks about not having enough in the bank. It’s probably because he doesn’t go there that often. Ma Purdy used to take him to church every Sunday. I think they went to the bank on occasion, too, but since she passed, God bless her, he’s been to neither.”

“Ma Purdy was a right beast,” one of the crows said. “Threw apples at us. Put out the scarecrow.” The murder of crows, as a whole, shuddered. They hated the scarecrow, rejoicing the day it was blown away during a thunderstorm.

“What do we care that a Closure’s coming, four of ‘em or not,” one of the pigs grunted. “Maybe better pickings once they come. Slop’s been a bit thin, lately.

That question started a cacophony of talk in the barn, waking a few of the pigs, who’d fallen asleep.

Raccoons have collected change over the years. They have enough to pay the first $25 note for the farmer, gives them more time to get a harvest in.

One way to get crows to panic is to swear to wear an old shirt and hat and stand in a field.

Chylus and the oldest mouse child are the only only ones who can read. They go into farmer house to read bank letter, dad mouse goes with to protect. Chylus burps up wet shrew all the time. He and mouse kid start to become friends. Chylus is a young un too.

Before you presume, know:

Though they are raccoons – black masks, ringed tails, nimble fingers and all – they do not have foresty names like Ring-Tail or Crawdad. Neither do their names rhyme. Nor would they come up with their own names, taken from nature or from their own feats of bravery or skill. Raccoons, see, don’t need names. Warm fur, food, a place to sleep. And kits of their own.

Their mother left them nameless, calling them, collectively with their two brothers and sole sister, “my little kits” because, as their mother knew quite well as soon as they were old enough they’d leave the hollow in the tree where they were born and go off into the big world to find fish, walnuts, berries and spouses of their own, giving perhaps only fleeting thought to the kindly mother and mostly absent father left behind.

The other animals around Purdy Farm, however, called them This and That. They got the name from Farmer Purdy who, returning from the henhouse where the pair snatched eggs, from the dairy where the pair gobbled cheese, from the granary where the pair purloined corn, responded, “Oh, this and that,” to Ma Purdy’s question on the source of the frenzied cackling, the missing cheese, the diminished corn.

Neither one minded the names. Neither one knew who was This nor who was That. Frankly, only a few of the other animals around Purdy Farm bothered to keep them straight, either. “No honor among thieves,” the old badger muttered often when This or That were about. “No sense namin’ them, either.” That the raccoons knew the badger’s name was Aloysus infuriated the badger even more.

Chylus the crow calls them Procyon and Iotor, for reasons he kept to himself.

Before you wonder, know further:

"We’re brothers and stick together for the case of the narrative,” This or That said (I don’t know who is who, either, and the two aren’t telling). “If it weren’t for this story, I wouldn’t be within five miles of him.”

"Nor I,” That or This replied. (I’m sorry; it’s all very confusing. And they just lose or chew up the little name tags.)

They would not spy for the animals as they tried to discover the mood and musings of Farmer Purdy. “We won’t wear vests nor ties nor say things like ‘My fur and whiskers,’ either,” said This. Or That. “So don’t even ask.” But, they agreed, if they happened to learn anything in an off-hand way while they were plundering the Purdy Farm, that they would pass it on to the animals more concerned with the welfare of Farmer Purdy, if only because his welfare directly impacted their own. Secretly, they planned to steal Farmer Purdy’s shotgun and hang it in a tree in a part of the woodlot they knew the farmer visited only rarely, hoping that once they stole it and hung it in the tree the rains would come, so that when the farmer found it, it would be rusted solid and useless for peppering their rear ends with buckshot.

“We’d shoot him,” That said. Or This. “But then who’d plant the corn?”

Know also: Raccoons are not as cute and cuddly as you'd think.

Remainder, Part III

This photo is used under a Creative Commons license.

Brave mouse. Theeg had decided that's what he was long before he took the position of guard. Almost brave mouse. That's how he felt. If curiosity killed the cat, however, it could most likely pulverize a mouse. That cylinder didn't seem to be too menacing, so Theeg crawled out of the tunnel and sat next to the hole, opposite this new stranger. "Curious markings," Theeg said to himself as he plunked his thimble-sized butt down on the snow, trailing his tail out behind him. "No legs, but I suppose it can roll around easily enough." He tried to make out the letters printed on its side. (Mice can read just about as well as humans can. Pinnicus, who was a dear friend to the Bard until the friendship was broken when Shakespeare stole a play that Pinnicus had penned and billed it as his own Taming of the Shrew. He changed enough details to cast only shadows of suspicion; replacing the weasels with knights and the frightful, thumb-sized shrew with a woman with big bosoms. Who, again could forget Louis Kaurol de la Dormousse, a Frenchmouse whose friendship with a jovial English mathematician led to a literary partnership so fruitful they decided to share names.)

Theeg, working out the "udweis" on the side of the cylinder, was no Ember Ellen Poot, that gloomy female mouse and author of horrid little stories, but in all he did feel that he had encountered a rather mysterious object worthy of a tale. On this bright but cold day, the cylinder was warm and smelled of wet rotten tumbleweeds.

