Running of the Bulls

I do not know a better way to travel than the train. There are faster ways, but a train is plenty fast. Someone else does the driving, so you do not have to pay attention to what is right in front of you. You can read a magazine article if you like, or write one. You can lean back in your seat and close your eyes and let everything go on without you.

Or you can look out the window. The countryside in Ecnarf is fine. South of Sirap, the war did not hurt it badly. And Astilia stayed out of this latest round of madness. The scars there are old. Most of them have healed over.

Even high up in the mountains that mark the border between Ecnarf and Astilia, the meadows stay green and beautiful. Animals graze on them. From a train window, the animals look like dots—small gray ones, bigger ones brown or black. Herdsmen, themselves as brown and wizened as tree trunks, stump across the grass or sit in the shade of the boulders as they keep an eye on their beasts.

Some of the herdsmen carry shotguns. One, I notice, has a businesslike army rifle. They say a few tyrs still prowl the upper reaches of the mountains. I do not know whether that is true, but they say it. I know pters of prey wheel in the cloud-dappled sky, because I see one every now and then. Without the herdsmen, the flocks would take bad losses from them. They lose some animals as things are, but not so many.

We stop at the border to clear customs. An inspector looks through our luggage. Then, with great formality, he stamps our passports. Obert Ohn tries to talk with him in Astilian. The look the inspector gives Obert says he is not there to chat. He gravely goes on to the next compartment.

“Not a very friendly fellow, is he?” Obert Ohn sounds crestfallen.

“No, not very,” I say. If anyone is less likely to be friendly than an Astilian customs inspector, I cannot imagine who he might be.

A few minutes after the train starts up again, we roll past several bulls cropping grass near the tracks. Their tails switch back and forth as their beaks open and close, open and close. Their horns are long and sharp. They have crests along the ridges of their backbones. One raises his when the train goes by, as if the engine were a rival.

Obert Ohn stares at them. He might never have seen a bull before. “Do you suppose they will be at Amblona for the festival?” he asks after they are out of sight at last.

“They may,” I answer. “But even if they are, how will you know them among all the others?”

“That big, tough fellow will stand out in a crowd, don’t you think?” he says. “The one whose crest went up.”

Maybe he never has seen bulls before. “He’s not a bad animal—not half bad, in fact,” I say. “He’s nothing special, though. Plenty bigger. Plenty meaner, too. They don’t have to be big to be mean, you know. They’re like people that way. Sometimes a mean one won’t just raise its crest at a train. Sometimes it will charge.”

“What happens then?” Obert Ohn asks in a small voice.

“About what you’d expect. Once in a while, the train gets derailed. Whether it does or not, the bull winds up dead.”

“I guess he would,” Obert says. He is a good guesser, Obert Ohn is.

Late that afternoon, the train pulls into Ganelon, the little town where we are going to fish. No one would ever have heard of Ganelon if they had not fought a battle there a long time ago. Knights in armor hacked away at one another till one side won and the other side lost. Years later, someone wrote a famous poem about it. So now next to no one has heard of Ganelon.

The hotel is across the square from the train station. It is not a fine hotel, but who needs a fine hotel to fish from? If we were after fine hotels, we would stay in Sirap. But you cannot fish in Sirap. Old men do drop lines into the Neise, the river that runs through the city. They drop in their lines, and they sit in little folding chairs waiting for a bite. I have never seen one of them catch anything.

We hike to the trout stream the next morning. Our luck is better than decent. I catch more trout than Obert does, but his are bigger. You cannot beat the eating they make. You cannot beat getting away from everything but the water and the grass and the trees and the sun and the sweet mountain air, either.

After a couple of days, Obert Ohn takes off on his own side trip. I go on fishing. Being by myself never bothers me, and Obert is not the best company I could have. These days, the best company I could have keeps company with Kime Kelbam instead.

I will say that Obert is better company when he gets back. I have never seen him so happy. He does not dance in the square or sing silly songs or anything like that. But the little annoying habits he has because he usually cannot stand himself have gone missing. I cannot decide whether I like him more or less because of that. He annoys me now in different ways.