Chapter 3. How Camel Met Moosie

One morning Mike started off on a walk, while Camel stayed home. Camel fussed around the room, pacing back and forth, and just couldn’t get comfortable. Sometimes he stopped, sat down on the rug, stretched out his hooves in front of himself and laid his head on them. Then he would stretch out one hoof from the bunch, scratch behind his ear, sigh deeply, grunt and let out a sustained “Hmmmmmmm…pf!” And after Camel let out his fifth “hmpf!” and scratched himself behind his ear for the third time, a rustling noise came from behind the arm chair. A large plaid throw blanket moved on the floor and Moosie popped out from underneath. He had just woken up and he was trying to scratch his nose with his short little paws, but without much success. He thought the matter over, and began rubbing his nose on the leg of the arm chair, when all at once he saw Camel. The two animals stared at each other.

“Who are you?” Moosie was the first to speak. Camel took his time carefully examining Moosie, at length letting loose his usual “hmpf” and articulating:

“I see that I have not yet made the acquaintance of all the residents of this household.¹⁴ It would seem that other species of cloven hoofed fauna are harbouring¹⁵ here.”

“What did you call my hoofs?” Moosie asked.

“I said nothing about your hoofs”, Camel answered, “I merely observed that there are various herbivorous¹⁶ creatures of the cloven hoofed order residing in this house, the existence of which I was not previously cognizant¹⁷.”

“Yes”, Moosie said, “I live here, but how did you get here?”

“Let us relegate as parenthetical¹⁸ the actual facts of my arrival in this house and maintain the hypothesis¹⁹ of Christmas and Santa Claus”, Camel said.

“Ah!” said Moosie, calming down. “So Santa Claus brought you. So where’s Relegate, his parents and Hypo? Did they all come together with you?”

Camel wiggled his ears, raised his brows and gave Moosie a disapproving look.

“Yeeees, I see!” he drawled, “Lovely company we have here, I must say!”

“Yeah? Where is this lovely company?” Moosie asked. But Camel didn’t answer him. Then Moosie asked:

“So it’s Christmas already?”

“Allow me to inform you”, Camel said, “I beg your pardon, I don’t have the pleasure of your acquaintance, and hence I do not know your name – that Christmas arrived exactly two days, eleven hours and twenty-five minutes ago. And you, I take it, have been slumbering?²⁰”

“Slobbering?“Moosie asked, wiping his mouth.

“I merely observed that you were asleep”, Camel answered.

“Yeah”, Moosie said, “I fell asleep for a while. I wanted to sit in the arm chair, but I fell behind the back and went to sleep. And nobody woke me up. And now I missed Christmas and everything!”

“No great loss”, Camel said. “Another year over, a new one just begun. Life goes on, everything changes! “Sic transit Gloria mundi’, which translated from the Latin means “thus passeth earthly glory’.

Moosie wanted to say something else, but he couldn’t get it out, so he asked:

“So what’s your name?”

Camel slowly raised his brows at Moosie. “I do beg your pardon, I have forgotten to introduce myself”, Camel said, my name is Camel Dromedary, although I have recently acquired the new name “Dreamer’. Allow me to inquire as to your name.”

“My name is Moosie”, Moosie said, “I’m little white Moosie”.

Camel’s eyebrows rose even higher. He stood up, walked around Moosie, carefully scrutinizing him from horns to hoofs, and then back the other way. Then he unhurriedly returned to his former position, sat on the rug and said:

“The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca once observed “Errare humanum est’, which in Latin means “To err is human’, although in that particular case he was not alluding to moose. Possibly, I can now expand the application of that statement: “Errare mammali est’, which means “To err is mammalian’²¹. A silence descended on the room.

“Dreamer”, Moosie said after some moments, “do you mind if I sniff you?”

“Why would you do that?” Camel asked. “Allow me to be more specific: to what purpose?”

“Well, so I can get to know you better and we can be friends.”

“I already have one friend in this house”, Camel said, “Nevertheless, if you wish, by all means sniff as much as you like.”

Moosie stuck his big nose into Camel’s face and carefully sniffed him. Camel couldn’t resist and started sniffing Moosie too. Then Moosie happily snuffed right in Camel’s nose to show he had finished sniffing him.

“There”, Moosie said, “we’ve sniffed each other all over. That means that now we’re friends!”

“Right!” Dreamer offered, “Right on the nose, I dare say!”

Chapter 4. Building the Ship

Mike climbed up on the sofa and said:

“We’re taking a trip around the world!”

“And what about me?” Moosie asked. “Will I have to stay home all alone?”

“No”, Mike said, “We’ll build a ship and we’ll sail on it all together. Me, you and Dreamer.”

