Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn (58): An End and a Beginning / Stop. Start / The Real Story

She stopped talking and the cold realisation of what she had said hit me like a sledgehammer.  Even though I had gone to the clearing that day to end it, for good or ill.  At that point it was because it had ended that I regretted the way I had gone about things.  Later, with the help of someone, I would better understand the enormity of it all and show true remorse.  But not there, not then.

For the moment I only looked stunned, a million thoughts going through my mind.  Many of them still trying to find a way to capture the unicorn (“If only I had made a pact with that guy at work, he could swoop down now and carry her away”), others to stop this intervention and continue in the spirit the unicorn desired - to find that middle ground, set up a camp there and sign a treaty.  A lot of it was that part of me that would first see how badly I had sinned telling me what an idiot I had been and seeing all the truths I had always looked past.

Quickly, though, I came to and saw the reality of the scene before me.  I apologised to the Lady of the Woods and bid her farewell.  She nodded solemnly to me, no doubt pleased I was not to make a scene.  She then stepped aside for me to do the same with the angry creature behind her.

I looked down into the unicorn's eyes, or went to, having trouble at first to look her in the eye.  Then I had a vision of what had gone before, smelled her burning hooves in my nostrils, saw them bubble in my mind's eye, and knew what I was honour bound to do.

I knelt and fixed my eyes upon hers.  Instantly I sensed the wrath of a thousand unicorns burning through her.  All older, all taller, all fixing me with the same stare that told me to stand off, to get away.  They were far away, somewhere behind barriers or portals, unreachable without their own magic.  Yet it seemed as if they were before me, standing alongside my unicorn, so strong did I feel their will.  And it battered me and I knew I would never see her again.

Taken aback, when this passed, without knowing what to say or do, I mumbled, "Sorry... Thanks... G'bye..."  Then I stood up, turned around and left the clearing for the last time.

As I walked away I heard an immense amount of rustling and creaking behind me.  Far more movement than was natural on such a still day.  After I had gone about fifty paces it all stopped.  I looked back to see the path was overgrown with moss as if no one had used it for many years.  And beyond that there was no clearing, just a mass of dense tress either side of the old path as far as the eye could see.

I kept walking in the knowledge that the moss was growing rapidly behind me with each step I took.  It was something I didn't want to see again and so I kept my quickly filling eyes faced forward and sped the process up.

As the tears began to roll down my face I wondered how the rest of life would unfurl itself.  And that I would have to either rediscover what I did before or find something new - a task I had been trying, and failing, to do for weeks on end.

Instead I wandered on, not noticing where I was going at all, worried more about my general direction than the directions I needed to get back to the lay-by.  My mind became more irrational, more hysterical, as I lumbered onward, convinced, or determined, that I was heading for a breakdown and that everything would soon come crushing down upon me. 

I imagined my life coming apart as I journeyed off route: I would have to leave my job first following weeks of sitting at my desk and staring at a blank computer screen.  Then there would be months of me not leaving the house, eating nothing but porridge, and then dry oats, until my parents put an end to it and forced me to move back in with them. 

Finally I pictured being back in my bedroom lying on my Thomas duvet for some inexplicable reason (we gave it away before I left primary school but try regression), occasionally going out to Randy's old hutch where I believed he was still alive and would spend afternoons talking to him.

That was when the fresher air of the breeze across the Great Lake struck my face and shook me out of my downward spiral daydream.  Which was a bit of a shock.  Though I had been vaguely aware somewhere underneath that I had gone off track, I ultimately believed I was on auto-pilot.

Fed up with my mind thinking too much, I sat down for a while to try and regain some semblance of order up there.  Hugging my legs to my chest I placed my forehead on my knees and just tried to forget what had happened and remember how to get from there to the van.  A journey I don't think I had done directly, or not in that direction anyway.

An imagined me had gotten part way there when I heard footsteps on the beach behind me.  I swivelled about to see Victoria, the Merlungh, exiting the forest.  I raised a hand and waved.  She returned it, approached and sat down next to me.  As she walked forward she seemed different to how she was before.  We began to talk.  Nothing I had imagined came to be.

Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn: (57) What the Lady of the Woods Said

"You had her from the start, you understand.  From first sight.  Her running away was the start of the play.  I don't think you realised any of the truths involved, so intent were you on stealing her away.  Of trying to gain what you were after without seeking to find what she wanted and trying to meet halfway. 

“The clearing, for instance, always being under your power.  Perhaps not always entirely, I regret we cannot help if you go underground too far.  But it did move itself for you, was always in an appropriate state for what you had planned and was always as fresh as you required. 

