aodan vertelt twee grapjes

Hare and Tortoise - a short story.

(Family story - target audience age seven and up)
Once upon a time, there was a forest with around three hundred animals in it. They did not know any better than that they were called the Alcanoiles, after the mountains of their home forest, which was in the Mustervla regions.


This is the story of how the spiders tried to take over the forest's control of the Lions by spinning magical webs.
Until the very first spider emerged some four hundred years ago from a raindrop and set about making a beautiful web from the raindrop to the middle of a lake, the forest had been like any other forest. A nice, slightly enchanted collection of trees with leaves, surrounded by a stretch of sand leading to mountains of which the forest inhabitants believed they were a perfect ending to the world. They looked at the skies with silent trepidation except for nights because then the skies volunteered them what the sea offers to human beings in summer. The wind and the leaves were laboring together to provide a thing that you and I might know as humid air, but that the Alcanoiles knew better about.
They called the air around them Humdrum. To the animals Humdrum set the tone and created the feeling in the free air against which every animal could make an exact pitch of sound, wing flapping, hoof pacing or step knowing that where they would land next would be another enchanted, and therefore, safe spot. All animals believed that Humdrum must go on forever if they were to live long and happy lives. Humdrum was simply the most important thing to be aware of, here, now and all the time, they told each other. Until the arrival of the very first spider in Alcanoiles, Humdrum really was nothing beside the sound of the wind and the leaves. Perhaps in ages longer ago, the forest had been alive amid a different noise, but no one was quite sure what the animals before them had been pitching their endeavors against. At any rate, the sound of the spider that arrived first and that had managed to make it alive for over eleven days and nights all on her own, was seen to be the novelty of the century by all animals, even though none of them knew what a century actually was. Rather than the constant ruuussshhhs swuuusch of the wind and the leaves, the spider's enchantment sounded more diverse and melodic. Although I know better than to try to capture sounds into words, the spider's sound leant itself to words surprisingly easily. Had you and I had animal's ears, it would have been something like cling clang pong ping. This distinct sound was unheard in the forest. All animals found that the combined effort of the wind and leaves were useful for assuring safe passage of the simple things in life, but that the wind compared to the spider's clings very vaguely, almost as a disguise. No, the cling clang was the real Humdrum for this day and age, everyone believed, and the owls used to say that by tilting your head, you could find your way around even with your eyes closed. So it was decided the spider should not be eaten, in case the sound would disappear and leave the forest void of its effect.

twoIn the year that followed, the first spider had become the proud mother of five new spiderlets and together they had started to attune the forest as if they had nothing better to do. Soon they realised that besides singing the entire day, from time to time, they'd have to create different, less clingy webs, to catch a fly. These webs were not meant to produce sounds because the other animals would find it difficult to think they were safe amid the screams of dying flies. So the spiders always made sure the webs for giving the forest its atmosphere would be made of the best quality silk, almost of metallic threads. They lasted longer and would be making the most pertinent noise. "A metallic thread leaves them clear in the head," mother spider told her young ones. Until the arrival of the first spider and probably until her little ones had grown up, Alcanoiles beasts and animals had been mostly very nice to each other, apart from the ones that ate other animals of course and only bees, horseflies and musquitos were hated by the Alcanoiles because they were known to administer other animals unknown quantities of stings for no reason whatsoever. Of course a tiger was not exactly friends with a sheep and neither was a sheep kind to the leaves on trees or grass for that matter. Smaller animals would generally ignore big animals, even if they were not eaten by them. Lions ruled the forest and their rule was mostly believed to be fair and unobtrusive. No one ever questioned it, Lions were not hated by anyone. A few animals really loved the lions, but only those that had enough time to themselves not doing jobs for the lions. Among them were the tigers, the elephants, some bears and most all the giraffes. Like in any other reasonable forest, if something big happened, it would be the owls that'd go round the forest to bring other animals the tiding. They had a very official way of doing this and ended each time with 'so I hear the land lies'. This meant that they could never be exactly sure, but that most of what they had been reporting would be true, or, they thought that way it would be understood. Trees grew and so long as new leaves kept appearing once a year and made Humdrum sound roughly