CHAPTER 15
Rather than ask what Albert meant by that, we animals watched intently as he took a piece of tree bark and used it as a shovel to scoop the tree resin onto the monolith.
After covering one side, piling most of it in the middle, he smoothed it out and spread it evenly using a branch from the same tree that had donated the bark.
Albert then asked Tubthumper to flip the monolith over, and then he did the same thing on the other side, spreading the tree resin over that side as well as on the edges of the block of stone.
Finally, Albert stepped back, put his hands on his hips, pursed his lips, squinted his eyes, and said, “That’ll do.”
“That’ll do what?” I asked, not sure how it would do anything.
“That tree resin, so ably gathered and delivered by the Cats and the Lizards,” Albert replied, “will eventually fossilize into amber, and preserve what I have chiseled for future generations of Germans to take note of.”
“Wouldn’t the stone have remained intact without the coating?” Tubthumper asked.
“Perhaps. Possibly. Probably,” Albert answered. “But not for sure. What if some jackass with a jackhammer were to come across this monolith, after it has sunk into the earth, not realizing that it is something more significant than an ordinary layer of rock? He could hammer it all to smithereens before he knew he had uncovered an important message from the past . . . or is it the future? Well, he would view it as coming from the past. As we have prepared things, he will strike the amber first, and the unusual texture of it will tip him off that something out of the ordinary is afoot. Or underfoot.”
I saw Albert’s point. But I didn’t understand how a Jackass could handle a jackhammer, and I questioned him about it.
“I didn’t mean a literal Jackass, or Donkey, Taterskin; I meant an imbecilic human,” he tried to explain.
We were having none of it, though. Tubthumper said she had known many Jackasses in her life, and none of them were imbecilic. As to what she had heard about many humans, though, her observations differed. So why would an “imbecilic human” be labeled a Jackass? Wouldn’t it make more sense for an Animal with limited intelligence to be referred to as a Human?
Although Albert is my best human friend, I also stuck up for the Jackass (the literal Jackass, that is), and quoted the great animal lover Mark Twain, who wrote, “Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn’t any. But this wrongs the jackass.”
“OK, OK, I guess you’re right; you shouldn’t take everything I say so literally, though,” Albert acquiesced, with a dismissive motion of his right hand.
What this taught us was that we would not take everything—or anything, perhaps—that Albert said at face value anymore. We would carefully weigh it, and see if it made sense to us and jibed with our own observations and experiences before accepting it.
Well, our work here was done, it seemed: Drako had met a Pterodactyl, and we had left behind a monolith with clear proof of its authenticity and a stark warning that we hoped would be heeded.
Although she didn’t enjoy the chaffing Terri gave her about her size, Drako still liked the Pterodactyl, and wanted her to join us on our journey.
When told about our itinerary and what she would see, Terri was curious, and when Drako told her (having noticed her strong preference for the raw form of the condiment) that where we were going there were soft pretzels and various varieties of mustard—all she could eat!—the temptation was too great for the Teutonic Lizard to resist, and she decided to join our group.
Truth be told, Terri didn’t know what a pretzel was, and in my opinion, Drako didn’t do an especially good job of describing them to her, but it didn’t matter much—it seems that Drako had her at ‘various varieties of mustard.’ It turned out that Terri did end up developing a strong liking for pretzels, too, though—both the large, soft ones, slathered in Terri’s condiment of choice, as well as the small crispy salty ones, although the only thing the two types have in common is their Gordianesque shape.
So it was set: Terri would join our flying menagerie.
Albert told Terri that she would either have to go through the Compressor/Decompressor operation, as she was too large to sit in one of the seats on either side of Tubthumper (who herself would have the wand passed over her again, to reduce her to the size she was when Terri first saw her), or she could ride along on the back of the Zephyr, as long as she stayed in the middle, so as not to upset the weight distribution. She would still need to be decompressed a little due to her weight and the drag it would induce upon the Zephyr, but she was told the size reduction would only be temporary.
The thought of being shrunk was anathema to Terri—especially after having relentlessly teased Drako about her diminutive size—but she did acquiesce to be temporarily shrunken some, and so she chose to ride on the rear of the craft.
So that was settled. We all climbed aboard the Zephyr (Tubthumper after being shrunk back down to a-little-larger-than-a-breadbasket size, and Terri to one-half of her normal size, reducing down to three feet tall with a wingspan of around six feet). Albert set the destination to Oona-Woop-Woop, Australia, and the year to 1787. He had his reasons for choosing that particular year, as we were soon to find out.
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