Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [45]
And that was how Peter spent Frost’s first gift, making danger pass him by.
Afterwards he cleaned himself as well as possible in the stream, before setting off to find Bo again. But he found neither Bo nor any of the others. The Black Forest had swallowed them without a trace, or perhaps it had swallowed him. Who can say which?
PETER WAS LOST in the forest for months. He had no gold to spend, for that was left behind, in his bundle at the camp. And besides, there was nowhere in the forest to spend it. He had no coat or warm clothes, except for what he was wearing when he first ran out of the camp, fleeing into the night, away from the attacking soldiers, whom he never saw for himself. But Max had, and his condition at the time was ample testimony that they were indeed real and dangerously close. He had only Frost and the clothes on his back.
For all of Peter’s life, the Piper family had lived on the move. Traveling often in the country and through the woods (though always on the protected roads), he’d grown up gathering wild plants and mushrooms for their dinner. Mother would direct him to this tasty fungus, or that buried tuber, identifiable by its sprouts, or its color, or shape or markings. “The forest is just a book you have to learn to read,” she’d say. Under her direction he’d jump down from the wagon several times a day to snip wild herbs or any of a hundred edible plants and mushrooms. This knowledge saved his life in the Black Forest.
Peter lived as a wild boy, scrounging his meager dinner in the daytime and finding a hole to sleep in at night, or climbing a tree as necessary. Once in a great while he’d catch a fat toad, or some creepy crawly thing, and the best of all prizes was when he’d come across the half-eaten carcass of some other creature’s dinner. How he feasted then!
Fresh water was plentiful. Hundreds of small streams bisected the forest. One only had to be cautious of who or what else might be coming to drink.
And wherever he wandered he always looked for Bo, or his mother, or anyone else from their escape party, but there was never a sign of them. He’d daydream for hours about finding someone, and it was always Bo who was foremost in his mind, before he’d remember that there were others to look for and long for as well. He wandered so far and so aimlessly that he could have been a hundred miles or a hundred yards from that old campsite and he’d never know it. Many times he’d daydream that Max would suddenly appear, his sword flashing in his hand, and announce that he’d killed or driven away all of the threats in the forest, and he’d come to take Peter home. But Max never appeared. No one did.
Peter carried Frost with him always, but seldom played it and never to use one of its two remaining gifts of safety. The wolf hadn’t returned and most other creatures seemed content to give him a wide berth. He ran and hid from the more aggressive ones. Once he’d seen a lovely dark-haired woman in the woods and he started to approach her to ask for her help, but she was naked, painted in weird red designs, and talking in a strange tongue to a coal-black goat with high twisty horns. And that disturbed Peter enough to pass her by. At another time he spied a great ogre, as tall as the Peeps’ old house. The thing had its back to Peter, who watched it bite the head off a black bear with one chomp and then suck out the innards, before finishing it with another single bite. Peter made no sound, but backed away slowly and then put miles of distance between the ogre and himself.
And then long after he’d lost count of the days, Peter stumbled onto the banks of a great river, winding its majestic way through the woods, and it sparked a dim memory of something someone said: “West to the river and then upstream to Hamelin Town. That