the same as the year hence, every animal knew he was not anywhere he should not be. Their mothers and fathers had told them, as they themselves had been told by their own parents, never to set foot where they could see plain sky. "Keep close to the trees and gras and when the light is so strong that you will have to blink your eyes more than five times, you're in danger of making the great fall that no one returns from," every animal was told as soon as they could walk. The story of the Hare and the Tortoise was told as a warning so often that it was every animal's nightmare, except Durry the eagle's. His sole ambition in life it was to make a symphony in Humdrumese because he believed the language contained direct links to forest outer space. Durry had not done anything in his life but playing until the day that he thought he was no longer just playing. They had not been great games. Throwing sticks, making waterways in mud puddles, forcing slugs to race each other by threatening to confiscate their houses and finding out how many prayers he'd have to say before he'd catch and eat a rabbit again after letting it go, not much else. Durry never had, he just was and this was just about as much as he thought he was. In this, he was no different from most animals in the forest. Durry thought he had good reason to become fluent in Humdrumese. Why is it, he had asked his mother many times, that every time the light forces me to blink my eyes more then three times, I seem to see the mountains take as many steps back and make way for more grass? Each time he asked this question, he actually had meant to ask ‘Why is it that each time I blink my eyes more than three times, I can't remember what I actually meant to ask’? Durry did not know many things, but he had asked so many questions that had been driven by his longing for the sandy space outside the forest, or forest outer space, that by now he had begun to think that outer space might not be there. "I really must probe mother some more, I am sure she's in the know," he said to himself. It had been the effect, every time he asked his mother the Big question, or, as he chuckled to himself, every time 'he did the eye blinking thing', that made him doubt more and more that Humdrum really ceased after the last tree in the forest, like the spiders made them think. But each time, she had thrown an instant fit so powerful it made him believe she also thought that in reality no boundary ever existed and she was forced by some jerk to shut up about it. The fits had been so brief however, that afterwards, he doubted he'd really heard what he'd heard. After the trembling, shivering and gasps for breath had worn out, and she would have rearranged her feathers Durry's mother begged her son never but then never to act on his life ambition, not even to speak of it ever again. He had trouble thinking what his mother had said when she threw one such fit, so frightened he had been when they happened. Only after the third occasion had he mustered up enough experience to actually rembember some of the words. They'd been in rhyme. He recalled this one line clearly. "It will flex us all perplex," she had screamed. The mother eagle had thrown this line only just about from under the top leaves of one of the tallest trees, for Durry, a wicked little eagle he was, had picked this spot to practise his theory of forest outer life on her. Durry inspected it carefully and thought it was pretty cool stuff. That evening, Durry's father, grandfather, grandmother and around six of his ten aunts and uncles were called in to make sure Durry once more would be brought to understand that their and therefore his forest stretched as far as only the strongest bird could fly and return. Nice troop reinforcements, Durry thought. "That is it boy, and no further nonsense, you're upsetting us all", he was told. "Show some respect". And though he thought it uncanny he agreed to listen to everyone's vivid descriptions of their own personal farthest tree, although he wondered why it really was so necessary if he needed to be convinced that the edge of the forest was really too far for him to see for himself the so awful grey stone. Every story ended with 'had I gone any further, I would not have been sitting here today'. "Too bad", Durry thought in most cases, although he took care not to rhyme the unspoken replies in case they would hem them all in.
Three
Durry, despite the many warnings he had heard the night before, decided now was the time to be totally reckless. No one would be suspecting him immediately of more boundary exploration activity so soon after a rebuke.
So, as soon as the next day came around, Durry woke up early. He fluttered around somewhat around the tree he usually slept in and waited for hhis sister to wake up. She was up early too, because she was an early bird. Durry fluttered around some more and then casually threw one rhyme to his sister.
"O dear harpsicord, why don't you plonk your ass over here and have a beer," he tried. The effect of that totally innocent pun was explosive; his sister, it appeared, was flung into the air, with a force other than her own frail wings. She shot up in a matter of split seconds, higher than the tree they had been sat in. The spider webs that were covering the leaves were ripped apart and Durry’s sister was virtually unconscious when she landed back.
