I went
straight out there armed with oats, sugar and milk to find the clearing as
deserted as it always was upon my arrival.
I eagerly set up all the parts I had trundled along in my cart and begun
to cook up the juice that I needed.
By
mid-afternoon it was bubbling nicely, steam drifting out across the forests in
all directions on the ever-changing winds.
It attracted nothing. The unicorn
was nowhere to be seen and nor was any other living creature. She was still presumably trapped by her
kind. Or maybe by herself now. I left the clearing as empty as I had found
it.
My
persistence in my insistence to keep trying was the main reason for this
victory. Every week I returned and did
the same thing. I got up, loaded the
van, carted it all to the clearing, set up the cauldron, lit the fire and
cooked up the porridge. The lubricant to
make her slide away with me.
And always
the same breeze blowing through to signal my failure, the same birdsong mocking
my very presence. The same nothingness
of a non-event. The only welcoming thing
the black burned spot in the middle each week.
There to will me on and tell me everything would be okay.
I’m sure I
would have gone mad, slowly growing old as I hung about for something that just
wasn’t meant to be. Instead, all of a
sudden one week I heard a movement in the undergrowth - a large-ish animal
rustling about in the fallen leaves. To
begin with I dismissed it as a deer or such.
I was quite worn down by this point and forgot I’d never seen a deer
about or even heard or seen an animal since the unicorn had been snatched
away. Then, looking through the trees, I
saw a flash of white fur followed by a silvery tail.
After three
weeks of the rustling getting closer she finally appeared at the edge of the
clearing. I dished up a bowl and took it
over to her. At the first flick of her
tongue she stopped briefly at the addition before very quickly continuing and
eating the rest quickly. I gave her a
second bowl before putting the rest onto the cart and wheeling it back to the
van.
To begin
with she got in my way, trying to make me stop and serve her. I just nudged her aside and kept on. Once sure I would not relent she tried to
jump into the cart to eat straight from the cauldron but there was no room for
her to fit in or to grip on enough to succeed.
Which was a bit of shame in a way.
She kept trying though. I had to
stop and scald her, worried that she was going to tip the whole pot over.
For the
rest of the way she followed gloomily. I
was worried she would give up but the old elf was right. I could have walked forever and she would
have kept on following in the hope of receiving more. So mesmerised was she that she didn’t seemed
to notice the trees ending, didn’t see the road and couldn’t see the van for
what it really was. Rather she got
excited, seeing the plod at an end as I unloaded the cauldron, and bounded up
the ramp to finally feed straight from it.
All the way
home I was uneasy, convinced something would go wrong and that I would open up
the van to find it empty. I strained my
ears to try and hear her moving about or eating. The engine drowned out everything for most of
the way so that I was grateful for the town and its red lights. I turned off my engine briefly to hear the
unicorn scraping her heels impatiently, the porridge having run dry.
The concern
was for nothing, though, as I pulled into the garage with a unicorn in the
back. I closed the front end and opened up
the back end of the garage. And then,
finally, I led the unicorn into my garden and into her new home.
And that is
how a victory finally became mine.
No comments:
Post a Comment