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.