Chapter 24. Schmoozeglutton Discovers a Meal
Schmoozeglutton hunkered down behind a couple bales of hay. A good span ahead of him stood one of the ugliest creatures he had ever seen. It was a big beast. It wasn’t as tall as a troll, but possibly it was as heavy as a troll. The creature had a beer keg of a chest, and stood on four legs. Those legs, though, weren’t good solid legs like those of a troll. Instead, they were weak and spindly-looking, especially the front two. The beast had a head that was mostly nose. And the worst thing was that the creature had no comfortable slabs of body fat, no layer of blubber, no reserves of lard. Schmoozeglutton could see its muscles working under its hide.
It looked like no creature he had ever seen. For Schmoozeglutton, it was another sign that the world had moved on. Land trolls, big blue bugs, and now this.
Schmoozeglutton had gone in search of some dinner. Not just something to eat, but some actual dinner. He wanted to bag a creature big enough that everyone would be able to join the feast. He took it as a good sign that he thought of food at a time like this: surely it was a leaderly impulse. He, the new king of the Rabid Band, held a sense of responsibility toward his cave mates. His subjects.
What he’d really hoped for was a nice big wooly mammoth. That would be just the thing to drag back to the troll caves, he thought. Not only would it feed everyone, it would have the added benefit of putting Brumvack in his place. It would be a pleasure to piece out a mastodon, haul it into the common room of the caves, and sit down to eat. Brumvack would either have to beg for a piece of meat that he hadn’t helped hunt, or go hungry. That would show him. It would be the just the thing to cement Schmoozeglutton’s victory.
But, no matter how much ground he covered, he hadn’t come across a wooly mammoth. Mammoths, of course, had always been sparse on the ground. Perhaps the land trolls, as they had moved into the area, had killed and eaten the last of them. Certainly, he had seen no sign of one. No scat, no footprint, nothing.
He did, however, find the beast that stood before him now. It wasn’t nearly so large as a mammoth, but it was pretty big. It chomped at the short plants at its feet, grinding each bite with its teeth.
It was an awfully ugly creature, though. Where mastodons were good looking beasts, with large heads and large bellies and good, solid, troll-like legs, this creature looked pretty pathetic.
Schmoozeglutton shook his head. It was going to be awfully easy to slide into depression, he could see. The world, he sensed, was no longer worthy of him and the other members of the Rabid Band. Trolls, as everyone knew, were the high point of creation, the world’s most robust and cultured inhabitants. Since the trolls had deprived the world of their influence, things had gone badly to seed. This creature in front of him was proof of that.
But Schmoozeglutton squared his shoulders and set his jaw and took a deep breath. He was the leader of the Rabid Band. As that leader, surely he could steer the world back onto its tracks. He could MAKE A DIFFERENCE. He could whip the Rabid Band into shape, and show the world the meaning of true dignity.
The beast before him, it was true, wasn’t a good omen. Was this what had become of the wooly mammoth? Once a fine shaggy beast, and now this? The creature before him was skinny and pathetic. Its bones showed underneath its hide. It was wooly, but only in a single stripe that ran from its high forehead down the back of its neck. And, Schmoozeglutton added, its tail. What was the sense in that? A short haired mammoth with a wooly tail? But this was no mammoth. Where the mammoth had a big head, this had a small one, though its nose was admittedly large and attractive. Even with the nose, though, it was obviously a creature of very little cranial capacity. Its eyes weren’t clear. And those skinny little legs! Schmoozeglutton couldn’t get over its legs. How could they even hold up the beast? And, given that they were holding it up, how could the beast abide itself? If he had legs like that, skinny little legs underneath his big troll body, he would remain in the troll cave, unwilling to be seen upon the surface of the world.
But, for all of that, the creature looked to have meat on its bones. For now, given the trolls’ state of advanced hunger, that would have to do. He watched the creature, pondering how best to bring it down.
