CAVE-KID

Loog is at it again. I want to call him something more fitting, like “Leonardo” or something, but I can’t make my mouth say it. So, Loog he is. I should probably call him “Mr. Loog” on account of him being so much older but he hasn’t invented politeness yet.

What is it that he’s at, you ask? Hard to say. Loog is never satisfied with the sort of things the rest of us are. Always trying to do something new. Like the time he made fire.

Loog had been watching lightning and how it burned stuff everywhere. He got all worked up and decided he wanted to become Mr. Lightning God himself and burn some stuff, too, crazy as that sounds. I mean, fire is scary enough as it is without turning it loose right there in the cave, know what I mean?

Well, Loog farted around with rubbing sticks and whacking rocks together and poking at newts and all manner of monkeyshines. I remember watching him while I was gnawing a saber-toothed emu nugget, and Boog was hitting his own toes with a blunt stick and then laughing. Boog tends to find enjoyment easily. They like emu drummies with bones, I prefer nuggets.

Eventually, Loog got it figured out. I’m not positive how exactly because I get distracted easily. But right there in the cave there was a pile of sticks and leaves and lizards and rocks and hair burning and smoking and stinking up a storm. As a side note, those first fires were kind of experimental. Turns out the lizards and rocks and hair aren’t really all that helpful.

“OOG! Oog Loog!” I recall saying.

“Huh huh huh! Ow!” was all Boog said as he whacked his toes again.

I truly believe things will improve drastically once we get a bit more spoken communication figured out. But what do I know? I’m just a cave-kid.

I was so amazed at the beauty of those glowing embers. But I was scared to touch one myself. For all I knew they would bite. I recall gingerly grabbing the unlit end of a stick whose other end was glowing.

“Boog! Boog-ah ooo!” I said and turned the stick toward Boog so he could appreciate it, too. As it played out, he was less interested and shooed it away with his arm and a harsh, “OOG! No Goog! Ooo!”

It’s amazing how small an eye is, and yet how drawn to one dangerous objects are. So anyway, that’s why Loog is kind of one-eyed on whatever he’s working on today. And it’s why he had to hurry up and design an eye patch even though pirates hadn’t been invented yet.

We are pretty used to the fire now, thanks to Loog. I mean here we are, around a really nice fire pit sitting on comfy, upright sections of log, roasting saber-toothed emu bits. I wish I could say, “fellas, it doesn’t get any better than this,” but it comes out, “OOGA, ooog ahh OOG ahhhhh.” Emphasis on the “ahhhh” if you know what I mean.

Loog was a little pissed about the whole eye-putting out business when he was busy inventing fire. But I don’t always cause him problems. I did eventually learn how to aim the sling, and it wasn’t like he lost another eye over that. We gave up on the boomerang. No matter which way I flung it, it always came back and hit him standing there beside me. I didn’t tell him to stand there, and he invented the darned thing. It never hit Boog since he was bent over whacking his toes then, too.

There was this one time Loog was busy trying to figure a better way to get food. Real meat food. I mean, we could always get stuff from trees or plants, but you never knew when that was going to make you dizzy or mess up your water works or worse. And it wasn’t like he had invented anything useful like an outhouse or toilet paper.

“Oooga booga, oi ahh uh!” was what Boog said about it and I couldn’t agree more.

Whacking animals with clubs meant getting mighty close, throwing rocks met with limited success, and lobbing spears wasn’t much of an improvement. Anyone who says we ate well while whacking things with clubs or chucking spears ought to have to eat off that for a couple months or shut up.

Loog started drawing in the dust and grunting up a storm one day. He was smashing branches off this tree and that one with a stone axe. Stringing one end to the other with vines and giant woolly aardvark innards. He put notches in the end of little spears, which somehow related to the strings.

I wanted to say, “Dude, if big spears don’t work, what makes you think little ones will?” But again, with the language barrier all I said aloud was, “oog booga uh, Loog?” And he didn’t feel compelled to answer. That’s the way of genius. And adults. Anyone will tell you.

Well, I was trying to figure out how the thing worked while Loog was busy whacking a rock into a pointy little heart-shaped end for the tiny spear, and he must not have invented the safety yet, because it went off. And then there was Loog over there calling names and yanking on this little spear sticking out of his behind.

So as I was saying, Boog and I are chilling by the fire pit, and there’s Loog down there whonking on a rock enough to harelip the governor. He tried to explain what he’s on about, but it’s hard on account of the language thing. All he says is, “OOO! OOO!” and I’m pretty sure he’s working on a wheel. I swear I haven’t the foggiest what he thinks we’re going to do with one.