"This forest was never meant for humans.  Or not humans alone.  Of course we don't, cannot for fear of our own safety, stop such as yourself from entering.  Often we scare away ne'er-do-wells, often we don't need to.  Only a few, though, are afforded such privileges as you received.  The first time you went too far we let it slide.  When you entered the cave we thought it would soon end, that you would go too far in a different way.  But you only stopped and slept.  We decided to remove you and let the unicorn play on. 

"Since then, however, you have overstepped the mark more and more.  The kidnap is where we should have ended it, we can see that now.  Your use of black magic, or such, the complete crushing of her spirit.  Since then, though, we have seen nought but constant abuse climaxing and ending today.  When and where I am seen is where it ends.

"You must leave, unicorn hunter.  Say your goodbyes for you will not return here again.  If you do you will not see this unicorn or find this clearing, I guarantee.  And as for the cave.  It shall be closed.

"Look for something else to fill your life with.  Open your eyes and I am sure it won't take too long.

“Now, though, you must bid us farewell."

Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn: (56) The Lady of the Woods

She was astonishing.  Even though her hair was green.  It wasn't as hideous as the examples of green hair I have come across in real life.  It wasn't like dyed green hair - all garishly bright with a dried out and unnatural look.  It was perfectly natural, matching her eyebrows, and a very dark green, like a Christmas tree.  And it was long and plaited into several ponytails evenly spaced about her head and made perfectly.  Close to the top of these and circumnavigating her head was a crown made up of miniature versions of the flowers or fruits or leaves (or maybe all three) from every plant in the forest.

Her face was the sort that makes you want to kiss it.  Her eyes were like a flower that has sucked up ink and is fringed and dotted around its edges with a second colour.  In her case a pale green surrounded by a light brown.  She wore a dress that seemed to both mask and complement her slender figure.  In style, I guess it was Ancient Athenian.  Certainly it reminded me of being a teenager and dreaming of Kirsten Dunst in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Her skin was a smooth enigma.  Neither dark nor light, possibly even dirty or leaf- or bark-like.

It was only afterwards that I was able to take all of this in.  My time with her zipped by far too quickly.  And that first glance was only allowed to last the briefest of moments.  No sooner had I set my eyes upon her than she had set me to work.

"You have to move fast.  Take the pestle and mortar at my feet and crush this in it."  She took a tiny pine cone from her crown without looking at it in any way and dropped it into the lacquered wood mortar.  It grew larger as it fell, reaching full size as it hit the bottom.  "And mix your blood in it."  A simple knife with an ornate handle was lying next to the mortar.  Whether it had been there all the time or appeared out of thin air, I could not tell you.  "Then stir in these flowers.  And do it quickly before her hooves melt away, please.  Human hands must undo human inflicted wounds."

I started to reduce the pine cone to dust instantly, seizing upon the pestle in the right hand and turning it as I pressed down.  Repeating the action again and again, quickly, simply and without much thought.  After only ten seconds she told me that would be adequate.  With her watching over me, a woman of such beauty and presence, you would do anything for her and with the screams of pain that were still coming from behind me and causing a pain deep within me that drove me onward, the next part was surprisingly easy.

I took the knife in hand and cut a deep gash in the palm of my left palm before putting the blade down and squeezing my hand into a fist to let the blood run out of the bottom, digging my nails into the wound to keep the flow going. 

When she told me to stop I picked up the flowers, there were four of them altogether, all of a type I didn't recognise, and stirred them into what I already had.  Once instructed for the final time to stop I was informed what was to be done with this remedy for my work.

"Dip your hands in, this will heal your wound also, wipe the mixture over her hooves, using a flower for each one."  I hesitated for a second suddenly a little overwhelmed by the whole scene.  "NOW!" she roared and I was back in the scene and working automatically.

And I did as she bid me, quickly but carefully, taking the gloop so as not to spill a drop.  I set it down next to her right front foot and began the task.

The first problem was the smoke rising and getting in my eyes, burning them.  I quickly reasoned that the blood would help.  I bathed my hands swiftly; healing the wound I had made and coated my eyes.  This blinded me in reality but also helped me see.  In my mind’s eye I could survey the whole scene as if clouded in a thin red gel.  I set straight to work.

To begin with I was worried about  my hands getting burned.  I should have realised of course that this would not be the case.  Just as the cut across my palm had healed as I took the first flower, and helped me to see, so the medicine protected my hands against the heat of the unicorn's hooves.  Hence she had told me to cover my hands. 

