Since their return from Shamballah, Daklakht and Dagrolyt have been staying out at the Refugee Camp, where we've built enough experimental bakhls to house about ten families in non-skesk comfort. Primitive huts, but well-designed and a lot better than sleeping out in the rain. Or not, depending on how strictly you adhere to Atli. Although now that the weather is warming up it's actually nice to sleep outside. Even Adam often prefers to. As does Daklakht, even though there are almost always some empty huts available, since the Camp's population is in a constant flux. He doesn't want a house, but he does enjoy having a his own table out there, since he has become fascinated with studying brightly colored pictures of different places in the world, as found in slick and shiny NokhSo magazines. He'd been considering going back to Aket and his work as Alutna-jii, but had been assured by passing Nokhons that his protégé, young Daset, had been doing an excellent job in his absence. So he didn't need to be in a great hurry about it. Understandable, what with Masnia visiting him every day and Magga every night. Adam visits him too, maybe even developing a belated father-son relationship. (No,I don't feel jealous about that, since my adoptive son and I already have a very nice relationship.) About 50 yards way his next-door neighbor is Dagrolyt, living in one of the larger huts along with his two ladies and his brother Dabronat and Malasna, a nuclear family. They enjoy living together, although such tribal groupings are traditionally frowned upon in Nokhon culture, which promotes isolation. They are also the very people best at adapting to the "civilization lifestyle"; rejecting the most inhibiting rules and restrictions, accepting new possibilities, mixing with humans, learning the language, etc. Here at Camp residents come and go; some of them try to study English half-heartedly, maybe learn a few phrases, until they find out how hard it is to actually communicate with another species. A very few Nokhons go native whole hog and learn a usable vocabulary, then find themselves a job so that they can actually function in the modern world. Most just come here to noncommittally dip their toes in the Nokhon-NokhSo culture to see what it's like. But that's fine, at least we're all becoming accustomed to one another. We also get the occasional human being who wants to learn to speak Nokhontli. Academics, linguists, climate crisis activists, some quite dedicated. Most of them go for the weekend workshop here at the Hacienda, for some actual contact with native speakers, then continuing lessons with the video CDs we've produced, some with Adam speaking the language, or with The Great Dambaraggan, Master Nokhon Orator. Generally Adam is most popular with younger people (and the girls), being a currently famous rock star doesn't hurt. Dambaraggan is favored by academics (or snobs) and Shakespearians, because he performs like a big fat hairy Fallstaff and has the girth to back it up. Actually, he's very good. But now Dambaraggan will be the only native- speaking teacher of Nokhontli we can offer, since Adam is going off to do the USA Concert Tour with Chrome Pie. They’ll be starting in Salt Lake City in just a few days and on their way further east, and be gone for at least three months. Pokey's going with them, so I'll be overtaking his duties of teaching English to Nokhons. It's funny: I was Pokey's English teacher at Monroe High School and he was one of my absolutely worst students. Now it's him who is the better teacher because he has more patience with these stupid Bigfoot blockheads. Most of them are undisciplined and willfully ignorant, but so was Pokey back in high school, so he can relate. We also have limited capabilities (2 rooms) to offer room and board to those wishing to have some extended interaction with squatches, for perfecting conversational skills. Several members of the Indigenous Primate Research Center have put in some weeks with us and whichever Nokhons might currently be guests, everyone usually having a nice time of it. It can be quite social. Happy hour is at 5:00 pm. At the moment (12th of May) we have two such students staying with us (real live paying customers). One is a new guest, evidently a rather talented linguist named John. Trim, athletic, late 30's. He's only started a couple of days ago but is already capable of simple but effective conversations in Nokhontli. I asked if he spoke any other languages, he answered Russian, Arabic, Korean. He did not seem to be bragging, in fact, I got the opposite impression that there were others he wasn't naming. Especially after he had a passing conversation with Roberto