Every fourth summer, the otters of Redwall went off to a Hullaballoo. They would follow streams and rivers down to the shores of the great sea, where they would meet up with other otters from all over Mossflower. Hullaballoo was a festival that could last until autumn, as long as the otters were having fun. Meeting old friends and relatives, fishing in the sea, splashing in the waves, singing, dancing, and lighting bonfires each night on the beach for feasts were good rough fun of the sort that otters enjoy immensely.
It was early and cool. A cloud of mist hung over the ocean, and the water looked like battered steel. A small group of otters had separated from the rest and headed north along the shoreline, looking for wood for tonight's bonfire. Winifred, the leader of the party, looked out to sea. "Look at the way the pale vapor churns and changes in the dimness," she said to Streamsleek, the otter beside her. "It's like being inside a kaleidoscope filled with foggy gray glass."
Streamsleek scratched his head. "Kaleido-what?"
"A kaleidoscope is a tube with a bunch of mirrors inside it," Winifred explained. "When you look inside, you see beautiful patterns of light, in all sorts of colors. I know what it looks like because Uncle Skip gave me one once."
"Hey, what's this?" Streamsleek was bending down and picking up an object he had discovered half buried in the sand. All the otters gathered around to look at it. It was a piece of dark green glass that had been rubbed soft by the ocean's waters.
"Looks to me like it's either part of an emerald or just a random piece of green glass," said Winifred.
"Here, check this out!" Another otter by the name of Gail held up a dented silver spoon. "I found this lying not too far away. It can't be a coincidence."
"What do you mean?" asked Winifred.
"A spoon and an emerald washing up on the beach right next to each other? They must have come from the same ship. A schooner must have wrecked not far away from here, maybe a pirate ship, and we're discovering the treasure washed in by the tide. Maybe the rest of it is close by!"
Gail's words galvanized the rest of the otters, and they started moving along the beach, slower now, heads down, looking for more salvage. Soon enough Winifred found a carved wooden figure of an otter holding a sword. She felt a shiver of sorrow. "This must have been a Dibbun's toy," she said. "There was a child on the boat, and he's probably dead now. Drowned."
"No, it isn't," said a young otter named Ben. "That's mine. I dropped it here yesterday."
"It's true," said Ben's brother Joel. "He's always losing his toys. Back where we come from, on the North Coast, he hardly has any left."
"Oh." Embarrassed, Winifred handed the carved figure back to Ben.
Suddenly they heard a sound, a long, mournful lowing. They all stopped in their tracks and cried out, "What was that?"
"It sounded like a foghorn," said Streamsleek.
"Didn't sound like that to me," said Gail. "It sounded like something alive!" Gail had a very active imagination.
"Do you think there's somebeast out here besides us?" said Ben.
"I don't know," said Winifred.
They listened hard, but they did not hear the noise again. They kept walking and soon they came upon what looked like an enormous, oddly shaped, gray boulder rising out of the shallows, lying half in and half out of the water. Some net was snarled around it. After a moment of hesitation, Winifred walked up to it. Then she gasped.
The boulder wasn't a boulder. It was a dead animal, a giant squid. It was long, almost as long as two canoes lined end to end. Eight tentacles curled out into the water, bobbing lifelessly on the surface, thick as fire hoses. The head stretched out on the pebbly beach, even thicker, spade-shaped. Between the head and the tail, its body bulked up, thick around as a hippo.
"It's a monster," Joel said quietly.
Winifred's chest tingled and crawled, like she had ants under her dress, but she kept her voice calm as she tried to reassure Joel. "You mustn't be afraid. I think it's dead. See, it's not moving."
"It smells like rotten fish," Joel said.
Ben saw a board floating in the water nearby. He waded in and grabbed it, hauling it to shore. "Look. Part of the boat."
"Does it have the name of the boat on it?" Gail said.
