LITMIR.BIZ

      Once upon a time, there lived a clockmaker in a village at the edge of the Black Forest in Germany. Long ago he had been known as Young Ula, the clockmaker. Then as Ula, the clockmaker. In time, he became Old Ula, the clockmaker.

      For years past numbering, he had been the finest maker of the famous Black Forest cuckoo clock anywhere in the world. When the best was wanted in the way of such a clock, people came to Ula. Travelers from across the oceans, when they were near the Black Forest, stopped at his village to order a clock from him.

      Some, when they heard how long it was going to take, went away without ordering. Angry. Or disappointed. Anyway, not patient.

      “To make a clock takes time,” Ula would say, looking to see whether his customer appreciated the little joke. “To make a clock takes a good deal of time.”

      Old Ula’s clocks were entirely hand-made. The workings were old-fashioned and simple. Four wheels in each train, verge escapements and foliot. He always began with the works. Carving the wooden wheels and spindles, fashioning the two long chains of brass links, fashioning the bellows and the wire gong that would give the bird its voice. He cast two weights of lead, in the form of fir cones. Then he would proceed to the dial face, carving lacy hands and numerals. Then he would make the house. Small, sometimes. Sometimes large. Usually something between small and large.

      But never simple.

      The workings of his clocks were so severe and plain that nothing ever went wrong with them. But the cases, the houses that surrounded these works, were of the most elaborate kind.

      Naturally, people ordering a clock made by hand by the finest clockmaker in the Black Forest directed what they wished to have in the way of decoration. And usually they wished to display on the face of the clock their skill as hunters.

      For instance, one day Baron Balloon came into the clockmaker’s small cottage. Baron Balloon himself lived in a castle at the top of a mountain from which he could look down on the village. Sometimes he did not come off his peak for weeks. But today he had ordered the carriage with its coachman and span of gray horses, and down the winding road he’d come, especially to commission the finest, largest, most intricate and imposing cuckoo clock that Old Ula had ever made. It was to be a present for his daughter at Christmas, now four months away.

      Brangi, the clockmaker’s big brown dog, was lying across the doorstep in the sunlight. Brangi was getting old. Once he had frolicked through fields and forest, and fought other dogs, and loved other dogs. He had bayed at the moon with a full deep voice. But of late he preferred to lie on the doorstep in the warm sun, or lie beside the hearth in the evening by the leaping fire. The moon no longer called to him.

      Now he was in the Baron’s way.

      The Baron, accustomed to having everyone and everything get out of his way, stopped at the doorstep and said, “Hoh! Move!”

      Brangi thumped his tail and sighed and relaxed. He hadn’t a notion of what was due a Baron in the way of obedience. The Baron’s own dogs jumped when he snapped his fingers, but they’d been trained by their parents.

      Brangi just lolled there, blocking the Baron’s entrance.

      “Hoh, Ula!” the Baron bellowed. “Get this hound out of my path, or I shall be obliged to have my coachman remove him!”

      Ula, who had been growing rather deaf, had not heard the arrival of the Baron’s coach, but now he rose from his workbench and shuffled to the door.

      “Come, Brangi,” he said mildly. “Don’t you know an important man when you’re lying across his path?”

      Brangi glanced up, yawned, seemed to reflect, and, just as the Baron was on the point of bellowing again, moved slowly into the cottage, where he subsided on a rug beside the clockmaker’s worktable, put his head on his paws, and went to sleep.

      “And now, Herr Baron,” said Ula. “What may I do for you?”

      The Baron looked about the room. Accustomed as he was to castles, it seemed pretty poor stuff to him. A room with a workbench at one end, beneath a window. A fireplace with a box settle to one side and an old rocker to the other. A hooked rug. White curtains at the windows. Several clocks on the wall, finished and waiting to be picked up by those who had ordered them. Two on the workbench, undergoing repairs.

      There was a longcase clock in one corner. “Did you make that?” the Baron demanded, pointing.

      “Alas, no. I make only cuckoo clocks. That was made by a friend, now gone.”

      “You bought it from him?” said the Baron in surprise. It was a clock, obviously, of great value.

      “He gave it to me.”

      “Hmph. It’s an exceedingly fine one.” Its fineness irritated the Baron. He had bought a great many things in his life, but had never been given anything. He considered offering to buy it, looked at the clockmaker and reconsidered.

      He continued his haughty inspection of the cottage, but there was nothing more to see, except a staircase going up one wall to the clockmaker’s bedroom, and, at one side of the workbench, Erich the Foundling, carefully sanding a spindle.

      “Tell that boy to leave,” ordered the Baron Balloon.

      Old Ula smiled and shook his head. “Not possible, Mein Herr. He is my assistant.”

      Erich the Foundling lowered his glance proudly, but he was alarmed. The Baron was so huge and important and loud, and Old Ula so gentle and quiet.

      “You, boy—out!” said the Baron.