I smeared the red knobbly mixture on feeling the writhing of the hooves as they bubbled under the flower.  This soon stopped once a decent covering had been applied and then the foot became free, visibly healed and as good as knew.  The glue had instead been reduced and all that was left was a pool of tepid water.

Before long all four of her hooves were free of their incarceration in hell.  She snorted in my face, covering it in a film of snot and moved with venom, more like a wild cat on the prowl than herself, and took up a position behind the Lady of the Woods.  "You are lucky," the Lady said, "I personally would have given you a bloody nose at the very least."

I wiped the mess from my face and blood from my eyes and stayed on my knees, cleaning it all from my hands by wiping them on my trousers.  I didn't dare do it on the grass in the presence of the Lady of the Woods.  I thanked her and she began to talk again.  But in a different tone.  She had been stern and businesslike before, now she was calm and kindly.

Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn: (55) The Final Plan

I always knew the final plan would come one day, I suppose.  When I got her home I thought it had happened.  Never did I dream how horribly the last plan would go.  Or be, even.  I started out all wide-eyed.  Now they were bloodshot, watering and irritable.

The wound from the unicorn’s horn had healed by the time I got back to the van.  However, though my movement wasn't inhibited in any way and I felt no stiffness at all, there was a constant pain deep inside my shoulder.  It was a living hell.  No painkillers would work and I couldn't really go to the doctor complaining about a magical ailment.

It drove me fucking mad over the following week.  I was snapping at people left, right and centre.  Whether it was my superiors wanting figures, my mother on the phone or just people asking how I was.  They didn't laugh at work that week.  They just stared at me after I was gone and signalled their concern to one another by nodding at my back and shaking their heads.

I thought I would return to the clearing the next weekend and get her back good and proper - and capture her for good or ill.  Most things had stopped mattering to me now.  All I felt was pain and I sought to end it and this unicorn fucking nonsense.  Which was probably just in my head anyway.

I entered the clearing in costume again, this time as a matador with a red rag in hand.  She was still mad for once - something I had hoped for so that she might charge.  And how she did.  At first in anger then, slowly, more and more for the sheer hell of it, getting a buzz out of it.  That was how she let her guard down enough.  She stopped really paying attention to where she was going, running at me with her head down.  And so I began edging my way towards the edge of the clearing.  Before long I was lifting the rag to reveal the trunk of a tree too close for her to avoid.

Now, originally, my plan had been a bitter one - to leave her there after a period of piss taking.  And I did laugh manically for a bit at her looking quite foolish, her horn half stuck in a tree.  But only for a short while.  I went on to pretend to take pity and told her I would help her out, for that plan had changed to one of kidnap.  For which I had a trick hidden closely by.

Not far away was the old trusty sudoku-othello board.  I wheeled it up alongside her and produced a big tub of glue telling her what I planned to do with it as I used a brush to slop it all over our old game station.  I told her that if man made items were able to stop magic then I felt her hooves encased in glue and stuck to a bit of board on wheels should do the job very nicely indeed. 

Once done with my monologue I pulled the cart so it was positioned behind the unicorn and then pushed it up against her hind legs, forcing them into the air and onto their place upon the cart.  They slid along nicely until I stopped and allowed them to set.

The plan was then going to be to saw off her horn and wheel her away.  The bits I would need to set her free were at home waiting to be used upon our return.  It was close to the most horrible plan I could have conceived, I thought (someone had once suggested a landmine).  But it seemed justified.  The pain in my shoulder was more or less driving me to it, convincing me that this was what she wanted.

The unearthly screech that was soon emanating from the unicorn's lungs and throat told me otherwise.  Smoke carrying with it a terrible stench was coming from her hooves which were bubbling.  The unicorn screamed and my mind was filled with images of her muggle cousins being boiled down at the knackers yard and yelling to me for clemency.  "Help me," Boxer mouthed, his throat failing as it filled with blood that foamed out of his mouth; a bloodshot eye looking into mine and petitioning for intervention.

And all I could think to do was run.  If I ran it wouldn't be happening.  Nothing could be real if I couldn't see or hear it.

So I tore my eyes and ears away and turned around to leave.  And instead encountered the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.  She was completely clad in green.

Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn: (54) Wrestling II

At some point in the week following the boat incident I had a moment of clarity and realised what a jerk I had been to waste so much time and money on a plan just to piss it away.  I could also see this was likely to keep happening unless I could find something else to plough myself into.  Which I couldn't and so instead resolved to return to the clearing with the simplest of ideas.

