The Stag

When the forest started burning, a great stag held back while all other animals fled in panic. He moved calmly, picking his way before the flames, turning even to browse now and again. Everything in moderation was his motto. He’d never been in a fire before but that didn’t matter, he knew better than to run amok.

            

Creatures all about him paced ahead, including cougars, who might have waited to pounce on any deer or other game gone astray or lingering, but they also raced in frantic haste. So did badgers, humping fast across the tinder floor. And through the underbrush little things were scurrying, and in clearings elk went streaking, and grizzly bears whizz’d along. A ponderous moose bounded by. “Take it easy,” counseled the stag, but nobody heard, least of all flights of frightened birds who clacked or thrummed their wings as they zoomed straight out of there under a dimmed and lowering sky.

            

The stag, aloof, erect, majestic, bided his time. He sauntered through a grotto. He munched snow-on-the-mountain, though something coarse coated his tongue, roughened his bite. He strode slowly, in the darkening light, unperturbed by the pell-mell headlong rush all about him. A bolting horse from somewhere trampled past. Still, the stag held back. He sniffed the air, which had thickened with motes of—what? flakes? ash?—making him chuff and cough. His heart began to quicken.

            

He stopped his temperate grazing and wished now to be off, and he started, but his rack of horns was snared in a raveling bramble which normally he could have disentangled but, wheezing, he shuffled, swayed and bumbled further, folding to his fore-knees, feeling alarm but also curious surprise that he was not able to rise where he had stood but sagged and softly crumbled in the midst of smoke, the sound of crackling wood. Then, casually overcome, he succumbed.

            

Moral: Everything in moderation—including moderation.

The Grasshopper

A juvenile grasshopper under a toxic shroud lost her parents in a field of timothy grass. Only she survived the pesticide. She was adopted subsequently by a cloud of cicadas who acted, yes, in locust parentis. The whole swarm lavished affection and care, whereupon she thrived for the rest of that year—although, however much she ate, she never grew bigger but always stayed svelt, with the same slim grasshopper figure.

           

After that time, it came to pass that the spiraling locusts buried their young, deep under sand and silt, beyond discovery, for the many years it takes for resurrection. She, being she, could not follow successfully, though she sank her whole casing in the same desert hollow. She was not able to draw grasshopper breath so far below. She had learned to chirp their cluster song, had migrated for the summer, and had managed to abide—but she died.

           
Moral:  More or less, when you gotta go, you gotta go.

Q. Are glaciers on the move—and, if so, how fast?

A. They certainly are, but at highly variant speeds. You can’t see them move at all in

Greenland; you can’t even tell if they’re coming or going. Actually, they are moving above a  
millimeter a day in the east and sliding back the same in the west, all of which is very hard on 
the upper peninsula, especially the crust. Underneath, where all the fairies live, there’s no 
stress at all. On the other side of the Arctic Circle, though, in Faintheart, Alaska—on the cove, 
where the fishing colony keeps re-establishing its tiny village every twenty-three days—the 
saying is, “Here she comes again!” Nowadays, they have snowmobiles and can make quick 
getaways, but in the old days it was almost perilous. Why, incidentally, glaciers are female I 
don’t know, since there is no gender in that Esquimo dialect. It just gains something in 
translation, I guess.

The Ostrich and the Hippo

When the ostrich strode to the river bank, the hippo smirked and then sank almost out of sight. 

His ears were like a periscope turned in all directions, and he heard the ostrich, who said, “You, you enormous blubber, come out of there and stop your snickering.”

            

“What did you say?” tried the other.

           

“You heard me, your ears don’t lap over. And I can see both of them flickering; does it make you so nervous answering me?”

            

“I’m twitching off testy flies and fleas.”

            

“That’s tsetse flies, you illiterate hulk, you huge sniggering ignoramus. Now, tell me, exactly, what makes you laugh at the sight of me?”

            

“It’s seeing someone almost as ugly as I but far funnier.”

            

The ostrich said, “Oh, you admit you’re the ugliest creature alive?”

            

“I’ve got the disproportion, for a start. I’m so ungainly, all the way around. You can’t see my bulk so much in water where I move all right. But on land I’m ever so slow; if I went any slower, I’d go backwards. I don’t so much move as encumber wherever I am, like a piece of lax lumber.”

            

“Well,” said the ostrich, “I can sprint if not fly, and though I balloon at the waist, have a scrawny neck and a door-knob head, at least I can run, and I feel often spry. But you, I agree, have no redeeming traits, your head’s too square, your mouth opens as wide as a gaping lagoon, your tail’s all wrong, it stops too soon and, over-all, you should have stayed in bed.”

