Originally, Bert was very small, but now she had grown bigger. She often used to walk along the paths in the forest. Now she bounded along them. If she met somebody she would have looked up at them, now she only looked up to them, for Bert was the lowliest of the clan of the Bone-Bashers, which was the lowliest of all the clans. This made Bert the bottom lowliest, and she was happy and content with her simple life – until one day she met up with her close friend Chuck, whom she had never met and would never meet again, but in the following years they would spend together, she would grow even bigger, as she was but a young Bone-Basher. Bert didn’t know how to count, and couldn’t understand numbers at all. If she had been thinking about four birds, and seen four trees, she may have been able to see there were just as many, or certainly roughly the same amount, but wouldn’t have been able to explain it, even to Chuck. He understood her better than any other Bone-Basher, although his language was different to that of Arn, who was no longer a Bone-Basher, but instead a clan-chieftain’s arch-sibling. One time Bert could have met Arn, but Chuck couldn’t and since they were not together, Arn went unnoticed. Arn, who could have been a friend of Bert, never knew this, and his life is not of importance to us, or Chuck, who by now had parted from Bert, who had only met him once and was again bounding down the paths which seemed to have shrunk, for again she had grown, as this is the way in the clan of the Bone-Bashers. At the end of the paths lay nothing, because the paths had no end, and Bert knew this, and she knew that things happen in the middle of paths, not at the end. Indeed something did happen. Bert one day was set upon by a large forest animal – the sort of animal with teeth that could easily tear apart a smaller animal with equally sharp teeth. Such an animal Bert wasn’t, nor had she seen one, and never would because they were all to meet Arn and Chuck, whom Bert would never see. But Bert was a happy Basher, for she knew that when this world was finished, and left her, which was inconceivably distant for her as she was unable to count years, the world would be re-birthed for her, and she would share the same name as herself, Nigel.