“Climb aboard! WOOOOOO! I haven’t felt so alive in years!” Hermit shouted as he lassoed the front leg of a barely conscious Tsara while crashing into Motnja, knocking him over.

“OOF!”

“Grab onto the pegs!” he told us, while dragging Tsara along. So we did. I’ll tell you, it wasn’t comfortable, crashing through a second rank of wolves while holding onto wooden pegs for dear life, also while being dragged along the dirt floor. But I couldn’t complain, cause we were saved! Well, almost, we still had to find cover and hide from the wolves chasing us. And that raging lump o’ metal. Can’t forget that.

We kept on sledding, until we crashed into the river. Hermit’s sled was now a boat.

“Everyone! Unscrew some of the pegs! We can use those to paddle and steer!” Hermit said, as me and dad got to work on the pegs, and Tsara got to work on standing up. It was seriously ingenious – built in oars! Who knows what else the pegs could be for! Combat, hiking stick, javelin, anchor, all sorts of things! The wolves were running alongside us, on land. Every so often, a wolf would try to jump onto our sled, so my dad took the role of pushing all those wolves into the water with his long peg. I was at the back, steering. Whenever we needed to turn, I would stab my peg into the river bed, effectively turning us. But it was tiring, it’s hard to have the current of the river and the whole sled pulling on you while you tried to hold onto a peg. It was also pretty amazing. Even more amazing was the fact that my dad didn’t freak out.

“EYY! Elliot! His dad! Random wolf!”

“Yon?” I turned to my left, and spotted Yon and the four other members of the Chromagarde waving at me. I waved back. Tsara gave a friendly nod. My dad stared. And shook his head again.

“Don’t worry about these punks! We’ll deal with em! You guys just get to safety!”

“Thanks!”

“The… Chromagarde?!?” Hermit gave a small gasp of shock, and started fan-crabbing.

As we drifted away, I saw the team go into action. Aku slithered under the storm of paws, tripping tons of wolves. Bea simply stood and swatted them away. Pri jumped all over Motnja, distracting him, while Yon threw acorns and berries – whatever was on trees – at the clunk of metal, who was fighting back with strokes of “anti-colour”. Opa lifted two wolves at a time, and dropped them from 6 meters high onto the others.

They got it covered.

I started rowing with my peg, 3 times on one side, then switch, 3 times on the other side. We needed to speed on out of here, since more and more wolves were splashing into the water, either trying to jump on our boat, or a side effect of Motnja being distracted by Yon and Pri. The wolves were under his influence after all. I saw Pri almost get clipped by a dot of anti-colour. Hermit kept looking around from side to side, as we floated away from the commotion. A couple of minutes later of rather peaceful boating, the peace was broken.

“AHA!” Hermit shouted, pointing his pincers toward a gigantic and perfectly camouflaged tree. “There’s my tree!”

I stuck my peg onto the bank, and pulled us to closer to shore. We all got off, and dragged the sled out of the river. By all I mean everyone except my dad. He was too busy falling on his back trying to see the top of the tree. If there was a top, of course.

Hermit pinched my dad’s leg a few times to get him to stand up.

“OW! What was that for?”

“No dilly-dallying! We gotta get the sled into the tree!”

“And get my dad updated on what’s going on.”

“Yeah, I would like that.”

Hermit waddled around to the shadowed side of the tree, and went in through the deerskin flap. We all followed behind, my dad ducking into the through the flap. Then there was more gawking from my dad. Man did he like to gawk. Tsara was jumping around, looking around, while Hermit and I settled down into some stools near the carved table.

“Ok, everyone here at the table, we need to talk.” Hermit said.

Tsara bit my dad to get him to the table.

“OW! Why me?”

“Alrighty, everyone’s here. Now let’s get to updating this guy over here.” Hermit said, motioning towards my dad.

The next 20 minutes were spent explaining to my dad about everything. Hermit explained the theory of colour, the history of colour, and the like, while I explained everything that happened since I met Hermit, and what happened at my birth. Tsara sat there, occasionally biting my dad when he lost focus.

“So, for the past few days, you were in this enormous tree, with a Hermit crab, and with 5 other talking animals in the forest. At least that’s better than stealing.” My dad said.

“Ok, now I need some updating. Why was a bunch of wolves and a metal bucket raiding the village? And where were the villagers?”