in fluent Spanish. Roberto deVega is our other live-in student, also fluent at several languages, now learning Nokhontli. He's from Mexico, is only 12 years old but smart and dedicated to protecting us from his evil drug-lord father, Salvador deVega. I label him as a paying customer, but that's only officially, for the sake of his legality as an out-of-state student. Actually we're paying his tuition ourselves just so there's a paper trail to ward off his father's lawyers, if they should come after us again. But the thing is, Roberto is actually learning the language. He's only been with us about a month but he has squatch friends he talks with every day, his command of Nokhontli already much better than their English. He's a happy kid so he tells jokes-- in Nokhontli. The hard part about that language is not so much the sounds you have to make, but also the body language, the gestures, the facial expressions. He's getting those down nicely. It probably helps that he speaks English, Portuguese and Zapoteca on top of his native Spanish. Roberto was a little sad when Adam and the band had to leave on their USA Tour, they were all much closer to his age than us old farts left behind, but he just got better at Nokhontli and now he is best buddies with a young Nokhon named Dalarbart. They walk into Monroe together for pizzas now and then, so Dalarbart's English is actually becoming understandable now. Naturally enough, Roberto would have liked to go on the concert tourné of the USA with a wild & crazy rock 'n' roll band, but that was out of the question, considering the legal problems that would have caused us. It was risky enough that he was a foreign runaway child staying with us under the sympathetic supervision of the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office. Our excuse for being allowed to take care of him being that his own Mexican Drug Cartel family is considered a criminal environment. Taking a minor across state lines would have had the FBI after us and given the deVega lawyers a chance to reclaim him. There was also the daily problem of the lifestyle he'd be exposed to in that bus full of horny young lovers (sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, right?) who really didn't want a nice but curious kid hanging around them day and night for the next three months non-stop. We had a variation of the same dilemma with him here. We had the kha-rat for the month of May little more than a week ago and we had to make sure Roberto didn't see that. Part of the dilemma was that we didn't want to lie to him, which in fact Adam simply cannot do anyway. Besides, Roberto's too smart a kid and he'd figure things out. So we told him the truth: that the Nokhons practice a ceremony every full moon and strangers or newcomers (or children) are not invited. We arranged for him to stay three days with my Uncle Gary and Aunt Rhonda in Seattle: they live near Green Lake now and could loan him a bicycle so that he could finally explore the big city. That was more than fine with him. But Roberto also let us know that he was accustomed to "morally challenging" situations, his drug-lord father owned several bordellos in Mexico and took Roberto along a few times so that he would be a real macho hombre when he grew up. He went on to explain that Mexican bordellos were not just whorehouses, but semi-respectable restaurants where families came to eat dinner, drink bebidas and hear music along with the local elite. For us, of course, our morally challenging situation was that the local legal system would consider a squatch orgy as being criminally immoral and psychologically unfit for any child to see. So we had to make sure nothing gets seen, more to protect ourselves from moral watchdogs than protect this child-- who would probably only be entertained rather than shocked.
Elaine and I had been in town to do the day's shopping, lots of organic vegetables for our Nokhon friends, more ice cream for Dagrolyt, so I got out to the Mead Hall around noon. John, our newest student of Nokhontli, was already practicing the language one-on-one with Dambaraggan. The Master Orator was impressed with John's fourth day of progress, he had some vocabulary and the basic rules of grammar down-- pretty simple compared to most languages --the trick is in the gestures, which Dambaraggan was showing him. But they were at an awkward point because neither of them was fluent enough in the other's language to completely understand questions or explanations; usually Pokey took care of those problems, so I stepped in to help them out. I too found myself impressed by how much John already knew. "John, where have you learned Nokhontli before?" I