was seldom anyone who came to the Garbage Dump who didn’t find their way on their own.
The garbage trucks that transported combustible refuse took the Right-hand Road. If the cargo consisted of worn-out apparatus made of steel or iron, you took the Left-hand Road. In both cases you drove along meandering roads toward a turnaround several kilometers into the garbage region. The garbagemen drove as fast as they could, as the stench became worse and worse the deeper in toward the heart of the Garbage Dump they came, but it was hard to maintain any speed to speak of on the curving roads, and there was always a risk of avalanche from the mountains of garbage.
Once at the turnaround for combustible refuse, the garbageman tipped the bed of the truck so that the garbage fell straight down into a gigantic hollow where tons of soot and ash couldn’t conceal the fact that the embers derived nourishment from new trash around the clock. At the corresponding turnaround for steel and iron was the Hole. Magnus’s own enormous outhouse, and no garbageman had ever stayed long enough after having tipped his load that he heard the scrap hit the bottom of the Hole.
The Middle Road inside the wooden gate led, via tunnels and unexplainable windings, the whole way up to the top of the dump and a shantytown consisting of a few dozen ramshackle hovels and shacks. Up there, with a view of the dump and the eastern parts of Lanceheim, lived the populace of the dump. Stuffed animals who knew how to run across the mountains of garbage without starting a landslide, those who no longer perceived the stench of decay, who keep the incinerator glowing and the roads drivable, and had forgotten how things looked in Mollisan Town.
In the middle of this settlement disguised as a Garbage Dump lived the Queen of the Garbage Dump, Rat Ruth. Her residence was a veritable temple of refuse, built of pieces of wood, shards of glass, and compacted newspapers. On the roof stood a four-meter-tall plastic Christmas tree that Ruth had found many years ago, and which she’d become attached to. The tree’s hundreds of lights blinked red and white and green, day and night.
The garbagemen who thought they had something of value in their load took the Middle Road up to the dump’s settlement. On the square in front of the rat’s residence was a kind of parking lot, where they parked their cars and awaited the dump’s foreman and uncrowned prince, a hyena by the name of Bataille. He was the one they dealt with, a hard negotiator who knew that the alternative to his meager offers were the dump’s south or north waste stations. Nonetheless, Bataille was to be preferred before Ruth. The rat most often slept during the day, but on those few occasions when she awakened by mistake and received the terrified garbagemen, there were no negotiations at all. If they wanted to leave the Garbage Dump in one piece, the only thing to do was to turn over the small valuables they’d planned to sell, and then drive away as fast as they could. Hyena Bataille found a certain enjoyment in the actual negotiations; Rat Ruth thought it was more fun to scare the shit out of the garbagemen.
There were two reasons to live at the Garbage Dump. Animals who were driven out of society, on their own account or others’, moved here as a final outpost. And stuffed animals which had been produced with a defect were dumped along with other dross and refuse. Those newly produced animals who had never gotten to ride in the Deliverymen’s green pickup made up the majority in the dump city. There were discolored birds and gnawers without teeth, stuffed animals without whiskers, arms, legs, or tails, all of whom worked for Rat Ruth. The kind who made their way to the dump after first having lived in the city most often had a hard time getting into the community. It often happened that these animals were forced to live alone somewhere in the wasteland around the burn piles, or else they were compelled at last to return to Mollisan Town.
Ruth was a discarded stuffed animal. She was missing her right paw as well as a left leg when she rolled out of the factory. Instead of being placed with some eagerly expectant couple on the Cub List, she was tossed up onto the bed of a garbage truck and