“You wish to involve me in a trip around the world on a ship?” Camel asked. “But let me inform you that the camel is a terrestrial animal. We don’t swim and we have no affinity²² for it. Sometimes they call me a ship, but they mean a ship of the desert, as opposed to a typical oceangoing vessel.”

“Don’t worry, Dreamer,” Mike said “we’ll go on a ship. You won’t have to swim…”

“Until such time as we suffer a shipwreck”, Camel concluded to Mike, “an intriguing prospect, don’t you agree? In any case,” he continued, “I am not refusing, I am merely giving a timely warning, and I strongly urge you to take it into consideration.²³”

“So you agree, Dreamer? Hooray!” Mike cried.

“And what about me” Moosie said. “I can’t swim either. I could fall in the water, get waterlogged and drown!”

“It’s okay, Moosie, don’t worry, I’ll save you, I promise!” Mike said.

“Moosie will have to have his horns fastened to an unsinkable object, such as a life saver. It will improve his buoyancy²⁴,” Camel added.

“No”, Moosie said, “that’s a bad idea. If I fall in the water with a life saver on my horns, my nose will be underwater, and I’ll drown.”

“It would appear that our antlered friend is showing a germ of intelligence,²⁵” murmured Camel.

“Germs? What germs? You see germs on me?” Moosie said frightened, turning his head around and trying to look at himself from every angle.

“He means that you’ve started thinking smarter,” Mike said for Camel, “but let’s get to work on the ship!”

“But what are we going to build the ship out of?” Moosie asked.

“Out of the sofa,” Mike answered quickly, “and we’ll make masts out of hockey sticks. We’ll have a sailing ship!”

“While you are planning the construction of the ship, it would behove you to carefully consider the material side,” Camel looked attentively at Mike and added “we must know what it will consist of.”

“Of course,” Mike said. “I’ve got a big book about sailing ships, and it’s got everything in it.” Mike ran to his room and brought the book. The book really was quite big. Mike put the book on the carpet and started flipping through it. Moosie and Camel moved closer to him.

“Here it is!” Mike cried. The chapter on “Types of Sailing Ships’. What kind of ship will we have?”

“Seeing as we have only two hockey sticks,” Dreamer said, “it will have to be a two-master. So what is left to determine is whether it will be a schooner, a brig or a brigantine.”

“And how do we find out?” Mike asked.

“Look carefully in the book, my young friend,” said Camel, “it says here,” Dreamer pointed at the page with his hoof, “that a brig is square-rigged, a schooner is gaff-rigged and a brigantine is mixed²⁶, which is to say that it has various types of rigging.”

Mike lay on the carpet and began examining the pictures attentively. Then he got up and stuck the two hockey sticks into the sofa with the blades facing up, one at the sofa’s “stern” and the other at its “bow”.

“I can hang a t-shirt on each stick,” Mike said, “so then it will be square rigged. So the ship will be a brig!”

Dreamer looked at the sticks sticking out of the sofa and shook his head.

“I would advise you, my young friend,” he said, “to use some other material for the masts. Hockey sticks will hardly hold square rigging.²⁷”

“But what else can we put there instead?”

“I have an idea,” Dreamer said, “but I am not prepared to share responsibility for the consequences of its implementation.²⁸”

Moosie, who by this point had lost the thread of the conversation, raised his head and asked:

“I don’t understand. What aren’t you prepared to share with who?

Camel turned his head to Moosie and said:

“My antlered friend, allow me to give you a small piece of advice, so that you will – how can I put it gently? – appear… a bit smarter.

“What advice?”

“If you don’t understand some word, then don’t ask display your ignorance by asking naive questions. Just say ‘Uh-huh’. I will try to explain to you.”

“And what if I don’t understand two or three words?” Moosie asked next.

“Then say ‘uh-huh uh-huh’ or uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh!” Dreamer explained. “Agreed?”

“Uh-huh,” Moosie said.

“So what don’t you understand now?” Camel inquired.

“I understand everything,” Moosie said, “I just said “uh-huh’ because I understand everything.

Camel sighed deeply, and then continued:

Very well, I propose the use of the mop that we use to wash the floors as the foremast, and for the mainmast the big broom we use for sweeping. But if the application of these measures results in an altercation²⁹ with your parents, I would not wish to suffer any complaints and accusations.”

“Uh-huh,” said Moosie.

“I understand,” Mike added, “don’t worry, nobody will blame you!”

“I merely wished to say,” Dreamer concluded, “that all must be shipshape before we cast off.”

“Of course,” Mike said, “We’ll settle everything ashore, before we’re on the high seas.”

Chapter 5. Captain Wolf

The ship was ready. It had masts, yardarms³⁰, sails and two anchors made out of shoehorns. Mike fitted out two cabins inside the sofa – crew quarters and the galley. Then he built a captain’s bridge and set up the helm there, made from the front wheel of his scooter, which he managed to unscrew.