FlapJack the Great

Danny “Flap-jack” 

Born in 1654 in Oliver Cromwell's England, Elsa and Edward Fjord, were keen to keep their child a secret from the pervading socio-political environment. Being a student of the old ways, Elsa raised her son as she had been brought up, in Druid tradition, to be a time traveling wizard. Gifted and bored by the local political rivalries, young Danny dreamed of the colonies, and the intrigue they might offer. European forest had been widely cleared of magical creatures and faeries by the time he reached 18 years old, and with his parents permission, he donned a shimmering green cloak one late winter solstice eve, and began the journey that would live on in the dreams of children forever.

Teleporting from the family cave in Gluecestershire, he arrived in 1692 Salem Massachusetts. He found the people charming, but a little closed minded. After several of his new acquaintances found themselves on trial for practicing organic gardening techniques, he quickly zapped himself a little further into the future, and into the uncharted corners of the world. Pulled off course by a vortex in Northern Arizona (which had not yet been discovered) and landing roughly in the pacific northwest, it was here that Danny found himself disconnected from his route home, having landed on his staff. He was left without the critical component to his magical endeavors and was forced to rely on his skills in potion making and hand magic.

Befriending a family of wolves, Danny spent the better part of the next century wandering forests, cataloging plants and their inherent curative abilities. It was the summer of 1885, a hot blistery afternoon, when Danny observed smoke on a nearby mountain. Having made contact with several tribes in the area, this was not unexpected, but the size of the fire concerned Danny for the wildlife, and calling forth as many four legged assistants as he could, Danny began the long hike to the peak of Mount St. Helens, where he met the source of the fire. A kindly Swedish family had settled the area with the clever idea of deforesting it for profit.

Danny, having grown tired of the life in the woods, opted to try this new scheme, and with relentless inquisitiveness, quickly established himself as a capable lumberjack. Using a combination of traditional logging styles and magical spells designed to increase his physical size, Danny was able to clear entire mountainsides with a single weekend. His enormous height made him a towering figure in local affairs, and may have been the original source for the story of Paul Bunyan written in 1910 by James MacGillivray. This of course made the resident loggers somewhat redundant, not to

mention greatly depleted their stock of wheat and oat flour with his continual insistence upon being fed only oat-cakes, or flapjacks; ultimately leading to the pact between the Swedish family and the Great Forest Spirit.

One cool winter day, while Danny was upending some particularly massive old growth trees, a fairy appeared to him and offered him a handful of snow-berries to quench his thirst. Having downed several handfuls, the fairy laughed maniacally after tricking him into eating the “food of the dead”, and went on a fairly derisive rant about Danny's behavior, which is not directly translatable from fairy. Stripping Danny of his magical powers, she sentencing him to sleep forever in the forest. It was at this point that Danny was overcome by the effects of the toxic Snowberry, and fell into a deep slumber. Over the years, he was covered by fallen plant

matter, moss and mycelium, and slowly returned to the size of a normal human in his cavern of overgrowth. This of course was the inspiration for another widely documented time traveling journalist, Washington Irving, who produced Rip Van Winkle in the summer of 1819, who cleverly released the story before the events they were based on had occurred. It was many years later before Danny would be discovered by modern anthropologists and mythological recovery teams, and given a new life. Danny can still be found earning the cash to eat lots of flap-jacks most days, at the 7-11.

Snowberry (Symphoricarpos albus)