Ben rubbed the water off the board with his paw and squinted at the words printed there. "It says… The Gorse Pot, I think. I can't really make it out too good."
"The ship and that giant squid must've collided," Winifred said. "The crash totaled the ship and killed the squid at the same time."
"Poor thing," said Gail. "I wonder how old it was."
Streamsleek's eyes were bright and feverish. "This discovery could make us famous! We should build a museum and put the creature's body inside it, for science. We'll probably be doing interviews about this our whole lives."
"How would we get it out of the water, though?" said Winifred. "It looks too heavy to budge."
Streamsleek snapped his fingers. "We'll run back to the campsite and get the rest of the otters! If we tie all our fishing nets together, we can make a net big enough to pull him out."
"It's the discovery of the century!" said Ben.
"Okay," said Winifred. "I'll stay here and guard it while you go get everybeast. Just come back as soon as you can. I'll be waiting."
"Be careful," said Joel.
Winifred scoffed. "I don't need to be careful. There's nothing to be afraid of, it's dead!"
The other otters took off, chattering excitedly as they followed the meandering course of the narrow beach back the way they had come. Soon they were out of sight.
Now Winifred was alone. She looked at the squid again. Its hide did not glisten like a whale skin but was dark and dull, like a chunk of granite with lichen on it. The ants on skin sensation returned. She was sure to remember this day for the rest of her life. Animals would probably be asking her questions about this even when she was ninety seasons old.
She waded closer to the squid and peered into its open mouth. It had lots of very small teeth, in slanting double rows. "If he was still alive, he could use those teeth to cut through my arm like a buzzsaw," she thought. "Think how many fish they must have chopped in two. He's so big, he probably had to eat twenty fish a day just to keep from starving. Come to think of it, I don't know for sure it was a he. I don't know anything about it at all, not even how long it is."
Winifred stopped. There was an idea. True, she didn't have a measuring tape with her, but she knew that she herself was exactly four feet tall. If she lay down next to the squid, she could see how many Winifreds long it was.
She flopped down into the water and swam over to the squid so that she was level with its head. Its head was about as long as her whole body. She swam alongside the entire length of the squid's body and estimated that it was about four Winifreds long, or sixteen feet.
Suddenly she heard that foghorn-like noise that she had heard earlier. Only it wasn't far away this time. It was coming from right beside her. It was a long, anguished, bovine sound, a sort of thunderous lowing, loud enough to make the individual droplets of mist quiver in the air. She looked back at the squid's face and saw that its eyes were open! It wasn't dead after all!
Frantically, Winifred tried to swim away, but the squid reached out one of its tentacles and grabbed her by a hind leg. She tried to free herself by kicking the tentacle away with her other leg, but the blow had no effect. Another tentacle reached out and grabbed her other hind paw. Now both her legs were caught. Winifred twisted herself around, brought her head up to the tentacle that held her, and bit down on it. But this didn't seem to hurt the squid either. In fact, its skin was so hard that the force of the bite broke off two of Winifred's teeth.
Winifred realized she was in trouble. "Help me!" she yelled. But nobeast came. Her friends were already too far away to hear.
Two more tentacles stretched out and grabbed Winifred's arms, binding them to her sides. They were squeezing her really tight. She had never felt such pain in her life. "Help!" she shouted again. She wasn't sure if she was crying out to her friends or calling upon the heavens for help, but in any case, there was no reply.
The tentacles squeezed tighter. Soon they were squeezing her so tightly that she lost all feeling in her arms and legs. But at least she wasn't hurting anymore.
Slowly, the giant squid began sliding down into the waves, taking Winifred with it. She tried to yell for help again, but her head went under and her mouth filled up with water.
The salt water stung Winifred's eyes, but she kept them open as long as she could. All she could see was water, though.
Her lungs were filling up and she couldn't breathe. She knew she would never see the surface or her friends again. At last, Winifred was forced to close her eyes for good, accepting her premature end as the beast dragged her down to its lair.