FABLES FOR A FARTHER TIME
The three fables presented here are part of an evolving series inspired by James Thurber's books Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time.
The Antisocial Butterfly
ONE CLEAR October day an immense, amorphous shadow swept across a remote pine forest, and for a moment it blotted out the spot of sun in which a self-absorbed tiger swallowtail was basking. The slight drop in temperature alarmed her back to reality, and she sprang to a nearby tree for safety.
From her new vantage point she could observe the great cloud, a scintillating carpet of orange, settle across the forest. It turned out to be a flutter of monarchs en route to warmer climes, their pockets stuffed with casino coupons. Having lost their bearings, they had pulled over to consult a map.
“Which way is west?” one of the wanderers wondered.
“I’m working on it,” snarked the leader, orienting his foldout.
“We should have stopped and asked for directions,” someone else complained.
“I don’t want to freeze to death here,” worried another.
The leader traced his two-pronged claw over the geography and searched for known landmarks.
“Next time I’m taking a bus,” grumbled a tattered monarch at the back of the crowd.
The leader glowered.
Just then the elegant swallowtail made her stunning descent into the snowbirds’ midst and offered to assist. She provided such excellent directions and so charmed the flock with her practiced bonhomie that they urged her to accompany them on their journey.
They importuned that she’d be safe with them because they were unpalatable to predators. The swallowtail smiled and bit her tongue to keep from blurting out that indeed it appeared that their bad taste extended to the loud shirts they wore.
Instead she thanked the monarchs for inviting her to travel with them and declined with her regrets, citing a full social calendar.
Seeing the travelers’ disappointment, the swallowtail reassured them that she too was perfectly safe from predators. She was an accomplished lookalike, she bragged demurely, who in fact belonged to a very palatable variety, one that had successfully mimicked the family’s poisonous swallowtail cousin the pipevine. She cast an admiring glance over one shoulder at her forked hindwings and privately congratulated herself on her good taste. Besides, she dissuaded herself, her kind always flew solo.
The swallowtail soon waved her wellwishes to the departing cloud of monarchs and watched as they faded in the distance.
As she turned to go back to her spot of sun, a red-winged blackbird who’d been eavesdropping and overheard the whole thing swooped.
He admitted to himself that, just as she’d claimed, her taste was excellent.
Moral: Don’t give away all your secrets.
Corollary: One swallow does not a summer make, but one swallowtail might make someone a tasty snack.
© Anne Ross 2019
A Not Unshaggy Four-Dog Night
THREE DOGS from a big-city paper—a newshound, a comma hound, and the Shar-Pei with the sharp pen who did the advice column and the horoscopes—wandered into a chichi watering hole late one Friday afternoon for happy hour, free hors d’oeuvres, and unlimited popcorn.
As they headed to their table, the copyeditor whisked a stray section of a competitor’s daily off the bar. “Take a look at this,” she said with a haughty sniff, pointing at the banner.
“Yeah,” gruffed the seasoned field reporter. “‘Quarreling dogs come halting home’—what kind of chien lunatique headline is that?”
“Their whole rag looks like a dog’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” said the copyeditor, nose in air. “It’s typical sensationalistic gonzo journalism, of the tabloid kind.”
“What exactly is it supposed to mean, anyway—‘Quarreling dogs come halting home’?” the Shar-Pei speculated.
“It’s a not untimeworn cliché,” said the copyeditor dismissively, “that ought to be retired.”
“But what does it actually mean?” protested the newshound, immediately flipping open his laptop. “Frankly, I don’t understand either.”
Not to be lapped by the newshound, the other two top laptop dogs also fired up their devices.
“Let’s start with,” the copyeditor quickly got in edgewise, “all the ‘huh’ words, shall we?—who, what, when, where, why, how, hunh, hmmm, and ahem—and see if we can whip it into shape.” In her view, a copyeditor always had to be whipping something into shape.
On that cue the newshound reasserted his reportorial authority. “Who’s quarreling where? What over? And why?” he posited. “When does the quarreling take place? How many dogs are involved? Do they go home together? Do we know their names? What pedigrees are we talking about here? Is it a fair fight?”
“Beg to differ,” the copyeditor interrupted, firing a shot across the bowwow. “Who says it’s a ‘fight’ at all? It says here that ‘quarreling’ connotes verbal disagreement only, typically without fisticuffs or pawicuffs.”
“You can't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds,” snarled the advice astrologer. “‘Halting’ says they’re limping home, so, ipso facto, they exchanged blows.”
