Such queer characters! What a strange and picturesque party! How, I wondered, would I ever paint their portraits? Only through rhyme, I reasoned. And yet... and yet my choppy, chirping verse fails, as you see, to do it with any great art. Well, these ARE the twenty beasts I found in the forest.

But the locusts! I'm forgetting them completely. And Pagoda! Perhaps she didn't die. She may be alive even now wondering what happened to me.

Dear Pagoda,

Where oh where are you? Alive or... No, I refuse to think of it! I can only imagine you flying by my side, singing and reciting poetry. What were those monsters who attacked us so viciously? Curse the fate that hurled you to the bottom of a burning ditch and flung me across an ocean wide! And now I have my claws full in this crazy place. A turtle and a swallow salivate when they see me, for in this strange land a cricket is a tasty morsel for a reptile or bird. The other pilgrims wrangle too: the bear tackles the salmon, the frog is hopping mad at the butterfly, the toad throws ugly looks at the moth, the spider conspires with frog and toad to... Ah, it's a hornet's nest of turmoil!

This evening at camp the bison tells his tale, for he drew the short straw. And so MY tale for this time, my dear Pagoda. But I write it with hardly any hope that you'll see it. Are you alive and jumping? Even if so, how will this ever find you? What carrier pigeon can deliver a letter to a locust lost in a burning ditch?

Yet I dream of the day we'll fly together again...

LOVE,
Your Cricket

All bickering and backbiting ceased the moment we learned the bison was ready to tell his tale. We were camped near a waterfall. It was a night wanting a moon and misty too. Happily, a few stars peeped forth, and by them the bat was able to guide and gather us into a circle. Foremost stood that deep-voiced brute of a bison. And he began in this fashion:

Since I have leave to speak I will be blunt and bold. I am a plain beast. I did not go to a fancy school like the salmon. I do not jump around scribbling verse all day long like the cricket. Bovine they call me. And what does that mean? Sluggish and dull! We bison are stupid, no doubt you have you have heard. Bull will follow cow and cow bull; none will think at all for themselves. Yes, you know the hearsay: that if the beast before sinks into quicksand, the brute behind will march with him to a wet sandy death. And if we had been of more nimble wit we could have steered clear of those killers who made mincemeat of us. I'm sure every animal here has heard all this gossip. It is a widespread belief in the animal world that the bison is no fox for intelligence.

Yet listen to my tale. Just as I put my heart into winning our story-telling contest, so I set my teeth to convince you - sink or swim! - bison are not dumb!

Perhaps you have heard that in the dim distant past there was no land - only water, and on the water just three living things. One was a gigantic duck, and next to it two spirits. Floating in a stupor for a flow of time beyond measure, the two spirits grew weary. Infinite hours of boredom made them miserable. And so they called upon the duck to dive down in the water and return with mud. The duck did so and with the mud the spirits shaped a dry cake. Casting it on the water they made the land.

Then with clumps of dried mud from a second cake the spirits sculpted the figure of a magnificent being. Many such were formed: the first creatures on earth - the bison.