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.