An Embarrassment of Riches by James Howard Kunstler Page B

a nursing female, he was suckled through infancy at the teat of his wolf-mother. Happily did he disport himself in the wild with his brother and sister wolves. And sadly did he bid them all forever farewell when it was time for the litter to depart the den and strike out upon their own—”
    â€œAny fool knows that a wolf pup and an human baby do not mature in the same span of time,” I said.
    â€œI compress my narrative for dramatic effect.”
    â€œO, well then….”
    â€œHe struck out on his own, in his own good time,” Bilbo glared at me. “By and by he endeavored to find a mate. No she-wolf would have him. The packs drove him away with snarl, fang, and claw. As the seasons chased one another, there he repined in his lonely den, an outcast. Then, one twilight in the approach of another winter, when a full moon shone coldly through the bare branches of the leafless trees, did Neddy, in a state of delirious despondency, wander into the rifle sights of a Pennsylvania marksman, who brought him down with a fifty-caliber ball to the shoulder. Imagine this huntsman’s surprise to wade through the browning bracken and discover his prey to be of the human form!”
    The dwarf began to snuffle. Soon his remembered miseries brought forth a draft of tears. Though entirely skeptical of this account, I found it hard to listen and watch unmoved. Even Uncle paid rapt attention.
    â€œAh me,” Bilbo continued, dabbing his own moist eyes with the tattered lace cuff of his yellowed linen shirtsleeve. “This huntsman brought poor Neddy back to his hovel and there nursed him back to health—not out of kindness, but upon reasons of the basest calculation, for the moment he was able to stand upon all four limbs did this churl in buckskins sell Neddy to an enterprising Yankee named Artemis Swatley for the sum of one Spanish gold dollar. This Swatley, a Connecticut peddler with his wagonload of pots and pans, fancied himself something of a showman, and hauled about from town to town a collection of oddities—a six-legged cow, jars of pickled monstrosities of nature, a trio of speechless albino acrobats, and a plaster o’Paris effigy said to be the very mummy of King Philip, the notorious Wampanoag firebrand—all as a sort of window-dressing, as ’twere, to gather the ignorant country folk in order to sell them wooden nutmegs, nostrums, short-weighted sugarplums, and sundry gewgaws of the cheapest manufacture. He featured Neddy in this exhibition of horrors as ‘Bungo the Dogboy.’”
    â€œDreadful,” Uncle declared, completely enthralled.
    â€œCame the revolution,” Bilbo went on portentously. “Alarms! Chaos! Confusion! Slaughter! Swatley’s miserable caravan chanced to be caught in the vicinity of Monmouth Courthouse ’twixt a company of bloodthirsting Hessians on the one hand and a mob of fractious Jersey rabble on the other. This rabble destroyed his wagonload of wooden nutmegs and shoddy tinware whilst the Hessians captured his freaks, Neddy amongst them. Need I tell you he was cruelly treated by those mercenary German brutes? They released him upon their withdrawal to New York. Amid the clangor and smoke of war did poor Neddy wander the countryside, knowing not whether he were truly man or beast, his little heart a’palpitating with sorrow, and yet the indomitable will to live still burning in his bosom.”
    Neddy let loose a melancholy howl. Bilbo patted him upon his tin cap.
    â€œThere, there,” he said. “Where was I?”
    â€œThe war,” Uncle refreshed his memory.
    â€œAy yes. It ended. At last, peace descends upon the land. The doves return to their roosts. The chimes ring out. The States are confederated, the Articles of Peace signed. Commerce and agriculture reawaken from the nightmare slumber. Neddy is taken in by a series of masters, one crueler than the next. He is used for everything from fetching