Storytelling Week 7: Justice is Served

After many long and difficult months, Sam the squirrel succeeded in producing the largest farm in the village.  Since he was a squirrel, he did not need a road to access his farm, only trees that were long enough to jump back and forth to.  

Sam returned home to gather his family so that they could all return together to the farm and begin to pick his ripe harvests.  But when they returned, they noticed, little by little, that their harvest was slowly disappearing.  Unable to figure out what was happening to it, Sam thought maybe he was just seeing things and that there was just as much harvest there as there was before.  The family continued to work, picking the ripe corn until the wife noticed that indeed, the harvest was smaller.  

The family looked and looked for hours, unable to find who was stealing all their hard work.  Suddenly, Sam saw a small black creature running through the fields, stealing all of his harvest.  He noticed, this small black creature was a very snappy spider.  In his angriest squirrel voice, Sam shouted, "You there, what are you doing in my field, picking all my harvest?  

The spider responded, "These fields are mine for I have been coming here for weeks and there is no road leading up to it."

The Squirrel did not know, however, that in order for a farm to be considered yours, it had to have a road leading up to it.  Though he told the spider he did not need roads for the farm to be his, he was surely mistaken.  And by that, the spider gathered all the harvest he could fit into bags and left the farm bone dry.  The squirrel and his family had nothing to eat and of their hard work went to waste.  

The thieving spider didn't even need the harvest he just stole from Sam but only wanted to sell it at ten times its cost.  As he made his way down to the market to gather what was not entitled to him, a strong wind storm came through and the bag of corn flew out of the spider’s hands.  As the wind picked up the back and nearly set it down a little ways down the road, a hawk swooped in and stole the back from right under the spider’s nose.  

Spider shouted, "That is my bag, hawk.  You cannot just steal it from me."

But the hawk knew, the hawk had been watching and he replied with, "But spider, I watched what happened down at Sam's house.  I was perched high up in the trees and I watched you steal all that harvest from a good, hardworking squirrel.  You cannot be rewarded with the work you stole from another man."

And off the hawk went, far out of the spider’s sight.  And so later that night, when Sam had made his way back home, sad and hungry, the family went to sleep.  But the next morning, when Sam went back to his farm, there he saw all of his harvest returned.  Though he didn't know who returned it all back to him, in the corner of his eye, way up in the trees, he saw a hawk, perched on a branch, overlooking the whole thing. 

Hawk on a branch 

Author’s Note: I chose to retell the story of The Squirrel and the Spider this week.  While I was reading the original story, I really liked how the beginning played out but wished that in the end, the squirrel would get his harvest back so that's how I changed the story.  I didn't want the spider to reap the benefits of something he didn't work for so in the end, the hawk returned the justice to the squirrel and everything worked out.  I wanted to change the crow into a hawk because it seemed like more of a protector.  When I think of a crow, I think dirty and mean and I didn’t want that portrayed in my story.  When I first read the story, I thought it was interesting how the farm couldn’t be yours unless you had a street that ran up to it.  It seemed like a silly rule to have in order to claim property that is yours.  One of the things I particurarly liked about the story was that instead of the characters being humans, like a more typical story, they were all animals and insects.  You wouldn’t expect the characters to be like that in a typical story. West African Folktales by William H. Barker and Cecilia Sinclair with drawings by Cecilia Sinclair (1917).