Remainder, Part II

NOTE: Here's a bit more of the stuff I'm dredging out of my files.

The next day, his mother gone and his siblings sleeping yet again, Theeg poked his whiskers out of the hole and into the sunlight. This he did after carefully surveying the Rubble for any tell-tale tails or whiskers poking out from behind lumps of concrete or from behind the trunks of the taller and thicker weeds poking out of the junk. The smell of purple hung on the breeze like leaves hung on trees. Skunk weed, tiny purple flowers that shot forth a sickly sweet perfume half rose and half rotten mud; sent out in waves thick enough to choke the lungs of those who dared breathe the invisible staining stench. The Lot, as his mother called it, was much bigger than Theeg had expected. Their burrow was roughly at the center of it, next to an odd metal tower, painted red, that poked out of the ground to a height somewhat shorter than the weeds that grew around it. The Two Rivers were there, looking stagnant and muddy in the wide patch of dirt where no weeds seemed to grow. The rivers followed their nearly straight and nearly parallel courses out of sight, in the direction of the Blocks. Another much smaller and less barren path angled towards the southwest, climbing the hills that led towards the Field, where Theeg's father once lived.

The circle of blue grew larger and larger as Theeg edged his way up the tunnel. The Red Tower, the Two Rivers, the field; he knew these from the descriptions and stories he had begged out of mother, as he sat chewing absentmindedly on a nondescript seed and letting crumbs fall out of his open mouth as he listened, wide-eared. The tower and rivers were made by the Boys, she said. Some of the trails were theirs as well, but in recent years, their presence in the area had slowed to a crawl. Odd things about boys, mother said. "Maybe they die, maybe they go off to other places," his mother murmured tiredly one evening, bored at the continual questions her son posed, "they stop coming to this place, and so much the better for us. Disgusting creatures, anyway. They'll never reach the blue."

The blue. Now framed not in a circle, but in a ragged sawtooth of tall Amazonian weeds. The sun's intensity caused Theeg's shadow to cower for protection around his feet. He blinked his black eyes and twitched his whiskers, trying to adjust his senses to a world too large and bright and far-off and interesting to exist outside of his own imagination. He'd never seen the Blue's White before. Odd clingy bits of fluff, like the cottonwood seeds that strayed from the nest lining and stuck themselves to the plywood roof, but thicker. And further away.

Just A Little Exercise

NOTE: Felt like anthropomorphism tonight.

Mole stood on top of the rotting pumpkin.

Lout.

Above, Chylus perched on a thin beam of evergreen irreverently poking through the canopy of a quaken aspen.

Imbecile.

On the barbed wire, tipping their tails as they cursed at cowering sparrows, Magda and Vox waited, as did the others.

Half-wit.

Mel and Rosie, their countless brood squirming in the tunnels directly behind them, trembled like soon to be popped corks as they watched, awaiting the signal for action.

Gadabout.

Worthless.

Bum.

“Damn that sun,” Mole cursed. “Ninety-three million miles away and it’s still strong enough to burn the skin off your bottom.”

Chylus started from the branch, but checked his flight and jostled heavily to his perch when he realized Mole’s noises had been a curse in general, not the curse which would start the attack. The jolt of his landing loosed two pinecones, which thwocked on the ground practically on the heads of Rosie and Mel.

“Oy! Watch i’ up there, ya burnt crumb, er I’ll smack yo wi’ me stick, I will!”

“Rosie,” Mel crooned, “Please calm down.”

“Shut up, yewself!”

Mole rolled his eyes.

Magda preened her white feathered eapulets.

“After this, anting, I say,” Vox said. “Anting, anting after this, yes?”

Magda opened her beak to speak.

“Attack!”

Mole leaped from his pumpkin perch into the thick bramble of weeds and vines. Chylus darted from his branch and swooped low over the fallow pasture. Mel and Rosie picked themselves up off the trampled ground and tried to brush the dust and tiny shrew paw prints off their backs after their brood had popped from their holes to answer the mole’s cry of war. A cloud of dust and shrill shrieks marked the spot where their hundreds of tiny shrews were clawing their way through weeds and bracken. Vox and Magda, with final dips of their tails, leaped into the air to follow the shimmering wingtips Chylus so eagerly flapped through the air.

Mole leaned against a cucumber vine, chuckling.

“Oh, a fine army you are,” he said, laughing still. The shrew brood stopped charging and were now fighting and rolling and scamering in the thick pine needles. The birds, still airborne, wheeled quickly at the mole's cackling and lit on a barbed wire fence.

“You said attack,” Vox said petulantly, dipping his tail in time with his mate.

“Aye, I did,” Mole said. “But did you know what you was to attack before you took off like you did?”

“Well, maybe it was an attack in a general sense,” Mel said, shuffling his feet.

“Mole, we'll know,” Chylus said. “We'll know what to attack. He'll be here. We'll see him. And we'll attack him! That's what we're training for, right? That's what we're all wanting to do, right?”

“Aye,” Mole said. “And there he is!”

