Troglodytes Watch

By George B. Chase

This is a satirical fairytale for the 21st century. Troglodytes Watch is the Winter Wren, a direct descendant of the dinosaurs.  It survived the calamitous upheaval caused by the meteorite perhaps because it was as it still is: a diminutive, secretive and watchful spirit.  The substance of this tale begins with three ancestors who escape from a tribe of headhunters in Borneo around 700 B.C. and ends with some of their descendants on a nuclear waste dump island in the northwest Pacific Ocean where they are prepared to wait out the next evolution-changing, life-arresting calamitous upheaval. The foibles, frolics and conflicts of the various peoples are witnessed, narrated, and influenced by the spirit of Troglodytes. This tale is infused with some literary, some facetious and some deliciously infuriating commentary. The figures are drawn by the writer and the foreign words and expressions should be no burden to the Reader.  Relax, read and enjoy the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Release date: Aug 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781977267276

George B. Chase

This tale originated as a soliloquy based on a disorderly collection of unrelated topics, events and expressions, which were later fashioned into a thin slice of history to give it some sense of order. Latin quotations were added to give it some sense of purpose, namely, to show how little human reactions to life and fortune have changed since Roman times: “Nothing is being said here that hasn’t been said before,” (Terence, 150 BCE). A largely concocted genealogy, with bits of genuine genealogical possibilities as well, were added to further increase order and purpose. Troglodytes (the wren) was also included in the frontispiece, first and last chapters, and allusions passim, because he might well have been the sole witness of many such events since the Mesozoic Era.    

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Amulet

Cao Xueqin c. 1715 to 1763 The Story of the Stone

(It was Cao who wrote that the only reason people write those silly romances in the first place is so they can put their poems in them because nobody would read their poems otherwise.)

hrunken heads on their tethers clacked their warnings softly from the head house. Its thatched awnings rustled as Ensera slept. A whirling shaft of motes and spume woke Ensera from his febril dream. Nauseous and sweating, he fumbled for the curative potion of pisang and paku, the one kindly thing that Papow had done for him lately, he recalled. An antidote for revelry, She had said. The whole village was in a deep sleep following the great feast day.

The moon slipped behind a cloud, pitching the room into darkness. Ensera crept out of his room, stole away behind the many apartments of the long house, and the moon jumped out again as if to mock his effort to cover his tracks. After a few turns on the common trail, he bolted off through the brush to pick up his bundle of dried food, line, and hooks. The earth was quiet, the sea brooding black. He was alone, angry, afraid, and sad, but still safe. There was nothing else he could think to do. He could never take Papow for his bride now, it having been discovered that he took the head of an old woman of his own tribe. It angered him that Ngunyu had so many heads. Ensera grumbled to himself as he groped along the trail in the moon splattered darkness. He stomped angrily, forcing his legs to get him there on their own while he occupied himself with thoughts of Ngunyu and Papow. Some of them are women’s heads, and some he got by ambushing fishermen, not brave warriors from distant tribes as he claims. And everybody knows it. Ensera grumbled, clenching his jaws in his rage as he tripped over roots and vines, stomping on his feet to punish them for piling on his woes. He had enough to be angry about. And he even uses the name Ngunyu muttered Ensera. It’s not even Ulu Ayer; means headhunter in some Senta tribe somewhere, he says, the posturing slug!

Ensera hated Ngunyu and his posturing, he was afraid of him, and he could not remain in the village to see him take Papow for his bride. Ensera sensed in his very marrow that Papow favored him, not Ngunyu. Now there was no way he could compete with Ngunyu. The chief had taken his head from him and had it buried with the body of the old woman that had been found buried beyond the fields. He was shamed, and he had overheard that he was to be banished.

Never mind that I am one of the best fishermen in the village, and clearly the best boatman. Heads! Heads! That’s all that matters anymore! Yet they pretend to care about the old woman. Taking heads used to be proof of bravery. No more! Ensera snarled, The girls go to the head house and count them and oooh and aaah, Ensera whined in disgust.

Ngunyu has an excuse now to come after my own head. The Chief wants Ngunyu to marry his daughter. He thinks his grandsons will be brave and strong. Ensera spat, stumbled, stomped, and forced his arms through the dense ground cover to find his hidden stores. I’m not worthy of the Chief’s daughter. My mother was dropped into the sea by a raptor when still an infant, caught in a tanggok net on the Sarebas River. Not worthy, the son of a bird, to marry the Chief’s daughter.

