GARY PANTER BLOG

October 5, 2009

The Fly River

Filed under: Blog — Gary Panter @ 10:48 am

Yogi Bear, Wally Gator and Tennessee Tuxedo and That Walrus that hangs out with Tennessee are on this big raft going through the jungle. Creepers, shoots, lianas and flowering tubers erupt and pustulate all round the frolicsome group as they roll downstream around elbows in the tributary and whitewater features replete with jumping packs of piranha chattering their choppers and flashing mirror-like scales. Smoke swirls around the volcano.

Yogi looks first at Wally, then to Tennessee, then to Atom Ant who he didn’t know was on the boat until this moment and says to no one in particular, but not the walrus whom he disdains for no reason he can put his finger on, maybe a simple lack of formal introduction never enacted by the hatted penguin, “Hey, Boo Boo, do you hear something?”

Atom Ant looks up brightly and shouts in a shrill ant-like voice “I’ll fly up above the forest canopy and check it out!!!” He flies straight up out of sight and never looks back.

Wally Gator looks down after a spell with a baffled expression on his log-like puss and says to Yogi in a voice that sounds like Daws Butler imitating Phil Silvers or maybe Bert Lahr, “Yeah, Yogi, now that you mention it, I hear some kind of consonant, unceasing, dull, roar. Do you hear anything Tennessee? Chumley?”

“Why Wally, Chumley hasn’t heard so much as a peep since you fired off that magazine earlier, trying to shoot a mosquito off his head. Isn’t that right, Chumley?”

Chumley says, “I can’t hear what the hell you guys are talking about, but the river falls out of sight ahead”

Everyone on the raft blinks as a man and gulps. By now Atom Ant has struck gold in China.

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