I started by revisiting an old plan.  One time, a long time ago, I had tried to wrestle the unicorn into submission and she had beaten me fair and square.  Now, though, I had a new edge.  An inner anger and bitterness to bring into the ring.  While she was unchanged, I was a much darker character now.  I had been airier before, worn bright colours, been more of a fan boy really.  Now I wore black underpants, had a black head band and very bad hair.  Metaphorically, you understand.

Oh, alright then.  More than metaphorically (save the pants).  The 'fun' part of me decided I should approach in costume.  I wore a black t-shirt with a skull on the chest, a head band with the same motif and, rather lamely, black sweatpants, at the end of which a pair of steel toe-capped boots.  Draped over the outer garments was arguably the coolest part, a long leather trenchcoat.  I looked pretty silly.  But then that was the point - I felt that a sense of humour would help get her into the fight.

And it worked nicely.  I stood, legs apart and stooped over ushering her to the fight, removing the trenchcoat to show how serious I was.  The unicorn grinned her wicked grin and walked towards me.  We faced off, waiting for the other to spring.  Circling around staring into each other's eyes for signs of when and where.  Or of weakness leading to backing out.  Of these there were no signs that I could see.  Nor could she in mine. 

All that could be seen was the fact that we both knew who would win again.  With the first twinge I launched myself forward and the bout began.  I took out her front legs first, twisting and turning her over but she sprung me off easily.

And so it continued.  We made play after play for each other, dodging and ducking all we had thrown at us as we continued toward the inevitable conclusion that caused a knot in my throat to form, grow larger and choke.

Each time I laid my hands upon her I felt an urge to turn nasty in order to gain some form of satisfaction.  To vent my spleen through physical aggression.

It happened when she pinned me.  My right hand shot up and took a firm grip of her mane and I yanked her off me and onto her back, my left knee being used to push her front legs onto her stomach to help limit her struggle.  Then my left hand grabbed her throat.

As she gasped for breath and flailed her free legs about I thought about how good this outcome could be.  This was the perfect exit door.  Without a unicorn I would be able to walk away a free man, move on with my life.  I had entered a huge maze-like cul-de-sac but there was suddenly a dark and gloomy alleyway with a dim light at the far end.  A light that was full of hope for the future.

Then I came to my senses and let her go.  And for the first and last time she punished me.  With her watery eyes focused in hate she pushed her horn through my shoulder before holding it at a steep downward angle until I slid off it and onto the ground.

Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn: (53) Reunification, the Passage to the Final Era and its Beginning

My failure in taming the unicorn, though not entirely my own fault, meant a need to return to how it was always going to have to be.  To be in it for the fun of the chase.  A kind of chaste relationship.  Too wild to tame, we would have to be friends larking about.

If she would ever see me again.  This was worse than the worms had been, I believed.  It would surely take a lot.  Or so I thought.  I cooked up a whole apology routine only to find it was not needed at all.  The unicorn seemed to have forgotten the whole thing and we got back into the swing of things with a ball game that I steered out of the clearing and attempted to steer into the van.  After her eyes followed the ball into the prison van she rolled them and shook her head before trotting away.

And that was how it would always be.  Nothing I tried could ever succeed because I needed to drug her to do so - that was all that would ever work.  And the end result was to gain something unreal or something angry.  She would not ever be what I wanted her to be.

The once used and now empty stable in my garden was a constant reminder of this.  It riled so that I took an axe to it, as if it was to blame.  I chopped and chopped until splinters flew up into my hands.  Then I set fire to what was left, trying to forget with my family over for fireworks.

The house seemed to get larger and larger at this time, the eternal silence hissing annoyingly at me like a snake that was always close at hand but out of view.  And at work, my reasons for having left temporarily had not been forgotten and people would frequently ask how my quest was going. 

While wearing wide grins. 

And laughing.

That's when I started snapping.  First at home, at the silence and nothingness.  I would get suddenly very frustrated with it and start kicking things and throwing chairs whilst first shouting at it as if it were a person standing in the corner of the room and, later, while listening to angry music and muttering.

Then at work, finally biting back when things were said, retaliating in my own stuttering and confused way.  They only kept on laughing as I became like an angry little gnome, red in the face and comical to all but myself.

All the anger built up within and I found myself entering the clearing with all this baggage on my shoulders and I began to hurl it at the unicorn.

