The Taming of Corky

I couldn’t believe what I saw, for the eyes were wilder than many of the animal eyes I’d seen, but this little wild thing that was obviously poised for flight was human. At least, I thought it was human; it was hard to tell under such a matted, tangled mass of hair. And it was wearing clothes--or rather, what perhaps used to be clothes, but were now tattered and torn to shredded rags. Both child and rags were filthy.

It was impossible to tell whether this wood sprite was a boy or girl, since the rags gave no clue at all, and neither did the wildly disheveled hair, so nothing visible helped me to determine the sex of the child before me. All these observations were made in the space of a few seconds, for though the little wild one and I both froze in each other’s gaze, there was an almost immediate thaw on its part. It sprang up and sprinted off as if I were the very fires of hell turned loose on it, or an extremely large and hungry thing about to devour it.

I was too dumbfounded even to call out after it, to say I was sorry for giving it such a fright, but then wondered if it would have understood had I tried. He or she was gone too quickly for me to have tried to follow, and I decided that I’d given him enough of a scare already. I realized that I’d referred to it at last as "him," and didn’t know why, except that I just had finally gotten a feeling of maleness from him that I couldn’t describe. It would be easy enough to call it "her" later if I discovered I’d guessed wrong. Listen to me, would you! I was already assuming that I’d see my little wood elf again, as if I hadn’t fallen asleep and dreamed him up.

I stood there by the rock for a long time, wondering: Where had he come from? To whom did he belong? How could anyone let such a little one wander loose, alone in that wild countryside? Who would take such poor care of him as to let him get so ragged and filthy? I thought he couldn’t be more than seven at the most, even allowing for differences in sizes among children of the same age. I shook myself out of my wonderings and started slowly toward home, though I continued to ponder over my newest discovery as I walked, scarcely noticing my surroundings as I passed through the now familiar woods.

By the time I reached home, it was time to start cooking the evening meal, so I busied myself with preparations. Over dinner, I described my afternoon encounter to Bert, hoping that he might be able to come up with an idea that might explain where the mysterious little guy had come from. I was more than a little disappointed at his seeming indifference, as interested and curious as I was. He was willing to shrug it off as probably being simply a child of a very poor mountain family, since it was known that some still "squatted" on land up in the hills, eking out a very minimal existence by farming a little land or running a still. He even thought the latter might be why the child was so badly frightened at seeing me, since he might have been going to "warn Pa that the ‘Revenoors’ was comin’."

This explanation didn’t satisfy me at all, for I felt strongly that there was more to his tale than this simplistic suggestion implied. I concluded that if Bert had been with me and seen the child himself, he might have been more convinced, as I was, that there was something very special about this little wild child. Could he have run away from an abusive family situation? Or could he perhaps have wandered off from a camping area and gotten lost? Maybe there was a hunting accident of some kind. My imagination threatened to run away with me, as I tried to come up with a reasonable explanation for the ragged child’s appearance in such a remote area, seemingly alone.