Loog has a pretty short fuse for an inventor. I mean, it’s all part of the job to get it wrong sometimes. His previous wheels were a prime example. Somehow the kinda square one didn’t do something or other like he wanted. Same as the triangular one. Then for all his talk about his stone hammer invention being for beating on THINGS, he sure chased Boog and me around swinging it right at us like a madman. He needs to invent an anger management course, that’s what he really needs to do. Or therapy.

It really isn’t my fault. I mean, a fella gets full and lazy munching emu nuggets. I should know. I say it’s the tryptophan, but Boog says, “ga gaboo onk!” And it’s not an excuse exactly, but I do like to stand and stretch when I’m feeling full and sleepy like this, and there goes the round log. Rolling down the hill. Right towards Loog as it turns out.

And who knew how well a section of log would roll on its side? Or what speed it would get up to rolling downhill? Or how it might get airborne if it hit a little bump in the dirt, say, right before it reached someone? Someone sitting there whacking a rock with a stone hammer trying to invent a wheel.

You’d think Loog would be more grateful. I mean, I practically invented the wheel for him. All he had to do was sit there and get hit upside the head with it. I could tell it was just about exactly what he was trying to invent because he said, “OOO! OOO!” when he saw it, which was the best he could do at saying wheel. I mean that’s what he said after all the name-calling and hammer swinging.

He really should work on a concussion protocol. He seems to get them a lot, but there’s so much yet to be invented for that kind of questioning. What do you ask after he gets hit in the head again? What is the date? The day of the week? Year? Who’s the President?

I’m pretty sure he got a concussion even without the question-and-answer to prove it last time. That was when he invented the surprise party. At first it was just a random sort of surprise party because he hadn’t come up with the idea of birthdays yet.

We love parties. We really do. You get a nice bunch of grape water gone bad, some fire-roasted emu, and dance around till you drop. It’s a hoot. Sometimes we find these mushrooms that make moving pictures out of our cave décor, but that’s another story.

On this particular occasion, Loog waited till Boog had found a nice sunny spot on a hill a ways off to beat his toes with his club. He snuck over and told me, “Ooo! Goog Boog ahhh um onk!” and pantomimed something that could have been anything to me. I know one day he’ll up and discover charades, but I’m not all that excited. I’m nothing for understanding pantomime.

Eventually I got the drift. We lit off a real sizzler of a fire, roasted some drummies, gathered up mushrooms, and hung vines and flowers all over. We looped wooly aardvark innards around the cave, but they got to stinking so we wound up eighty-sixing them. Loog dug out some messed up grape water he’d stowed away somewhere or other. Then we hid and waited for Boog to smell the drummies and come to the cave.

When Boog came back snuffling, he looked around and scratched his big dumb head. Out we jumped yelling, “ARRGHHH!!” which, again, might have been better understood with the spoken language to say, “surprise!”

Boy, was he ever surprised! Maybe startled is a better word. He still had that knotted club in his hands, and in the heat of the moment thought he’d better save himself by swinging it. That was a bad concussion for Loog. In spite of his head turning black and blue and swelling up twice its normal size, there he was jumping around blaming everyone else for his problems.

That wheel is pretty cool. If I were going to use it, I’d probably see if I could use it to redo that Loogenstein monster thing he was excited about a while back. It just seems like to me there’s a way to use a few wheels to lift the stupid thing way up in the trees for the lightning to get at it.

I think it all started with his potion phase. It may come as a surprise that he had a phase like that. You probably didn’t know doing potions was a thing with us because I never got his paraphernalia drawn well on the cave wall. I’m pretty proud of my drawings, but for the life of me I can’t get those test tubes and beakers looking right. All my attempts looked like some kind of Egyptian guy holding his arm out like they do, on account of the beaker being clear.

But Loog had decided he could make Boog smarter, which was a lot better than waiting for him to evolve more brains, to my way of thinking. He got to tinkering and pouring back and forth and murdering a slew of woodland creatures for their bits and pieces. I don’t know exactly what he did wrong. Maybe the whole mess should have been pasteurized, or maybe he forgot to carry the seven. “Ooh, onk eeg!” Boog said, which was a lot more insightful than most of his comments. And I agree, mathematics could probably use some work like spoken language.