Ensera spat again and looked cautiously about. Ensera had often caught the Chief’s big slave idly casting a gaze in his direction, never looking directly at him, yet clearly watching him. He had to move fast. He grabbed his bundle and turned toward his canoe.

Ensera had hidden the canoe well, just as he had hidden the old woman’s body well. How? How did they find it? Why was the old woman dressed like an enemy headhunter? Ensera, sickened by it all, felt trapped, tricked, and betrayed, but by whom? He had become so enraged by it all that he decided to do it after all; no matter what. He drew out his poisoned darts and blowpipe, sneaked back to where Ngunyu slept, sated on the tauk he had drunk throughout feast day. FOOP! THOOK! The darts popped through the taut skin of Ngunyu’s belly. Ensera ran to his canoe. There was no way he could accomplish his treachery without arousing the villagers; they were too watchful. As he approached his canoe he heard the shouts about the longhouse, and he knew they would soon be after him.

Ensera reached his canoe in a swamp on the edge of the sea and began to free it from the tangle of reeds. ….Something there! Fear pulsed and pinched in his throat, choking him. Stillness pounded in his ear, drowning out the sea. He imagined smelling the odorous vapors of a tethered head. There it was …smiling evilly at him from the shadows …on a large head standing in the reeds. Thorns pricked his fingertips, and a sickening flutter gripped his stomach when it emerged in the form of the big slave, the Chief’s spy!

The slave, whose massive image had just caused Ensera to freeze in fear, had been captured three years before on this same beach after a storm had washed his craft ashore with him on it, unconscious and near death, tied to its mast. He called himself Manouluae, after a great leader of his own people. He was big and strange, and very strong, Ensera was sure of that, and now Ensera would have no choice but to fight him with his back to the sea. Adrenalin overcame stark panic. He grabbed his fish chopper and pointed it toward the form in the darkness.

No! We want to come with you. It was Papow’s voice. Confusion blanked out Ensera’s thoughts. His hand grabbed the fish chopper, his arm swung it toward her. No! Manouluae wants to escape, she said. He will help us escape. He knows the great sea. He knows I don’t want to marry Ngunyu. We worked out a plan when it became clear that you would have to leave the tribe. That way he too could find a way to escape. We know you have prepared much dried food. Oh, let us come with you!

Ensera, his senses returned, suspecting a trap, said nothing. Brandishing his chopper, he backed up toward the surf. Manouluae now spoke in broken Dyak. You go island. They follow. Not good. Manouluae see star. Up moon, down sun. He pointed to the north. Great wind turn long; blow back to sun. Good. Find land far. Papow for you; Hoohokukalani for Monouluae.

Papow now stood in a swash of surf lighted by mysterious colored sparks spreading in the sand around her feet. Sparks Ensera had often wondered at: too small to touch, too fine to see, so bright they seemed close, close up they seemed far away. Standing among them Papow now appeared an enchanted spirit. It was a good prospect. The thought of having Papow to himself weighed against his caution. He motioned for Manouluae to move to the front of the canoe. Papow, you push in the middle. Ensera’s idea was that if Manouluae made a wrong move, he could tip him out of the canoe, a handy trick he had become very skillful at as a boy playing on the boats with his friends. Manouluae stopped, motioned for Ensera not to take his canoe. Take mine. He turned around and took a couple of necklaces from around his neck. Take; bird-man sea charm. Took my people dead in water. I take back. Not feel cold. Papow took one of the bamboo tubes containing the charms and gave the other to Ensera.

Three charms! Three! The thought spun through Ensera’s mind and then faded into an ethereal rainbow of tiny lights splashing up around the feet of the fleeing refugees. The sparks, themselves survivors from primordial seas, swirled into a shroud around the escapees, screening them from their pursuers as they guided their craft toward the dim light on the edge of the morning sea, and then, as it appeared to the wondering eyes of the pursuing tribesmen, the fleeing trio disappeared into a tiny tiny dot on the thin thin line on the crest of the rotundity of the earth far far away to where the dawn light squeezed out between the horizon and the cloud blown sky, and suddenly, a great and awesome raptor slipped wide over the morning clouds on a mission unspeakable, and just beneath the surface of the sea a huge pig-like marine behemoth lurked impatiently in the shadows of the deep. Then again, a bright star rose rapidly into the eastern sky, its hard light blinking with the cold precision of a stone heart, an ominous sign, unimaginable in the most dreadful of dreams. Whatever it was they saw, had it been the Sputnik launcher flopping end over end, had they heard EAST IS RED shout sung or Kudryavka yap, it wouldn’t have complicated their understanding of the nature of things any more than what they thought they saw. Such transformations must be the work of Petara and should be heeded as warnings. Wisely the tribesmen beat a splashing return to their timeless emerald isle.

