invasive species
Ferdinand was fed up. It was the third time in a month that he’d chipped his tooth on chicken-wire. The others had already eaten most of the ash trees; there were only a few other hardwoods and they didn’t taste as good. Getting to the good ones took a long time—hours of crawling through the woods.
He thought of the stories his great-grandmother Myrtle used to tell him. She talked of the old days, when the ape-creatures waged war by planting metal jaws in the water to dismember anyone who happened to step in them. The ape-creatures would eviscerate the corpses and drape the skins over their pathetic, hairless bodies in triumph.
Ferdinand remembered that in his youth, the ape-creatures would try to rip the big dam down and let the water flow out of the swamp. They left the dam alone now. A long black pipe snaked over the top of it. No one knew how it worked, but after the ape-creatures built it, the water never got any higher. Ferdinand and his friends had to go build another dam.
No one knew why the naked ape-creatures came here, or how they managed to survive without fur. Some said they came from across the ocean; others said from the sky. They seemed to have a voracious appetite for trees, but they never ate the bark and didn’t build dams of their own. And sometimes, as now, they would wrap wire around the base of a tree for no obvious reason, leaving it completely inedible.
For Ferdinand, it was the last straw. Not content with killing the beavers, the ape creatures preferred to taunt and starve them into submission. Surely the last onslaught was at hand? Ferdinand knew the time had come to fight back.
April 3rd, 2006 at 1128 e
This is what you do with your time? Really?!