Another week on Nizgidge Ridge
Barely survived on August 24, 2025.
I was growing a beard—like the goat that I am. Becasue was not growing a beard—unlike the goat that she’s not. I was also doing my damnedest to be a manly, six-foot-tall man–squirrel again. To balance out her 5½-foot-tall girl–chipmunk nature. I went scampering about, through the treetops, looking for acorns but fell and bent my corneas. Becasue unbent them for me. So much for being a man—let alone a man–squirrel.
And it was an ugly tree. I hit every branch on the way down. This did not help matters.
Knocked out, I dreamed that my plump little redheaded huzzey-muffet had been transformed into a giant, anthropomorphic wasp. She held me down with her six arms and stung me with her pointy buttocks over and over. I woke up and discovered I’d landed on top of a yellowjacket nest.
Turns out, that pond was full of Goa’uld. We didn’t go back after that. The smell of goats again permeated the forest everywhere we went.
We wandered to and fro for many more hot, sticky miles. At what point would we both be reduced to grunting, frothing wildmen? Last week a bear stole our shoes and today toads made off with our socks. Becasue’s goat-leather accouterments were holding up nicely but my leisure suit made out of pepperoni was not. Its tattered, greasy remains were also attracting badgers. Badgers do like pepperoni. I tried stitching together some maple leaves but then a moose tried to eat me. The moose failed. We ate the moose.
Monday must have decided it had assaulted us enough by then, for it fled from sight shortly after the Sun plummeted below the horizon. I surmised this happened right around midnight—but I was too busy fending off a vampire bat attack to check. Another day in this dogforsaken forest came to a grumnutterous end.
Gnomes stole our underwear on Thursday. Gnomes stole our outerwear on Wednesday. Gnomes stole our middleware on Tuesday. Gnomes tried to steal our 16½ weeks’ worth of food on Monday. The gnomes failed. I got our clothes back. And that’s why gnome-kebabs were what’s for dinner last Sunday. Then we stopped eating those mushrooms I foraged and time started moving forward again. Not backwards and in colorful loops.
Becasue ate some more though and believed she turned into a mountain lion. That’s how I ended up with my skin clawed off. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.
Tuesday afternoon (for it was truly Tuesday), we solved that age-old question: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Apparently enough to give me a skull fracture. And: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Indeed it does—they scream and scream when they fall over and can’t get up! (That maple also made a nice, solid crack! when it gave me another skull fracture.)
I tracked the woodchuck down and chucked a severed maple limb at his head. Sweet revenge would be mine! Unfortunately this particular woodchuck had been a quarterback in high school. He caught the branch and chucked it back at my head. I went down like a sack of potatoes. (And I did make a sound.)
The road still had not reappeared. Would it ever? Becasue and I finally found the clearing on Wednesday. Or, a clearing. But in place of my Trabi was a single spark plug, lying on its side, on the ground. Not even my Trabi’s roof remained. There were a bunch of mating beetles milling about, too—but these weren’t Volkswagens, so it was unlikely we could ride any of them back to civilization. But they gave us some ideas so we slunk off into a dense thicket to do things to each other.
We relaxed in a field of mushrooms. I fell asleep and dreamed I was drowning in a torrent of horse mucus. When I awoke, I wasn’t sure if I did or not. Were we both still asleep?—underground, being slowly digested by a field of carnivorous mushrooms? These nefarious fungi nearly ate Mulder and Scully like that—would they get us too?
Becasue was still asleep. I poked her. Her reaction assured me she was still among the living. I straightened my nose back out and lay back to relax again.
My huzzey-muffet hasn’t been blonde for weeks now. Being hopelessly lost in the woods with only a crazy man will do that to a girl. It also makes her crazy. But not in a bad way. In an “I’ll claw your face off if we don’t get out of these woods soon” way.
I again wondered why they make self-cleaning ovens and even self-cleaning public toilets but only self-dirtying humans. It was hot, it was humid, the rank stench of goat hung in the air. Those squadrons of mosquitoes had linked up with a flotilla of leeches, their object to wholly exsanguinate the both of us before the next nightfall. Cicadas sang from the canopy: It was a song of our death and devourment by grues (and Langoliers). And of how the crows would pluck our eyes out, the carrion beetles would carry off our innards, and the wendigos would violate our corpses in the most unnatural ways. Anything that remained would be digested by the field of man-eating Cordyceps fungi.
As the cicadas buzzed out this rather cheerful tune, I noted bitterly that the singing spiders hadn’t returned to defend us. They had likely switched sides and were plotting our demise in their underground lairs. Everything in this dogforsaken forest wanted to kill us.
Thursday prodded us awake with the mellifluous sound of another sortie of mosquitoes buzzing around our ears. One thing was looking up though: That toppled maple tree had stopped screaming. I embarrassed myself again proving what an ursine doofus I am. Becasue laughed and pulled some corn from our bear canisters; we feasted heartily. With 16½ weeks of corn, we wouldn’t starve. And with the average human body containing 4–5ℓ of blood, neither would the mosquitoes.
Indeed, some things were looking up. Then I looked up and an acorn beaned me right in the left cornea. Everything in this dogforsaken forest wanted to kill us.
Trying to cross a vast swamp on foot quickly proved a mistake. I suggested we attempt the crossing on horseback, but Becasue reminded me we were rather horseless—all we had was our own four shoeless feet. Sinking up to our knees, we decided to press onward, which resulted in us sunken up to our navels. Never one to give up nor to admit my mistakes, however stupid and shortsighted, I insisted we press further onward—then upward, never backward—which resulted in us sinking further downward. Up to our nipples in mud, I was forced to admit one thing: Nothing. Then we ended up up to our eyebrows.
Those spare eyebrows we both wear as necklaces meant we weren’t dead—not yet, at least. “If we survive this—you won’t,” Becasue warned me. I grinsped. I was in for more than just a face-clawing-off this time. Off in the distance, a maple tree whimpered. Then the turtle we were standing on shifted and we were up to our real eyebrows. (It was a big turtle—a turtle built for two.)
We built a campfire to dry our clothes (and ward off any hungry grues—and Langoliers). We were still caked in mud from head to toe. Those friendly gnomes living in the warrens beneath the swamp had sure been a dogsend. They, a family of Murrumbidgee Mud-Rumbling Gnomes, guided us up to the surface and even gave us a pot of gnome gold. Usually Fortune pisses on me—or tries to drown me and my girl in thick, sticky mud—so Her sudden about-face was more discomfiting than comforting. Surely a piano would suddenly fall from a window—or a safe!—and crush me to death on the sidewalk! But then I remembered: This deep innawoods there were no sidewalks. Nonetheless, I started looking up in the trees for pianos dangling from or safes perched on branches.
Another acorn fell and took out my right cornea.
I poked at the fire contemplatively. “Maybe we’re both dead but don’t know it yet,” I whispered. “Maybe that turtle is plucking our eyes out right now. Maybe those gnomes are violating our corpses in the most unnat—”
Becasue told me to go sleep in a tree that Friday night.
I was starting to look like a werewolf. Wolves (of the non-were kind) tried to eat us. The wolves failed. And that’s why we had wolf-kebabs for lunch on Saturday. That wendigo we encountered on Saturday proved more troublesome. But wendigos are even more fictional than gnomes, so that never actually happened.
By Sunday I finished looking like a werewolf. I decided to practice some wolfish howling but then the dropbears attacked.
Shit.