It was a blip, the voyage of Ensera, Papow and Manouluae, touching a midway crossover point on time’s strange-loop journey back and forth through the eons between their common and disparate ends and origins. It was Uruk plus 1,597 years; lift-off minus 2,584 years. Long after their ancestors first found Monte Verde had they set off, that time from Uruk, to the steppes, over the Hindu Kush, out of Asia, to the remotest islands until they almost made it again to Monte Verde, this time to Easter Island, and then back to the sea, until they would set out for the stars. It was already late in the history of man pursuing man, man running from man. Man, the product of the sub-atomic particles within him as Newton intuited: all phenomena depend on forces by which particles are impelled towards or repelled from one another.

The escaping trio knew of no crossovers, naught of Uruk, never heard of Monte Verde, less of artificial celestial bodies winking from the sky, or the sub-atomic particles within themselves. The calm that Ensera felt within himself grew to exhilaration at the thought of a new home, new freedoms, and a new life. Manouluae’s desperation turned to hope, his Hookokukalani, his people, his island. Papow, enjoying the ride, giggled contentedly. How clever she was! How well it had worked. She was sure of it now. She had special powers bequeathed by her grandmother, said to have been a sorceress, who gave Papow the name of a beautiful but odious omen-bird – Burong Papow. Papow reviewed her intrigue. It was she who tricked Manouluae into finding the body. She had seen that the old woman was losing consciousness, was oblivious of the powers of carved idols, even laughed at birds, showing no fear. She was the perfect target for Papow’s plan to return to her origins, far from the hazards of foolish men. She had led her father to think she would marry only Ensera, and she had led Ensera to believe he would now be banished, forcing him to run away. She knew he would run. She would use Manouluae as a cover in case her plan failed. Cowards and beasts are fodder before the powers of Papow. She had enticed Ensera to go after heads, teasing him with her charms. Now free, in charge, Papow quietly nursed her own ideas about how her life would be lived. And if she failed, she had ancestors with descendants like herself, scattered far and wide, who would carry out her plan. Now or then is all the same to the heart of Burong Papow.

Pentadius c. 290 A.D.

Chapter 2

The Ring

Quintus Horatius Flaccus 65 to 8 B.C.

rctium was a shrimp. He was an unflappable little shrimp, and even when he learned of his conscription and imminent departure for the cold blown northern sea, he responded to the news in his usual way, he whistled a little tune to himself, one he made up on the spot for the occasion. Arctium was to be assigned to serve as an informer in the guise of a page to Suetonius Paulinus of Legion IX under the command of Aulus Plautius in the army of Tiberius Claudius [41 – 54 A.D.]. His change of career was arranged for him by a Roman trader, to whom Arctium had been delivering his produce. The trader had long observed Arctium’s skill in understanding the dialects of the slaves in the trader’s charge, slaves who were now to be instructed in the exercise of the oar, five oars to a bench, on a quinquereme soon to join an armada sailing for Britain. The trader knew there would be many slaves on board such a vessel, and that most of the foot soldiers were themselves conquered peoples, so there would always be the threat of uprisings and mutiny, especially if the Romans were to become weakened by disease and battle. The trader passed these thoughts on to the patrici, along with his idea that Arctium’s innocuous appearance combined with his skills should make him able to detect any mutinous rumblings among the lower ranks, and thus make him a valuable asset to the leadership, and, of course, to the trader’s standing among them for having arranged it.

Arctium’s skills were inherited, more widely developed among his clansmen than they themselves recognized, a technique for survival that had become a family trait. Arctium had learned from his people that they were once the sole possessors of the fruited island of Cicania, as Antiochus of Syracuse had properly called it, once the home of the Cyclopes and Laestrygones, but seventeen generations had passed since then, through which course of time his people had retained only fragments of their land, little of their customs and less of their language. Fragments of their history had been passed down to them through tribal bards, and it was a secret source of pride to the Sicanians, the glue that kept the remnants of the secret family society together. They had come from the shores of the Sicanus River, from which place they were driven off by the Ligurians, whoever they were. And, in their new home they found life as precarious as ever. The Sicans had, thereafter, still to suffer much through the centuries by the waves of conquerors who would pass their way; first the Sicels, who renamed Sicania after themselves. Thank you very much. Arctium had muttered to himself when he first learned of it. Then came the Greeks, followed by the Romans. Though life had been tolerable for Arctium, at least up to that point, and despite the ever present Romans, for whom he harbored a mixture of fear and awe, and from whom he preferred to keep his distance, Arctium was content to tend his family’s orchards and vineyards that helped to feed Rome and her armies. He was a colonus, a free peasant. His withy frame had taught him always to carry a kindly expression, whether he was feeling kindly or not, and it was an odd quirk of his nature that adversity always seemed to make him smile the more broadly, even when he was all alone, and he would often whistle little tunes to himself as though he was happy in adversity. It was not the same as whistling in the dark, but his mother didn’t understand that. She was overly protective of her son, and she scolded constantly that it made him appear unmoved by those who would scarcely hesitate to bully anyone who disdained to show proper caution in their presence. That’s what moms are for, I suppose, Arctium would say to himself, worry, worry, worry.

