Mountain Qualia

NaNoWriMo Day 8b

It was nice to be in the open air again. Even though he left the hotel not entirely voluntarily. When Tipi came downstairs and passed the reception desk on his way to the breakfast hall, the clerk explained him that the room had only been paid for the one night and whether he had packed already. Tipi had replied that he was wearing everything he owned. The receptionist then told they allowed him to ask for a packed lunch in the breakfast hall. It was a bit of a messy encounter. 

First, because there seemed to be a humor mismatch. The man serving breakfast called himself a poacher. "An egg poacher, " he had said with glee. And second, when Tipi had asked for a packed lunch, the man had asked how many. Tipi had said five and now he carried five packed lunches in his backpack.

He could travel nowhere by any means other than by foot because this time they had not left him any money, and at the hotel desk they assured him that in Austria, he would get nowhere on charity alone. Next to all that, it would have been a great idea to have asked for a map of the region before leaving the hotel.

There were five lunches between now and him worrying about how to survive and so he tried not to worry too much. There was a simplicity in hiking up a mountain. The way to up is quite clear, you just need to find a path in the obvious direction. In practice though, it was more complex. Because even though the hotel was build on the slope of a foothill, the hill itself did not align with the peak, and there was not one big lonely peak, but there were several surrounding him. At least, that is what Tipi assumed because a layer of clouds hid the actual summits.

He decided to just take his chances and pick any old direction. If he was clueless anyway, reasoning about it would not help one bit. If there were people watching him and he was messing things up again and they knew better, Tipi supposed that they would set him on the right path again. But if they did not know better, which was not a very unreasonable assumption either, then nothing was lost either.

He decided to just enjoy the hike as it came to him. Within twenty minutes, the path in the grassy hills turned into winding paths among pine trees, where shallow inclines on broad paths alternated between steep climbs with tree roots as makeshift staircase steps. An hour in, he had encountered only a few professional looking hikers and one experienced mountain biker. Colorful geometric figures marked the many paths and these would make sense if he had carried a map. It was tempting to keep following a specific color-shape combination. The yellow upward facing triangle had nudged him into a certain direction a few times already.

While it amazed him that his body, after the painful journey, had ample problems lifting his body up the hills so far, he still found that he could use a rest. Right at that moment he saw a tuft of white fluff peeking from behind a tree. He swung around the tree and found that it was a small plush penguin. Tipi wiped the dirt off its slightly tainted white belly and looked it in the eye.

"I shall name thee Pingyu, fierce adventurer and explorer of both high latitudes and altitudes!" Tipi tucked the plush companion into his backpack. He could have left it there. Some poor child would at some point be begging his parents to search the entire path for the toy and the parents would not spend their time doing that. Instead, they would bribe away the pain with promises of new toys or a simple ice-cream. In that case, both the toy and the child would be lonely. By taking the toy with him, at least it would not have to face the dark forest nights alone.

After twenty minutes of more climbing, he reached the edge of the forest and the path widened in to a meandering snake on a grassy slope. It was well in the morning and the sun was breaking through. Tipi's shirt was dark from sweat already. Maybe a cotton shirt wasn't the best for hiking steep hills. While enjoying the view of the valley below and a range of peaks above, he noticed a tiny figure scurrying down the path towards him. Within a few minutes, the figure had turned into the clear figure of a small boy.

"Have you seen my parents?" he said with a flustered face leaving out all the etiquette of talking to strangers to get to the very point.

"I have seen no one in at least half an hour," Tipi said. 

"No, no, no!" The boy flailed his arms around in desperation. He then let the tears flow that had been help up for way too long. "I ran up, they said I could. I went so fast, so they were gone. So I waited, but they didn't come. They took so long so I went down. But then there were so many paths. There weren't any paths going up." Then the boy looked up at Tipi.

"How can these path appear, like poof?"

"I, I don't know. I'm sure your parents will show up. How long was this ago?"

"Days," the boy wailed. His clothes looked fine, and he did not seem famished or dehydrated or dirty at all. It had not been days. "Can't you call them? Could you please call my parents?"

"I, I don't have a phone, and I wouldn't know who to call."

Tipi wanted to show more interest in the boy's situation, but something the child had said got him obsessed. Because like the boy, Tipi had felt he had followed a single path up the mountain. When he took a few steps to where he thought he had left the forest and entered the wider path, he noticed there were in fact three different paths going down into the forest and he would not have bet his life on choosing the path he came from.

"This mountain is going to teach us a lot of things, boy."

"Where are they? Can't you help me?"

"I will help you. What were the plans of your mom and dad?"

"We'd go up a mountain and have a drink and wurst in a hut up there. There are swings and ropeways."

"They will think you went up ahead alone and have gone there to look for you while you took down a different path down. All we have to do is go back up and find your parents at the hut."

"You think?"

"I'm certain. It's what any parent would do." Tipi imagined the panic of the parents while they were searching for their child. Then Tipi opened his backpack and took out Pingyu.

"Is this maybe yours?"

The boy shook no. "Are you sure, do you want to have it?" Tipi said.

"No!" the boy slapped the toy out of Tipi's hands and into the grass near the deep end. He tucked the toy back into his bag again.

"Let's go find your parents."

The boy wiped his tears and knees and waited in silence until Tipi flung his bag on his back and was well underway on the path up the mountain. Then the boy hurried along to catch up on Tipi.