The Wild Things

CHAPTER XXXI

Max woke up before dawn, cold and wet with dew. He had somehow fallen asleep, and now he was hungry and thirsty and, he realized with a shudder, he hadn’t moved his bowels since he’d left home. His fur smelled terrible and now had a green tint to it — the lagoon water had been full of algae and had gifted Max its thick stench.

And there was no sign of anyone.

But he knew, at least, that he would make everyone happy this day. He had a plan and only had to find the beasts to enact it.

In the pre-dawn light Max could see the tracks they’d made, and could clearly make out Carol’s huge footprints, leading out of the meadow and toward the cliff. He followed them across the meadow, through a narrow stand of trees, and into a clearing covered with a strange moss, black and yellow, alternating like a checkerboard. Beyond it, the ocean was a frenzy of white. Max scanned the electric blue horizon until he saw what seemed to be a figure sitting on the edge of the cliff, the same cliff where they had howled together on Max’s first night.

He ran toward the figure, and when he got close he knew it was Carol, sitting forward, seeming tense.

“Carol!” Max yelled as he approached.

Without turning around, Carol raised his hand, demanding silence. Max stopped about twenty feet away, not knowing what to do next.

Carol remained staring out at the ocean, as if looking for a sign in the ripening sky. As it grew lighter, a crescent-shaped band of orange appeared above the line of the sea. Carol leaned forward, getting dangerously close to the very edge of the cliff.

And then, finally, when the liquid yellow of the sun at last broke through, Carol’s body relaxed, and then shook in waves, as if he were laughing or crying. Max couldn’t tell. But the spell, whatever it had been, was broken.

Carol turned around.

“Hey Max! You were wrong about the sun dying. Look, it’s right here.”

Max didn’t know how to explain.

“Don’t scare me like that again, okay buddy?” Carol said. He spoke cheerfully, as if the distant, rigid Carol of moments before had been illusory, that here was the real Carol, the one who loved Max’s brain and who knew how things were supposed to feel, who wanted only the right things to happen.

“How are you, King Max?” Carol asked, putting his hand on Max’s shoulder. “What happened to your fur? It’s kind of green.”

“Algae maybe? I don’t know,” Max said distractedly. He couldn’t worry about his fur at that moment. He wanted to know where all the others were.

“Well, Douglas is over there,” Carol said, pointing to a lump in the near distance. Max had walked right past him, thinking his body was an outcropping. “But I don’t know where anyone else is. Why do you want to know?”

“I have a plan,” Max said.