“Lucy was a girl like any other. She liked to run and jump and swim and laugh like the rest of you. If there was anything that was different about her, it was that she was curious about the White Mountains, beckoning above her village. They were far but seemed so close.
What was it like up there? How could there be snow even though it was so hot down in the valley? What would the view be like? Whenever she asked those questions, her parents didn’t answer but just exchanged glances. When she kept asking, they’d say that the mountains were a place best to be avoided, or to stop thinking about them and to concentrate on what was going on in the village instead.
But Lucy wouldn’t listen. Whenever she was looking up from what she was doing, the mountains were there. Sometimes they were bright in the sunshine, sometimes they were hardly visible, and sometimes she couldn’t see them at all because of clouds and fog. But they were always there.
And so, one morning she set out on the trail East. By noon, she was walking through Nester Canyon, and as the sun was going down, she was climbing toward the summit of Mount Muntarb.
What Lucy didn’t know was that there was a good reason she was forbidden to go to the mountains by herself. Because, you see, we are only human because of the other humans around us. As we move further away from them, we become less human, and up in the mountains, there is nobody else. That’s why by the end of the first day, as she was camping under a small gnarly tree on the slopes of the mountain (you may not know this, but in the mountains, the trees are smaller, and there are also fewer of them), Lucy started feeling strange. Like every evening, she wanted ask the gods to protect her parents and her two sisters, but somehow she couldn’t keep her mind on them. Instead, it danced around like a leaf in a river. She put it down to being excited about her adventure and went to sleep.
The next morning, she woke up and noticed that during the night a soft, brown fur had started growing on her feet. She didn’t think much of it and set out to continue climbing toward the peak. Soon, she started to use her hands when walking. At first, she put it down to how steep the slope was, but when she had to walk downhill for a little bit, she continued to use her hands. The hair now not only covered her feet but also her legs, arms and belly.
What was happening? Lucy was now so far from all other humans that she slowly turned into an animal. It didn’t stop with the fur and the walking on all fours. The front of her nose became longer and turned into a snout, her teeth became long and pointed, and she even grew a little tail. Those were only the visible changes. On her inside, she had stopped thinking, and instead all that mattered to her now were smells and sounds and how the rocks felt under her paws.
As she reached the top of the mountain, she sat down on her hind legs, looked up at the sky and let out a long, mournful howl. She sat there for a long time before she started moving down the mountain again. For the next weeks, she was living in the foothills, eating berries and hunting for smaller animals. Although she was almost completely animal now, there was still a little part inside her that missed her family, not unlike an ember still burning deep inside an otherwise cold fire ring. Slowly, over the course of a few days and driven by instinct, she approached her tribe’s camp, until one day she could smell the humans there with her long snout.
She approached the camp, and as she came closer, one of the humans spotted her. It was her uncle Sorb, but with her animal mind she couldn’t recognize him, and of course he couldn’t recognize her. She sat down and waited. She didn’t move when she saw four of the humans run toward her, because her mind was conflicted between animal panic at the approaching men and her desire for human companionship. This was a mistake, because one of the men threw his spear at her and it hit her in the chest. She howled and turned to flee, but it was too late. The humans were on top of her now, and the last thing she saw was one of them hitting her on the head with a big rock. He hit her once, then a second time, and just before he hit her the third time, she looked up at the human’s face and realized it was her father holding the rock. Then she died.
Her tribe never realized that it was Lucy they had killed. They thought it was just a new and strange kind of animal they had never seen before. They cut off her fur, hung it up to dry, and later used it to make mittens. After some time, nobody remembered the strange animal any more, but her parents would sometimes still ask themselves why Lucy had run away and wonder if she was still alive.
And that’s the end of Lucy’s story.”
The shaman looked around and seemed pleased to see that his audience of a dozen kids between the ages of three and thirteen was horrified. “Now go and play,” he told them. “But remember to stay away from those mountains!”
Seymour, who was ten years old, had heard the story before, but even so, he shuddered when he thought about what it’d be like to slowly turn into an animal. Next to him Don, who was eight and had heard the story for the first time, was sobbing. “Why does he always tell us these horrible stories?” he asked. “I like the funny stories better.”
Seymour didn’t have an answer to this, but he was sure that the old man enjoyed scaring the kids. Seymour was determined not to show that he too was scared because he didn’t want to give the old man the satisfaction.
He felt sorry for Don, and to cheer him up, he suggested, “How about we get some syrup?”
“Okay”, Don nodded and wiped away the snot off with the back of his hand.
Together, they got up and walked away from the large, ancient tree under which the shaman held court. The other kids had by now dispersed in small groups. The shaman himself stayed behind, grinning about the kids’ reaction to his story and preparing some of the dried, smelly leaves that he liked to burn to inhale their smoke.
Seymour and Don followed a trail that led up a slope away from the village. A little later, the forest around them started to get denser, and then they reached a stream. They easily crossed it by jumping from rock to rock. They had successfully hunted for syrup in the same spot the previous day. Syrup-hunting meant looking for small, insect-like animals known as aphioids that carried beads of a sugary liquid on their back. The aphoids got that “syrup” by collecting it from the flowers of an otherwise unremarkable bush. After visiting several flowers by running up and down the branches of the bushes, they accumulated enough to bring their bounty back to their nest. When you looked closely, you could see them carrying the pea-sized liquid drop, held together only by its surface tension, in a way that suggested that they were in a great hurry.
The next step was to follow an aphioid for a few minutes. Eventually, it’d return to the nest. To get enough syrup to make it all worthwhile, you had to get a large number of aphioids to drop their syrup beads, and the best way to do that was with smoke.
Don had already located a syrup carrying aphioid and was on his knees, concentrating on following its path along the branches of a bush and later on the sandy ground. Soon Seymour was on his knees as well tracing an aphioid of his own. Before long, they located the nest, which was a gray, irregular mass stuck to the underside of a tree branch.
Don scooped up as many of the syrup-carrying aphioids as they could find on a large leaf. In the meantime, Seymour used his firestones and some dried moss to make a small fire. Once the fire was burning well, he dropped a few green branches on it. The fire immediately started producing a lot of smoke, and when Don held the large leaf into the smoke, the aphioids started panicking and dropped the syrup. After Don shook them off, the leaf was covered in a layer of the syrup. They sat down on a rock, stuck their feet into the stream, and took turns licking the syrup off the leaf. It was delicious!