For example.  And this was an expensive plan to just piss about on.  Thus showing what a dick I became.  Anyway, one time when I was going 'off road' to explore the forest for places I could maybe trap the unicorn I stumbled across (quite literally) a river running through the forest.  I followed the river and found it eventually led out of the forest and under the road I parked by on each visit.  While walking along it to get back to the van I started to formulate a plan.

Many months later (or was it years? it certainly felt like years), a bitter man spent a whole day dragging a rowing boat along that river to the point where it was nearest to the clearing and left it close to the water's edge with half a bag of oats inside.

A week later and I led the unicorn to that place with a trail of oats and a promise of more.  She was happy to get into the boat, to let me offer her another new experience.  The unicorn looked about herself eagerly as I rowed her downstream.  At the river bank moving sedately past and the down into the clear water and the fish.

I only thought of when and how she would get away.  Would she steer the boat to the bank and jump sprightly out?  Or would she make it sink and walk away?  I thought of the laughing the next week and my mind became clouded.  I stopped rowing and began to rock the boat.  Just gently from side to side and then harder and harder with a horrible grin on my face, reflected by a look of worry and fear on the unicorn's.

Eventually I tipped the boat and we both fell in.  She got pissed and stormed off, flicking her wet, matted hair in disdain.  I just laughed, happy to have found a new way of dealing with it.

Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn (52): ..and it all fell apart

To begin with she was a mess.  Understandable, of course, given the trauma she had suffered.  Attacked and savaged by an animal she hadn't known existed.

She lay in a heap, small and very still, as I nursed her towards full health.  Each day I would clean and dress her wound, a horrid gash down her calf, as she winced and moaned, small tears welling in her eyes.  She seemed to be in almost constant pain from the swelling of her leg (it had ballooned up to almost twice its size; I guess unicorns are allergic to dog saliva).  I crushed painkillers into her porridge to try and remedy this.  First with whatever I could find around the house before working up to ketamine.

When the swelling subsided, the pain passed and I stopped administering the drugs.  Her strength had already started to return from eating the replenishing porridge.  This, combined with the wooziness lifting, caused the unicorn to wake up.  Since the attack she had been as in a dream, disconnected and distant, somewhere other than there in the stable.  Now she returned to her full senses, seeing and understanding where I had brought her and all that that meant.  And she hated me for it.

She was still not fit enough to stand or do very much about her situation.  The wound was still quite open, the infection, though no longer causing her leg to swell, must still have been stopping it from healing.  Instead of fighting me, then, she began by ignoring me.  She refused to acknowledge my presence or anything I did for her.  She didn't even look at me, or not really, as I busied myself by changing her food, water, hay and bandages and clearing up her mess.  If I walked within her eyesight she reacted in no way at all, only continued to stare with glassy eyes dead through me. 

She soon tired of this, though, and of the silence once I stopped talking to her.  That was when she got nasty.  Snarling and spitting at me when I came in, not ceasing until I was gone again.  She let me change her bandage though and everything else, she just made darn sure it wasn't at all pleasant.  She even saved up her shit for when I had just mucked out. 

Her biting me was the last straw.  I sat inside, alone, knowing that what I had been striving for for so long was outside and the result was a bitter taste for us both.  I made a resolution to end it.  I would feed her the sugared porridge to sedate her and once she was better I would take her back to the forest.

The porridge certainly got rid of the nasty unicorn.  It made her forget her anger toward me completely and she became friendly towards me again.  We even played Othello once more.  And that just made me more depressed when I was away from her - I was interacting with a fake.  I started to spiral downwards.  I knew I had to release her but also that I could keep her in this state forever if I so chose.  To get what I wanted for once.

That was when the darker moments began, the moments that galvanised me into taking her back.  They were like a shadow that covers almost everything, leaving only the bare facts.  I want to believe it was a dream, it feels like one rather than a proper memory.  But, at night, when the real me was asleep, I would sneak out to the stable, having already slipped the unicorn sleeping pills, and gouge at the wound a little to prolong our time together.  As I say, I want to believe it never happened and hope to God it did not.

She did heal, though.  And quickly after the shadow had arrived.  I led her to the van as I had in the forest.

I let her go at the edge of the forest.  She darted away more quickly than I had ever seen her move.  I broke down in the lay-by and wept.

Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn (51): A few weeks of happiness ended violently…

The first evening was something of a scary start.  The very moment I opened the van doors she was pining for more porridge.  Whining and mewing and begging for more.  She would not stay in her stable. The unicorn kept constantly on my heels, rubbing her face against my calves or making pathetic noises to let me know she was there and that she wanted more.  She just followed me until I started to brew up some more. Only then did she give me space. 