In a sense, that was lucky, because Durry did not immediately know what to do and his next line "I believe you're growing a beard", was almost equally disastrous. His sister had begun to shout loudly and she shot off in the air again. This time below the foliage of the tree and she got stuck in spiders’ webs, once again nearly unconscious.
Durry found himself unable to shake off the rhyme and in his head was making up scores more. ‘I am not chosey but don’t want you to appear’ was one he remembered afterwards. The other rhymes escaped his mind soon after he thought them up. Nevertheless he thought he was doing real magic stuff.
"Jeez, if just some nonsense yields this effects, what will happen if I get to the real thing," he said to himself, wondering what it would be like. He was convinced though that the real thing would land him in forest outer space. Perhaps the world outside the mountains would open up finally if he had an idea about the right words. But for now, his sister was still stuck in the tree top covered with spiders’ webs. The general Humdrum cling clangs were quite unbalanced, but since Durry had been thinking very hard about rhymes, he had not noticed any earlier than now. It was most important to first get his sister down at this moment. Durry began to try to reverse the wheel he'd set in motion by thinking up a few simple rhymes. But even "A pun is fun" would not help out. "My feathers have turned into a sticky mess. Perhaps I will never be able to fly again, dumb sod, Mom is going to kill you," his sister complained. She had regained all consciousness that was for sure.
Durry realised that it was very important that he got his sister free as soon as possible because otherwise he’d be in some real trouble, despite his newfound sorcerer’s status. His sister opened her mouth again to start screaming again, but then they both saw something neither of them had seen before; his sister’s reflection was very vivid and sharp in the spider webs. The webs that spiders created were invisible, yet the light behind them shone through, and Durry’s sister was reflected near perfectly.
The spiders always made sure that whenever a web got tangled up too much or gathered dust, they’d quickly eat them and spin neat lines again because they did not want the other animals to see the webs. It was the secret to the enchantment.
You and I know there are clowds above the trees, but Durry and his sister didnt know this. When they saw Durry’s sister’s reflection (only she was close enough to the sticky web to be reflected) they were spooked out of their wits. Durry did the first thing that came to his mind. "O for crying out loud, do not shout!, he screamed, fearing another shouting sister would be impossible for him to cope with. And to his relief, not only was his sister completely dumbfounded, she instantaneously was disentangled and fell down the branch like a stone. Twenty yards below, she finally regained her wing capacity and flew to the nearest branch. Durry was beside her immediately. ‘Woah”, he said. He didn’t know what else to say. He was frightened what his sister’s next actions were going to be. But Durry’s sister was pretty cool for once. That was because she’d seen herself for the very first time. So she said ‘not bad, you made my day, bro’. And flew off. Durry was happy as a bee in a bonnet. Not because he had made hhis sister’s day, of course, but because ONE she wasn’t going to land him in trouble and TWO because she would understand his idea of the outer forest, he was sure of it. A very unlikely candidate for believing in him, but as his father would say welcome to the world of sales; the oddest people surprise you from time to time. The world wouldn’t be the same without them.
"Right, that's that", he sighed, and flapping his wings back into place which was difficult because particles of the sticky web his sister had escaped from had landed on his feathers. Being a lazy sod, he gave up his real life, mechanical, effort and turned to magic once more to sort this problem. He hastened to say "I will be you until you stumble too." Durry didn’t even know where his sister was at that time, but it must have been quite okay, because he'd safely landed in another tree before he knew it.
Durry felt a sorcerer of mega proportions. He said to himself that he had two fool proof spells now, even though he only meant to try out one. OK, so to escape the effect of an unwanted rhyme, you’ll simply have to create an impression you know what you are doing and opt for the next rhyme that comes up in your head. And stick it in a context of a great undertaking.
You say one or two magic new words and the lines practically weave themselves,he told himself.
