The Wild Things - By Dave Eggers Page 0,25

the fire to see what was happening below. He was making his way commando-style, when a cat, a simple orange house cat but for its size — it was only four or five inches high — stepped in front of him and hissed.

Max had never encountered a four-inch-high cat before, so he had no plan of action. He hissed back at the cat and it stopped, tilted its head, and looked at him quizzically. It then sat on its hind legs, lifted a tiny paw, and began grooming itself.

Max heard more crashing, the sounds of splintering wood, but he saw nothing. He was sad to leave the tiny cat, but figured he would see more of its kind on the island, and by the time he did, he would have worked out what to do with one.

So he skulked forward, again toward the fire. He wanted the warmth it promised, and he wanted whatever food might have been roasted on it, and he wanted more than anything else to find out just what was going on.

A hundred yards more and he knew.

CHAPTER XVII

Sort of. That is, he saw what he saw but couldn’t believe any of it. He saw animals. Animals? Creatures of some kind. Huge and fast. He thought they might be an oversized kind of human covered in fur but they were bigger than that, hairier than that. They were ten or twelve feet tall, four hundred pounds each or more. Max knew his animal kingdom, but he had no name for these beasts. From behind they resembled bears, but they were larger than bears, their heads far bigger, and they were quicker than bears or anything so large. Their movements were nimble, deft — they had the quickness of deer or small monkeys. And they all looked different, as humans do — one had a long broken horn on its nose; another had a wide flat face, stringy hair, and pleading eyes; another seemed like a cross between a boy and a goat. And another—

It had been a giant rooster. This was the weirdest one by far. Max slapped himself, making sure he was awake. He was awake, and there was a giant rooster before him, no more than twenty yards away, in the full glow of the raging fire. It was at once comical — it looked like a giant man in a rooster suit, standing upright — and powerful and menacing.

The rooster creature seemed frustrated, staring at another creature, this one of similar height and heft, but with a different shape. This one had a mop of reddish hair and a leonine face, with a large rhino-like horn extending from its nose. It looked female, if that was possible for such an ugly thing. She was in the middle of destroying something, beating a large nest with a log. In her enthusiasm and abandon, she looked like a kid destroying a sand castle.

And this seemed to be greatly upsetting the rooster.

Soon Max could see a pattern to what the beasts were doing. It looked like they’d come upon some kind of settlement, full of great round nests — each made of huge sticks and logs and every one of them bigger than a car — and they had decided to destroy them. They were systematically wrecking them all. They ripped the nests open, they jumped from trees into them, they tossed each other into the nest-walls which collapsed instantly from the force.

Max was about to turn and run the other way — there didn’t seem to be much point in staying so close to such destructive, borderline maniacal beasts — when he heard (could it be?) a word.

There was, he was almost sure, a word: “Go!”

He would have never expected them to speak, but he was sure he’d heard the word Go. And just as he was repeating the sound in his mind, turning it over, analyzing it, the creature closest to him spoke a full sentence:

“Is it twisted?”

This one was standing, showing his back to another, who was sitting at his feet. They seemed to have fallen through the wall of one of the huts, and the first was asking for help, assessing possible injuries to his spine.

“Yeah, it’s kind of twisted,” said the second.

The two gathered themselves up and ran off.

Max squatted down again, determined to watch a bit longer, to try and parse what was happening and why.

One creature seemed to be leading the melee. He had a big round face, sharp