The Sea Lion

A sea lion on a sun-drenched day, bouncing gently on a small ice floe, was mesmerized by the horizon line, bobbing up and down and far away. He thought a single Great White Cloud, in sea lion’s shape and all aglow, was God, and he was God and God was he. Up and down the ice raft bobbed, he on top, in rhythmic trance, under blazing sky, feeling One-in-all and All-in-one, identity and unity.

When evening came and it grew dark, he slipped into the frothing sea and was eaten by a Great White Shark.

            

Moral: So much for that unified feeling. When all is said and all is done, the All may not feel one with you.

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.

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.