“Are you a weasel?” I asked inquisitively.
“No,” again with a thick Irish accent.
“Then if you’re not a weasel, but your name is Weasel, what are you?”
“A waysel.”
“A weasel?”
“No, a waysel.”
“A waysel?”
“Aye.”
“So, you’re a waysel named Weasel?”
“Aye.”
“You’re an Irish waysel named Weasel?”
“Aye.”
“Then if you’re from Ireland, how did you get here?”
“Where’s Ireland?”
“So you’re not from Ireland?”
“No.”
“Then where are you from?”
“Here.”
“Here in this cave?”
“Aye.”
“So how did you get here?”
“Well, when a mommy waysel and a daddy waysel love each other very much. . . ”
“No, how did you get here in this cave?”
“Well, sit down. I’ll tell you all about it. A long time ago I was roaming the desert on this planet, looking for someplace to stay when I found these caves. I looked in all of them and each time one of you,” he said, pointing an accusing finger at Plittereeg, “comes out and shoos me away- until I found this cave. So, I stuffed my belongings in the corner and fell asleep.
“The first night was easy, but on the second night falling asleep was hard because I was hearing constant moaning and groaning from the back of the cave where I had never been.”
It was very hard to follow the next few words Weasel said because he was making complex gestures with all of his arms and hands.
“So the next day I went to check out that area in the back of the cave.” His voice took on the menacing tone of somebody telling the scary part of a ghost story. “But suddenly, a giant tentacle reached out and grabbed me!” Plittereeg hid his face in his hands at this point.
“The last thing I hear as the tentacle drops me into that murky pond over there is this loud ‘quack’.”
Alabaster and I looked at each other and Plittereeg’s fearful expression changed to confusion. “Quack?”
“That’s right. In all the two years since that day I have never gone back into that part of the cave. When I came here, two years ago, in a hidden room there were all sorts of things like swords and axes and masks and cloaks- and even mattresses. I had no idea what they were doing there.”
Plittereeg answered his question. “My people throw them in here through a special shaft to appease the octopus.”
“Well, anyway, I used the food offerings to stay alive and when they stopped throwing food offerings down every once in a while I used the weapon offerings to hunt for small animals out in the desert. Once I came upon this little specimen.” He stood up and motioned for us to follow. We walked passed an open door where we could see the piles of offerings and past a couple of empty rooms that were dark inside and had piles of rocks or sticks inside them.
Weasel led us to a room where it was brightly lit due to flaming torches hung on the wall and another contributor to the lighting were jars of fireflies. In fact, fireflies weren’t the only animals in this room- there were huge cages with rainbow-toothed saber-toothed tigers and elephants with wings.
“This is my zoo,” he said. He led us over to a door in the left wall and opened it. “In here is the most amazing specimen of all.” What we saw before us was a giant tooth, incredibly huge, stretching all the way up to the ceiling and into a carved out part of the ceiling so it would be able to fit. As I used my eyes to follow the tooth upward, I could see that in the cavity in the ceiling there was another specimen connected to the tooth- Weasel led us up, climbing on some notches and scratches and wear and tear that the tooth must have experienced while it was being used. We climbed up through the cavity onto a ledge outside of the cave where the biggest and most incredible wooly mammoth skeleton I had ever seen stood.
“I’m still working on excavating it,” said Weasel, “this side of the mountain is never used by the citizens of that city over there. Speaking of which, what is the name of that city, little green man?” he asked Plittereeg.
“Alchukata.”
“I have no idea how to spell that,” said Weasel, “but it sounds like a good name. Anyway, the inhabitants of Alchukata never come down here so I can excavate it in peace without worrying about anyone trying to come down here and steal the bones. It really is my most amazing-”
But Weasel never finished his sentence because we heard a deafening bellow from below. We all clambered into the cave and went to see what happened.