The porcupine and the bat introduced themselves to the otter. Both Alexander and Colin were somber during the introductions, so much that Zack was prompted to ask, “What’s the matter with you guys?”
Alexander glanced at Colin. “Look, Ah don’t like this. Colin an’ Ah’ve been talking, an’ we think somethin’s wrong. Ev’r since that one time we had our run-ins with those black things we ain’t seen ’em again, an’ we walked all day yesterday ’thout seein’ a one, we slept all night undisturbed, and we ain’t heard a peep from ’em so far. You catch my drift?”
Zack made a face. “Don’t be a pessimist, Alexander.”
“Ah’m not bein’ a pessimist, Ah’m bein’ a realist — ”
“Semantics,” Zack scoffed dismissively.
“All right, Ah’m a pessimist, an’ you’re an idealist, an’ you’re gonna get us all killed.“
That got Zack’s hackles to rise. “Hey — ”
“Look, Ah’m serious. Colin, why ain’t you speakin’?”
As if on cue, Colin began, “Alex’s right. Those things have been gone too long. We think they’re going to attack us in a pack the next time, and we should be ready for it.”
Zack crossed his arms, shut his eyes, shook his head, and looked for a long moment at the porcupine and the bat in turn. “You two,” he said slowly, “are so paranoid! What in the world, or out of it, makes you think those black … whatever-they-ares want us particularly? They probably found something else to eat and forgot all about us. You. In fact, what I think is that now they know better than to try to eat you. They try, they get hurt or killed.”
Colin looked shaken. It was probably the sound of his theory coming down around his big concave ears. “Why did we all fight one then?” he asked.
“They live in this forest. They’re probably all over the place. It’s been known to happen, you know,” he said nastily, and was immediately sorry for it. “Like wolves or monkeys, maybe,” he added lamely. He couldn’t look at the rage in Colin’s face. “Dammit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that, but I’m scared too.”
“So you admit it,” Colin gloated, seizing his chance to get back at Zack.
“Yes, I’m scared! Do you think I want to be here? Do you think I want to be in this forest, where every little thing sounds like death, where I don’t know if I’m going to be alive the next hour? No! I want to be home! I want to lie in bed and watch the moon, I want to eat a hot dinner with my sister, I want to go back to the way things were! I don’t want to die!”
At last Zack’s flashing green eyes met Colin’s wide-eyed expression of shock. After this outburst the forest was eerily silent. Zack turned his face away, eyes closed, jaw and fists clenched.
At length it was Colin who whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Zack let out a short violent burst of laughter. “No,” he answered, his voice a harsh whisper. “No. I knew this was gonna happen. Sometime. I — I just didn’t know it was gonna happen to me.” He looked up and sighed. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know anymore.”
The forest creatures began, cautiously, to strike up their usual conversations. As cautiously, Scott said, “Perhaps … it would be best if you just kept doing what you’ve been doing.”
“What would that be?” Zack asked, turning a look more quizzical than watery on him.
“Why, leading,” Ethan answered immediately, his tone implying he thought it the most obvious thing. Scott’s muzzle bobbed up and down in agreement.
“Haaah, me?”
Ethan had to break a small smile at Zack’s surprised expression. “I thought you would have noticed by now.”
Zack shrugged uncomfortably, thinking about this. “I’m not really … a leader.”
“I object. Anyone else?” Ethan looked around. Scott, Alex, and even Colin nodded. Micah abstained. “See, you’ve been almost unanimously appointed. Seems you’re the only one here who’s surprised,” he observed wryly, running right over Zack’s protests. “Don’t take it so personally. Just because you’re the leader doesn’t mean you have to give orders. Or,” he added, “that we have to take them. I’m a bear, not a sheep.”
“Sheep don’t give advice to their shepherd, not useful advice at any rate,” Micah put in, “and I would like to advise being on our way. Unless I miss my guess, you guys got here by following the river downstream …?” Zack nodded confirmation, eliciting a similar bob of Micah’s wedge-shaped head. “Then if we keep moving downstream, assuming there’s any civilization in this place, it should be by a river.”
“You call that a river?” Scott indicated the narrow rill peeling away from the pool and meandering off into the trees.
Micah glanced at it. “Oh. Ah, no, not that. But the pool drains off through an underground channel that lets out somewhere farther down. It’s a river, believe me.”
Colin confirmed this, saying, “Right. I saw it from the air.” Here an enormous grin split his face as it finally hit him what a deliriously amazing feeling, not to mention how tremendously useful, it was to be able to fly. Zack had to bring him out of his reverie by asking which way to go. “Oh, you can follow the little rill. It joins back up with the main body where it lets out. You can’t tell for the trees, but were in a long, shallow valley,” he demonstrated the general shape with one slightly cupped wing, “with a transverse fault running almost perfectly perpendicular to it … ehhh, I’ll draw you a map later.”
“All right. Well,” Zack said, paused for just a fraction of a moment during which an expression flickered across his feline features that said even if the others had forgotten his earlier outburst, he hadn’t; extended an arm invitingly: “Let’s get going, then.”
“Baaa,” Scott bleated, almost snickering.
“Shut up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Remind me why you don’t want leadership.”
“I’d tease me mercilessly,” he gasped at last, when he was through laughing for so long all the others, even Zack, started chuckling. “Just so I didn’t take myself too seriously.”