The shrews dove back underground in puffs of dust. Chylus squawked and leaped into the air, followed quickly by Magda and Vox. Chylus flew in a tight circle, just below the treetops, watching.

“Mole!” he shouted. “That's the scarecrow! You've got us jumping at scarecrows! I am NOT jumping at scarecrows!” He wheeled in the air and flew a straight line into the cupola atop the barn, where he hid his nest.

#amwriting Fragment, "Penford's Rear"

NOTE: Here's a bit inspired by the film "Babe." I still hope to have something along these lines completed within the next few years; that may be my next target after I've got Considering How to Run a bit more polished. So many ideas, not enough gumption to finish any of them . . . 

Aside from beer at breakfast and the occasional watermelon during the summer, Penford wanted but one thing out of life, and that was to be remembered after he was dead.

His cow - a rather surly Guernsey named Mahan - gave nothing but the sourest of milk and kicked at him every chance she got whether Penford’s hands were warm or not. His chickens lay eggs under the henhouse and abandoned them to rot and skunks. Wool from his sheep was so matted and filled with twigs he was only able to sell it to a man in Willoughby who turned the stuff into scouring pads.

But Penford knew his skills at animal husbandry were wanting and managed - more through sheer determination than through any modicum of skill - to keep his operations from falling into the total chaos which would have made him posthumously famous as the worst farmer in the entire valley. That post was held by ancient Bill Handy two miles down the road, who managed after eighty-five years behind the plow to raise nothing but seven miles of rather rickety barbed-wire fences and to send three yokes of oxen to their maker with the most unkind feelings towards man ever conceived by any beast.

Penford wanted to leave his name to something, preferably something which didn’t give twiggy wool or rotten milk or rot soon after he’d put it in the root cellar. His land would outlive him.

Penford Meadows. He rather liked the thought of people mentioning the area by his name years after he’d passed on. Penford Slough. He had a slough, small though it was. Penford Reach. His land reached from the county road to the power line gangling between Willoughby and Chase.

But the land was already referred to as Penford’s Rear.

That unfortunate name – entirely his fault – came from his favorite retort to nearly every inquiry, question, criticism or comment given him.

“So, Penford, I hear your pigs escaped and made that wallow at the baseball diamond!”

“My rear.”

“That corn over there, Penford? Thought corn was supposed to be tall and yellow, not short, viney and orange.”

“My rear.”

“The idea of the collection plate, Penford, is that parishoners place money on it, not take from it. That’s the rector’s job.”

“My rear.”

Penford did not suffer from overpopularity. Many of the boys in town and at least half of them on the farms secretly admired Penford for his oafishness, his laziness, his ability to arrive at church wearing stained overalls and his incredible appetite for raisin-filled cookies at after-service functions. With the allure of the mountain man slowly fading in the area after One-Arm McGillicutty gained his nickname and lost an arm after falling drunk on the railroad tracks the night before Groundhog’s Day, the boys – in the words of Mrs. DeWitt, the vicious schoolmaster who had laboriously tutored Penford seven years of the third grade before she gave up on him and sent him back to his farm – “needed another questionable soul to imitate.” The Martin boys had gone as far as building a secret den in a cut on the ditchbank between the Martin and Penford properties where they could lie with a spyglass and take notes on Penford’s slothful habits and midnight trips to the privy until Mrs. Martin discovered Mr. Martin in the den with the spyglass trained on the upper windows of the home of Widow Hovarth.

But then Penford is much busier than any of them realized. Oh, he’s no Caractacus Potts or Arthur Hoggett. He didn’t spend his time inventing things, nor did he train animals best adapted for the frying pan for other tasks. He loved his farm, but knew of its faults.

“Penelope, don’t pout. Do not pout. Come out of those reeds right now and get into the pond. Be reasonable. I will not stand for this,” Penford said.

A duck poked her long neck and beaky face out of the reeds and shot daggers at Penford, hands on knees, bent over the lip of the small pond at the near corner of the pasture.

Penford smiled. “Now see, there are no other ducks about” – indeed, he’d spent the better part of an hour rounding up the other ducks and stopping them up in the henhouse with the chickens. Neither species was too fond of the arrangement, nor each other if the row of hisses and shrieks and clucks and the clouds of feathers flying from the henhouse vents meant anything, but his duck experiments with the reluctant Penelope required solitude.

The duck peeked out of the reeds again and waddled a few inches into the shallows.

“That’s the girl. A few inches more and we’ll see how it works.” Using a shepherd’s crook, he coaxed the duck out of the shallows and into the pond, where she bobbed and slowly leaned onto her side until, paddling with her feet, she managed to propel herself a bit lopsidedly about the pond. With her beak turned back she worked at tearing the bubble wrap from her back. Penford swatted her rear gently with the crook. “That’s not on, Penelope. That wrap’s there for a good reason. Just give it a minute to see if it works.” But she’d managed to break one of the rubber bands with which Penford had attached the wrap. With a few vigorous flaps, Penelope flew from the wrap, whirled and triumphantly settled onto the pond, glaring fiercely at Penford.

Then she promptly sank like a brick.

