Wildebeesties
James, a wildebeest, roamed across the savannah, sucking up water wherever he could find it, hollering his name to the skies and kicking up with his hooves all the time, making a right racket. Out there though in the savannah no-one could hear him, or could they? A little earwig called Ronaldo McDonalds heard him from many miles away and began to pack his clothes ....
posted by Mark Baker @ 10:48 am
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Ronaldo's little heart beat faster as he gathered his belongings for the long trip; the cube of beewax that had been mysteriously left in his cot when he was born, the teabag hammock for those nights in the wild (he hated the idea of sleeping on the ground --you never knew what creepy crawlies were around), and his string tool box.
This last item he carefully opened. He gingerly took out the 1 inch string, the 12 inch length and the 1 yard piece and laid them flat on the ground to check for any damage or fraying. Phew! They were all okay. He trembled at the thought of being stuck out alone in the wild without being able to know how long things were...
With his belongings on his back he began his long trek across the blackfoot plain.
But if he had known who he was to meet just 3 hours into his journey, would he ever have begun it?
Ronaldo paused and pricked up his ears.
The hollering had stopped, he was sure. But there was something else on the wind...the deep bellyrumble of elephants.
"Oh bother!" He said checking the wind direction. He reached into his bag and pulled out a tin of Peslick's Pachyderm Preparation and smeared it all over his arms, then his middle arms and finally the lower pairs too.
Satisfied that he wasn't going to get bitten or trodden on by pesky grey behemoths, he took a few minutes to tuck into a quick scallop stirfry with goujons of drizzle and a drizzle of goujons.
But as he sat there intently eating, a small shadow fell over his pack and a scrawny hand reached quietly inside....
It was the Wolf of Naresborough. "Hello!" cried the Wolf, "I am the Wolf of Naresborough!" "Oh my God!" retorted Ronaldo McDonalds, "not he!?!" "The same - yes, yes, yes - I am he, he is me, the legendary Wolf of Naresborough, ba-boom". Ronaldo had all his life wanted to meet the Wolf of Naresborough who was well-known for ravaging whole villages whilst remaining a friend of small creatures. The legendary Wolf of Naresborough, ba-boom. Yes, indeed. They talked, for many an hour about life and death, about seaweed, biscuits, Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, sex, death, peanuts, extra-terrestrials, money, harmony hairspray, beetlejuice the movie, harmony korine, extra-terrestrial biscuits and wildebeest. Wildebeest. Yes, my friend. That's what it came round to in the end ...
"Ah, yes, many is the wildebeast that I can call friend"said the Wolf. He looked down at his diminuitive dining companion. Ronaldo's chitin brow had hardened.
"My..that's a serious expression you've got on your wee face, little fella. Wasn't because I mentioned.....wildebeast! was it?"
Ronaldo stood up, his tiny hands bunched so hard into fists that his knuckles went white. He pulled out a little cape and drew it around his shoulders. The billowing grey clouds that had just appeared brought a hot wind that whipped it into a flapping frenzy.
"You may as well know, Wolf of Naresborough, that I am on a quest. And at the end of that quest, I shall bag me a wildebeast!!!!"
The land was plunged momentarily into darkness. A bolt of lightning struck a nearby tree, causing it to splinter.
Owwww!! howled the wolf but when lightness returned, Ronaldo had gone. "Dagnabit" muttered the wolf to himself, "those pesky earwigs, you cannae trust 'em!" Ronaldo had done an "earwig leap" which utilised quantum physics to enable him to jump the distance of a mile to at least give him a head start on the Wolf of Naresborough. However, no earwig had ever done more than one earwig leap - it really screwed you up, man - the last earwig who had tried was now "recuperating" on the top of a mountain eating bananas and pretending to be a mongoose whilst farting very loudly. Ronaldo's lead was down to three quarters of a mile. "Owwww!!!!!" ...
The Wolf of Naresborough stretched his scrawny limbs and yawned. The sun beat down on his warm belly and he wriggled his back against the prickly ground.
Suddenly he sat bolt upright. Prickly ground? He looked around and gasped a gasp heard just once before throughout wolf-kind.
