"Too Tall" Talbot in: Snowball Fight! - Part 4 of 4

TOO TALL TALES

Too Tall Tahoe Talbot and Deirdra Sully awoke in the same snowy pasture—ahem! battlefield—they left when Babe the Blue Ox sent them packing. Only now, there were far more trees around.

“Did we really stop Paul Bunyan?” Talbot suggested.

Before Deirdra could answer, an adorable, albino ox calf the size of an adult elephant came trotting up and gave her entire face a big, fat lick. Laughing up at the sky, she said, “Look, Tahoe! The snow!”

The snowflakes fluttering down around them were a vibrant shade of glacial blue.

For that moment, they forgot about Paul and the loggers, the cold and exhaustion, even about getting home as they frolicked and danced.

After a little while, they heard a low rumble as the earth under their feet trembled softly. The pure white calf was playing too, lowing and rolling around in the unusual blue snow. ❄️

Deirdra closed her eyes, whispered, “In eighteen and sixty-two, we saw snow fall oh so blue.” She looked up at Too Tall. “Tahoe! Do you realize what this means?”

“Nope. Not at all.”

“We didn’t make it back to the future—we went back another three years!”

“How could you possibly know that?”

“That ox calf? That’s Babe. Paul’s gonna save him when he finds him frozen in the snow. It’s how he turns blue.”

“So... Bunyan is gonna show up here at some point?”

“Yup,” Deirdra replied, noticing a small group of loggers setting up camp near the treeline. “And if that’s a giant flapjack griddle those lumberjacks are greasing up over yonder, it’ll be sooner than later.” 🥞

Once the group had a cast iron skillet the size of an ice rink in place, loggers strapped big ol’ hams to their feet and skated around on it while cooks stoked the sprawling campfire underneath.

“And so... We should be going?”

“There’s also the possibility we landed in another universe —”

“Leaving now, got it,” Tahoe interjected.

“Fine,” Deirdra agreed, wishing she’d explored the idea a little more.

Evading notice, they hiked to the treeline, headed for the Big Onion River.

“Just one last thing,” said Talbot.

He unbuttoned the flannel.

Hung it up on the same tree from which he’d taken it.

“I feel like he’ll need this more than I do.”

As they walked along the riverbank later, Deirdra chimed, “Hey, Too Tall.”

“Yo.”

“Where do you think it came from?”

“Where do I think what came from?”

“The flannel.”

“It came from that tree. Same one I just left it on.”

“No, I mean, if you got it from Paul and Paul got it from you, where did it come from?”

“Say again?”

“You took the flannel from Paul Bunyan. But since Paul only has it three years in the future because you left it for him to find, where did it come from originally?”

“You’re simmering my noodles, Dee.”

Unfortunately for both of them, she was still wearily theorizing by the time they reached the coast.

“Of course, it’s also possible we created an alternate timeline...”

“Hey, I have a question too.”

Deirdra brightened up. “Really? Great! What is it?”

“How are we getting back to Egypt this time? Airplanes haven’t been invented yet. And the only boats aren’t fast or, well, quite big enough. I wish Shadow was here.”

“How good a swimmer are you?”

“Not good enough to swim across the whole Atlantic Ocean!”

“Have you ever tried?”

“Technically, no.”

Deirdra hopped on for a piggyback ride. “Giddyap, little doggy! Mush!”

“Fine,” Talbot relented, jumping in just past the breakers. “But if we don’t make it, this was all your idea.”

Too Tall was beyond tired. And swimming lessons seemed like forever ago.

It would take a miserably long time to cross such a vast distance.

Incredibly, though, they popped out of the water on the other side about twenty minutes later. “Hah!” he laughed. “That wasn’t so bad after all.”

Back at the Giza Plateau, they found far fewer workers and archaeologists excavating, so Tahoe decided to help Deirdra look for the button and any other mechanisms that might control their next temporal destination.

Deirdra located the ground button right away this time, while Talbot said, “Hey, look! The Sphinx still has the ear and beard I broke!”

“That’s because your classic clumsiness hasn’t broken them yet. See any controls over there?”

“Not yet, Dee. Wait! There’s something inside the nose!” Talbot went wrist deep into the pharaoh’s left nostril. Fumbling around. Exploring. Picking its nose. “I think it’s right—here!”

With a sickening crack! the entire nose fractured off.

“Doggone it.”

“Tahoe! Stop breaking the sacred pharaoh and get over here!”

Talbot placed the nose between the lion paws, then joined her at the ground switch.

“Check it out. The button is also a dial.”

“Sweet!”

