I Love a Lemurian!

Happening 5: Long Way Home

Johnny had wanted to get back home as quickly as possible. He had to get back to his family.
           He did wonder how he was going to make a living for himself and his family. The police probably weren't too keen on seeing him return to town. Could he still catch rats? He would have to have a serious talk about that with his boss, old man Williams. (Or would Mr. Williams already have started to teach a new apprentice the trade?) He imagined himself continuing to work for Mr. Williams secretly. Johnny did most of the actual rat-catching after dark anyway, which was when the rats generally came out to feed. Perhaps old Williams, or a third person, could talk to the customers, inspect the premises and assess the job at hand, and Johnny could come out at night and do the work.
          Mr. Williams had been a decent employer, and one of the very few humans that spoke to Johnny as a fellow man, but would he be as sympathetic when he could get in trouble with the authorities for employing Johnny? Perhaps moving North wasn't that terrible an idea...
          Still, Johnny had to leave these questions be for now, and turn his attention to the practical task at hand: getting home. He'd see about everything else after that.

He had first planned on hiding away on a freight train—having heard tales from older lemurians back home that this was how they used to travel (and also worrying about some of those tales telling of hounds being trained by the rail yard guards to sniff out lemurians, and having seen Dame Lydia, who had lost her tail to these bloodthirsty hounds).
           Johnny had followed miles of railway track, knowing they would eventually lead him to some station, and they did—and he creeped around rows of train wagons, coupled and uncoupled, but there was absolutely no telling which way any of these trains would go.
           He could tell by the sun (rising in the east, setting in the west, obviously) which way (roughly) his home was, but when he found several trains pointing that way—how was he to know if they would travel in a straight line, and not turn this way or that down the line? He could end up in, well, wherever, for all he knew.

He had stolen a bicycle during his second night from home, in a little town called Lamoni. He'd felt bad about it, but most lemurians would reach a point in their lives when they would rationalize: if laws didn't apply to lemurians whenever this suited the humans, why would a lemurian still obey human laws, at all? Johnny had now reached that point.
           He would cycle at night, under cover of darkness, and sleep during the day. He was now traveling through Missouri, and he knew a lemurian's life was as perilous here as it was in his home state Texas. Luckily, lemurians could see very clearly in the dark.
           Johnny's ancestors, living in Madagascar, had lived much of their communal lives during the night, as daytime on large parts of the island were much too hot for serious exertion. Likewise, his much more distant ancestors, the lemurs wherefrom the lemurians descended, were nocturnal creatures.
           He had ridden his bicycle on dark roads for two nights, when another practical matter couldn't be ignored any longer: he was dying of hunger!

Spring had only just started so there was practically no fruit or berries to pick in the forests he came across. Early in the mornings he would hide his bike behind a bush, and scour the woods for something, anything, to eat.
           There were probably plants and herbs here that he could digest, but he was never taught how to tell which was which. He sampled some plants, and anything that didn't taste half bad, he cautiously ate.
          Even though he was lost, lonely and hungry, the woods had a soothing effect on him. He remembered he used to have dreams about living in the woods when he was a boy, and those dreams had always been very peaceful.
          On the third morning, having halfheartedly munched some leaves and stems, as he was about to look for a decent spot to sleep, a distant dog's bark startled him. Most dogs really didn't like lemurians. Johnny speculated this was perhaps because during the millions of years of evolution, dogs and their ancestors, the wolves, had never come across anything resembling a lemurian. They might be simply wary of what they didn't understand.
          The dog didn't bark again, but before long he heard it approach him through the shrubbery. The dog had been downwind, so Johnny hadn't smelled it—which of course meant that Johnny was upwind and the dog smelled him just fine. A dog's sense of smell was as keen as a lemurian's.
          Quickly, and as quietly as possible, Johnny scrambled through the woods, moving in a large half-circle, hoping to get on the other side of the dog, downwind.
          This seemed to work, as he heard the dog bark again, nowhere near him. He was worried the dog might pick up his trail on the ground, so he kept moving. Then he heard voices, even before he smelled the men. Two unwashed men, gunpowder, grease: hunters. They weren't hunting for lemurians, but Johnny knew nobody would give them any trouble if they did shoot one. So he kept moving, until he was sure they weren't following him.