#amwriting Fragment, "Doleful Creatures"

Found the following while cleaning up some old files from 1994. Some cannot be opened; somehow Microsoft forgot that when folks were saving things in MS Works using the .wps format that they might, in some distant future, want to re-open the files. Nothing I've found will work yet. I'll keep trying.

I do know this about the following: Most of the characters speaking are crows. That's about all I remember. Still, it's got a good flow to it. Behold:

Chapter One

Don’t start with a weather report.

Off it. You know you had one planned. Couldn’t get the metaphors straight, could you? No. Couldn’t straighten a dead snake. Daft. Icicles and ice cubes, if you want. It’s cold. That’s good enough.

The wind is tired of biting,
it’s toothless, slurping broth.
The trees are tired of being bare
or naked because of sloth.
The sun is bored with sugared snow,
and casting a pale cold light.
I’m not saying this to help you out,
but only for doleful spite.

Cretin. No one cares about this story anyway.

I don’t and it’s mine.

My story. And you think you’ll write it up and win some silly award and get rich. Wrong. Ten thousand copies. That’s the average press run for a pulpy kid’s book like this. Ten thousand copies for all that work? Better off doing brickwork with the brothers again, freezing butt and fingers in winter.

Then you’ll be able to describe cold.

Now that’s a story: Bricklayer Freezing. Happens much more often than a Holstein pheasant leading some stupid army on some stupid crusade over something useless and tasteless as a pumpkin patch. Even after all the butter and brown sugar.

Pugh.

Better off to sit in a nest all winter, because you’ve got it all wrong.

But I haven’t even started yet.

Now you have and I can hear the Nobel Committee applauding from here. First words you’ve written on this story in three years. And you started with a conjunction, no less. Lazy ass. You’ll never get this done. Too much dreaming, not enough scheming. How many nights have you dreamed about writing, writing, writing, having that book finished and a copy in your hands while rubbing the spine where your name is printed on the glossy paperboard? Did you ever read what you wrote? Dyslexic. All those accolades because you whacked at a keyboard with a ball peen hammer. May as well get an award for remembering your own name.

But I know my name.

Another conjunction. How pretty.

Well?

Shall I pick your nose for you as well? All right.

The man was not lazy. We were greedy. Especially Chylus. He ate forty-seven of them, not thirteen like he said. Forty eight. He ate forty-eight. I forgot about the baby.

No season of leaves? No wildflowers, or clouds, or cows?

Listen, I’m using your voice like you asked. No will you let me please tell the story?

Just don’t forget the cows.

Chapter Two

You forgot to tell them about the cows.

Oh shut up.

Chapter Three

Humming coming!

Quiet!

I’m still not sure. . .

Button your beak!

The man idly hummed out of tune to something he’d heard on the radio earlier in the afternoon. He was a dreamer, of course, prone to long walks he took to avoid doing anything really constructive with his dreams. He felt if he enjoyed the sights of nature and wrote a poem about leaves when he got home, he’d had a good day. Spotting a squirrel ranked a bit higher, while talking to cows sent him home in the giddiest of moods to write convoluted short stories about how much he hated cars. It was only when he walked near the auto salvage yard that his mind wandered to animals.

He thought today, after his walk through the woods and along the pasture fence - which really wasn’t a pasture fence, but the property line between his own and that of Mr. Grundy, who owned the salvage yard across the street - he’d write about how much he hated his job. That was certainly nothing he’d ever tried before.

He’s almost in range, Quentin!

Quentin? I’m Morbley.

I’m Quentin, and he was talking to me. You’re just a lieutenant.

Since when do we have ranks in this flock? I thought we were equal opportunity.

All that rot got us was disention and a bunch of freelancers who wasted their energies on cats!

But that tabby never came through here again, did he?

Positions!

The birds, he thought - undescript and rather raggy-looking sparrows- were a bit louder than usual, but as the sun was shining after nearly a week of steady drizzle, they, like he, were apt to make a little more outdoor noise when the noise-making was good.

I’m not sure we have an affect on him, really. If I had my way, we’d do something a little more permanent.

I just worry about the transitory nature of our efforts. There one day, gone the next, and he never even wipes that silly grin off his face.

I just wonder about some of the louts in my outfit.

There he goes militarizing everything again. Are you sure he’s not a jay?

Less beaking, more sneaking! Here he comes.

I’m putting in for a transfer to a different flock.

He’d written a sonnet about spoons yesterday, but wasn’t quite satisfied with the rhymes he’d chosen. Writing a sonnet about spoons was not a cliche, but all the rhymes were. Poltroon. Maybe he could work poltroon in there somehow. Maybe, he thought, these are Bowie spoons, a weapon so ludicrous only a coward would use them. That would be a little Ogden Nashery. Babboons wielding Bowie spoons? That went beyond Nash and right into Shel Silverstein.

That was the tack.

Not a sonnet, but a song. A song about . . . naw.

Sonnets were literary. Songs about spoon-carrying monkeys sounded like something from a Disney movie. If he despised anything, it was anthropomorphism.

Damn damn damn! Morbley! He was right under your group!

