Winning Friends
A rampaging elephant destroys a sparrow's nest without slowing down — and finds every one of her small friends waiting at the reckoning.
No creature is too small to be owed an account, and enough of them together can close it.
Narration voiced with OmniVoice (k2-fsa), CC-BY-NC.
A sparrow had built her nest low in a flowering tree, three eggs warm beneath her, when a musth-maddened elephant came crashing through the grove looking for nothing in particular to destroy.
He rubbed his aching head against her branch the way such elephants do, and the branch, the nest, and the three eggs went down together under a foot that never noticed them at all.
The sparrow grieved the way small things grieve — loudly, and to whoever would listen. A woodpecker who had nested nearby all her life was the first to come.
WoodpeckerHe will not remember doing it. That is not the same as being allowed to forget.
A bee joined them, and a frog after her, and the four sat in council the way animals rarely bother to, because an elephant alone answers to no one his own size.
BeeSize is only an advantage against a single enemy. Let him answer to four.
The woodpecker found the elephant asleep against a bank and drove her beak into both his eyes before he understood he was under attack. Blind and roaring, he thrashed toward any sound that might be water.
FrogThis way, great one — the lake is this way, cool and close.
The frog called from the lip of a ravine that had no water in it at all, only a long fall dressed, to a blind and desperate ear, as an answer. The elephant charged toward the voice with the last of his strength.
He did not stop in time. The sparrow built again in the same tree the following spring, and the grove kept its story the way small places keep the memory of what four small allies can do to one enormous mistake.
Ready to listen
1 / 10 · Studio narration
