The Caribou

Professor:      "I am here on the North Slope recording a bilingual caribou, who speaks a unique Eskimo dialect . . . Will you illustrate, please?"

Caribou:         "drzlyfumnpxksrccbggujalkr”

Professor:      "Meaning?"

Caribou:         “One o’clock”

Professor:      "May we have another example?"

Caribou:         “gxh.”

Professor:      "Translated how?"

Caribou:         “The place where two oceans meet in a bay that goes inland through a purple fjord that turns pale and then not so pale and goes on and on, in and out and then narrows somewhere but floods in May and maybe part of June.”

Professor:      "Any other expression, not so nuanced, that we may be interested in?"

Caribou:         “landscapeintruisionsinthenameofcivilizationalloverthespillspoiledplace

                        bypropernounsexxonandbritishpetroleumforimproperpurposes.”

Professor:      "We can almost decipher that."

Caribou:        " In plainer English: 'Men come now and dig dig and pump pump and lay down big pipe and seep and soak the land with poison, and may they go to blazes without taking us with them.'”

Professor:      "Thank you very much."

Caribou:         "You are not welcome."

            
Moral: Enough said.

Ebenezer Elephant

Ebenezer Elephant took a trip. He packed his—no, don’t go there—his suitcase, bought his ticket, said see-you-soon to some zebras he knew, one lizard, a friendly baboon, a giraffe he played cards with, and he departed on—or, rather, below—an airfreight blimp, carried in a huge sling underneath. He’d been given a sedative and he slept, swinging in the blue, swaying, rocking, lofted, out cold in cerebral goodbye land. The next he knew, he opened his eyes in Thailand.

            

He was looking for a cousin in the streets of Bangkok, and he found him with the inevitable mahoot on his back. (Thank God, I live in Africa, he thought, where all they can do is kill you.) Still his cousin confessed that it wasn’t so bad, life was better than it had been in the dwindling jungle where teak trees were disappearing because you, for one, were made to knock them over for squalid lumber. It made him sad banging down the columns of his very own ground for a pittance or only because the man on your back sometimes gave you more scrubs in your daily bath as extra reward. When they were done with the woods, there was a swath of long vast emptiness, your home ground gone, not a sapling, not a seedling, left standing, nothing but mounds and mounds of debris. So they left for the city, where they scrounged at night for garbage and handouts for the tricks the cousin had now been taught, just as demeaning as the circus where fellow workers had newly started. He thanked Ebenezer for the presents he had brought, and they parted.

            

Ebenezer flew home, swayed in the sling, not thinking, gratefully, of anything. Then he was home where he’d started from. He did not need any coaching now not to devastate all of his very own trees. But he would still have to take his chances on local poaching. One way or the other, though, he would never get down on his callous’d knees begging for handouts, pretty-please, ponderously.

            

Moral: It’s a close call between death and slavery.