Who?

Who? WHO! The hummer!

Oh. Him.

I think we’re in trouble, Lyle.

Why didn’t you fire?

Why should I?

Well, let’s see. Maybe it’s because that’s what we’re up in these trees to do in the first place!

It all seems a bit pointless, don’t you think?

(Probably not very often by the looks of it.)

I heard that!

(See? I told you the dumbest ones always had the sharpest hearing!)

What was that?

Nothing, sargent.

Perhaps he’d be better off forgetting about spoons for the moment

The Writer Babbles: Anthropomorphism

NOTE: I've long held a fascination with critter lit, fueled by a third-grade reading of Robert C. O'Brien's "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH," followed by Ivy Ruckman's "Melba the Brain" followed by countless other similar tales. So, years ago, I started writing one. Here's an excerpt. I still think it's got possibilities.

Ima pouted earnestly in a dark dry hole filled with the odd tangy smell of humus mixed with forty-weight. Not only had she not been allowed to say good-bye to her new friend Ernie, or indeed stay around a few extra minutes to witness the rantings of the enormous yet flower-covered Mrs. Nussbaum, but her father and mother in the zeal most parents even in the lower echelons of the animal kingdom are prone to exhibit, grounded their little daughter for the rest of the week.

Moles, by the way, invented the parental concept of grounding. The offending imp is condemned to sit idly pondering on his or her sins in a dark underground chamber (hence the term 'grounded') until the punishment is lifted. Spending days on end in a dark hole devoid of any elements of entertainment value outside of the occasional errant pillbug and crabgrass roots dangling from the ceiling is certainly a more heinous punishment than banishment to a bright and airy bedroom filled with all the creature comforts, telephones, televisions and clean changes of underwear children of the lesser decades even up through their twenties earn by whining until their parents break down and buy them what they want or break down and force their children to work fourteen hours a day at a beet farm to keep up payments on the double room at the state mental hospital.

Human children do, however, have that option open to them. Moles have even less enthusiasm for socialized medicine than does the average human, and state-run facilities for the mentally stressed are limited to the occasional rattlesnake den. Then again, Moles can, if they feel energetic and stout enough, can tunnel right out of their chambers of punishment and once again breathe fresh free air, providing their tunnels don't collapse on them first. They must also, even the females, go as long as three months without manicures.

Of this, Ima cared little. Thoughts of revenge against her sister Pinecone, though briefly entertained, were abandoned in favor of thanks to her younger sibling for starting the family off on this grand adventure, even if at the time the grandest adventurer of the family was holed up in a dark pocket of air two feet below the surface. She had actually been in the presence of a big 'un--Ernie, he called himself--who didn't act as if he wanted to squash his tiny questioner on the spot. "Indeedy," Ima thought to herself as she sat on her rump in the dark, listening to the vague earth-scratchings of her father and brothers as they widened tunnels and carved out bigger living quarters, "he seemed right nice, that Ernie. A bit dumb, a bit talkative, but not a bad sort. If only father hadn't taken me away so soon!"

A timid scratch near the tunnel entrance stopped Ima's thoughts. "Ima, didja get the candy?" Pinecone's narrow face and cheerful whiskers poked into Ima's chamber of punishment and smiles lit up their faces and the darkness around them. "I wanna eatit. Dat smell's still got my tummy all rumbly." Pinecone shuffled into the room and pawed at her sister.

"Stop it, Pinecone!" Ima squealed as Pinecone's whiskers tickled her ears. "Of course I brought you a bit. Wouldn't be sporting of me not to, after all it was your nose that smelled it in the first place." Pinecone danced an anxious jig as Ima pulled a chewed bit of candy corn out of the satchel she always carried. (No matter if you've never seen a mole with a satchel; chances are you've never taken a really good look at your average mole anyway. And if you had, even the dimmest of moles knows to ditch any vestiges of cranial sophistrication whenever one of us big 'uns gets too close.)

Pinecone gently snatched the candy out of Ima's paws and immediately set to contented chewing. "Um, yum, um YUM!" she mumbled between bites, sending bits of candy corn flying about in the gloom. While Pinecone chewed and yummed, Ima settled once again comfortably on her round bottom and thought of her new and interesting friend, the giant Ernie. In retrospect she realized the rashness of her daring-do, her conscience still stinging with the razored lecture she received from both father and mother mole. That giant could have easily squashed her flat as look at her. "But still," Ima thought while Pinecone continued to yum in a rather sticky voice in the darkness next to her, "he didn't squash me. That must mean something."

"Ima! Ima!" Pinecone had obviously finished her candy. She poked her sister in her sliver-sized mole ribs and agitated her hands as if she were preparing for flight. "Dat big 'un TOUCHED you! Was it gross an' slimy? Did he taste like toadstools; did he smell like Ditchbottom after rain?"

Ima paused to think while her sister fidgeted impatiently. She drew her claws through her whiskers and patted the fur on the side of her head. "Well," she started slowly, "he did smell better that Ditchbottom. . ."