He once puzzled over the accounts of the Cyclopes and the Laestrygones, who were said to have inhabited the island in Odysseus’ time. If no one was here before us, who were they? he asked his elders. Odysseus must have been a pipsqueak if he thought we were big. Oh yes, there are those among us, great and plump, especially when food is plentiful, a Sicanian with an empty stomach couldn’t eat six Greeks; two for breakfast, two for dinner, and two for supper. Imagine eating Greeks under any conditions! Yeech! Arctium liked other stories better, like the one about the mermaid, Galatea, in love with the shepherd boy, Acis - who was beyond any doubt a Sicanian, thought Arctium, despite what he may be called in Roman stories. He could identify with a shepherd boy. The attraction was natural enough, Acis’ mother was a naiad, a water nymph of streams and fountains, and Galatea was herself a sea nymph.

When Arctium was older he reasoned that Galatea was not one of those shrieking mermaids with feathers and stork’s legs that gave Odysseus such a hard time on the rocks of Siren Land, she was, in fact, a gentle dugong. Been waiting since the Eocene epoch of Egypt just to see Acis, was Arctium’s account of it. Better story that, I figure, said Arctium, congratulating himself, than the Greeks and Romans came up with. Not surprising some of our clansmen look like great and plump dugongs, mused Arctium with a grin. How did Arctium know about Eocene anything, much less dugongs, one might ask. He got the idea from Scricciolo, who already had a habit of tattling and telling secrets to the early Egyptians, originators of the expression a little bird told me; and who was better qualified for the tattler’s role than Scricciolo, the hedge-row sneak, who had a personal acquaintance with Egyptian dugongs since the Eocene. Epochs don’t mean much to Scricciolo. Just how did Scricciolo impart this knowledge to Arctium? It was a kind of epiphenomenal symbol transfer between Scricciolo’s brain and Arctium’s brain that happened on a day when Arctium was reclining on the banks of the Acis River. That was the river that was formed from the blood that flowed from the shepherd boy, Acis, when he was smashed with a boulder thrown by the jealous Cyclopes who wanted Galatea all to himself. Scricciolo’s song is, of course, a musical recording of Scricciolo’s DNA molecules, and it encodes within itself the totality of Scricciolo’s experience on earth, including data on ancient Egyptian dugongs, and on that particular occasion, Arctium was tuned in, daydreaming as any farm boy might in idle moments, of water nymphs and girls and such, and with the Acis River acting as a resonating medium between Scricciolo and Arctium, the transfer, though incomplete, was accomplished. Arctium was an artful dreamer.

There was another quirk about Arctium. He was close to his plants and his powers of observation had sparked an interest in other potential enemies - insects. His anxiety about crop damage had led him, at first, to the habit of picking insects from his plants, one by one, not with the idea that he could ever save his crops that way, but out of frustration and an odd mixture of curiosity and disgust. He had discovered that some insects preyed on other insects, and so those he left alone. He was especially intrigued by robber flies and dragon flies, whose adeptness at catching other insects in midair was a marvel, and he wondered at their strange looking eyes. He had even learned that if he threw a pebble into the air over the robber flies, they would sometimes fly out to inspect it and fly back to their perch to wait for the next possibility, dragon flies could seldom be fooled in this way. He had also noticed that the jeweled but deadly predacious tiger beetles, too fast to be observed closely and impossible to catch, would not only suck their victims dry as did other predator insects, it would crush their armored shells with what were obviously very powerful jaws. For many years Arctium passed his time this way on hot, still, and dusty afternoons when there was little else to do but watch his crops grow and watch the bugs eat them.

