Turbo Pudding
Daina Ozola travels a long way in Fernevale, from a sanatorium in Surrey to Riga and on across the ocean to Brazil, and she’s never short of animal company. You may have met Pudding already, the hedgehog who snores in a hatbox, and the Vicar, the robin who rides on the gardener’s cap. It’s Monday, so here is the rest of the animal cast, in the order Daina meets them.
The picture at the top is from a snowy post road in Courland: Mikus and his horse Brūnis, with a car stuck in a snowdrift behind them.
The Night Committee and the badger
At night the garden of Pine Hollow belongs to the animals. Two tawny owls sit in the pines, and Daina knows exactly who they are: “Two owls. Win calls them the Night Committee.” The smaller one, the lady, calls “ke-wick,” and the gentleman answers “hoo-hoo.” Daina thinks of her grandparents: “She asks, he answers. Like Omīte and Opi.” Call back to them with the wrong call, and the gentleman slowly turns his back on her. “I’ve insulted him. I called him in his own voice.”
In the second chapter a badger turns up too. Daina’s description: “A badger, striped like a humbug, built like a footstool. He came in under the fence.” You can pet him once, and he feels “like a scrubbing brush that thinks.” Try a second time and all you get is one flat look.
Bosun, the ship’s cat
On the SS Vindava, the steamer to Riga, a gray tabby the shape of a sofa cushion has claimed the warmest spot on deck. Daina sums him up: “A torn ear, whiskers like a walrus, and a face that’s seen everything twice.” Trouble is, he’s sitting on the one lever she needs, and he isn’t moving. Daina knows how this works: “Cats can’t be moved. Cats can only be bought.”
Once Bosun is a friend, he follows her around the deck “like a very small, very bored bodyguard.” He likes to be petted, but count the strokes: “Three strokes. Not four. Ship’s rules.” In Riga he walks her all the way to the customs shed and no farther, because “Sea cats don’t do land.”
Duksis, Opi’s dachshund
At the family villa in Kaiserwald, Daina finds an old friend. “Duksis. A sausage on four buttons, with ears so long he treads on them. He still sleeps under Opi’s chair.” He’s red as a fox, with enormous, sorrowful eyebrows. Crouch down to pet him and he flips straight onto his back: “No dignity at all. I love him.”
Duksis turns up all through the Riga chapters. By the old pine he waits with his nose at the roots: “He’s been waiting under this tree for seven years too.” At midnight he even rides up the pine in a lift basket, which makes him, in Daina’s words, “the first dachshund in Riga to go up by lift.” Her verdict: “If Dr Fell could see this, he’d double the milk.”
The jay at the gate
The old pine has a second guard. Daina spots a jay on the gatepost, “eyeing the brass on the garage door like a pawnbroker.” It collects shiny things and keeps a larder on a branch outside the treehouse window, just out of reach. Daina tries once, nearly slips off the frosty sill and changes plans: “Trees forgive, but not twice. I’ll trade instead.”
Brūnis, the horse on the post road
In Courland, on a snowy road, Daina meets Brūnis: Mikus’s big bay-brown draft horse, with a white star and shaggy feet. “A forelock over both eyes. He pulls by faith.” Mikus is proud of him: “Brūnis pulled out a church bell once.” Give the horse a pat, and he’s “warm as a stove, and smelling of hay.” The first pat brings back a family memory, too: a winter sleigh ride, Opi at the reins, the sleigh ditched in deep snow and Omīte laughing so hard she has to hold her hat. Omīte’s verdict: “Kārlis could talk to trees. Never to horses.”
Teimosa and the animals of Brazil
Across the ocean, in Rio Novo, a gray-brown mule stands in the far corner of Seu Bento’s corral. Her name is Teimosa, and she belongs to Aunt Made. “Ears like two sails. She’s thinking about me. Slowly.” Bento warns that nobody hires Teimosa: “She hires you.” Pet her and “she leans. All of her.” She has firm views on rafts, too: “She just doesn’t board rafts.”
Brazil has plenty of other neighbors. Coatis, according to Daina, have “ringed tails, long noses, no conscience.” Capybaras by the pool are “guinea pigs the size of sofas.” And on a mountain meadow at night, something tall and red watches from the edge of the grass. Daina can only call it “a fox on stilts, in a red coat.”
The prologue and chapters 1–2 are free to play in your browser at fernevale.com. The full game is $9.99, paid once. More about the game is on its Fernevale page.
