The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

        Poor Frogstick. He had been as happy as a shoat in a wallow when he finally gave the slip to the infamous Gator Gang and their be-slimed matriarch, Sha-No-She-Ba. He sang, he skipped, he frisked through the woods like a colt in a green pasture on a sunny day. Thinking that his troubles had all moved south, the gnarly Frog-man was walking along whistling Yankee Doodle with his hands in his pockets when he blithely kicked at a small log that was in his path. The little log rolled over and turned into a tiny, brownish, darkly mottled pig that had apparently been sleeping in the middle of the trail.
        "SKWEEEEE....," it squealed, "SKWEEEESKWEEEE SKWEEEEEEEE!"
        "No!" cried Frogstick, quite beside himself with panic. His paranoid mentality jump-started his adrenal glands and shocked his heart into frenzied palpitations, leading him to immediately suspect that history was about to repeat itself: that somewhere an irritable parent would hear the squealing oinker and respond with brute fury.
        Hohoho! What a corker!
        Frogstick gave chase to the scrawny shoat, and it fled before him, squealing at the top of its lungs.
        "SKWEEEE," it squealed, "SKWEEEEEEE!"
        "Stop!" he cried, "Stop! Shut up!" He slipped and fell trying to grab as it cut back and dodged past him heading in another direction. "Oh, no," he moaned. Scrambling to his feet, Frogstick followed the tiny pig around an ancient cypress tree. He rounded the corner, huffing and puffing, scrambling on his hands and knees.
        And then, he saw it.
        The massive boar hog stood stock-still in front of Frogstick, quivering in ill-contained rage. His head swung slowly from side to side. Saliva ran down from his jaw... all the way to the ground in a gruesome river that dangled from the gash of its half-open mouth and shivered milkily in its descent to earth in a strange streak of slick, semi-transparent spaghetti. Two long, razor-sharp tusks rolled from that mouth. The tusks were a matched a pair of yellowed ivory curls that were flecked with something dark and rancid.
        The beast's fetid breath blew hotly in Frogstick's face. Frogstick could see the hairs on the high back-ridge of the brute bristling and flexing like a thousand caterpillars writhing beneath a hair shirt.
        "UUhhhh..,." the big boar grunted. Then the tiny hog, now standing between the boar's front legs, raised up its head and shrieked like a banshee.
        "No, no,... please!" pleaded Froggy, "I thought he was a log... I didn't know he was a hog... I mean he ain't an ugly hog... he takes after his old man."
        "OOOOEEEGH!" the boar cried, and he flashed after Frogstick like a bolt of lightning.
        "AAAAAAAAGHHH!" Frogstick cried as, abandoning all hope, he ran, fleeing before the enraged boar-hog, moving faster than he ever thought he could fly.
        You just can't reason with a hog.
        Well, now, the other swine in the herd heard the blurb squerped from the panic-stricken nerd, and they all fell in behind the big boar and took off in hot pursuit of Drumbo. This was the same herd that left the tracks that we came across later that day.
        They rumbled after Frogstick like a pack of maddened vigilantes, bent upon exacting unimaginably horrific damage upon his unsightly form. Old Frog-a-matic didn't have time to muse about the peculiarly coincidental nature of this strange new twist. Like many of us real-life folks, he was too busy running scared to consider the hidden significance of his travail.
        He ran like the wind, gusting like a gale; he was lost in his running, and the dull thud of his feet and the wrenching gasp of his ragged breath became almost soporific in its effect. It was as if he had discorparated and was observing all of this from a distance now; he had long ago passed the threshold of pain and was deeply imbedded in a trance-like state of shock. By and by the hogs behind him got tuckered out and abandoned the chase, but Fogstick was too traumatized to even know or care.
        He ran, and ran, and kept on running. He shagged it north and east, not knowing where he was headed
        The old Frog-Walloper was rambling and reeling like a drunkard by the time that he reached the huge cattle plain on the north-east border of the Nowhere County Wilderness Area. He finally staggered to a stop. Collapsing in a heap, Frogstick fell to pieces.
        "Run," he wheezed. "Keep on! Run!" His eyes deliriously roamed the horizon as his trembling lips mouthed the senseless syllables. Sweat burned his eyes and blurred his vision. Then, floating amid the drops of liquid, a black shape appeared on the horizon and began to grow larger. "Run!" he whispered to no one in particular as he lay there gasping in the grass.
        "Putt-putt-putt-putt-putt...," said the black shape. The sound slowly progued its way into his conciousness. "Putt-putt-putt-putt-putt...," it putted. The black shape grew larger and assumed details.
        The black shape was a square metal box on wheels. It was an antique Model-T that was piloted by a grizzled gray fellow in well-worn bib overalls. He wore a large black hat with a flat brim and a clean white T-shirt. His head was crowned by a hoary bush of curly locks, and upon his chest was spread a beard as big as Granny Gutchins apron; it shot out in every direction, completely covering the front of his body down to his stomach. The old man parked the relic in front of Frogstick and eased his way stiffly out from behind the wheel, gingerly limping over to the semi-conscious Frogstick Gutchins, also known as "The Ol' Movin' Target." With a grimace, he bent over and tugged on Frogstick's arm.
        "C'mon, son," he wheezed, "we're goin' home."
        "Who are you?" croaked Frogger through his sun-parched lips.
        "I'm yer Pa, boy," the venerable old codger replied. "C'mon, boy, let's go home."