“Or they stopped off at a bar,” the comma hound snapped back. “In the middle of having words, they—”
“We haven’t established the ‘they,’ yet,” the reporter gnarred, his hackles visibly rising.
“—halted to have a drink. After maybe one too many they had their car keys confiscated and stumbled home on foot and it took them awhile. ‘Halting’ in three senses of the word,” she said, triumphant.
“Utterly ridiculous,” growled the advice maven under her breath.
“You’re ridiculous,” the newshound snarled, gnashing his teeth.
The comma hound furrowed her nose at both of them.
At the far end of the counter, a bar dog named Rex, quietly minding his own business and trying to enjoy his Asta Collins after a long, hard day, finally reached his limit and determined that the rising ruction of dog Latin from across the room had now made his a not happy hour. He turned to the table of three with all the courtesy, restraint, and good humor he could muster.
“Hey, anklebiters! Put a muzzle on it, wouldya?”
Although he said it cheerfully enough, the three at the table turned toward him with all the fury of the Hound of Heaven and rose to their feet.
“You don’t have a dog in this fight,” barked the reporter.
“Oh, don’t I, now?” said the bar dog, slipping down off his stool and heading their way. He happened to be a professional boxer, was currently between official bouts, and sometimes moonlighted as a bouncer or, as on this occasion, a pouncer.
LATER, shoulder around shoulder, the three members of the fourth estate, now in no condition or demeanor to quarrel with anybody, found themselves halting home, perfectly clear about what that meant.
Moral: A pounce of contention is worse than a hound unsure.
© Anne Ross 2019
The Lemming Who Saw What No One Else Could
ONE BRISK AUTUMN DAY a myopic Norway lemming named Gunvald stood up and stated the obvious, that the local population had reached its maximum density. As a result of the horde’s (defensibly) hedonistic lifestyle, he pointed out, they had simply eaten themselves out of house and home. It was time to move on.
In the eyes of his hungry Lemmus lemmus kin, Gunvald was a true visionary, who emboldened them with the prospect of new grasses, shrubs, and bark, and an improved life “with twigs for all.” Because he had attained the venerable age of one year—old by lemming standards—and because no one else wanted to stand up, it fell to him to lead the way.
Their stomachs agrowl, the lemming horde set forth forthwith, dreaming of a fresh landscape to depredate. With Gunvald at the helm, their number overran snowfields, bravely swam across rivulets and streams at his behest, and headed for virgin tundra. As he successfully faced one blurry topographic challenge after another, his confidence as a leader likewise grew by leaps and bounds.
Two action-packed days later, the entire population suddenly found itself on high ground overlooking the steep, glacier-carved sides of an Arctic fjord. Gunvald, seeing the horde’s longed-for destination in the foreshortened distance, announced they had reached the final crossing, one last slim body of water below, beyond which every delectable morsel they hungered for lay. The plan was simple—glide down to the water’s edge and swim the short distance across.
At one corner of the swarm, a neatly coifed mass of calico fur expressed her reservations. She squeezed her spouse’s elbow. “I know it’s rhetorical,” she wondered, “but if somebody told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?”
“I would,” piped up their precocious kid, an aspiring stunt double they promptly ignored, “but it depends on whether they pay union.”
“Let’s not get into analogy-backfire territory,” her husband told her, shepherding the family into the throng.
Gunvald the nearsighted visionary gave the word. Everyone looked at each other, took a deep breath, and lurched forward in unison.
Those who survived the leap of faith continued the second leg of their biathlon by swimming lemmingpaddle out into the middle of an expanse that far exceeded everyone’s expectations, and sank.
YEARS LATER, a visionary documentary film crew flew an off-brand subspecies of lemmings in from Hudson’s Bay, cast them (a cast of dozens) to their deaths off a snowy cliff in Alberta (no stunt doubles were on set), and won an Academy Award for embellishing and further spreading a deep-seated trope (the lemming proclivity for “mass suicide” and its implications for humans) that had originated as a fanciful misconception.
Moral: In flights of fancy or fancies of flight,
Temper your vision with regular sight.
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Note: It appears that lemmings do not yet have a noun of assembly of their own. A suicide of lemmings—although it would fit right in with the sinister murder of crows, conspiracy of ravens, mischief of rats, skulk of foxes, mob of kangaroos, siege of bitterns, and unkindness of ravens—is out of the question because of its inaccuracy. Perhaps in order would be something more lighthearted and in character, like leap—a leap of lemmings.
© Anne Ross 2019