It is the recipe to see, he hummed happily jumping into what would be the third or fourth layer toward forest outer space, by his calculations. He wanted to go there to see if he could get by without blinking his eyes at all. When his sister had been up in the tree, he had realised that he’d manage to blink only twice, but that might have been because of her reflection. He wasn’t sure. Those bird uncles and aunts that had flown to the edges of the forest and had made it back, had told him that what came next were mountains so high and steep they were unable to fly over them or find a resting place somewhere half way. Spider webs don't stick there, and that was something, because in the Alcanoiles, spiders were known to produce most sticky fabric, the first spider having stuck its lines succesfully from one watery substance to another. But Durry, by shouting that he’d be trading placeswith his sister, had unwittingly created an explosive situation for himself, his sister and the entire forest actually.
Durry felt jubilant because he was convinced that he could say a few good rhymes that would easily land him in outer space that would still be safe. It would only be a matter of finding the right words for outer space, he said. “Was it only last night that I asked my aunties and uncles whether they really thought that our forest ends when the stupid, silent mountains rise up?," Durry asked himself. He had asked his aunts and uncles whether they really believed all animals were simply trapped in a place with nowhere to go outside its boundaries because there's no Humdrum for that territory. Durry had even asked one raven uncle who had returned and told others about the grey blue mountains of which the tops were obscured by clouds. "It was the impression that I got," the raven said when Durry asked him thhe question. Durry had thought the raven was sad, although he did not show it. That afternoon, Durry did the thing that mixed up all the time frames in this story. He began to frolick around in rhymes with reckless abandon without realising that his sister was doing exactly the same thing!
Lifting his wings and flapping them about heavily, he set out rhyming.
Instantly, the low forest buzz turn into a more rhythmic sound. Real Magic way. The next thing that manifested itself was a bird dropping something in a spot that Durry saw turn magic just ahead of the dung's landing on the forest's moss carpet.
"Wherever there is motion as a result of my rhymes, the world has already become enchanted before the other animals move," he thought. “I am doing it for them!” But again, he was not sure he was not imagining things. He was not even sure it was him that was doing it. Then Durry, because of his confusion and his recklessness, did the thing that did all spiders in for at least the next four millennia and which made Humdrum the language of the dead. He had run out of ideas for rhymes and began to recite poetry he had learnt when in the third grade and created a short circuit because his sister was reciting those exact lines at one, brief but o so fatal moment.
What happened is that his sister and he landed on the same spot and the web lines lost their elasticity and snapped.
Durry had just tried to repair the damage when his line about the egg and the chicken sounded simultaneously with the one about the hare and the tortoise. In an instant, the entire forest started to tremble right until the edges and it did not stop there; the sand where no one had trod, started to ripple too. Clouds of dust were soon obscuring the sky. The birds were very confused about their bandwidth as they alluded to their skies that day.
But guess whhat: The moving lines reached the mountains, yes the mountains! The grey rock however bounced off echoes that resounded through the frail spider webs for days in a row. Poor Durry had set off one motion too much for the spiders. By the time the tremblings had stopped, all spiders had been eaten. Or so every animal in the forest believed. In reality, the spiders had quickly hidden in underground networks that they had taken over from the moles. The moles, being blind had given the very first spider the idea to take over control of the forest. The day that Durry’s little accident happened, the very last mole died. It was a mass murder of mega proportions that went by totally unnoticed. The spiders, for years had been blocking the system by simply spinning thick webs over all entrances and exits of mole holes. The moles were not able to see the thick spider webs because they were blind. Spiders knew that the same principle would work outside too. “So long as we keep the lines neatly separated, the other animals won’t see our webs. They will be magic and we’ll produce magical sounds along the strings’, the spiders decided.
At first, when Durry’s accident happened, everybody had thought the world was at an end because the day had turned into a night. Durry did not say a word, because he thought, his sister might have said he had been behind this hocus pocus that had turned the forest upside down. But luckily that was not the case. All animals were busy trying to find their nests and families without the aid of Humdrum and the hype prevented that anyone should think of him. Each animal shouted in their own voice -the sheep bleated, the horses hinniked, the cows moaned, dogs were barking and wolves howling. Soon the constant zooming of leaves in the wind and the spider plongs were forgotten. Durry, for the rest of his living days had nightmares of mountains falling on him almost every week. He never spoke a rhymed word again in his life, even though he could have easily done so, because rhymes had lost their power, since all spider webs were no longer being maintained by an active spider population. The animals were a bit surprised to find that the forest had become so spaceous since the departure of HUMDRUM, but they soon stopped wondering about why this was and lived their happy lives listening to the wind and the leaves again for safe guidance.