I gave her another three bowls and she seemed happy, got very excited and bouncy, wanting to play.  I tried telling her it was getting late.  Tried calming her down with the ball which she energetically smacked over the garden fence.  Eventually she peaked and went to sleep in her new bed.

I myself went to bed tired and paranoid.  I lay awake for what seemed like an eternity worrying about how this was going.  What if I was creating an addict, a live-in horror, a slave to the drug I had forced into her system, myself the slave called upon to make more, to keep dishing it out, keeping her up.  I virtually made myself sick from worrying about it all.  It was surely all going to go horribly fucking wrong.  I loomed on the edge of a great abyss created by me waiting to fall and fall and fall wondering what it would sound like when I hit something.  Or she did.

Eventually I was waking up with the sun bright in my face.  I got up, dressed and went into the garden to find the unicorn of old happy and ready to greet me as she had been during the taming period I had spent in the forest.  I went inside.  Obediently she stayed outside. 

The night before I had gone inside to make her porridge only after a ten minute shouting-versus-neighing match about her not coming into the house: I had had to push the unicorn out of the kitchen door at least three times before she let me be and left of her own accord.  And that was only after I had given up and started to get the pans and the oats out whilst simultaneously letting forth a torrent of abuse (I was fortunate not to have any neighbours at that time). 

It would seem she had remembered something of the previous evening. 

I was much calmer as I made the porridge that morning.  My only outburst was one of laughter as I came to realise the porridge had acted as a spell rather than a drug.  Like a magical potion.  I giggled a lot at that thought.  It held me in good stead for several days.

***

And so the unicorn began to live contentedly in my back garden.  We began our new life together by playing ball again.  Whacking it back and forth up and down the garden.  And we went back to our Othello battles.  Which soon vied for place among other games once I taught her draughts and then chess (the pieces had wheels and a horn divot in the back to help them move).  Otherwise we would spend evenings and weekends just arsing around, blowing the seeds off dandelions and the like.  I left her to her own devices during the day.  In those first weeks I have next to no idea what she got up to.  Probably slept and munched on the oats I filled her trough up with each morning.

Everything was calm and bliss until the new neighbours and their dog arrived.  That was when she started to become a little antsy and curious as to what was beyond the garden.  The new smells and sounds woke up something inside her and I began to see evidence of her daytime activities. 

She would pull at anything that grew over or under the fence to start with.  Grapevines and creepers, ivy and whatever else I would find mangled and stripped naked on the lawn, leaves everywhere.  One day I came home to find her trying to get her front hooves onto the fence to help her peer over.  As I opened the back door she stopped suddenly and tried to look innocent.

That was all as the bits and pieces were moved in and the fella next door sorted out the garden.  Probably he was grateful of the unicorn's help.  If he even noticed it.  They are quite insular next door.  We have never spoken since the apologies. 

Once they were settled, their dog was brought from a friends or a home, I don't know, and released into the garden.  This sent the unicorn completely mad with curiosity.  She was positively bursting to see what had appeared to be her own special neighbour.  I should have told her or shown her in some way.  Not just left her to it.  Anything but left her bloody to it.

The first day I left them alone she began to ram the fence.  Repeatedly by all accounts.  Eventually, inevitably, it smashed and the unicorn was brought face to face with the rottweiler.  It snarled and it seethed and it charged toward her.

Up until then I guessed the unicorn had been happy to not use magic.  Or had forgotten it so completely that it didn't matter.  Suddenly, though, she needed it.  And couldn't use it.  Instead she could only spring up and out of the way of this vicious creature, too scared to fight against its teeth and claws. 

That was how I found her.  Only I was too late to save her from harm.  The unicorn had run out of energy and been bitten quite horribly on the leg and was lamely cowering as the rottweiler stood growling threateningly to finish her off if she tried anything else.

I rushed out quickly and quietly grabbing the mutt's collar and dragging it back home.  I received quite something of an apology.  I think the couple next door still believe their sweet-but-bad-tempered pooch broke down the fence.  They never seemed to notice how flustered I was nor the stable.  As I said, insular.

Then I ran back to my garden and began nursing procedures.

Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn (50): How A Victory Became Mine

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.

Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn (49): The Elf on Great Sugar Loaf Mountain

I went to County Wicklow to escape it all.  I removed myself over the seas and into the past, to the birthplace of an ancestor of mine who left the Emerald Isle to escape the famine.  She married a man from County Cork and settled in Norwich, I think.  At least, that is where their grandson, my great-grandfather was from.