When his toaster oven broke the week before, Ernie turned immediately to the owner's manual he had dutifully saved and learned enough to fix the problem. Plumbing difficulties had been solved with the help of Mr. Fix It on PBS and a book borrowed from the local library. So when the neighborhood moles suddenly began speaking hedgerow English to him, Ernie sought quick information from his books.

Farley Mowat seemed quite skilled at understanding wolves, dogs and owls but as he was a naturalist and not an imaginary his adventures in the arctic tundra had little bearing on encountering talking moles in a trailer park.

A bit out of C.S. Lewis helped a bit: "This was bad grammar, of course," Lewis wrote on page 101 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, "but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia--in our world they don't usually talk at all." Though he spoke of beavers and not moles, Ernie thought beavers to be a closer relation to moles than any other example that easily came to mind.

"So, bad grammar," Ernie said aloud as he held the book in his hands. "that crit--Ima--did speak a bit odd." The book slipped out of his hands and tumbled to the pile of paperbacks at his feet. "What am I saying?" Ernie hollered, jumping off the couch and pacing back and froth from living room to kitchen in his tinny trailer. "I'm insane. What happened today, it, well, didn't. Couldn't. I've had one too many hits with the snake. I'll go for a walk. Clear the head." He opened the door.

"Hey! Big 'un! We'd like some candy corn, too!"

Ernie's eyes bugged at the two moles (Ditchbottom and Tummythumper) standing timidly at the head of his porch steps. "Um, sure," Ernie burbled, staring down at the two diminutive trick-or-treaters. "Hang on a second." He backed up, closed the door, then sat back down on the couch. "Doctor Bean. Where's his number?" Ernie shuffled through wallet cards and fished out the psychiatrist's.

Tummythumer and Ditchbottom, meanwhile, waited patiently on the porch, leisurely leaning their backs on the bag of charcoal. "He is a bit slow, like Ima said," Ditchbottom said as he picked his mole teeth with a bit of twig. "Don't really know what she sees in him."

"I see the candy, at least," said Tummythumper as he rubbed his corpulent belly.

"Now, let me get this straight," Doctor Bean said to Ernie over the phone. "You've got two moles on your front porch asking for candy corn."

"Right. And it's not even Halloween."

"Why do you think," Doctor Bean asked, "they're asking you for candy corn?"

"Well," Ernie said, "I gave some to their sister earlier on today and I imagine they're jealous."

"Jealous?"

"Or hungry. I only gave their sister a little bit," Ernie said. "She wanted some for her sister. Didn't mention any brothers."

"Ah," Doctor Bean said. "Hold on a second, will you, Ernie?" Cupping his hand over the receiver, Doctor Bean whispered to his secretary, "Emma! Get Ernie Hoobler's file out, please! And get on the other line and take notes. I think the Science Project Mice Loose on the Bus Episode's made him blow a gasket once again!"

"Anyway, Doc," Ernie said, "I can't talk long. They're outside waiting now. What do you think I should do?"
Emma stifled laughter as Doctor Bean shot her a nasty look. "Well, Ernie, what do you think you should do?"
Ernie thought for a moment. "You know, Doc, I'm thinking they'd like some vanilla wafers. Hold on a minute." Ernie put the phone down on the couch.

Emma and Doctor Bean strained their ears to hear the goings-on in the trailer owned by the crazy man who talked to moles: a cupboard opened and closed. Wax paper rattled; a door opened. "Boys," they heard Ernie say, "Boys? Oh. There you are. Take a few vanilla wafers. I promise they're good. Much better than candy corn." Doctor Bean and Emma strained to hear tinny voices; heard nothing but breeze. "Yes, sharing with your sisters would be nice. Oh, is that what happened? I thought she'd been stung by a bee, the old biddy. Tell your father, then, well done. Next time I'll give him the barbecue fork. Sure, boys, sure. Come back any time. Your parents, too. I'd like to speak with your father, thank him for betting that azaela patch off my porch earlier." The doctor and secretary heard footsteps, followed by a door closing. Ernie then picked up the receiver, and said through vanilla wafer crumbs, "I've sent them off now, Doctor. With vanilla wafers for all, of course. You know, their father is quite a brave character, attacking my neighbor with a picnic fork and all."

Doctor Bean wrote "He's gone and leaped!" on a bit of paper and showed it to his secretary. "Who attacked your neighbor with a picnic fork, Ernie?"

"The mole's father, like I said," said Ernie. "Quite the fellow."

"Um, Ernie, why did you--er, the father, attack your neighbor?" Doctor Bean asked.

"From what the boys tell me," Ernie said, "the old fellow got a bit confused. Meant to jab me in the foot, as I was the one who caught his daughter and all. Moles can't see all that well, doctor, or so I gathered when the boys had to smell about for their wafers instead of sighting them out. That's what the encyclopedia said, anyway."

"Ah hah," Doctor Bean said. Emma left the room to cover up her laughter. "You caught his daughter, you say.

Um, Ernie?"

"Yes, doctor?"

