In the black of night, hidden in the bog’s thick fog, Odin and Punga watched as a little opossum teetered along the edge of a river. As she looked for a spot to scramble through the tangle of roots and up the bank, she wore a satisfied smile across her jaw of fifty teeth. The white-faced marsupial had just captured a poisonous snake and was now delighted with her full belly. While climbing the riverbank, she found an opening that allowed her to move between the twisted and hairy-skinned roots. Odors of rot stung her nose while patches of fleshy roots quivered about her. Within the roots, eye-like slits gleamed red. Frightened, she backed away. One of the hairy tendrils opened his scaly bark, exposing mossy fangs. The sight of the fangs, far sharper then her own, caused her to fall over in a faint. “Playing opossum,” she mimicked death. Without a struggle, the oil troll swallowed her.

  Upon seeing this, fear lay heavy in Odin’s throat. The rumor that the oil trolls had returned was true. Odin and Punga had entered their realm. So soon, they had witnessed their wicked ways. Thus they kept as still as possible and watched as the oil troll, behaving like an owl, regurgitated the opossum’s hair and bones. Picking through the bones, the troll gathered the opossum’s fang-like teeth, keeping in mind that his favorite female would wear them hanging from her ears.

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  Oil trolls had evolved in a quagmire of oily clay deep in the black water bog. Their flesh and bones hid souls that festered with cruelty and greed for crude oil. Mutated in the toxic residue of oil, the trolls’ bloated tongues rested on purple lips. Grotesque grins exposed gaping mouths full of blackened fangs and woody scales circled their lips. Some had clawed feet and wore faces blighted with knobby warts; some grew two heads. Oil trolls were nature gone wrong.

  The oil troll dwellings were along the bog’s muddy riverbanks. Here, in the light of day, they hid and slept, appearing like twisted roots growing out of the rotting mud.

  Fog came with the night, wrapping its sinister mist around the coiled roots, resurrecting them into blood and bone. Once awakened, the hungry trolls, their eyes gleaming red, shuffled with a lopsided gait through the bog searching for food.

  The females adorned their naked bodies with waist belts woven from the hair of dead trolls. Some wore the bones of deceased kin hung from their neck by a leather cord. In the shelter of night, after waking from their daytime sleep, the females pulled their dirty hair to the side of the head, braiding it into a figure of eight. The male oil trolls found them pretty, flattering them with gifts of opossum teeth earrings.

  Paralyzing fear clutched Odin’s body as he thought of Laelia somewhere in the bog with the hungry oil trolls. Witnessing their ravenous appetites, he tried to drive away the thought of oil trolls swallowing his sister.