Anyway.  I stayed in Bray (watched Wanderers on the Friday) and went out driving and walking in the surrounding countryside.  It was such a massive change to walk around relatively open ground.  I could see for miles most places.  And the sky.  So much sky.  With great fluffy clouds.  Uninterrupted coverage, not a canvas bordered by trees.  Where I couldn't see for miles my view was obscured by Great Sugar Loaf Mountain.

I had decided even before I arrived that I would climb this feature of the countryside.  On an earlier trip it had captivated my imagination as I passed on the train to and from Dublin.  As well as on a trip to a local estate where I couldn't take my eyes off her.  All the beauty that estate’s owners had tried to landscape into the garden seemed like a sick parody of nature in comparison to the Wicklow Mountains' centrepiece.

On the third day I trekked around and up the slopes of the Great Sugar Loaf.  It was on those slopes I met an elder of the Mountain’s elf inhabitants.  I couldn't believe my eyes.  A tiny (two foot by my reckoning, I never saw him standing) old man with a great wiry grey and white beard that reached down to his middle was sitting on a rock looking up at me as if we had an appointment.  What I could see of his face was kindly and tanned, possibly from a lifetime of sitting on that very rock.  A stick leaned against his leg, covered in elaborate decorative carvings that I never managed a complete study of.  "Good afternoon," he bid me, in an accent that seemed to mix Scandinavia with Ireland and just as any rambler would have done.  When I did not return the greeting, but stood open mouthed, he added, "Unicorn hunter."

My jaw dropped further at that, although I did manage to find it in me to talk.  "Good afternoon to you," I replied with a nod.  And then down to business, "How..?"  I paused, unable to complete the question, still just a bit too thrown by his greeting.

It didn't need to be completed.  "My wife, a very wise and gifted lady-elf, predicted your coming some years ago.  As a child she learned to see the future in the waters of the Vale of Avoca.  She saw you and I talking.  She put an image of you in my mind so that I would know you when you came.  That you sought to trap a Unicorn she sensed.  I know not how.

"The vision seemed odd to our minds at the time as we elves have very little contact with you giants on account of your violent nature-raping and elf-squishing tendencies.  Although there have been times.  We have fought side by side with your kind as well as helping out and hindering in other ways. 

"Come now, boy, sit and let us talk.  My wife said I would be able to help you in your task, although she did not know how.  Her visions are quite silent."

And so I sat down on the ground, removing a flask of tea from my rucksack and offered the elf a cup.  He said yes, producing his own flask and a cup.  Later on I would try a most delicious sweet minted tea that tasted very much like humbugs.

He told me of the history of the Elves of Great Sugar Loaf Mountain.  The theories on how they came to be there, in Ireland, and the story of how they came to be at the Mountain itself.  Apparently the leader of the time, Olf, selected and rejected sites all over the country before finally settling on a site close to where they had first landed.

And he also told me other tales from their past, involving other key characters who had shaped their time and society living inside the Great Sugar Loaf.  He told of their fights with the indigenous elves of Lugnaquilla and how they were solved, of Morris and his trip to Iceland where he found the courage to return and end the cult of kings and decadence.  The old elf told me of how they had played tricks on and helped in equal measure both bandits and refugees in the times when the Wicklow Mountains were still remote to humans.  And of how they stole buttons from the British Army at a time when they were not.  Finally he told the adventures of his own life and how he had met, fell in love with and rescued his wife from her own elf brethren.

I learned too of their craft-bound ways, how they strived to live surrounded by beauty merged with practicality at all times.  It reminded me of that visit to the V&A; I mentally shrugged.  He spoke of the great hall where they met and ate each evening.  And of the homes they lived in, all cut into the sugar found below where we sat.

And then he asked about me.  I told him all I had told Schnizzelwort and the Merlungh, adding all that had happened since in regard to the domestication and how the attempt had ended.

"They rescued her because I got too close," I ended, looking down. 

The elf fell quiet.  After a long pause he asked thoughtfully, "Do you know why, or how, you got too close, as you put it?"

I looked at him, puzzled, "The stable, making her dependent," I answered firmly.

"Not exactly.  Your human things wore her down, you see.  They took her magic, made her incapable of escape."

"That's why she seemed lethargic and lost the appetite to wander?"

"Precisely.  It is also why she has never got into your 'van'.  It is always on the road, yes?"  I nodded, “Mostly.” 

"It is the man-made element she fears.  Get her above the road and she will be powerless and yours."