had to ask. "I knew a Bigfoot when I was a kid, he was my giant friend. Like in a Disney movie, y'know. He taught me some words." "Are you still in touch with him?" "No. That was in California, my parents moved to the East Coast and I had to go with them. They never believed he existed-- nobody did back then. I was only nine. Never saw him again." "Did you ever go looking?" "Yes, of course, once I was old enough, but never found a trace. Later on, in the military, I worked with a fellow officer who'd also had dealings with Nokhons a long time ago." I told that story to Dambaraggan, who said, "I tried to ask him about where he had first learned Nokhontli, but he couldn't understand the question." "Could you have understood the answer?" I asked. "Not before we teach it to him." At that point Daklakht and Dagrolyt wandered into the Mead Hall, looking to see if Elaine had come by with some lunch. They offered greetings to Dambaraggan and me but when they saw John both stopped and stared, obviously surprised. "Alutnat Da-Stinger," Daklakht said, then asked me, "tyø ø'ø dake sba?" Roughly translated to 'what is Agent Stinger doing here?' "Ha nø thø ahat tli," Agent John Stinger answered in workable Nokhontli, meaning: 'I'm here trying to learn your language.' Daklakht was surprised by such new fluency, so John grinned and said, "I just now learned how to say that." Dambaraggan and I confirmed that we had indeed taught him exactly that phrase. Then I connected the dots and said, "I suppose that colleague you mentioned was Marcus Wissen, retired USAF General." "Correct, he was my mentor and we'd been discussing the potential development of a special response unit of Nokhons. It seemed like a good idea." Dagrolyt spoke to me, in Nokhontli, of course. "Da-Stinger wanted us to work as alutna for the NokhSo authorities, but we wanted nothing to do with them. Now he is here anyway. Is this good?" Here followed a discussion that I had to translate for everyone, about how, yes, John had understood that neither Daklakht nor Dagrolyt were willing to be spies or soldiers for clandestine military organizations, but that he still believed in the concept and would try to find other squatches willing to volunteer, which is why he was learning the language. I explained to John that we were sensitive about governmental interference to the NNP. That we'd been visited by a federal inspection team a while back and one the agents had more or less threatened to shut us down if we didn't provide him with Nokhon super-soldiers. John, Agent Stinger, nodded and said, "Yeah, I know the guy. Agent Santers is kind of a dick, all right. But I'm thinking more in the line of super-firemen or super-rescue teams. Bigfoot Response Team. Some of these big bruisers would be good at it. Why let their superhuman abilities go to waste?" "Living their lives in peace is hardly going to waste," was Dagrolyt's argument. But Daklakht offered no argument, probably because he'd been Aluta for most of his life. Also because he still felt grateful to Agent Stinger for having gotten them home from Katmandu. Besides, he was busy looking outside the open barn doors at the Camaro convertible parked there.
I mentioned that Daklakht and Adam had been getting to know one another-- bonding, I suppose -- and one of the things they had just begun to have in common was that Daklakht became interested in learning how to drive a car. Specifically, Adam's car, the Squatchmobil: that well-worn old 1998 Chevy Camaro Z28 convertible, perhaps the only car in the world set up to accommodate an 8-foot tall Bigfoot driver. Adam had taken Daklakht for a ride in it, top down, sliding around the windy local country roads and playfully punching it on the straight-aways just to demonstrate the power in that 327 Chevy V-8. The stern and stoic Alutna-jii had shrieked in amazement and awe. It was imminently ironic that the strict old Bigfoot cop who had relentlessly enforced each and every rule against the evils of skesk could be so immediately converted into a teen-aged hot-rod enthusiast. Adam let Daklakht try to drive the car himself, although only within the Hacienda grounds and at low speed. Daklakht was a little too unsure about steering-wheel geometrics, clumsy with the brakes (Big Feet, remember?), although the automatic transmission was easy enough. But even though driving slowly, he managed to gently sideswipe a few trees anyway. No real damage was done, but it was going to take some learning. However, they had only a couple of days before Adam and the band had to leave on tour and Daklakht was left behind, wistfully gazing at the parked Camaro every day. And dreaming of riding the thunder.
