Rash Deeds
A bear stands loyal guard over a sleeping friend, and swats a fly with the only weapon devotion thought to reach for.
A foolish friend can do to you what a wise enemy would never attempt.
Narration voiced with OmniVoice (k2-fsa), CC-BY-NC.
An old gardener, who lived alone at the edge of his fields, found a young bear wandering lost one winter and fed him, and the bear never quite left after that.
The bear grew into a devotion that had no calculation in it at all — he fanned the gardener through the hot afternoons, and sat guard while the old man slept.
VillagerA friendship with a beast is a wager no sensible man makes. Send it back to the forest before its love does what its claws could.
GardenerHe has fanned my sleep for two summers and never once shown me his teeth. I will keep the friend I have.
One drowsy afternoon, under a tree, a fly began landing again and again on the sleeping gardener's face, returning each time the bear's broad paw swept it away.
The bear's patience, unlike a man's, did not know how to end gently. He looked around the yard for something the fly could not shrug off, and his eye found a stone the size of a loaf.
BearSit still, small thing. This will be the last time you land on my friend's face.
The stone came down exactly where the fly had been sitting, with all the force loyalty could gather behind it.
The fly did not survive the blow, and neither, in the same instant, did the gardener. Love without judgment is not a smaller danger than hatred — it is only a slower one to suspect.
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