Things changed when his uncle returned home from the military campaigns to die of his wounds in his own bed. Just before he died, he gave Arctium a ring, about which he seemed very secretive, even on his death bed, saying only that it was just such a ring as Zeus Averter of Flies had used to get rid of the pesky flies on Mount Olympus. It was a ring made of amber and upon close inspection one could see that it had a tiny fly somehow carved within it. Arctium was much impressed by the artisan who had made such a ring, and he was fully comprehending of the powers it must contain, for it was a trade secret of long standing in his family that flies could be kept out of the house by means of a special verse, which was chanted while scratching the likeness of a fly on the stone of a ring during the second half of the constellation of Pisces, then waiting to bury it in the center of the house in the first half of the constellation of Taurus. Although to really make it all work well, especially in the storage rooms, one needed to hunt up a plentiful supply of hellebore and red fly agaric mushrooms, grind them up, put them into dishes of milk, and set those out at strategic points about the rooms. That was a sure killer of flies. As it was not the season to test the powers of the ring, Arctium wore the ring on a string around his neck.

Sometime later Arctium did notice that his trees and plants were less ravaged by insects than were his neighbors’, he preferred to think that it might have been due to his applying his own special knowledge of insects to his farming methods. At any rate, it was the success of his produce that earned him a close association with the Roman trader, which, on the upside, worked to his benefit, but there was a bigger down-side. It made him an object of the amours of Galatea, a sort of baroness in her own right. Unfortunately, Galatea was the paramount object of the trader’s amours. It did not escape Arctium’s notice that her scarcely disguised interest in him and his conscription to military service were closely sequential. Galatea noticed it too. Her own plan for Arctium was deflected by the trader’s plan to make his own use of him and get rid of him at the same time.

Fortune works strange turns. The trader, though he had his suspicions, was unsuspecting of her conviction that the most favored of her many objectives was being exiled by the trader so that he could have Galatea all to himself. Foolish man! He had no idea what awaited him. The baroness did, and she resolved to see to it that it be done. Cyclops would finally get his due.

Arctium joined the conquerors on the high seas, and sailed off to Britain, and what troubled his mind most about that was not the wrath of Poseidon, Neptune, Mars, Ares, or any of the rest of them; it was confinement without respite from Roman tribuni militum, primipuli, pedites, and auxiliae, not to mention slaves. Fortunately, he was soon to be kept too busy to give much thought to all that. The captain kept a taught ship, and he had a coterie of paranoid bureaucrats who held morning briefs, every day, at which Arctium was expected to give an intelligence report on the status of the slaves, pedites and auxiliae. Negative reports were not accepted. Exercises, drills, what-ifs, and deliberate exaggerations were expected every day, and soon Arctium learned how important it was to keep up on the latest projects so that he could be competitive in the acronym-dropping contests in order to ratchet up his fictitious achievement scores so he could look proactive and eager about getting his next pseudo-assignment or ethereal-performance citation, the which, were required for the staging of pageants of pomp and circumstance. The only difference in the Roman system was that if one failed to do it well, one didn’t just get promoted upward so that everybody would look good, one got killed. That kept Arctium’s sincerity pumped up to level.

What happened was, the quinquereme hugged the coastline, the coastline passed, the slaves were orderly, and the pedites and auxiliae were too occupied with nausea fluens to give much thought to insurrection. Each new insurgency concocted from Arctium’s imagination overtook the last one, and finally they all petered out the day before they stepped onto the shore of the Thames.

Arctium found the new land almost as cold as the sea, he was surprised by the richness of the earth in Britain and pleased that he was able to have some time to have a closer look at it. His Legion was deployed on the frontier where initially Claudius granted the land to the care of the tribal nobles. During this time Arctium was free to wander the course of a river that wound through the fens and check out the local crops in search of new provender for the army. One fresh cool morning he sensed a presence on the opposite shore of a tributary he had been exploring and expecting a deer or a boar to come down the bank to drink, he readied his bow and froze. Patches of sunlight drifted over the land and treetops, when, suddenly, out of a trace of sunlight there appeared a girl. Bucket in hand, she descended the bank to get water. She seemed aglow, brighter than the sunlight, diaphanous and airy, like a nymph, a keeper of gnomes and elves, not at all like the surly and furtive Ecenni, whom Arctium was by now accustomed to meeting on his searches along the river, although, whenever he was alone, they often seemed more surprised and amused than surly.

Arctium was surprised by something that seemed almost familiar about the girl. Was she not from one of the local tribes? he wondered. Not Icenni? An Iberian? He had heard talk of those. And whenever he heard of such accounts, he thought of