CHOWCHOW'S SUDDEN SNEEZE

After a storm they have a surprise...

Sally’s second night in the forest was far happier than her first, on her frightening own, had been. This time she wasn’t alone. This time she had a monkey to snuggle up to and for some reason Chowchow was quite happy to let her. And when dawn came she was surprised to find that she had slept well enough to feel properly refreshed. Despite the unfamiliarity of an endless forest.

That day, once they were up and about and had actually breakfasted on a handful of nuts each, scavenged from a copse of shrub-like bushes, and washed down with brackish water that made Sally’s lips curl, was divided into two completely different parts.

To start with the sun beat down as if it would scorch the Earth to a cinder, the air growing more and more sultry as the sun reached its zenith and their shadows (when there were any, bearing in mind they were in a thick virgin forest that was almost complete canopy) were little more than black splodges on the bone dry soil.

Then the clouds came, seeming to materialise from nowhere. It looked as if one moment the sun, by then unbearable, was scorching the Earth to cinders and the next it was heavily shielded by clouds that seemed to turn bright day into dull night.

And with those clouds came the rain.

At first a few gigantic spots found their way down through the canopy to stir little puffs of dust where they landed, and then, as if those spots and splodges had been a trial run, the heavens opened and it poured. A sudden squally wind didn’t help as it drove the rain at them, and within moments Sally was set through. From feeling far too hot earlier she found herself shivering and soaking.

The monkey was obviously accustomed to such instant changes in the weather.

Chowchow took her by one hand and dragged her into a relatively sheltered lair in a thicket that was mostly spindly trees of a kind Sally didn’t recognise, and thick spiny bushes that had been arranged into a kind of shelter by someone or something. Sally guessed it was home to some creature or other because she could smell a far from pleasant odour that seemed to cling to everything in there. Her biggest hope was that her new friend knew enough to believe that they were safe, at least for the moment.

She found herself snuggling up to the monkey, who didn't seem to mind close proximity to a child from an era he couldn't have guessed existed. She was dressed in twenty-first century clothes, fortunately with more than one layer against her skin, so she was able to shed the wetting outer garments without exposing too much skin.

Chowchow watched her, astounded. What he’d taken as skin turned out to be anything but. Eventually curiosity got the better of him and when she hung a couple of things onto a branch, hoping they might get a chance of drying, he picked up the girl’s sweater and examined it closely. This was something new to him, this shedding of wet skin so that it might possibly dry and maybe even be replaced.

“It’ll dry,” she said, enunciating the two words slowly and clearly, but no matter how careful she was with her diction there was no chance that Chowchow was ever going to understand her. He merely made a chattering sound and grinned at her.

The storm, though, more violent than any the girl had witnessed in her thirteen years, didn’t last for long before it burnt itself out, if raindrops can be said to burn! But by mid afternoon the sun was back, hotter than ever, and the forest started to steam. She’d never seen such a change in the weather nor so much steam without a hot tap in the bathroom back home being involved.

She smiled at Chowchow, and pointed.

“Steam,” she said.

He frowned and watched her lips as she repeated the word and did his limited best to imitate it, but to no avail. Evolution would have to make changes to his physiology before he’d be able to speak. As it was he seemed to be limited to his guttural growls, strange clicking sounds and the odd meaningless squeal.

They’d spent that first part of that day, before the storm had driven them to what passed as shelter, wandering around, sometimes pausing, sometimes even exchanging the odd sound with Chowchow clearly exasperated by his own limitations, though Sally’s own sounds were legitimate words and Chowchow’s, to her, merely guttural grunts. But somehow they communicated and some of those communications even made sense, like when Chowchow sneezed and looked shocked, and Sally’s automatic response was “Bless you!”

He looked at her and the expression on his monkey face may have been a grin or just as easily a grimace. Sally couldn’t tell, but it didn’t seem to matter anyway. A sneeze is a sneeze, she thought, and everyone has them, don’t they.

She remembered her late father and the sneezing fits he’d endured. He’d sometimes have a burst of a dozen or so, which left him shaken or stirred or both. He’d said it was pollen, from grasses or flowering plants, he’d never found out which, but when they were over he was moody and brusque for a while as he recovered back to what passed for an even temper.

What had always confused Sally was the simple fact that he’d had those fits during the winter as well as the summer, when there was hardly any pollen anywhere. Then she smiled to herself for a moment. If he’d been allergic to any plant pollen then he’d really have hated this forest, she thought.

But he was dead, wasn’t he? Dead and in the church yard with all the other ghosts and ghouls, and it served him right! Driving round the test track like a lunatic like he had, and for what? Maybe it was the only way he could think of escaping mum and her nagging criticisms…

Sometimes Sally could sympathise with him if that had been the case even though deep down she really hated the man that he’d been. But mum could be a tartar too …

It was precisely at the moment that criticism was forming in her mind that she heard the one thing she was least expecting to hear, bright and clear in the steamy air.

“Sally! I say Sally, where in the name of goodness are you?” The voice rang out clear and desperate and she knew it straight away.

“Mum...” she stammered whilst Chowchow sat back on his haunches, a look of abject fear on his face as he made the most alarming of clicking and screeching noises.

Then Sally saw, through a gap in the closely growing forest, the familiar figure of her dominant mother with Uncle Colin tagging along behind her like a mangy old dog on its way to the vet for the very last time.

© Peter Rogerson 14.11.19

Reviews

[Christoph]

This was delightful to read, and really hits the mark of providing a child's perspective for an at least slightly older audience.

I'll say that I didn't have much of an interest in the end, the appearance of the mother and uncle.

Still, I'm likely to read on just because the prose was working so well.

[Peter Rogerson]

One of the thoughts that has always fascinated me, even sixty-odd years ago when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, was how a creature from the dim past might react to the twenty-first century, and that's what I'm slowly aiming to discover...