A Certain Cantankerous Wood Cow
So many urgent problems pressed on Helga’s mind now, that the Rounds were only a distant, but fond, memory. A stronger memory was the vicious attack she had suffered from the Cougar bandits. The edge of this memory cut through any musing Helga might have had about the Rounds as they tied up their canoe at King Stuppy Marit’s dock—it was crawling with Cougars!
Helga felt that everything about the place was like a bad dream. The Trading Post was a series of dilapidated, cobbled-together sheds and docks. Made of scraps of lumber, rotting logs, dirty rope, and molding canvas, the Trading Post did not look promising—it smelled of long-dead fish and dreadful carvings of hideous faces were hung everywhere, leering down from walls and posts. “Trees were tortured to make those carvings,” Helga muttered darkly to Ola, “those faces show the frozen screams of trees...” Wood Cows made their life among the trees and, over generations, had found ways to know what trees were thinking and feeling.
“Aiean, Misst Helgy,” Ola replied, “the Cuoog’ers that run the post are a bad-bad lot!”
“Cougars run this trading post?” she asked, looking urgently at Ola.
“Aiean, Misst Helgy,” Ola affirmed. “King Stuppy is a Cuoog’er that is only free because he was sentenced to the Drownlands instead of bein’ hanged by the Grizzlies! The Grizzlies allow Stuppy to run his Tradin’ Poost if he stays out of trouble—and remains in the Drownlands.”
As Ola and Helga climbed the rickety wooden ladder from the dock up to the Trading Post, suddenly a cutlass was sticking in Helga’s face! There was wild, screeching laughter; then many cutlasses, swords and pikes bristled in front of them. Soon, the short, extremely fat Cougar that had been holding his cutlass in Helga’s face lowered it and looked at her with his fierce, red eyes.
“So, cow, get up here and welcome!” From then on, Ola and Helga were never alone. Being led into the Trading Post, they entered a dark gloom where it was hard to see anything distinctly, but it always seemed that there was some beast in the shadows with a cutlass at the ready.
Ola explained quietly that there was “nothin’ to be wooried aboot.” Helga found this hard to believe but soon realized that Ola was right. Despite King Stuppy’s terrifying look and the foul collection of riff-raff that constantly watched them, they were not harmed. Ola explained that the ‘cutlass in the face’ greeting was the customary welcome that King Stuppy gave to every unknown visitor. “Aiean, Misst Helgy,” Ola said, “that’s his warnin’ that he’ll be watchin’ yor. Yor tooch his stuff, and yor be loosin’ yorn fingers!”
In such a desolate, isolated spot, Helga would not have expected such traffic, but there were constantly arriving canoes and boats carrying all kinds of trading goods. “And a good bit of stoof that yor don’t want to be askin’ aboot!” Ola confided. Stuppy was “on to the shadowed work” Ola observed, with a knowing wink at Helga. “Just yorn not be askin’ questions,” Ola directed, “and we’ll be livin’ to go on.”
Thus warned, Helga silently observed the frenzied buying and selling. Even before the boats and ferries reached dock, buyers were throwing pieces of their clothing on to the goods they wished to trade for or buy. She saw one large Otter throw his sweat-soaked shirt onto a basket of corn he wished to claim, as was the custom in the Drownlands. Creatures threw shoes and sandals on to piles of fish, a filthy hat onto a barrel of pear butter, and so on.
Most of the creatures at King Stuppy’s got their meals from him. Bayou bread and steamed crayfish, bog-greens and catfish, fried marsh mushrooms and turnips. The food was reasonably good, Helga thought—but she avoided the Drownlands Grog that was the beverage of choice. She noticed some elderly Cougars sat playing checkers in a back room. As they played, they chewed a mixture of moss and leaves, and then spit it out into a vessel. They did this until a large vat was full of the mixture. This was mixed with water and marsh honey and left to ferment into the popular Drownlands Grog. Ola said that he had heard the blue-green drink tasted quite good, but it was against the Gateless Wolf diet to eat or drink prepared foods, so he had never tasted it.
Then there were the Cougars that were everywhere. Their rotten-smelling breath—even worse than the decaying fish—made the entire trading post reek with their presence. Yet, they were considered the “Royal Court of the King,” for Stuppy considered himself King of his realm. When the Grizzly Bear judges had spared his life years before, Stuppy had taken this as permission to make a Kingdom for himself. And so he had done.
His ‘Royal Court’ was made up of the foulest-looking bunch of Cougars imaginable. Stuppy dressed them in the finest clothes, but these they never washed. Dried food, nose-drippings and other such slop and dirt covered the ruffled collars and fancy, embroidered coats and leggings of the Cougar courtiers. Except when he ‘greeted’ unknown visitors with his cutlass, King Stuppy spent most of his time swinging lazily in his woven-grass hammock. With one eye carefully watching his domain, he ate marsh honey and bayou bread all day long.
Helga thought the odor of the marsh honey was unpleasant, but Ola told her that it had medicinal properties needed by King Stuppy. Marsh honey and bayou bread where the only things that King Stuppy could eat. His nerves had been damaged for life by poison darts Grizzly Bear trackers had shot from their blowguns to capture him. “The marsh honey keeps the King’s hand steady on the cutlass,” Ola remarked.
At first glance, as he lay in his hammock, Helga mused that King Stuppy looked like a very fat and sick old Cougar. “Only a fool would treat him like that, however,” Helga thought, “he would doom you without a moment wasted.”
And everyone who came and went from King Stuppy’s domain knew this basic fact. The honest traders, the dockworkers, the scullery folk, the thieves and bandits. No one challenged Stuppy Marit in the Realm of the King. No one, that is, except a certain cantankerous Wood Cow.