Quick Catcher and the Insurrection

Sir Andrew crouched behind some bushes and whistled gently, a simple warble indistinguishable from all the other bird calls around the lake.

He was watching the two tents across the lake as his friend Quick Catcher landed on his hand.

“Hello,” the small bird said. “As you can see, the bad men are still here. They are cutting wood and making a terrible racket. And some of them smell like trolls. Worse, really. Ya know, once I smelled a troll that had been dead for a week, and it actually smelled better, if you can believe it. Why I remember…”

“Yes, my friend,” the old ranger interrupted. He peeked through the bushes; the camp was an easy kill-shot away - for a ranger. For this lot of ruffians, he doubted they knew which end of an arrow went first.

“Thank you for finding them,” Sir Andrew whispered, trilling his “thank you” in songspeech. He must have gotten it right because Quick Catcher puffed up and flapped his wings twice in pride. “But now we must punish their many crimes against the Duke.”

“We?” Quick Catcher trilled. “What can I do against so many? Did I mention they smell?”

Andrew smiled. He didn’t smell any better. He had been tracking the insurrectionists for a week, losing and re-finding their trail three times, rarely stopping to rest. Thanks to his many forest comrades like Quick Catcher, he had gotten back on the trail and finally caught them at this mountain lake.

“I have an idea.”

///

An hour before sunset, Quick Catcher landed on a branch above the insurrectionist camp.

He looked down on the dirty rabble of five men and three women who sat around a smoky, cheerless campfire. Some scratched at unkempt beards, and others stared into the flames. They still wore red armbands, now stained with mud, that signified their misguided allegiance to the rightful Duke’s challenger.

One man stooped over a black pot and dropped in a few small turnips.

“Is that all we got?” A woman snapped, her nasal tone accusing.

“It’s all I got,” he growled. “I didn’t see you going outta your way to forage anything unless it was to shove it into your fat face.”

Another woman cackled, then she stopped suddenly. “Did you hear that?”

Everyone stood, daggers and short swords appearing in their hands. One man dashed to a tent and came out with a longbow. Quick Catcher held his breath.

“Over there,” a man with missing front teeth said, pointing to the deeper forest to the north. Quick Catcher looked north. From his vantage in the treetop, he saw movement through the undergrowth.

“It’s getting closer!” the cackling woman said, holding out her shaking dagger and stepping back. “The gods be damned, it sounds like a stampede.”

She was mostly right.

A second later, Sir Andrew burst into view, running straight toward the camp. He carried his own longbow, but no arrow was nocked. A quiver of blue-fletched arrows bounced on his hip. His own sword was still in its scabbard.

The insurrectionists cried out, and their own bowman took aim. Now, Quick Catcher lived up to his name. Like a bolt of lightning, he dove straight at the bowman’s face, sending his aim to the left, and sending his arrow into the toothless man’s bony buttocks.

Sir Andrew veered left then right, avoiding the screeching insurrectionists and sprinting along the lake shore.

Then the troll crashed out of the foliage. And she was mad. A blue-fletched arrow protruded from her shoulder.

“Bloody hell!” an insurrectionist screamed, diving to the side too late. The troll caught him by the neck and slung him against a tree. His body wrapped around the tree backward, snapping his backbone.

Then she spotted the bowman and stopped running. Her eyes narrowed as she pulled the painful barb from her shoulder and stomped toward him.

Quick Catcher joined Sir Andrew, still panting from his sprint around the lake. They watched as the troll destroyed the camp and dispatched the insurrectionists in most gruesome, permanent fashion.

All but one. Something about the toothless man with an arrow in his butt caught her attention. She grabbed him by one leg and dragged him belly-down back to her cave. His screams grew fainter until, at last, they could hear only the breeze and chattering pixies.

“Nice working with you, my friend,” Sir Andrew said. He handed Quick Catcher a tiny bead of blue glass. “A gift for your nestmate.”

Quick Catcher trilled a farewell and, grasping the bead, disappeared into the gathering darkness.

///

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