Hartmut was aptly named, for she had the heart of a dog. Not that she had ever seen a real dog, but if you could believe the time travelers, it’s the kind of heart that she supposedly had. Meaning that she loved earnestly, loyally, even viciously, and once she cast her devotion upon the recipient, be it man or creature, she didn’t let up easy.
“Like being hit by a freight train,” her mother often said. But Hartmut had never seen a freight train either, and so the dead metaphors had little effect on her.
Sometimes she wished she could be more like Marylou. Marylou didn’t pine for true romances that never came, didn’t stalk the young men at the mammalry college every time she got a chance to visit the outposts, or require months to unwind herself from the pain she felt right in her heart when they didn’t love her in return, and Marylou certainly didn’t stay up nights crying for their father who had never come back. Marylou simply took action. Whether it was a door that need fixing, a fish that needed catching, or a heart that needed untangling, Marylou simply acted. And that was exactly what Hartmut intended to do now.
Except she hadn’t exactly intended to do it right that second. It was only a thought she was having as she waded into the swirling water. A momentary revelation as she knelt in the Vertigo to rinse out her apron that had been stained with dirt and berries. Something caught her eye, and she slipped, and found herself being washed down the river of time. Now, sitting on a bank she knew not where, Hartmut reflected that this was the recurring story of her life.
She didn’t know where (or when) she was, but where/whenever it was, it was cold. She shivered, wringing out her long blonde braids. She was probably only swept a couple of weeks up the current, she told herself. But even as she thought this, she tasted the dirty Vertigo in her mouth, realizing how much of it she had swallowed, and she knew that it was more lies she was telling herself. A few weeks up wouldn’t have put her in the middle of winter, and she didn’t recognize anything around her. The island looked dead and empty. Besides the dry shrubbery that crowded the rocky shore, she could see nothing but flat sandbars and briney lagoons in every direction. Could she have been caught in the Tallahassee Loop current? If so, she could be just about anywhere.
“Oh, what am I going to do???” she wailed, looking helplessly about her for a sign. Marylou would have had flint for a fire, and for that matter, wouldn’t have been lost in the first place, with her circlet and map.
“And why does she get to have the circlet and map?” she reflected, walking round in little circles to warm up. “What did I ever get?”
She fell to her knees and sobbed into her wet apron. Presently, however, she decided that ready or not, the time for action had indeed come. She searched the gritty shoreline and eventually found a bit of shale stone and a dark flat bit of leaf. Using the shale, she sketched the following message into the leaf:
Washed up the Vertigo! Send help! Wherever this is, it’s cold. Hartmut
Miraculously, she located a glass bottle with a stopper lodged between two boulders, and after rinsing it out, she inserted her message and flung it into the river, not knowing what good it might ever do.
Exhausted, wet and shivering, she crawled beneath the same boulder on a bit of cold but dry sand, and presently cried herself to sleep. She slept the sound sleep of a broken-hearted innocent, her body forming a question mark in the sand. When, hours later, the moon was high in the sky, it was the plaintiff sweet howl of foxes that awoke her.
Slowly, Hartmut peeked her face out from beneath the boulder’s overhang and saw twelve red foxes sitting in a circle on the sand. She thought she was dreaming. Foxes had been extinct since the flood. And yet all turned their pointy faces towards her, and one rose up onto his hind legs.
“Flock,” he said in a gravelly yet sweet voice. “Flock hinder non frightenum.”
And she knew without needing a translator that the wondrous, beautiful foxes, who were real, so very real in the moonlight, had recognized her as one of their own.
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