"But how?"

"The one thing you have never tried and yet would have been obvious to so many.  Sugar."

Now, given where we were and all, I thought the aged elf was having me on.  I gave him a look that suggested as much.

"To be sure.  Sugar.  Unicorns go mad for the stuff.  Do not try and feed it directly, though.  She will be too sensible to eat sugar lumps, no doubt.  Put it in her porridge and she will go anywhere for you, mark my words, she will."

And that was that.  I couldn't believe I had not thought of it before.  Always with the god damned oats it had been.  On discovering this secret I thought not of the warnings hidden in our conversation.  All I wanted was that unicorn at home and for victory to finally be mine.

Attempts to Capture and Tame a Unicorn (48): Why

Saturdays and Sundays soon became a hole I sunk into only for work to drag me back out again.   I looked to fill the weekends with something new but came up short every week.  Even began to wish I still had John.

I had gone back to work heavy hearted, feeling it was all over, that I would never have another chance.  I sat at my desk each day redundant.  Rather than let my mind wander to find the next plan, I could only reminisce of what had been before.  That planning and anticipation had been what got me through the week.  Now I sat vacant mostly.  Until events began to pull me back out.

After a couple of months whispers started to go around the office.  An e-mail had arrived at another desk explaining why I had left and what I had been doing while I was away.  How they found out I do not know.  That has always been a mystery to me.

At first it was just that, whispers.  Then there were sniggers as well as I walked by.  Then the hints and allusions that became more and more snide until the actual piss taking began.  How they laughed and joked at my expense.  Until, finally, among it came the questions.  “Why?” was an oft repeated one, prefixing many different questions.  With the men, laughter accompanied and with the women it was pity.  But always, “Why?”

*

It was a mixture of wanting to, needing to, and still being able to that got me started.  The last perhaps being the most important.

The whole madness came out of a visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum.  It is a wonderfully huge museum where I always seem to find something I haven't seen before.  One time, I remember, it was the plaster casts of Trajan's Column.  I stood at the bottom of each half staring up and getting dizzy before moving to the bridge and taking them in more properly.  I felt excited that I had probably got a better view than the pilgrims in Rome yet hungry to see the real thing standing in what is left of Trajan's Forum.

That fateful day it was the tapestry room.  I had gone in to look at the Pre-Raphaelite paintings hanging in the V&A.  I'd already been to Manchester, the gallery at Uni and the Tate to see the boys.  And I had seen the William Morris section of the V&A British Galleries on another day.  That day paintings were to be my thing.  I scanned the map and planned the route to see Jane Morris in a Day Dream and The Mill-Girls Dancing to Music by a River.

On my way I walked by a pair of big, heavy, tinted glass doors that ignited my curiosity in an instant.  I was extremely intrigued to find out what was beyond that needed such a mysterious and guarded entrance.  Although it must have said on or by the door, I went through to discover and meet my fate.

Almost immediately upon entering the darkened room a small tapestry in the far right corner caught my eye; in particular, the white area at its centre.  Maybe it was just because this piece happened to be in my line of sight.  Or perhaps because all the other tapestries were huge, faded and filled with too much action, while this, though much smaller, was quite vibrant, colourful and eye-catching.  Either way I was drawn toward this slab of colour arranged around a bright white core.

I wandered almost trance-like towards the far end ignoring all else around me until I had learned more.  The tapestry was a type called a Millefleur, a form in demand around 1500 which was covered by many different flowering plants.  This one was a square filled mainly with flowers and a few animals (birds mainly) that were brown and almost indistinguishable from all around them.  In the centre, however, a white beauty stood out, a great horn sticking out from her head.

I had not thought of unicorns for some time.  Once they had appeared in my dreams and brought warmth at a time when I felt often cold and alone.  Gladdened once more I read on and discovered my future.  I left feeling different because I now had a purpose.

The unicorn tapestry was next to one depicting the medieval myth man Roland, known to me as The Gunslinger.  As I left Room 94, I thought of him and how I was now as him, on a quest.  Not for the Dark Tower, though.  Not for a curse.  At least, that was how I felt at the time.

*

Trailing around London can drain you, leaving you on a low ebb.  Within a week I was in my local library starting the research that would take me to the enchanted forest where I found what I’ve always felt was the scene in that tapestry.  I went after the unicorn because I wanted to, because I needed to, and because I still could.  Nothing had changed.  No matter what anyone said, I simply had to go on.

First, though, I had to let things simmer down.  I extended my respite in Ireland.