Free Jaguar by Bill Ransom Page A

Uncle Hungry woke him up with a hand over his mouth, grabbed up some clothes and blankets and led Rafferty into the dirt basement. He slid something aside that looked like a piece of the furnace and he put Rafferty inside a tunnel.
    “Crawl ahead,” he whispered. “Stop when you get to an open space.”
    From upstairs came the splintering of cupboards and shelves, the heavy thump of bootheels, curses. Rafferty heard Uncle Hungry close the tunnel behind them, heard him stop several times. The boy picked his way through roots and fallen-in chunks of sharp rock. Suddenly the tunnel opened up on both sides. When the uncle caught up with him he switched on a red flashlight. Rafferty stared at a grotesque mechanical creature that squatted in the middle of the room.
    Uncle nudged him out of the way and stepped over a case of bottles on the floor. He set the blankets and clothes on top of a stack of bottles, then he wedged the flashlight into some wing-colored coils rising out of the machine’s head. Uncle jammed a big roll of pink fluff into the opening they’d just crawled through. He slumped into one of two overstuffed chairs and waved Rafferty into the other.
    They sat inside a huge underground room full of sacks, bottles, crates and their two chairs.
    “It’s a big cooking-pot,” Uncle explained, his voice low. “Called a ‘still.’ It cooks cereal, from those bags.”
    He pointed to some sacks stacked on a board beside him. Rafferty tried to imagine how many bowls of cereal you could cook in that still, and where you might find that many people at breakfast.
    “Nobody can find us here,” Uncle told him. “We’ll hide out here until they’re gone.”
    The room with the still was the quietest place that Rafferty had ever known. He heard all of his own breaths, and all of Uncle Hungry’s. Uncle’s stomach gurgled every few minutes and sounded like a conversation in another room.
    “We have plenty of batteries,” Uncle said. “We have a water faucet. Lots of cereal and sugar but no way to cook it without getting caught.”
    We, Rafferty thought. He said that we have plenty of batteries.
    He didn’t know how long he slept that first night in the still, but he remembered being so hungry when he woke up that his stomach cramped when he took a drink of cold water. They couldn’t leave yet; the raiders were camped in the house.
    “We can get out if we have to,” Uncle said. “This other tunnel comes up between the manure pile and the barn. But then we’d just have to hide, so we might as well hide here.” He stirred a couple of spoonfuls of sugar into the water.
    “Here,” Uncle said. “Drink it now. It’ll stop the cramps.”
    Uncle Hungry figured later that they hid in the still for fifty-one days, living on that sugar and water and grain. Another party of raiders killed the first bunch, stripped them, carried off all of the rest of the food topside. They came out of the ground to summer, and Rafferty couldn’t tell where the sky and the earth left off because of the dust.
    In fifty-one days in the still Uncle Hungry taught Rafferty letters and spelling, reading, numbers and counting money. And he taught him something of the Roam, the nomadic people who had been his teachers. Rafferty taught him the rope-skipping song, the song about stars and a trick for getting gum out of his hair. Uncle showed him the scar on the back of his hand.
    “You see, I wear the brand of the Jaguar. That’s because someone else has been dreaming in my head. The Roam can tell you all about it. We always let them stay here; they bring their caravan through twice a year. They put up in that flat spot down by the creek. That’s how come I got this. The Jaguar’s priests found me when I was asleep. I don’t know how they did it. I had a dream where a bunch of fellas held me down and this fat, dark guy branded me. Verna had the same dream. Sure enough. . . .” He held up the hand again, for emphasis.
    “Why did they do