The Oxboy
Contents
My Father
The Prince and the Cat
We Are Betrayed
The Blue Hunters
Albertus
Pure Blood of the Human Race
A Family Meal
Suseen
Laceflower
The Rescue
The Otter’s Tales
Discovery
Prison
To the Forest
About the Author
My Father
No one can tell that I am the son of an ox. Like my father, I am hardworking, and I have a stubborn, tenacious nature. But so do many pure humans. Like any farm boy bred in the open air, I have broad shoulders and brown skin. Some call me ugly. I have a wide nose with flaring nostrils and a low forehead over which coarse brown hair falls in thick clumps. My toenails and fingernails are extremely hard. My eyes, however, are delicate and almond-shaped—an inheritance from my tall and graceful mother that sits oddly on my blunt features.
My mother has no close friends, and I have never met her relations. I may have grandparents, cousins, and aunts, as other children, but I have not so much as heard their names. My mother cut all connection with her family when she and my father ran away together.
I have not forgotten my father, though he left when I was five. He was never a father like all the others; kinder, perhaps. Together we roamed through the fields for hours, and from his back I used to reach for the hanging pear or the high, ripe berry. Sometimes my mother would join us, and then we wore crowns of daisies that she wove for us.
When my father wanted to rest, he would drop to the ground and put his head in my mother’s lap. His powerful muscles tensed and then relaxed. And she would comb his long coarse hair until his eyes closed and he drifted off to sleep. Then my mother too would fall asleep, while I searched the ground for my father’s hairs. I lined my pockets with great handfuls of them; they made a soft bed for the insects I liked to play with.
Each year my father left us for a short time to join his brothers and sisters, the intelligent animals of the forest. They hid from men, and even from certain animals, and were so difficult to find that my father sometimes came home without catching a glimpse of them. The year I was five he returned tired and thin but glowing with happiness. A blue velvet sack hung from his neck. Inside were a handful of pearly stones he had brought back for me. He promised that he would take me with him on his next journey into the forest.
When my father was away, my mother would always tell me the story of how she met him. How she had wandered far from home and found herself in a strange meadow. She was searching for a path or stream to follow when a great brown ox came out of the forest.
She trembled in fear, but then the ox spoke to her.
“My lady, do not be afraid.” His voice was soft and deep. “I will not hurt you.”
Like all children, my mother had learned in school that oxen were degraded beasts of burden whose sole purpose was to toil in the fields for men. The few such animals she had known were miserable starved creatures, gelded, with long welts along their hides, who drank foul water and ate moldy hay. But this ox was a splendid creature. Its muscles surged under its glossy coat; its eyes were bright yet gentle. She had never seen an animal like that, an animal that could be called beautiful.
The ox told her to climb onto his back, and she obeyed. Then he carried her swiftly home. He let her off where no one would see him, then vanished into the forest.
When she got home, she could not stop thinking of the ox.
“I went to find him the next week,” said my mother, “though if I had been discovered, we both would have been killed.
“We became closer and closer. One day I went to see him and never went home. We roamed for a long time through pathless forests, meeting the hidden animals, both intelligent and dumb. Then we came here with you …”
The cottage where my mother, my father, and I lived was like a sweet-smelling barn. It was far off the main road, at the end of a tumbled path overgrown with clover and blackberries. Stacked in the living room were bales of prickly hay that I could climb on or hide behind. My mother made a bed of straw for my father in their room, where he sometimes slept. In the morning he came to the table, where she set a dish of fresh water for him. She scattered hay for grazing over our floor—our house always smelled fresh and clean. At night when he wanted to come in from the fields, my father poked his head through the window and my mother opened wide the kitchen door for him.
Sometimes my father stayed in the barn. In the morning I would leap from my bed and run to the barn, where I would fling open the doors. Then I would climb the long ropes that hung from the rafters and swing over the bales of hay. My father would pretend to be sleeping, and I would land right on his back. Then with a great cry he would clamber to his feet, stamp out the door, and gallop around and around the yard while I screamed with joy.
And so I lived for the first five years of my life.
The Prince and the Cat
Often at night, after we had finished our supper, my father stretched out on the living room floor while my mother wound spools of brightly colored yarn that she wove into blankets for my father and me. Sometimes my father asked for a story. I leaned against his warm flanks. My mother put down the yarn. Then she began.
“In the beginning of time, animals and humans lived separately, and neither thought to intrude on the other’s world. They caught glimpses of each other when animals strayed to the towns or men and women wandered too far in the forests, but both were mysterious to the other.
“A prince was born. It was foretold that he would dream of animals, and as a young boy he often dreamed of a majestic gray cat who spoke to him. The prince was an unusual student, and by the time he was twenty-one he spoke and read eight hundred languages.
“The hall where the prince held court was often filled with scores of visitors all speaking at once, none in the same tongue. To go to his hall, some said, was like being at the ocean—many separate voices blending into one unfathomable wave. Only the prince could distinguish the individual strands in the roar of language.
“One day while the prince was walking in a meadow a cat appeared and began to follow him.
“The cat was gray and large, with pale blue eyes that watched the prince constantly. The cat went home with the prince that night, and the prince invited the cat first to his table, where he fed him with his own hand from a milk-white dish, and then to his chamber, where he made a bed for him on a heap of cushions.
“Soon the cat and the prince were inseparable companions.
“When the prince bathed in the river, the great cat slept on the bank. When the prince sat in his library and pored over his books written in all the languages of the world, the cat peered over his shoulder as though he too were reading every word.