Agent Stinger saw his opportunity and offered to give Daklakht driving lessons. The Alutna-jii hesitated, for all of 5 seconds, and then took him up on it. John asked Adam for permission to use his Squatchmobil, which was the only car Daklakht could fit into. The old Camaro is rather beat-up anyway, so Adam didn’t mind, having never been materialistic about possessions. We have about a mile of gravel road within the Hacienda grounds, from Old Pipe Line Road in to the house, on further to the barn and the Mead Hall and then out to the horse pastures and back. Not very challenging, no wild swings, but good enough for a beginner's practice. It wouldn't be smart to practice on the county roads without any kind of driving permit: a Bigfoot driving an open convertible might just get noticed by a cop driving by. Besides, what Daklakht really wanted to do was drive FAST and he had absolutely no skill yet. So he was dangerous to himself and others. Naturally enough, machines were completely alien to him, he had never before attained that familiarity with a vehicle which makes it feel like a natural extension of his own body. There was also a lifelong antipathy for skesk that had to be overcome. It was all new and required practice and repetition. But Daklakht is a fast learner, even though he's an almost-century-old Bigfoot, capable of amazingly quick reactions and accurate perceptions. We considered getting him a driver's license. And then Dagrolyt decided that he wanted to drive too, so now Daklakht's teaching him how. Both those guys have been diligently studying English; they would like to be able to function in the wide-open world. There are, at the moment, about five or six Nokhons among our regular guests, both male and female, also interested in exploring the possibilities that are now available to them. They want to travel around America and Canada openly instead of secretly, to the towns instead of hiding in the woods. With Pokey and Adam gone on tour for a while, I'd be the only English teacher for the Nokhons. Although others have dabbled at it, both Elaine and Doug, but they have no patience for the slow learners (neither do I). But an unexpected new English teacher has stepped into our ranks: our 12 year-old Mexican guest, Roberto. He may be just a kid but he has studied English at the finest private schools evil drug money can afford and he seems to have an affinity for teaching it to Nokhons. That may be because he lets them know that he too has learned English as a second language, and if a little kid can do it, so can they. Most squatches like Roberto, so he likes them back. He's always jolly and friendly and because he is so tiny compared to them they probably think he's cute. Masnia is especially fond of him, and so all of her family are also included among Roberto’s friends. Except for Daklakht, at first. The Alutna-jii, is an imposing authority figure, as a cop should be. He's even more huge than your average Bigfoot, 8' 4" and 550 pounds, just a little bigger than Adam. His default facial expression is sternness; he does not smile automatically, except to Masnia. He's tough and he looks it. So Roberto was intimidated and a little frightened at his presence. Actually, he's not the only one. But there was someone Roberto feared a lot more than a stern-looking Bigfoot cop: el brujo Don Joséf. Just last month the little old Mexican shaman had been captured by Adam and taken out to the Mead Hall, the only place they had with a cell that could be used to lock someone in, even a Bigfoot. (A little foresight planning when the IPR had built it, maybe just in case the government decided to do some evil experimentation on squatches.) Roberto had once been present while his drug-lord father had met the brujo at their home in Laguna de Tuxpan and he understood that the little shaman was one of the few men in the world that Salvador deVega was truly afraid of. There were stories about cruel magic and impossible murders that the brujo had committed for pay. When Roberto learned that Don Joséf was now at the Hacienda, he knew that the brujo was here to take him back to his father in Mexico. And that he would kill anyone who got in his way, including Adam and Melly and everyone. He could not believe the Nokhons had stronger magic than the brujo. Roberto had a nightmare about the brujo coming for him in the middle of the night. He was too afraid to call for help, could only whimper. The brujo reached for him. But then the most powerful Nokhon he'd ever seen suddenly stepped between him and the brujo. Daklakht, the squatch policeman, reached for the brujo and took the little man's entire head between forefinger and thumb, so large were his hands. If he snapped his fingers the brujo's head would explode. The brujo cowered and was gone. It had only been a dream, but the next day Roberto saw Daklakht and for the first time, the Alutna-jii smiled at him. They became friends after that. It helped that Roberto could now speak Nokhontli well enough to actually carry on a conversation and Daklakht in English almost as well. Also that same next day Don Joséf was released and sent back to Mexico. Roberto was concerned that the brujo would simply circle back to kidnap him, until learning that Adam and Daklakht had enchanted him with a magical syssk to make him obey their instructions. Which were to confront Salvador deVega and force him to confess his cartel crimes and report himself to prison. Roberto had felt a twinge of loyalty for his father, but was well aware that the drug lord was a cruel and dangerous man who must eventually be stopped. Roberto had close friends in Mexico whom his father had already threatened with harm or death to coerce his errant son to obey his will. At least if he was convinced to surrender and turn himself in, there should be no deadly shoot-out between his carteleros and the police. His father could survive the fall of his empire.
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