Tang's Wild Shortcut

Everyone was walking to the Great Clearing for the lantern lighting, and everyone was taking the path.

The path went around the ridge. It went around the left side, then along the bottom, then around the right side, and then at last it came up to the Clearing from below. It was a good path. It had been a path for a very long time.

Tang the orange possum looked at it the way you look at a plate of something you have already decided not to eat.

"It goes around," he said.

"It does," said Taro the purple sloth, who was already walking it.

"The Clearing is that way." Tang pointed straight up the ridge, through the trees, over the top. "That's shorter. A straight line is shorter than a bendy line. That's not an opinion. That's just true."

"It is true," Taro agreed.

"So why does everybody go around?"

Taro thought about that for a while. He thought about it for long enough that Tang bounced from paw to paw four times and drummed a hollow log twice.

"I'll tell you at the top," said Taro.

Tang did not wait to be told at the top.

He went straight up the ridge in about nine seconds, which felt wonderful. He came over the crest with his whiskers full of wind and the whole gold evening in front of him, and he saw the Great Clearing below, and he was right, it was so much closer this way —

— and then the far side of the ridge turned out to be loose grey stone.

Skitter.

Skitter-skitter-WHOOSH.

Tang went down the far side of the ridge much faster than he had gone up it, mostly sideways, entirely by accident, and arrived at the bottom in a small avalanche of gravel.

He sat up. He shook the stones out of his ears.

He was in a gully. It was narrow and dry and dim, with steep crumbly walls going up on both sides, higher than a possum and quite a lot higher than that.

"Ha," said Tang, to nobody. "Fast, though."

Then he stood up and tried to climb out.

He got three feet up the wall and the wall came with him.

He backed up and took a run at it — a proper run, a Tang run — and got a bit higher, and the wall came with him again, and he slid down in a rush of grit.

He tried the other side. Same.

He tried the other side faster. Faster did not help.

Tang stood at the bottom of the gully and looked up at a strip of gold sky, and for possibly the first time in his life, running was not going to fix it.

"Hm," said a voice above him.

Taro's face appeared over the edge, far up and upside down.

"Hello," said Taro.

"Hi," said Tang.

"How was it?"

"Fast," said Tang. "Extremely fast."

"Mm," said Taro.

Taro did not say I told you so, because he had not, in fact, told him so. He did not offer a paw, because his paw was nowhere near long enough and both of them knew it. He just looked. For a long, long moment, the way Taro looks at things.

"Tang," he said. "You're standing in a stream."

Tang looked down at the dry stones. "I'm standing in a hole."

"It's a streambed. It's dry now. It won't be in spring." Taro tilted his head. "Streams go downhill. Downhill goes to the stream. And the stream goes to the Old Bridge."

Tang stopped moving.

The Old Bridge was ten steps from the Great Clearing.

"So I don't climb out," said Tang.

"No," said Taro. "You run out."

And Tang grinned so hard his whiskers went sideways, and he took off down the gully like a small orange rocket.

The gully wound. It dipped. It went under a fallen log and around a bank of ferns and past a place where the stones were still a little damp, and Tang ran the whole way with his paws slapping the streambed and gravel flying up behind him, and it went exactly where Taro said it would.

He came out at the Old Bridge.

He was covered in dust. He had a leaf on his head.

He was also, by a very long way, the first one there.

So when the others finally came up the path — Kiwi and Cheri and Jackfroot and Blueberri, and Taro at the very end, unhurried — they found Tang sitting on the flat rock in the middle of the Great Clearing with his paws behind his head, waiting.

"How," said Kiwi.

"Shortcut," said Tang.

Taro lowered himself onto the grass beside him and closed his eyes.

"It was a shortcut," he agreed. "It just wasn't the one he picked."

They lit the lanterns as the light went. And after that evening people did sometimes take Tang's way to the Clearing, down the dry streambed and out at the Old Bridge — which was, if you measured it honestly, only a little bit faster than the path.

Nobody measured it honestly.