"I'd like to discuss this in my office," Doctor Bean said, "say, tomorrow morning. I'll call your supervisor."
"But doc, I can't come in tomorrow," Ernie said. "Miss Griffin's class is going on a field trip tomorrow and, well, I promised Ima and company they could come with us."

"Who's Ima, Ernie?" Doctor Bean asked.

"She's the mole I met this afternoon, doctor," Ernie said. "She's never been to a museum. Nor her brothers and sister. I thought it might be fun. For them. They'd be disappointed if they missed it."

"I see," Doctor Bean said.

"Anyway doc, the reason I called."

"Go ahead, Ernie." Doctor Bean rubbed his eyes and sighed.

"Ima's parents seem a bit timid," Ernie said. "What's the best way to approach parents who are afraid you only want to squash or shoot their daughter for digging up your flower beds and garden as well as sneak-thieving your candy corn?"

A laugh exploded deep in Doctor Bean's stomach but he managed to turn it into a cough. "Well, Ernie, I don't know if this will work with moles, but among humans the protocol is to prove to parents your good intentions. Do a little work around the house--er, hole." Doctor Bean began to giggle. "Dig a tunnel, or--ha-ha-hollow out a new room. Give them a few, uh, doilies to, uh, spruce up the place, Ernie. I hear moles are very f-f-fond of doilies." He cupped his hand over the receiver and shoved his face into the coat hanging on the coatrack to muffle his increasingly voluminous chortles.

"Thanks, doc," said Ernie. "I'll try that." A dial tone replaced Ernie's voice.

Ima hummed an old mole tune a she brushed her fur and gazed into her dim reflection in the shard of glass pushed into the wall in front of her. Deciding to make the best of her undergrounding, Ima had busied her sister with orders and convinced Ditchbotom to dig out a small skylight in her ceiling, which he then covered with a domed bottom of a clear plastic soda bottle.

Why exactly she found Ernie Hoobler exciting even she couldn't quite tell. She wasn't even sure if she liked the enormous dim-witted and hairy beast; or if Ernie could look beyond her own moleishness to the real Ima under the furry coat and behind the near-sighted eyes.

All Pinecone knew was that she was getting very tired of being a lady-in-waiting. Finding the shard of glass Ima stared dreamily into had taken the better half of the morning and led her almost too close to Mrs. Nussbaum's busybody poodle Snoops who snapped and bit at the mere shadows of birds flitting across the green patch of Nussbaum lawn. Then there were trips to the sunny lip of the ditch for fragrant purple flowers to take away the musty underground smell of her lady's waiting chamber and trips to the lawn of Mr. Onslow to cull the largest and yellowest dandelions for Ima to smell and then rub the yellow pigment on her moleish cheeks (which most mole males find very attractive; a pigmentation Ima hoped would attract the eye of even the most dim-witted of handsome giants). As Pinecone watched Ima absently weave purple flowers and the yellow heads of clover into a crown for her head she wondered if the smells and sights and sounds of last evening's encounter had completely chased her sister's mind away.

"Ima," she asked, "you mind's gone, ainnit?" Ima continued to weave flowers and hum an old mole love ditty quietly to herself. "Ima," Pinecone insisted, "roof's cavin' in!" Her sister hiccupped, but continued singing. "Snake's a-comin behind you!" Pinecone almost shouted, trying to get any reaction out of her daydreaming sister. She jumped up and down, jigged side to side, kicking up pebbles and raking dirt from the low ceiling above Ima's sleeping alcove. "Gonna get et! AIII!" Pinecone frowned deeply. She wrinkled her upper lip in disgust at her mushing sister, sitting on her round bottom weaving a stupid Flowering Mole Wreath of Affection. She felt like tossing pebbles at her sister's head. She felt like dousing Ditchbottom in rainwater and hiding his smelly furry body in some dark corner of Ima's chamber.

Pinecone felt like tattling.

She poked her head out of Ima's chamber door and peered down both long hallways of the family tunnel. She could hear Ditchbottom and Tummythumper playing at some underground game a ways down to the left and heard the snores of her parents from a chamber not too far to the right. She looked back at her dreamy sister, who had finished her first wreath and was earnestly yet absently at work on a second, much larger wreath. "Ima!" Pinecone shouted in a whisper. Her sister actually looked up form her work to stare at her. "Hoo you makin' that big 'un for. . .oooohh!" Pinecone's eyes drew round; her jaw dropped and her whiskers quivered. "Dat's for the big 'un, ainnit?" Pinecone hissed, shaking her head from side to side. Ima, suddenly drawn out of her odd trance, timidly nodded her head--her eyes much wider than Pinecone's.

"Um, Pinecone, it's like," Ima stammered, raising from her seat and squattling towards her sister, still perched in the somber gloom of the chamberway.

"Ima," Pinecone screeched, "he's a BIG 'UN! How can you--love--a big 'un?" Then suddenly: "Oooff! Stoppit! Aaaaghh!" Pinecone popped like a cork out of the chamberway, with Ditchbottom and Tummythumper wadded up in a crumpled heap on top of her. "Offa mee!" Pinecone squeaked from the bottom of the writhing pile of tiny moles. With claws flying and whiskers gently jabbing her brothers in the eyes, Pinecone pulled and struggled out of the heap.