But back to the potion. Loog had Boog drink it all up. Whatever the issue was, trying things on monkeys first would have been wiser, but Loog didn’t know that was a thing yet. Because if he had tried it on a monkey first—or even made Boog drink a small shot of it instead of a tankard—we would have seen the effect was opposite the planned one. This happened before Boog got into whacking his own toes and giggling.

Never let it be said that Loog didn’t learn from his mistakes. After this bionic-super-Boog potion and all his talk about “smarter, faster,” etcetera, the result was so awful he figured we needed a test subject in the future. Even the monkeys could tell something had dumbed down Boog, so shoveling anything down their goozles was out until they forgot again.

One day I caught Loog staring a hole through the cave wall where I had a lovely project in progress about us hunting a cave bear with spears, and then running away like a scalded ape when it saw us and started hunting us. “Ooga Goog gronk!” he remarked, and I’m sure you can see where he was going with this. If I could draw one of us on a wall that wasn’t the real thing, why not build one of us that wasn’t the real thing? One of us that could then sample his snake oil when he was up to scientific chicanery.

No one ever said that Loog’s ideas came in the best chronological order. In this case, for example, you should invent the graveyard and interring the dead before you start assembling a new, living being from parts of dead ones. As you might imagine, it bordered the impossible to get body parts in any kind of usable condition before Ptero-vultures and saber-toothed hyenas had gotten all the good bits. Yet, it takes more than that to deter tenacity like Loog’s.

Refrigeration would have been good, too, as a side note.

Without getting bogged down in the details, Loog did get his Loogenstein monster all assembled on a platform tied to vines and creepers. He said, “Goo gonk onk, ooga onk!” and gesticulated madly at some dark approaching clouds. He intended me and Boog to understand we were supposed to climb these godawful tall parallel prehistoric palm trees, carrying the vines and creepers to draw the monster up after us on its platform.

As bad as the spoken language problem was, it could be handy. We stared at Loog like he was stark raving mad, shrugging our shoulders as if we didn’t know what he wanted us to do. He went through it all again about seventeen times and we finally gave up and started up the tree just to get him to shut up.

By that time, the sky was really dark, and you could tell a real gully-washer was nearly on us. I don’t know what it would have done exactly since there weren’t any gullies yet, but it didn’t act like it cared. You should have seen Boog. He was one crazy looking bastard already, but in that electrical storm all his hair stood out on end all over his whole body.

It was raining buckets, the air was crackling, thunder was booming, and those scrawny palm trees were swaying all around like it was a Rolling Stones concert. I mean, this was back when Mick and Keith could really move. That was right about when the lightning struck. I mean, it was blasting the whole world all over everywhere, but I’m talking about this one particular bolt.

In another setting, you’d have said it was beautiful: it streaked down from the sky—Loog says they really go up from the earth, but anyone with eyes can see that’s a crock. As I was saying, it streaked down from the sky and then gracefully split right in two, one half zipping over to fry Boog, and the other half zapping over to fry me. Neither of us had the presence of mind or buy-in to hang on to the vines and creepers, so we let go and sort of fell out of the trees leaving singed-hair contrails behind us all the way to the ground. Loog must have thought the best vantage point for directing this whole production was immediately under the platform holding the Loogenstein monster.

The platform, monster, Boog, and I all landed at the same time. I don’t want to be snarky about it, but our little gravity discovery beats the dude with the apple by about a couple million years. Well, Boog and I were understandably disoriented. We wandered off to the cave to get out of the storm and lick our wounds, which reminded us of bacon, incidentally. This was before we learned to remove the hair from the bacon, if you must know.

We didn’t really get to missing Loog for three days. It finally dawned on us that no one had burnt us up or fed us poison or anything for a cold minute. After some contemplating, we determined it was because Loog was nowhere to be found. Turns out, he was stuck under the platform and the Loogenstein monster the whole time. What a jolly laugh we had, after he calmed down from chasing us around, yelling and swinging that stone axe.

And that’s what I mean about the wheel. Seems like we could have hung a couple in the trees and looped the vines over them. Then we could have yanked the vines from the ground to lift the monster and avoided being electrified out of the sky and knocked out of the trees. But Loog knows best. He’s the scientist, not me.

So, that’s where we’re at again, with him upset that my wheel cracked his skull. Yelling and throwing things. When he gets like this, I usually just try to avoid him till he calms back down. Find my happy place. For me that usually means knocking out a new painting on our cave wall. I think I’ll go churn one out about him inventing the wheel.