For he saw around him, the scattered remains of prepubescent hedgehogs, intermingled with half eaten spam sandwiches, blood splattered autograph books and dented tea flasks. He raised his paw to his jowls. It came away coated in sticky blood.
Oh no... its happened again... the madness. What would become of him if it were known that the Heroic Wolf of Naresborough could flip at any moment and slay those that he was sworn to protect?
Just then, his pager began to bleep.
"Ok, wolf" said the pager - it was from flip-flops, the wolf's agent and camerade. No, he wasn't ok - there were dead hedgehogs all around, the earwig had escaped and was goodness knows how far ahead in his pursuit of a wildebeest and he felt bad, really really bad. Perhaps this is what it means to be a wolf, he thought, perhaps I shouldn't feel bad - I am a wolf, after all - wolves do this sort of thing, don't they? Grrrr! he tried to act all hard - grrrr!!! But no, it was no good - the bad feeling would not go away. He picked up a hedgehog and absent-mindedly bit into it - Henry, one of his biggest fans. Perhaps Henry would have been pleased to have been eaten by the Wolf of Naresborough.
Ronaldo winked back into existence and fell backwards onto his arse. It wasn't just having all the atoms in your body shift sideways a mile that always made him dizzy, it was the fact that in that microsecond of non-existence he got a glimpse of 'elsewhere'. Fantastic visions, that like a dream upon waking, slipped away as he tried to keep hold, until he could no longer remember what it was he really saw, but was left with the vague feeling that it was something wildly important.
He looked about him. What a strange place this was. He appearing to be in a long metal tunnel. It was blocked at one end by a rounded metal object but was open at the other.
The disturbing thing was, that the tunnel was moving, because the view out the open end kept shifting.
And then it happened. The view at the end stopped lurching around like a drunked stag beetle and fixed. Ronaldo gasped at the view. For there, square in the middle was a large, motionless Wildebeest!.
Just then, from the opposite end of the tunnel, Ronaldo heard a booming voice "That's my beauty, you just stay there". There followed a loud metal click....
Oh my God!!! Ronaldo was hurtling towards James the wildebeest at a million miles an hour head over foot over head over knee over eyebrow and - waaaahhh!!! - IMPACT!!!!! The whole world stopped for a second - a mini-second, a little little piece of time. Then, Ronaldo slid down the hide of James the Wildebeest onto the parched grass of the savannah. James himself lay motionless on his side on the savannah grass, a huge bullet hole between his beautiful eyes. Graham Norton lay down the gun and beamed a big beautiful beam for he had achieved a lifleong ambition - to bag him a wildebeest ...
And so Mr Norton swaggered (in a mincing sort of way)with his gun over his shoulder to Pedo's Gay Restaurant and Bar to boast of manly deeds with his mustachioed compatriots.
And Ronaldo pulled himself up and stared at the dead Wildebeast. The promise he had made as an earwiglet to the memory of his parents, eaten by a Wildebeast such as this was fulfilled. Strange though, that in death's repose, the poor beast seemed unreal. Almost wooden...Ah well. He turned, hoisted his little backpack on his shoulders and went home.
And all was quiet. Until the sound of a pager could be heard. It was muffled and seemd to be coming from the corpse of James...it was followed by the crunching sound as made by a pager being crushed under foot and ground into the dirt. Just then, a scrawny hand punched a hole through the dead Wildebeast's stomach -from the inside!
Leaping from the safety of a nearby tree, the REAL James leapt out excitedly and pulled the Wolf of Naresborough (for it is he), free. "Oh Mr Wolf! That was incredible. If I had not seen it with my own eyes...you've saved my life! You are a real friend to all animals"
"Well, yes it was a little tricky. Quantum Tunnelling a mile (a first for wolf-kind I might add) and building a paper-mache replica of your good self and drying it in the sun before that villain could raise his rifle, was a mite taxing its true. However, all in a days work for the Wolf of Naresborough!" So pleased was James, that he reached over and shook the wolf's hand for a day and a night.
And so the Wolf redeemed himself in the end and all was well.
And James the Wildebeast lived happily...well at least until the next morning when he was chased for 17 hours by a pride of hungry lions before finally being driven into the dust and savagely disembowelled and eaten.
That's what I believe they call a twist in the tale! Bravo indeed!
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