6 All Alone

6. All ALONE Meanwhile, somewhere not so far away, Camicazi was singing to herself in the dark. She was singing to keep her spirits up. Camicazi was not the kind of child who panicked in a difficult situation. This was lucky, because she had been imprisoned in total blackness for a week now, in the suffocating claustrophobic confines of a tree trunk so narrow that she could reach out and touch the walls of her cell on either side. And the only lock could not be picked, she knew that now. And there was nothing to dig with and nowhere to dig to.

But she was not afraid, she told herself. She was scared for her dragon, Stormfly, of course, who had been taken away by that horrid man and put who knows where? Camicazi hoped that Stormfly had not been locked up too, for Stormfly could not bear confinement. But she herself, she, Camicazi, was not afraid. Even though nobody who loved her knew where she was. The tree in which she was imprisoned was in the middle of a forest. And from the outside, there was nothing about the tree that distinguished it from the other 35,672 trees standing

immediately around it. And she could not be more utterly and comprehensively and mind- losingly lost, than if she had been steering The Stormy Petrel across a tempest-tossed night sky, and accidentally dropped down a black hole in space. But I am not really lost, she said to herself, because it does not matter so much WHERE you are as long as you know WHO you are. And she was a Bog- Burglar, and Bog-Burglars do not scare easy. That was why Camicazi started to sing the

Bog- Burglar Tribal Anthem, shouting it out as loudly as she could in the echoing blackness of the tree: 'BOG-BURGLARS KNOW NOT THE MEANING OF FEAR! FOR BOG- BURGLAR HEARTS ARE STRONGER THAN OAK! YOUR SHIP IS NOT LOST WHEN THE SEA IS YOUR HOME! AND BOG BURGLARS… FIGHT… FOREVER!' Loud and defiant were the words, ringing out boldly within the hollowness of the tree, comforting Camicazi with every heartening echo. But outside the tree… Why, outside the tree they could not be heard at all.