Free Marianne, the Matchbox, and the Malachite Mouse by Sheri S. Tepper

probably not. All this conjecture was so compelling that she failed to keep her attention on the road. As the sun dropped behind the trees she looked up in sudden confusion, realizing that for some time she had not seen another person and that the trail she was on had, at some point behind her, departed from the route she should have been following.
    ‘Oh, fine,’ snarled Mouse. Buttercup ignored this interpolation since it was very close to her own feelings.
    There was nothing around her but forest and the path which meandered through it, seemingly without destination, certainly without observable direction.
    She was not frightened. That is, at that time, she did not identify her feelings as fright. She was distinctly uncomfortable, disliking the idea of being quite so surrounded by woods with the night coming on and annoyed with herself for having allowed the predicament to occur. It was while she was working through this feeling of annoyance that she heard the sound. Someone or something was blundering about in the underbrush at no great distance from the path and making a noise which was, perhaps, a whuffling. Or a hruff. Perhaps both, she thought, in sequence. An ungrislish sound.
    At a greater distance a person was shouting, words which made no sense at all to her though she was pleased that someone else was abroad in the falling dark. ‘Hiya, wurfle, wurfle, heah, heah,’ the voice called unintelligibly. ‘Heah, heah.’
    The underbrush quaked, shivered, rattled with leaves and twigs as a monstrous form erupted onto the path to turn toward Buttercup with an expression of brutish ferocity. Without knowing how she got there, Buttercup found herself with her back against a tree and her robe hiked high so that her spurs could be brought into play. The creature crouched, ready to spring, then began a series of stiff-legged hops in her direction, all the while making wuffling and hruffing noises. An inner voice was saying, ‘Just a minute, here. I seem to remember that animal,’ to which Buttercup was paying no attention whatsoever.
    Just as she was about to leap, fang fully extended, a person moved out of the trees behind the creature and called plaintively, ‘Damn it, Whurfle, down I say, let the Grisl alone.’ The person, a young male of a slight build and pallid aspect, came toward her, saying in an apologetic tone, ‘Damn dog! Please accept my apologies, Grisl. This animal of mine keeps running off and making a nuisance of itself. It really only wants to be friends, and I’m sorry if it frightened you.’
    Buttercup adjusted her clothing in a mood of frosty hauteur, remarking that she had not been in the least frightened. The ‘dog,’ meantime, continued its stiff-legged gambol, obviously overjoyed to be the center of attention. Buttercup thought briefly of nipping him, only slightly, to teach him a lesson, but decided that this would undoubtedly offend the young male who was, after all, the only person she had seen for hours and likely her only guide back to the road. Besides, now that she was calmer, she recalled reading of dogs, a rare animal imported from the planet of the barbarian Earthians with whom the creature was said to have a symbiotic or perhaps parasitic relationship. She had not seen a dog before, however, and could not, quite frankly, find any charm in the one before her.
    The young male, who introduced himself as Honsl, a printer from the nearby village of Rivvelford, continued his apologetic expostulations, ending with, ‘And now I seem to be lost. Can you direct me?’
    Sternly quelling a response to this question which would have directed him to depart in an unmentionable direction, Buttercup replied that she, too, was lost, having misplaced the road in her abstraction. He, in a manner which Buttercup considered to be very considerate, offered to accompany her back down the path in the hope they would come upon some more commodious and better traveled way. She found him a