The next horizon, sometimes just the next farm, was always more promising, until it proved not to be so, after all.

This way, Brrr made his slow progress southeast through Munchkinland until he’d reached the hardscrabble district known as the Hardings.

The Squirrel had been accurate in his description. In the towns of Three Dead Trees, Rush Margins, and the inappropriately named Center Bounty (Center Spite was more like it) the hounded creatures had hunkered down and made the best of a bad situation.

By now he was finally beginning to understand what had happened to the Animals in Oz. The professionals-the chattering classes, also the twittering, clucking, nickering, and braying classes-had gone underground. Some of them literally (Moles, Rabbits, Badgers), some symbolically. As a rule, many of them were so long removed from any kind of manual labor that they hadn’t fared at all well when trying to take up again the practices of their ancestors.

They made their living, such as it was, in the townships of southeastern Munchkinland-the stony dales and blackened, brackish rills, the treeless hills supporting only gorse and broom and the occasional weary flock of sheep, for their weary wool, or peppermilk colts, for equally wearying cheese. The Animals crowded, cheek by bristly jowl, or wither by wen, in stone crofts and stone hovels and stone lean-tos and stone corncribs built in a more hopeful time.

Brrr continued his career in down-market picaresquerie. A month in Three Dead Trees, two weeks in Broad Slope Town, then a longish stint, almost a year, in Rush Margins, the surface of Illswater glinting with a hard beauty in the occasional shock of sunlight. More often the skies were streaked with grey. It never grew very warm here, even in spring, what with the winds constant as tidal wash. They endlessly speckled the windowpanes with sand carried in from the eastern deserts.

But eventually even Rush Margins grew unbearable, too, and Brrr forged his way against the wind, ever farther south. He wondered if he harbored a secret compulsion to leave Oz entirely, to enter the trackless desert from which, it was said, there was no return. To dig himself a grave in the largest sweep of cat litter nature could provide, bury himself like a turd there. Outside the legal reach of Oz itself, outside its memory if he could only arrange that, too.

One evening on the south slope of Illswater, not far from Stonespar End, Brrr came upon a neglected parsonage. It had been dedicated to the use of a unionist minister-Brrr recognized the symbols carved over the lintel. He nearly passed it by, having no more use for the blandishments of piety than he did for political capital. A voice called from an open window, though, offering a firkin of water, and one didn’t turn down a drink even if it came at the cost of a spiritual seduction.

It was an ancient Ape in a quilted velvet smoking jacket so old and frayed that it betrayed no clue as to its original color. He beckoned with palsied knuckles. He called himself Mister Mikko. He shared digs with a Boar named Professor Lenx who, due to deteriorating hips, was confined to a wheeled cart that the Ape could only barely manage to maneuver in and out the garden door.