"We heard Pinecone," whispered Tummythumper, huffing and puffing and batting at Pinecone's tail which was in his eyes, "We heard Pine--getcher tail outta my face, sis!--Pinecone hollerin' about a big 'un an' we thought maybe he found yer fancy-pants skylight, Ima."

"Where's the big 'un?" Ditchbottom asked--in a rather muffled voice from the very bottom of the still struggling pile of moles trying in vain to right themselves.

"He's in her DREAMS," Pinecone whined, finally stepping out of the moley pile and pointing accusing fingers at her older sister, who stood bathed in a shaft of filtered sunlight streaming in through her skylight. "That big 'un who held her yesterday--she likes him."

Ditchbottom and Tummythumper righted themselves and stood in stock silence in a row next to their sister Pinecone, whose fingers still pointed in Ima's direction.

"You," Ditchbottom squeaked, "like him?"

"That big' un?" Tummythumper asked, incredulous.

"He smelt funny," Ditchbottom said, "like something wet after a rain."

"She's makin' him," Pinecone said, then whispered: "a wreath."

"Gross," the three said in unison.

"Mole-heart, mole-heart, love with the sun," Pinecone chanted, grinning a mocking grin and bouncing on her heels.

"Mole-lass, mole-lass, make a wreath for one!" Ditchbottom added in a rather silly voice.

"Leaf-dance, earth-dance, wed the lucky pair," chortled Tummythumper, grabbing Ditchbottom's hand in his left hand and Pinecone's hand in the other and dancing them about in a circle around their sister who wore an exasperated look intensified by her halo of light.

"Love of one, love of two, tunnels through the air!" All three chanted at once. They danced and repeated their chant as Ima sighed and tried to push her way out of the lively circle. Ditchbottom broke the circle long enough to snag a bundle of purple flowers from the floor. He bowed in mock solemnity sweeping the flowers deeply behind his back as Tummythumper and Pinecone stared and giggled withe their paws over their mouths.

"Accept, fair molelish lady," He said, sweeping the flowers from behind his back and snapping his body out of the bow and to attention, "yon bundle of ditchflowers as my token to thee." He chortled and was joined in a chorus of chortles by his brother and sister.

"My dearest moleish lord," Ima said, graciously taking the flowers from her brother's paw, "I accept thy bundle," with this she put the flowers to her nose and inhaled deeply, "that I may use them, dearest, to BLIP you right on top of the head." The flowers and their accompanying overpoweringly purple smell sang through the air as Ima aimed and landed them with a smack on top of Tummythumper's fuzzy head. Pinecone and Ditchbottom stopped their chortling and merely held their paws in front of their open mouths. Ima stormed out of her chamber, leaving Tummythumper to brush fragmented petals and stems from his fur.

Ima stormed back into the chamber, shaking her fists. "I'm undergrounded." She said, nearly a whisper. "You all get out. Now." Her three younger siblings silently and slowly shuffled out, single-file. Ima stonily watched their retreating fuzzy backs and kicked about at a few of the flowers crumpled on her floor. She sat back at her reflecting-glass and arranged her flowery wreath on her head. Softly, she sang, trying hard to conceal a smile: "Mole-heart, mole-heart, love with the sun. . ."

"Ima?"

She gasped and turned to the door, abruptly interrupting her flower arranging and her humming. Her father shuffled in through the door, squinting at the sudden light and holding back a yawn with the back of his paw. "What was all that noise I heard just now? And why are there broken flowers all over the floor in here?"
"Oh, Daddy!" She jumped from her reflecting-glass and wrapped her arms around her surprised but pleased father.

"Daddy is it now? My, my," Dirty-Fur mumbled, patting his daughter lovingly on the back of the head. "You haven't called me daddy since you were toe-high to a giant." He continued to pat her head as she continued to squeeze him tight. "I'm pleased you're not mad at me anymore, dearie. I love you so. That's why parents act the way they do at times--they love you--though their actions and harsh words may sometimes appear to mean the opposite."

"I love you, too, Daddy!" Ima said, trying hard to control the quiver in her voice. She released her grip and sat back down at her reflecting-glass, but this time rather than looking at herself she turned opposite and stared into the squinty eyes of her father, who plopped onto the ground near her feet.

"I was so scared for you, yesterday," Dirty-Fur whispered, putting a paw on Ima's knee. "I'd have rather faced a cat than that giant."

"But the big 'un--Ernie--isn't a bad sort, daddy!" Ima pleaded, putting her paw on top of her father's. "He may seem a bit slow, but more than that, he seems quite nice--not like any other giant, by any means."
Dirty-Fur sat blinking in the sunlight that cascaded over his head and shoulders from the domed hole in his daughter's ceiling. "He did seem the decent fellow," he said, more to himself than to the pleading looks his daughter gave him. "More willing to talk than to squash, at any rate. That must mean something." Ima put her head in Dirty-Fur's lap. He stroked her head, now bathed in light along with his own, and repeated to himself: "More willing to talk than squash. That must mean something."