Four
It would take years, no, what am I saying, decades, o no, millennia or maybe centuries further into the forest, for one wise owl, he said his name was probably Dougal, or that that was how he heard the land had been lying at the time of his birth, to accidentally come across Humdrum again. It went something like this. Dougal, let's just skip this nonsense about how the land is lying, we can by now safely assume it is his name, had the task of bringing news to the spiders of the forest. He was a bit stretched, to tell you the truth, because since one spider had given birth to a group of umpteen replicas of herself, soon after the Durry incident, the number of spiders in the forest had been rising rapidly. They spun invisible webs both in the molehills and in the forest, but none of them had started to creating humdrum again because they wanted the other animals in the forest to think that they had all been eaten, in case anyone found out what they’d been doing to the moles. So they went about their business quietly.
So when Dougal the owl came across a spider in front of a sparrow’s house, one afternoon, he was not really sure what kind of creature he had the pleasure of meeting. What was more, the creature wasn’t altogether all that nice. The spider stood on a ridge of a tree branch when the owl flew past him. It challenged Dougal. "Say, Dougal the owl", the spider snarled, "the Sparrow bird ain’t in, but I bet you your news is what a horse tail told me yesterday. Now if you come again be sure to bring real news or otherwise skip by this abode.”
Dougal wasn’t exactly easily impressed but this was knocking him off his socks, for sure. Never in his life had he been so taken aback. Owls were considered wise creatures and hardly anyone would ever try to compete with them. But the spider had no qualms about it at all. He noticed Dougal’s defeat and was encouraged to go on some more. “I tell you, horse tails have it that the hare's no longer a hare and the tortoise is no longer a tortoise in a day or two. Now beat me to that one’, he said.
Dougal the owl smiled by clacking his beak twice, as he always did to spiders, and said "Oh my, a new wise ass in the neigbourhood. Where’s your nose, so you can put on my glasses?”, he said, taking them off. And then, putting them back on again he said; o you have none- well I guess the deal’s off then. We’ll see in two days who’s the better party. Ciou.Dougal would never be impolite because he generally was too wise to be rude. But there also was another reason why he held back. This was because his mother had raised him to always be good to eight legged creatures, because, she said, 'you never know what'll wind up next'. He did not know what that meant and had never had time to look it up, but he knew that his mother was right. He was not sure why this was, because he found his head filled with all sorts of words he’d not looked up ever yet. Our friend Dougal, without knowing it, was close to reinventing HUMDRUM once again.
Alas, he only realised this when it was too late, after he had in vain tried to remember what the spider had been on about at the end of the day, and found that he could not recall the exact words but instead had heard a sound he'd never heard until then. It could have been both the clinging sound of a spider on his web, but somehow he thought it was too loud for that. It was more like his big sister's harpsicord. Like Durry, Dougal also had a sister who played the harpsicord. The events that followed were to be the news the owl would be shouting round the forest that next day normally. But they were not. Because the events that unrolled became the forest's revolution of the century which needed no broadcasting via invisible webs, because every animal of the forest gathered there to witness for themselves. At this point, the spider webs had become defunct mostly. In many areas in the forest, thick throngs of spiders webs were beginning to clutter up. The spiders realised that if they ever wanted to really take control of the forest, now was a decisive point.
They’d have to be moving quick to restore their magical webs once again, they decided. So that is why the rowdy spider installed himself in front of the Sparrow’s door. Knowing that the Sparrow would not be home he could easily intercept the Owl on his news round. This is how the spiders this time around made sure they convinced everyone in the forest of their magic. They conducted a stunt that every animal witnessed for themselves.
It involved a tortoise that had become trapped in old spider webs so thick he could not wrestle free. The ordeal was taking place at the edge of the forest, the spider told the Owl. It was a very precarious matter because the only way out for the tortoise would be to step into the sand dunes that separated the forest from the mountains. And there were no trees there.
