It feels weird to be coming to the end of the month. I need another 600 words today but I have to go eat sushi.
The few Skookums that were left didn’t know all the other names the man gave them. They didn’t much care, not having the gift of speech. The main thing they were concerned about was trying not to get killed off by hunters and logging trucks. Being obligate carnivores wasn’t much of a problem for the Skookums. They had gotten the bad reputation of being cannibals, but they actually preferred salmon or deer to a smelly human being.
When Mount Saint Helens blew it sent eighty three percent of the Skookum population hurtling down the Toutle River where they blasted through Harry Truman’s cabin. Of course, by then they were all just a milkshake of rocks, trees, mud, snow and bodies. Somewhere in the DreamTime the Skookums communed with Harry and his sixteen cats.
The DreamTime was how the Skookums did communicate, be they near or far, and when a human fell into a state where words were lost, they could join in. Ollie Svenberg joined in with a particular Skookum when he collapsed in the woods of hypothermia. The Skookum that found him could be called Salal Blossom if he needed a name, his consciousness sometimes seen in the DreamTime as a dangling white flower covered with dew.
Salal Blossom pulled Ollie Svenberg into his den to keep him alive. He felt his dreaming from several miles away, pictures of spring and golden haired women dancing. Salal Blossom hadn’t seen a Skookum female for so many years, he felt Ollie’s pain of loss. Salal Blossom crept slowly around the dream, making sure not to scare Ollie or the women away, then dreamed about his women all dead in the volcano blast.
Salal and Ollie finally met on the third day of dreaming. Inga and her daughters danced with Salal Blossom’s women in the sunny glen of the dream. Salal and Ollie looked into each other’s eyes and shared the grief. Ollie didn’t understand anything but the grief, having been around it all his life. Salal Blossom felt him start to drift out of the DreamTime, so he put his human trappings back on and left him where he fell.
