When Philbert finished mopping up the last of the garlic and grease from his plate with the spongy cap of a seeded breadbutton, he popped it into his mouth and leaned back in great contentment and released a loud sigh. He laced his fingers over his sated paunch and closed his eyes, humming softly and luxuriating in his repast with full intention. Little Mullaby, licking his plate clean, looked up at the sound. There was grease smeared at the tip of his nose and it seemed a wonder his wide eyes could not see it for themselves.

“Are they ready?” Mullaby asked.

“Not yet,” Philbert replied with his eyes closed. Mullaby’s own eyes wandered to the little embrous fire glowing in the gathering dusk and the two large eggs suspended just above on a lattice of green twigs. He licked his lips and stared at them until Philbert took notice, popping one eye open to investigate the silence.

“They don’t cook any faster for the watchin’,” he said.

“Will they cook any slower?” Mullaby replied, slightly alarmed.

“Stare away,” Philbert said, letting his eye close yet again. “Let me know if one of them hatches.” He nestled deeper into the mossy embankment behind him and felt the green blanket first give and then mold to his shape, inviting him to stay and put off until tomorrow whatever could be so put off. Philbert briefly considered it. He was an inveterate napper and quite the champion snoozer, when he put his mind to it, but he had already set his mind to a separate objective and not even the distraction of a particularly fine bed of moss would sway him from that intention. Probably. He had many miles to go as of yet. The dry season would make easy crossing of most all the creeks and streams in his path but there was something to be said for the sheer distance of it. He would probably need a pig.

“I wish I could lay eggs.” Mullaby’s high-pitched voice sliced through Philbert’s inattention and drew him back to the world beyond his grey-black eyelids. He sat up with a start and his face contorted through a strange series of half-expressions before coming to the conclusion that none could quite capture the appropriate levels of consternation and confusion and settling on simple incredulity.

“You wish for what now?”

“That I could lay eggs,” Mullaby repeated with a quiet confidence as though it were the most natural thought in the world. “Then I could have all the eggs I wanted, whenever I wanted. No scrounging for nests or tree-climbing. No no eggs!” Mullaby stared into the fire and beamed, having arrived at a suitable solution to the problem as he saw it, its impossibility notwithstanding.

“You would eat eggs that you laid? Your own eggs?”

“Yep!” Mullaby turned to Philbert with a toothy smile that brandished all his fangs like rows of innocent knives. “All of ‘em!”

Mullaby giggled and Philbert pondered the finer points of cannibalism in silence for a long moment.

When Philbert was satisfied the eggs were properly cooked, he plucked them from the fire with spindly fingers and handed one to Mullaby. They sat side-by-side with their toes warm in the embers and Philbert showed his young companion the finer points of sophisticated egg-handling. He rapped on the shell, holding it close to his outstretched ear to meter the slosh of its contents and confirm its readiness, motioning Mullaby to do the same. Then, with a quick scratch and flick from one of his long claws, Philbert sliced away the pointed end of the shell and sent it soaring into the fire for a deft decapitation as would make his more revolutionary forebears swell with recollection. For there was a time when the plumpins toyed with the notions of hierarchy and authority, governance and bureaucracy, and clans formed colonies formed kings formed corporations, each step in the sequence a cruder and less accurate approximation of the thing than the one before, and always, without fail or exception or anomaly or aberration, ending in a sort of violence that bordered on cartoonish and evinced a clear preference for any punishment that entailed removal of the head. When a dwindling population proved the experiment an unsustainable leap in their sociological evolution, the plumpins abandoned such ideas and retreated to the Hillocks where, as a species, they were still wrestling with the finer points of “property.”

Mullaby, whose ancestors had never so much wagged a fist in anger, much less participated in fiery rebellion or separated anyone’s head from their shoulders, gave a couple timid scratches at the shell of his egg before stoving in the top with a clumsy prod that was probably supposed to be a flick. He frowned down at the egg and then frowned up at Philbert and then frowned a little at himself for good measure. Philbert took the egg from him, gave him his own, and then set about repairing what little damage had been done. Then the two sat for a long silence and sipped their piping hot eggs in peace. Mullaby scooted a little closer and Philbert didn’t mind.

By the time they were finished with their eggs and had eaten the shells, the sun was setting fast and the shadows in the Hillocks were coming to life. Loops of thorny vines threw phantom lariats over the hills, elongated and spreading to meet the pooling blackness in the steeper vales. The great trees became sticking points for pillars of pitch that dripped into the many creeks and streams beginning to glimmer like ink in the encroaching darkness. Night came quickly this time of year but that was all well and good for traveling plumpins, who could see just as well in blackest night as the brightest day and would not be so tempted to nap along the way.

As they walked through the gathering dusk, Philbert asked many questions and Mullaby answered what he could, though he seemed to exist in a perpetual state of confusion and uncertainty. At one point, Philbert was quite sure that the little chap had forgotten his name.

“Well, my mom always called me Mullaby,” he said, tottering behind Philbert with his arms once again full of eggs. “Though I guess I don’t rightly recall any one time when she would have sat me down and squared me in the eyes and told, ‘Mullaby, your name is Mullaby and I gives you that.’ I s’pose it could be a nickname-“

“Or an insult,” Philbert interjected absentmindedly, eyes fixed downward and forward, scanning the path in front of him for something still unfound. As such, it took him a while to notice that Mullaby had stopped walking and was staring at his back with a wounded expression on his face.

Among the few questions that the plumpin had been able to answer, nearly all had been about his mother, and the resulting picture painted in strange anecdotes and oddball quotationing was of a parenting style both neglectful and overbearing, creating from this contradiction a creature lost in near every sense of the word, thrown into the world with an urging to find his fortune and the figure of his mother etched in his mind’s eye like that of a towering deity, ever watchful, ever reproachful and never satisfied. As a result, Mullaby was a sensitive thing and prone to emotional ricochet, caroming from one extreme to the other, reacting wildly to the world around him with an inexhaustible energy that Philbert recognized with envy and so was prone to disliking. But, he was beginning to understand, this also made Mullaby exceptionally easy to manipulate.

“I’m kidding,” said Philbert. “As friends do?”

This seemed to placate young Mullaby and he broke out in a big smile and rushed to catch up to Philbert, who had taken a squat near a small bush at the edge of the trodden path.

“Whatcha doin’?”

If Philbert had asked many questions, Mullaby had responded by asking this single question repeatedly and by now Philbert knew that an answer was the only expedient way to make the noise stop. In this way, Mullaby unknowingly received his first lessons in toadstool farming.

“I am looking for a pig,” Philbert replied, not taking his eyes from the rich black dirt in front of him and the large cloven print pressed deep into it. “And I think this one is very close.”