“Except for one thing,” said Deirdra. “It only goes backwards.”

“You mean —”

“Yup.”

“But what about going home? Our friends and family?”

Deirdra only gazed down at her sandy boots.

“It can’t be.”

“Look at the bright side: we can visit any time throughout all of history, righting wrongs, fixing injustices, and having wacky adventures along the way.”

“I just wanna go home, Dee.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Talbot’s face suddenly brightened. “Wait a second! I think I have it.”

“What?”

“Remember what Mrs. K. always says in AP History?”

“This again? Something like you can’t go forward without going back?”

“Right! So if we go all the way back, maybe we can go all the way forward.”

“That’s pretty thin logic, Too Tall.”

“But it’s worth a try, right? What’ve we got to lose?”

Deirdra turned the dial counter-clockwise as far as it would go and pounded it with her fist.

The golden beams blasted into the sky once again, uniting into a single braid redirected downward, surrounding them, carrying them to the beginning, to the moment it fired for the first time, delivering them straight into ancient Egypt. 🐫

Dazzling, brand-new pyramids gleamed under the desert sun behind their fully intact Sphinx guardian as Deirdra and Talbot arrived, several thousand years from the present.

Unfortunately, they landed right in the crossfire of a fierce conflict.

War chariots in formation bore down on them, their screaming riders brandishing bronze swords and spears.

The sky above was even more terrifying, as black with flying arrows as it had been white with snowballs.

“Uh-oh,” Deirdra gasped. “We gotta go, Too Tall. Like, RIGHT NOW!”

“I’m on it!”

At a run, Tahoe dove for the ground button, his reaching hand falling —

Just a tad short. “Gosh darnit!” He hastily inchwormed toward it in the sand.

“TAHOE!” she cried, mere seconds before the falling arrows would skewer them into human porcupines.

One final wriggle and Talbot slapped the button, disappearing them from the inbound threats.

Some arrows actually made it through the temporal distortion but clattered harmlessly about the two on a concrete sidewalk.

Their existence would puzzle museum curators for many decades.

A car Talbot and Deirdra recognized as new that year passed them on the street.

It had Minnesota license plates.

Someone walking their dog gave the two an odd look but dove back into their smartphone as they passed.

“Did it work? Are we finally back in the present?”

Utilizing his higher vantage point, Talbot surveyed the early summer vista and said, “I think so. This neighborhood and that lake weren’t here before, but I’m pretty sure this is the exact same spot that —” Something in the distance caught his eye.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. Let’s head into town and find a place to call our folks. Just one last thing, though,” he mumbled distantly, walking off.

“Again?” she sighed. “I’ll just — wait here, I guess.”

Talbot left the neighborhood, crossed a pasture, and went around the small lake to the other side. There were no trees as far as the eye could see.

Except one.

A mighty eastern cottonwood.

Talbot reached out and touched its rough bark, finding an —

Ancient piece of rusty, ingrown barbed wire still clinging to its trunk.

“He left it be,” Tahoe whispered, amazed. “It’s the only one, but he left it be.”

Perhaps Deirdra had been right all along. History had plenty of enemies worth fighting, but Paul Bunyan wasn’t one of them. Though he still didn’t support the lumberjack’s activities, he’d learned something about picking his battles.

Besides, there was more than enough to keep Too Tall busy in his own time.

And yet, Talbot had the distinct feeling their paths would cross again.

Did that mean he’d end up on more zany adventures with Deirdra after all?

Only the future knew for sure.

Talbot returned to Deirdra.

As they hiked into town, she shared her many scientific theories about pyramid time travel but never quite hit the nail on the head. “Honestly, I don’t really get why the Egyptians turned their pyramids into a time machine.”

Oh! I can answer that one, Deirdra! You see, even before the Romans, Egyptians were quite aware of the problems folk of staggering height posed. They ate WAY too much, even in times of scarcity, and the klutziness associated with their hugeness was certainly not exclusive to Talbot. In fact, that’s why they made the pyramids pointy: so that any giant who made the mistake of trespassing on their holy site would quickly hop away on one foot, yelping in pain. Since that didn’t always do the trick, they ultimately upgraded them with a time portal package to banish the “vertically unchallenged” from the necropolis whenever they might wander by.

As for Deirdra Sully and Tahoe Talbot, they turned in essays about their class trip to Egypt and subsequent disappearance that were not well received.

They were dismissed as ridiculous tall tales.

I mean, c’mon. Did they really expect us to believe their snowy scuffle with Paul Bunyan turned Minnesota into the Land of 10,000 Lakes?

THE END 🌳