by Michael "darkfire" Mazzaferri
He stood there, staring at the last of the invaders’ houses. They had believed the land to be uninhabited, never imagining that those who guarded it never stayed in one place for long. They had not known the nomads believed the land to be sacred; that it should never be disturbed. And so, like all young pushed out of the nest, they flopped to the ground and tried to fly. And when they discovered people on the lands they now thought their own, they quickly decided to destroy them. Together, the three brothers hunted through their new valley and happened upon camp after camp of natives. The warrior felt his anger and rage rise as he remembered how the strangers had butchered every man, woman, and child within the wandering camp. He remembered the screams and the fires. He should never have left to go hunting that day. One moment he was returning triumphant from catching dinner, and the next he was holding his wife in his arms as she bled out from the smoking wound in her chest. With none from the camp still alive, the hunter vowed to track down the three invaders and to bring justice to those who would desecrate this earth.
He followed one of the strangers to a nearby field of tall where herds of elk and deer roamed, and there he saw the beginnings of a house. The first of the strangers, the youngest, had been most naïve. He decided to build his home among the straw he found thriving in the field. The house was small and modest with a thatched roof. He had thought himself a farmer, and tried to sell the straw. It had been easy for the hunter to rout him from these plains. All that was needed was a little blow of the wind, and the new farmer’s crop disappeared in a blaze of smoke and ash. The invader had been asleep and never had the chance to escape. Soon, the hunter knew, the ashes would rejuvenate the land and straw and grass alike would grow anew and the deer and elk would return; such was nature’s way.
The second of the three strangers was a little smarter, and so decided to build himself a log cabin in the woods that once housed the hunter’s tribe. He fancied himself a logger and felled many trees that had been home to bird and beast alike. The warrior could not risk a fire this time. If the blaze grew too strong, the whole forest would light up and all his work would be for naught. When he contemplated what to do, the hunter noticed an old, dead tree standing beside the cabin that the logger had not cut. It was hollowed by a pack of squirrels to be used as storage for the winter. Indeed, it was already half full of acorns and nuts. All it took was a simple push, a light breeze, and the tree came crashing down on the fool’s home crushing him beneath the wood he had thought to sell.
The third stranger, however, was by far the oldest and the smartest. He had settled in a clearing beside the lake that had given the natives life year after year. In the bed of the lake, he found clay and with it fashioned large stones he proceeded to bake and then lay one on top of the other. Of these clay stones, he made himself a large mansion there on the shore of the lake. There was no straw nearby, so the hunter knew he could not cook the mason, and there were no trees, either, so he could not crush him. It had seemed he had met his match, and so he tried trick the mason. Unfortunately, subterfuge has never been his forte, and so no amount of tricking would get the mason to leave the house.
As a last resort, the hunter climbed onto the roof and spied a hole with which he might enter the house to kill the last of the brothers. As he climbed down, he realized his mistake when his foot slipped and he crashed into a pot of water. The mason quickly clamped a lid on the pot, trapping the hunter inside. He pleaded to be let out, but to no avail. The mason knew what the hunter had done to the others and so devised a way to avenge his brothers’ deaths. He proceeded to build a fire around the pot. As the water started to warm, the hunter realized he was running out of air, and thought back to an old saying his people had. “Live like a lamb, die like a wolf,” they said. Ironic, that it should be the other way around. His only regret being that he had not succeeded in avenging the deaths of his people, the hunter was dead long before the pot started to boil.
(c) 2009 - Michael "darkfire / candle" Mazzaferri
