FAIRWEATHER FOREST

A DRUNKARD sat under a fig tree and sang a song of nonsense, and the music he made was so cheerful and strange that all the creatures in the forest flocked to the tree and listened in merriment. The Drunkard was happy to sing for the deer and the mice and the Blue Jays and the bobcats, until his voice became tired and his malted beverage spilled into the grass. The empty jug rolled down the hill and into a gorge, and the animals dispersed to their respective habitats. The deer went into the meadow; the mice went into the field; the Blue Jays into the trees; the bobcats returned to the rocks at the edge of the forest. And for a time all was quiet in the wood. The Moon rose. Thereupon a swarm of ants came along and carried the slumbering Drunkard off to a hollowed-out tree trunk, where upon the Queen's throne they picked him apart until he was but bones and blood. And his screams sounded like the mating of crickets as they rose above the canopies and mingled with the music of the Jays; a new song which lulled the mice and deer to sleep, and beckoned the bobcats to hunt, but which the Drunkard himself could not hear. A Wizard came along and found the Drunkard's remains, and made a cup out of his bones, and filled the chalice with his blood, and lamented from atop a mountain: "How terrible it is for a man, a mortal, a minstrel, that your friends by daylight would rejoice in your peril under cover of night."