What Schmoozeglutton had found was in fact something that the town’s residents were vaguely embarrassed about themselves. It was the aging horse of the former sheriff. The former sheriff was also something they were embarrassed about, because through the 20 years of his retirement, he had become senile enough that he believed himself still to hold office. He rode his horse around town in his sheriffy way, his badge pinned upside down on his big floppy cowboy hat, his gun, which no one had the heart to take away from him, stuck in the waistband of his baggy old-man pants. When he was having a particularly bad day, he would stand in the middle of one of the town’s busier intersections and bring traffic to a snarled standstill as he attempted to direct traffic against the lights. Other days, he would march up and down main street, writing parking tickets from a pad of paper that said “Margie Mae’s Grocery List” at the top of each sheet. No one knew who Margie Mae might be, though people certainly wondered. And the town’s citizens still talked of the day the sheriff had ridden his flea-bitten nag at the front of Henrietta Kojak-Moon’s funeral procession, shooting his gun in the air and hollering “God Bless America!” thinking he was leading a Fourth of July parade. How he came to that notion was beyond anyone’s ken, being that it was late October, snow was falling, and everyone involved had assumed an appropriately somber mood. Still, to the sheriff, it was his country’s birthday, and he was going to do his level best to excite the town’s residents into a patriotic fervor.
In any case, the former sheriff’s mare, old-in-the-tooth and a little mangy in the coat, stood before Schmoozeglutton, halfheartedly cropping the sparse grass behind his house. Schmoozeglutton himself, from his vantage point behind the round bales, wondered how best to drop this beast and get it to the cave. What he needed, of course, was a club. His hand itched for a club. Or a rock. But a quick perusal of the yard showed no rocks of sufficient size.
Schmoozeglutton pondered a moment. Would it be safe to try to take down this beast on his own, in any case? Truly, he didn’t have any idea what the capabilities of the creature were. It seemed pretty tame, right at the moment. Lame, even. Evidently, its teeth were made for eating small plants, rather than tearing into trolls. It looked to have hard little feet, though. If it started kicking it sure might hurt.
What it boiled down to was this: it would look awfully good if he could bring in this kill on his own. It wasn’t a mammoth, but it was a sizeable enough beast that the others would be impressed.
On the other hand, it would do him no good to attempt to kill the beast on his own, and then find that it had some onerous defense mechanism that would leave him gasping, say with one of those hard little feet in his belly. Should he let out a foodwhoop, call in the others to help bring down this creature?
Neither answer seemed like the perfect one. If he called the trolls, they would forget, in the ensuing circus of activity, that it was he, their leader, who had been looking out for them and hunting some food. But, clubless and even rockless, he had little hope of killing the beast on his own. Should he sneak away, come back with a new club, and hope that the beast was still here? Surely, it couldn’t travel very far on those little bird-like legs.
Schmoozeglutton grumbled to himself. He was a troll of action. He hated sitting around and pondering things, even when that seemed like the leaderly thing to do.
A moment later, a turning of the breeze took the opportunity of decision away from him. Schmoozeglutton’s odor, as pleasant as it was, was a shocking new thing in the horse’s world. With a shuddering exhalation, the horse lifted his head and reared up a bit. It pranced a couple of steps backwards, working its nostrils and its ears. Finally, it snorted deeply—sounding almost like a troll, Schmoozeglutton thought in wonder—and galloped off at a pace that the troll would never have thought possible.
Schmoozeglutton was a practiced hunter. He knew better than to simply chase the beast. In fact, he could now see that it might be able to run faster even than a troll. Instead, he watched it for a time from behind the bales. He gave it time to gain a little distance, then ran at an angle to the horse’s trajectory, keeping a nearby outbuilding between him and the horse’s line of sight. He eyed the horse from around a corner, then, when he was sure the horse was looking away, ducked and ran to the side of a big turtle house, hoping not to wake it. There was one thing you could say about these big turtle houses: they provided some good cover for hunting. Trolls, as they lumbered across the icy plains, had stood out awfully clearly to the great wooly mammoths. This was far superior.
In this way, moving from house to house, he followed the horse into town. At the right moment, perhaps when the beast tired, or when it was cornered, he would be able to make his kill.