Menolyrical - Final Friday Fiction

“The Yellow on the Broom” by Betsy Whyte. Birlinn Publns.

  8 – voices calling

12 – anyone about

16 – rough moorland

IN HINDERTWIG ONCE

Hill Bert and Low Sooz managed to keep the herd on track after the tragic news. It had been a challenge. Over and above the obvious advancement to directorship for him, there was the need to settle the order for third, fourth and down to sixth. Beyond that, the ranks could sort themselves.

There were a few voices calling for a retrieval party to scale the far country. It was a vain hope for the survival of Vidge, the much beloved. Hill Bert was able to quell that murmuring by reminding the heads of lineage that there would immense thickets of thunder brush as well as much, very rough, moorland. It would be a risk to more lives to attempt such a search and would serve little purpose. What benefit could be gained from finding broken and shredded bodies which no longer contained the essence of being? In the incredible off chance that Vidge had survived the three-tree fall, he would surely have made his way back to the herd by now. This argument had been accepted except by a couple of the elders who had been fondest of Vidge, but even they could see sense, finally.

What Hill Bert had not told anyone about – not even Low Sooz – was his own concern regarding what had happened. He was almost certain the fall had been choreographed by Vidge. Knowing his mentor as he did, something deep within was whispering that the older buck would have had a survival plan. He was not the type of leader who would commit suicide.  There might never be a way of being sure, but Hill Bert sensed there was a reason Vidge had found a way to provoke Rooper’s attack at that very spot.

Right now though, just as the season was ending and the soft leaves were falling to warm the earth before the snow came, it was imperative that he took stock of the position of the two-legs and their infernal machines, their fires and their flesh-eating ways. It was time to try making contact with the Rimside herd.

Of the five herds of Hindertwig, they were the most vulnerable. Hill Bert and Low Sooz had walked the border of their territory on that survey trek a few months back. It felt like a lifetime ago since he and she had seen the truth of fire and cannibals. Trouble was, the cannibals didn’t eat of themselves, but instead took and burned the flesh of Hindertwiglets. Those two-legs ripped the trees and tore them apart and used their fibres to raise the flames which scorched the flesh. Hill Bert shuddered to his very core as he recalled the sight, the noise and the smell of those invaders.

Now he had to reach out to their neighbour-herd to warn them and form a plan for protection and survival. Alliance of numbers would be required.

(480 words)

© Yamini Ali MacLean 2018