The spider’s trick to get everybody to the spot was to tell a lie. He said that a hare was going to race the tortoise to the mountains. Dougal the owl, rather than checking out for himself whether this was true, simply told everybody the news.
And that is how the entire forest population gathered at the edge of the forest within no time. What they found there was only the trapped tortoise. The hare was not there. But everybody that arrived at the spot believed that the hare already had set off.
The tortoise, aghast at the spider’s lies, tried to tell the animals that no race was on but that he simply had become trapped in some sticky stuff. Having been stuck for long however, the shelled creature soon was totally out of energy. It could barely lift his head and unwittingly proclaimed a magic spell. "Why should I trod where you plot!!???," he sighed exhaustedly, before resting his head on the brim of his shield again.
These might have been the words to an ancient rhyme invented by the first Alcanoiles spiders. Instantly, sand started to sprout up around the tortoise, pushing up his shell and lifting his legs. You see, up till then, the tortoise, about the slowest animal of the forest, had never set foot outside the tracks of any of the other forest animals. But this time, no one ever had been where the tortoise set foot after his ‘swan song’. Not only did the tortoise set step outside other animals' footprints, but he landed totally effortlessly into the vast stretches of sand of outer forest space where he'd have to blink his eyes at least until the death. And so, as the other animals looked on in horror, the tortoise carefully trod deadman's land. The onlookers were not sure they understood it, but what they saw was to them at once strange yet familiar, although no one could tell exactly why. On the one hand, they were all utterly bewildered at the sea of light that surrounded the tortoise, yet they saw him disappear. Eaten by flashes.
No one spoke, but all knew the air around them carried the message – don’t go there. An age old spel was either being cast or broken right before their eyes. In the meantime, the tortoise was just pacing himself and making sure he did not forget which foot to set next in the strangely moving sands. To him, whatever he was doing, wherever he was going, was the most natural thing to do. He turned around and said : hey guys, this trodding and plodding is pretty besotting.
The animals were spooked out of their wits, hearing the voice of a deceased. Some wanted to follow the tortoise. “If the afterlife is so much fun, I want to go as well”, one young crow said. But his father pecked him in the eyes. Just in case the little sod has plans, he said. Can’t you see the spiders are messing with us?
One hare did it, however. He had not been able to find his brother and was convinced that he had raced the tortoise. Thinking that life had become meaningless to him, the hare, making sure no one noticed, zoomed into the sand, after the tortoise. "Quicksand", he thought the next split second. After that, we don’t know what happened to him. The spiders never even noticed him, and his brother – was found later, also trapped in some old, defunct very sticky spider webs not far from the edge of the forest.
The tortoise was going very fast because the spiders were throwing up sand from the underground tunnels under every step he took. They had prepared the track for ages and everything worked according to their plan. The tortoise had a the sensation that he was flying. Never in his life had he gone along at such dizzying speed. “Can that be?", the tortoise wondered excitedly. "Am I a hare?," he shouted to the animals that were still in the forest. But they misheard him. They thought he shouted "Am I there". They all became very sad and hung their heads. The tortoise traversed the sands to the mountains in five minutes sharp. It was a world record.
The tortoise thought that he'd slowed down, because the flying sensation in his muscles had gone, but as a matter of fact, the sand had begun to rise even before he set his foot because the spiders in all this chaos could not keep track with his enthusiast rhythm. This he regretted and, having been what to him had felt like flying, he wanted to do it again. Straight away!
Perhaps he had not looked back but he also had certainly not looked in front of him, so he stupidly did not see he had actually finished crossing the plains and was setting out to climb the mountain. "Let's just widen the space of my footsteps again”, he said. “What do I do? O yes," and he remembered. But the creature in his effort to 'fly' again would have either crashed straight into the mountain or rather have dropped off the cliffs -and this is the scary part of this story- because the tortoise really decided to hurry some more, not realising that what he actually was experiencing were the steps of a hare pacing himself whilst decending down a winding mountain path at the end of a long hike up a mountain... And where were the spiders?


All in his head...