When Philbert awoke, the day was mostly spent. He yawned and stretched and wriggled in his nest for a few minutes, making the contented squeals that freshly napped plumpins will make, before finally rising and peering about in idle curiosity. His long flapping ears perked and pricked, taking in the familiar Hillock sounds. He scratched his belly, still warm as a sunning stone, and it gave a rumble. He’d not eaten but for a few handfuls of blackberry in the morning and thought it was about to time for a proper meal.

Following his nose, he came upon a fresh patch of wild onions and dug them up, brushing the black soil from the white bulbs before setting them in one of the many pouches slung around his waist. Dandelions soon followed, yellow and juicy, then some flowering cowleeks, a whole heaping of wild garlic and a fair smattering of flat-capped toadstools growing from the damp cleft of a lichenous boulder.

Then Philbert fashioned himself a broad and drooping hat of mud and old leaves, set it upon his head like a great upturned basin and squatted in the roots of a nearby tree. He sat entirely motionless, eyes closed to slits and unblinking, with one grey hand extended in front of him, still as stone, a pair of very small and very blue toadstools in his palm. He sat and he waited.

It wasn’t long before Philbert heard the telltale scritterings and scratchings of little claws on the bark of the branches above him. Something coming closer. Something fat and furry, juicy and just out of reach… It scampered down the trunk in darting fits, the scrabbling of its hooked nails coming closer, ringing louder in Philbert’s ears. His mouth watered. His breath stopped. His eyes barely moved behind those half-closed lids as a large grey squirrel edged into sight, pointed nose sniffling, whiskers twitching. Its little black eyes flitted across Philbert’s disguise and, seeing nothing, settled on the toadstools in his palm. Sensing no danger, it crept right into Philbert’s hand.

Not half of an hour later, Philbert had a small fire burning in a clutch of grey stones, onions and garlic sizzling on the metal plate resting atop. The squirrel pelt, scraped and salted, lay to his side atop a flat slate of rock. “Not much meat on you, was there?” Philbert said, throwing the scraps of gamey meat onto the makeshift skillet, where they sputtered and slid in the hot grease.

“Maybe not, but it sure smells good.”

The small voice rang out from just behind, and Philbert turned with a start to see a small and sad-looking plumpin with an apologetic look on his face and both hands clasped in front of him, forming a sling filled to its precarious brim with great white eggs. He tottered forward in a half-slouch, wide-eyed and ears low, ready to attempt a scamper if the situation should call for it. But there was no need.

“More likely the garlic than the squirrel, but I should say it does,” said Philbert. “And you’re welcome to some, if you’d like.”

“I would,” the small plumpin responded. “But I’ve got these eggs…”

At this point, it becomes important to understand the complicated relationship that plumpins have with eggs.

Plumpins love eggs, but it is a reckless love. It is not the love they have for pigs, which keeps them grounded and grateful, but a love that drives many to strange deeds and foolhardy pursuits. Some of this is due, no doubt, to their relative scarcity in the Hillocks. Having no native egg-layers of any meaningful size, the only eggs available to plumpins are those found by chance in the wayward nests of migratory birds. And when such a nest is found, nothing can keep a hungry plumpin from trying to get a hold of the eggs inside. This is often comic, sometimes tragic, but always ends in good eating. Mostly for the plumpins.

This is also where another side effect of their scarcity comes into play: plumpins, as a people, never quite figured out how to transport eggs in any reliable or efficient manner. Absent any regular need and given how speedily they disappeared once found, the plumpins had simply never devoted any successful thought to solving that one particular problem. Nevertheless, such is the voracity with which plumpins approach these fragile treasures, that many a plumpin finds himself with arms full of eggs before concocting any real plan for what to do next. This led to the common saying around the Hillocks, “That plumpin can really hold his eggs,” and to the predicament that little Mullaby Wort presently found himself in.

“I found this nest,” Mullaby was saying, Philbert eyeing the eggs in his hand with a hunger that bordered on the erotic. “I was playing in the bramblethorn and I was pretending to be a bumbly-bee and I was flying through the creepers and I found this nest and it had these eggs and now I’ve got these eggs and I should probably go home. My name is Mullaby.”

The little plumpin shifted from foot to foot and the eggs rattled and clacked. His eyes went wide and he froze.

“Easy now,” said Philbert. Pulling his plate from the fire with his bare hands, for a plumpin’s skin is hardier than most, he leapt to his feet and hurried to the younger plumpin, arms outstretched to catch anything that might fall. But none did and Philbert gave a sigh of relief that Mullaby soon joined.

“That was close.”

“Yes, it was,” said Philbert. “Why don’t you let me help you just a bit here? Why don’t I just take a few of these off your hands?” Without waiting for a reply, Philbert began plucking the topmost eggs from the pile and nestling them in the crook of his arm. Within moments, their roles were reversed.

“What just happened?” Philbert said. Mullaby shrugged, a single egg left in each hand. “Well put those down and help me!”

Carefully depositing the eggs in the tall grass, Mullaby began taking back his eggs from Philbert, piling them once again in his little arms, when Philbert gave a shout.

“Not like that! Put them on the ground with the others or we’ll be at this all day!”

The smaller plumpin looked from Philbert’s face to his arms full of eggs, then to the eggs in his own hands and the eggs on the ground and then back to the Philbert’s eggs. After a couple slow revolutions of his eyes and the strained grey matter behind them, Mullaby had a revelation. Then he lost it, reaching once more for the eggs in Philbert’s arms.

“Stop it!” cried Philbert, nearly pirouetting in an attempt to keep away from Mullaby’s grasping paws. “Eggs on ground! Eggs on ground!” Wide-eyed once again, Mullaby’s revelation returned to its nesting place and, for the moment at least, he understood the plan. Placing his eggs carefully in the tall grass with the others, he turned to Philbert for more.

Several moments and one messy accident later, Philbert and Mullaby stood amidst a haphazard constellation of eggs, all planted upright and expectant like an audience or perhaps like tombstones in a cemetery of men. Philbert admired their work with his hands on his hips and Mullaby shifted restlessly with his feet in a small pool of yolk. He held in his hands the fragments of broken shell and looked rather forlorn.

“It’s just one egg,” said Philbert.

“I know,” said Mullaby. “But it was my favorite.”

Philbert sighed and returned to the fire that had now long since gone out.