THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WELL

Chapter 12 – page 5

G & J got the horses into a trot and headed out. Man, poor da Muff! First the plucking with the big bird and now lizards! Trotting wasn’t a good thing at all for the jars, metal cans and water they were carrying, not to mention the frog!. The lizards didn’t seem to be chasing them, so they started walking. “Boy that was a close one,” sighed J. “Yeah,” says G, “they might have been poisonous.”

What else were they going to run into? The horses started sinking up to their knees in the sand. It was some kind of a bog, sorta like quicksand, but not. They went a few steps further and the horses whinnied, whirled and hi-tailed it outta there slopping mucky sand everywhere. Once they were at a distance, G & J could see that the sand was a different color in a that area. And from back a ways, it looked almost like it was moving . . .like a whirlpool. How scarry.

Well, they would have to find a way around it. Should they go towards where water should be ? or back inland? They chose inland. Maybe the ground was more solid there. Soon the reeds were over their heads again and they thought they could hear owls, but it was daylight out. “Hoooo hooo hooo hooooooo! Hooo hoo hoo whooooo!”

Was it a bird or somebody?

I guess they might soon find out. Having encountered the lizards, the big bird, and quicksand all within about an hour, the tall reeds now became scarrier. And just as one might suspect, they ran into a patch of snakes hanging from the reeds. Small red snakes that looked like your regular ‘ole garden variety, but who knows in this world, what kind of snakes they were; and maybe they were poison, too. Of course, the horses did not want to go through them at all. So now what were they gonna do? They couldn’t go forward and couldn’t go back. “Hhhmmm,” said G. “What now?”