            

“Good!” said the hippo, “I accept all that and the fact that you didn’t dwell on my fat. Do you mind if I repeat the one thing about you that turns all your defects into a virtue? You’re a laughing stock—yes, with wings that don’t lift—and when you sprint, as you say, you whomp and you shift, careening and swaying side to side with a wobble and heave that make one feel you need a gyroscopic guide to keep you on course or you’ll tilt and keel head over heel, your neck stretched out, a glazed look on your face, as you jounce and leap in your ostrich pace, your feet over-long, your claws too splayed, sweat on your beak, even in the shade, your whole body careering, about to flop, when suddenly you come to a comical stop. I may be uglier, but you’re funnier.”

            

“Well,” said the ostrich, “all that makes me more special than you.”

           

Moral: Pride, on anybody’s part, will find its way.

Q. How come there’s no difference between “fat chance” and “slim chance?"

A.     It is what’s technically known as an idiot’s syncrisy of the language. Like, for example,

“slow up” and “slow down”—the same thing. Or “regardless” and “irregardless.” And “I couldn’t care less”—or, nowadays, “I could care less.” See? Still, to get back to the original query, and it certainly is queer, “slim” isn’t always equated with “fat,” as in the following joke:

First girlfriend: “Have you slept with him yet?”

Second girlfriend: “Fat chance!”

Well, who would, if the lover in question is some slobiferous pachyderm with a midriff like a Goodyear blimp and rapine in his bloodshot eye? But, come to think of it, I’ve never heard of some slender youth being turned down with “Slim chance!” either. Girls usually say, “Get lost!” and—I’m sorry, we can’t give advice to the lovelorn, this is a science feature.

The Bat

The question they ask about the bat is, how did he get from this to that? Between the time he was still on ground and finally flew in air, how did he stay hale and sound, how did he evolve from here to there, being such an easy prey? How did he last more than a day?

            

The answer is, he became an awkward sort of dancer. He began to run with a fanciful skip that was neither a waft nor a gait, skip-hopping along at a furious clip, an intermediate but distracting, off-putting trait. No longer treading, still not flying, he pushed his pinions, bobbing and weaving, rhythmically swaying and heaving, until one day, with the wind just right, all of a sudden— separation! genuine lift—flight—the climax of continuous hesitant application.

            

Moral: Being in-between in life may mean simply—or not so simply—that you’re on your way.

Q. Are pilot fish associated in any way with flying fish?

A. Not at all. A pilot fish lives in the mouth of a whale. When he goes to work in the

morning, he says to his wife, “I’m leaving for the orifice,” and that’ll be his day, darting in and out  

of whale’s teeth for his sustenance. His name is a misnomer, and he has nothing to do with your   true flying fish—or your fake one, for that matter. Flying fish, by the way, do have a sort of lateral 

fin-wing on each side. But they do not have, and never have had, propellers. Also, they never fly 

non-stop anywhere, but only make short hops. That might be because they've been de-

regulated. They’ll discontinue stewardesses next.

Best Friends

Best Friends

You cannot call your child “best friend,”

words that only honored others bear.

Not against the law,

exactly,

but it’s sheer impropriety.

Whether son as such,

or daughter as much,

children are disallowed,

cannot share

so matter-of-factly

in that surpassing praise

reserved for strangers to your blood,

privileged people, most loved

but removed.

The phrase is maudlin fault,

smuggled emotion,

so far around the language bend,

so callow,

gauche,

it is barred from polite or any society.

Even if true,

it will not do.

Still, though all three of mine are grown,

have their own

connections

further on down

the chain

of being, they remain

abiding, secretless closest confidants

and, therefore, no apology, no social correction

in this ungrammatic, unretracted

revelation

(which will do

because it is true):

these private friends are best

not in over-reaching far-fetched

but honest

public exclamation—

which can and must be said

before too late,

without subtracting from unrelated

comrades

or unrivaled mate,

with their own deserved affirmation—

For these special three,

lifelong bonded company,

may their own progeny—

good, better, or best—

be equally, or eventually,

simply

blest.

The Miner's Wife and the Butterflies

There was this once when, set apart in the brush of a Rock Creek campsite, I overheard a woman from Butte as she stepped out of her modest trailer and found the place thronged by a pullulating mass of monarch butterflies, en route to Lower Canada. A miner’s wife, she was suddenly and exultantly astounded by the sight and cried aloud, singing to her husband coming after, “Oh, Vinnie! will you look at all the {effing} butterflies! (her joy declared in seemly brackets). An otherwise sedate wife was beside herself, profanely enraptured by the enormous palpitating cloud rising and softly falling, heaving and gently bucking on that vivid riverine coast. In her downright, downhome, gross delight she exclaimed to her husband and to the landscape, her obscene ecstasy bursting at the bright abrupt beauty of the world.

            

Moral: Who you are depends on this: were you struck more by Decline and Fall or, after all and still in all, a woman’s bliss?