Prologue: A Long Time Ago
In the middle of the dimly lit cave sat a creature named Brumvack.
Brumvack was king of the trolls. His subjects, an even dozen of them, sat on boulders staring dully at him, as though he were a television set.
Though trolls are known to be extremely stupid creatures, one in every generation is born with the intelligence of, say, a politician, or even a little better. Brumvack was the smart troll of his generation. He got what he wanted by tricking the other trolls, by lying to them, by turning them against one another. Early in his long life, he had become the king troll.
(Though, actually, the translation “king” is only an approximate one. In the troll language, the actual word means something like “having the disagreeable odor of decomposing fat.” So his name and title is not so much “King Brumvack” as it is “Brumvack the Rancid”).
Traditionally, the troll who could belch the loudest got to be king. Brumvack, though his belches were very convincing, was not the loudest belcher amongst the Rabid Band. The loudest was a troll by the name of Schmoozeglutton, but Schmoozeglutton was stupid even for a troll. He was no match for the wily Brumvack.
Brumvack was huge. He looked like an unbalanced pile of rocks with a skin condition. Mold grew under his armpits and in his belly button. When Brumvack spoke, the trolls listened.
“Big uurrrrgh trouble (cough)” Brumvack snorted. His speech always sounded like that, with coughs and wheezes and voluminous throat-clearings and snot wipings. He thought they made him sound distinguished. “(Snort) It is the time aargh of the big (wheeze) sleep.”
Brumvack was a smart leader: smart, at least, for a troll. He knew that his subjects would get bored if he made speeches, and that they would rebel if he simply gave them orders. For that reason, he told them long, rambling stories, rich in troll history and tradition. The stories pointed directly toward what he wanted them to do, but the trolls never seemed to realize this. The correct course of action, upon hearing the story, simply seemed obvious to any right-thinking troll.
This is the story Brumvack told that cold afternoon, minus all the bodily interruptions, and with the language cleaned up a bit: We, the Rabid Band Trolls, have lived under Lake Borack since the age of the dinosaurs. (Back then, of course, the lake had not been called Maebiewahnapoopie, but “Borack,” which was the troll’s word for “big stinking body of water.” Notice the similarity to the name “Brumvack,” which means, simply, “big stinking body.” But let’s allow Brumvack to continue).
At that time, we had a tremendous underground city underneath the lake, and we sent excursions up every couple of weeks to catch the bone-headed dinosaur fish. Though we are known to be gluttons of the worst sort (the trolls murmured approval at the compliment) one bone-headed fish could feed the bunch of us for three or four days. On feast days, of course, we could consume a whole fish in an afternoon, but there were leftovers for cold sandwiches afterwards.
It was a happy time for the Rabid Band. It was the good life. We spent our days guzzling beer and our evenings sitting around a bonfire. We held nightly belching contests.
Our numbers were such that we could fight each other with our big troll clubs every month or so, and still enough would survive that things didn’t get lonely.
The Rabid Band existed in such splendor for millions of years. Good times, though, always end. It began to get cold. The dinosaurs became sluggish, and slowly died. The boneheaded fish, though they lived longer than the creatures of the land, eventually became extinct as well. Great sheets of ice covered the land. The trolls of the Rabid Band, used to eating the bone-headed fish whenever we wished, began to starve.
Trolls (Brumvack continued) are underground creatures. Even when fishing, we only poke our big noses out of the water to catch a breath. (At the mention of their big noses, the trolls grunted with approval. Brumvack was appealing to their vanity.) Now that the lake offers no food except the puny mudfish, though, we are driven to the surface to hunt. We chip our way out of the ice, kill an occasional woolly mammoth, and survive the best we can. Food is severely rationed. Even wood for the bonfire is scarce. We, once the great and powerful Rabid Band, are forced to eat meager portions of cold mammoth, stare at the ashes of our now-small fires, and dream of the good old days when food was plentiful, the beer flowed copiously, and we had enough energy to spar with our big wooden clubs. Now, though, many die of cold and hunger, until this pitiful band that you see before you is all that is left.
The time has come, my stinky friends (more murmurs of approval) for the Big Sleep.
If the trolls had taken the time to think about it, which they didn’t, they would have agreed that it was time for hibernation. Trolls could not comfortably exist in an ice age. Brumvack, being the leader he was, made his point through his story that it was time to sleep their way through the cold centuries of winter.
The eloquently told story was all it took to get them headed to their rock piles. They knew in their guts that it was time. One by one, they got up from around the meager fire and went to their own corners of the cave. There, they buried themselves in the boulders of their beds, determined to sleep until better times. Brumvack himself went to his bed, and piled his own boulders atop his still form. Soon enough, the cave was filled with the snorts and rumblings of sleep.
Brumvack’s plan, as far as he himself was concerned, was working perfectly. As soon as he was sure that his comrades were asleep, he quietly unpiled the rocks from his ponderous self. He was going to have a little party. With all the other trolls out of commission for the next few hundred years, there was plenty for him. He tiptoed through the network of the cave, helping himself to the other troll’s food. He sat in front of the fire, and began munching on the first of many mudfish.
But then he had a thought: what if one of the trolls woke up, and saw him munching on his food? That would surely lead to mayhem of a rather bloody sort. As quietly as he could, then, he crept into the colder reaches of the cave where the trolls were sleeping. He collected every club he could find. These, he set by the fire and continued eating.
Brumvack had a feast. He ate mudfish, gills and all, and chewed for a while on an old mammoth bone. He sat by the bonfire he had made from every last scrap of wood. He drained the last keg of beer, one stone mugful at a time.
“Stupid (burp) trolls,” he said, imagining his new life without all those extra mouths to feed, without all the groaning and complaining, without the smells of their stinking bodies in the cave. It was going to be a nice few hundred years, he thought, living here alone while the others slept.
The fire was losing its brilliant heat. Brumvack grunted, shrugged his massive shoulders, and threw a few clubs on the fire.It was a marvelous three days. Brumvack ate all he wanted. His stomach was full for the first time in years. He drank mugfuls of beer. He was, for the first time in months, warm all the way to his bones.
Eventually, though, the time came when Brumvack was sitting in front of a pile of glowing ashes, with no more food to eat and no more clubs for the fire. He once again felt the uncomfortable rumblings of hunger in his belly. He didn’t have enough energy to try to catch any mudfish. It occurred to him that he couldn’t bring down a mammoth alone, and certainly couldn’t without a club to wield. He should have thought to hold back his own club, at least, from the fire.
Brumvack was alone in the world, with only his hazy green belches to keep him company. “Aargh, bother, (burp) piffle,” he said, and slowly lumbered to his feet. He went to his rock pile, where he slowly buried himself and went to sleep.