From the Dwarf Country, the Little Brother and Sister - (Illustrated Edition of World Children's Literature)

Author: (German) Walter Moers
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-05-01
Features: Ensel glanced at his sister walking beside him and decided to keep this feeling to himself. Every time Klara heard a sound in the woods, her head would tremble as she scanned the surroundings, like a frightened bird. Ensel noticed that most of the trees were identical. If it were fir, spruce, or oak trees, he could still make marks based on the different species, but now, surrounded by identical firs, he couldn’t distinguish them. He didn’t have an axe or a knife, so he couldn’t make marks on the bark either. Although he could also knock on a tree with a branch, the result was the same: one tree couldn’t make a mark on another. People should leave marks when walking in the wilderness, something he had learned from The Cold-Blooded Prince. So, he began experimenting with smaller plants. The siblings returned to places they had seemingly already passed through multiple times: they saw Ensel’s broken ferns and the flattened nettle that served as a landmark. Sometimes they could hear the ranger’s singing and immediately changed their direction. But they didn’t dare to call for help, fearing that it would lead to their parents being driven out of the forest as well. They wanted to sneak back to the path, pretending nothing had happened. Now, they had been out for two hours, and it had been a long time since they heard the ranger’s singing. They entered an open area in the forest and saw a giant fallen tree lying in the center. Its trunk had been hollowed out, and its body had turned black and charred, as if struck by lightning. Perhaps it had happened a long time ago, because moss and fungi had grown on it, and its lower half was deeply embedded in the soil. Its appearance once again sparked Ensel’s imagination. One end of the hollow trunk resembled a yawning mouth, with a green moss tongue sticking out from inside. A hole in a branch looked like an eye socket on a skull, and the only remaining dead branch bent despairingly toward the sky, like a dead bird’s curved claw. From the Bear Forest School, Ensel knew that bears couldn’t tolerate fallen trees in their habitat, as they might attract dangerous forest beehives. This fallen trunk indicated that Ensel and Klara had strayed far from the residential area and were lost in the vast forest.