The Dog and the Mole

One fine spring day a dog was trotting through a pasture. He lifted his nose to the breeze, enjoying all the scents of the sun-washed grass and the small, scurrying creatures. 

Suddenly, he stopped and cocked his head. Straight in front of him was a peculiar sight. A mound of dirt was piled up right in the middle of the grass. As the dog watched, a fresh clump of sweet, dark earth seemed to shove its way out of the center of the pile and roll down the side, as if it was making a bid for freedom.

“Why this is very strange,” the dog said to himself. “I have trotted through this pasture many times, but I don’t recall seeing dirt behave like this before.”

But as he pondered this bizarre happening, he noticed another scent: sharp and musky. He sniffed busily. It was definitely an animal, but not one that he had ever smelled before. He strained his ears and seemed to hear a low, guttural mumbling coming from somewhere under his feet.

“I know what is happening now!” the dog exclaimed, his tail sticking straight up with excitement. “There must be a little creature digging in the earth. I should help it. I bet it has never seen anyone dig as fast or as deep as I can.”

And without another thought, the dog began to dig. He braced his back feet and his front feet became no more than a blur, dirt flying up in a plume behind him. He dug as he had never dug before.

A loud squeal interrupted him, and he stopped dead, up to his chest in the earth, a wrinkle of confusion between his ears.

The hill of dirt trembled and crumbled, revealing a tiny, black-furred creature with strong, shovel-like front paws which, he had to admit, seemed admirably suited to the business of digging. Before the dog could think of anything to say, the mole (for so the creature was) began to shriek. 

“How dare you!” It’s long, pink nose quivered with indignation, and it glared up out of beady, glittering eyes. The musky smell grew even sharper. “What do you think you’re doing, throwing dirt everywhere with your great big clumsy feet? You’ve completely destroyed my nice, new, tidy tunnels with your carelessness. Now I shall have to start my system all over again. Well, I won’t be digging it in this neighborhood, I can tell you that! The nerve of some beasts.”

And without giving the dog a chance to reply, the mole turned and burrowed its way back down into the earth, muttering something about “clod-hopping bumpkins.”

After a stunned moment, the dog turned and slunk home, shaken and embarrassed. 

Before you give your help, make sure it is wanted. 

…

And now for a long disclaimer:

Fables, as I am sure we all know, are a very ancient form of storytelling, with many distinctive characteristics. One of the outstanding characteristics of a fable is its briefness. A fable should always be told simply, with no extraneous details, and pointing to one central “moral” or “theme.” That being the case, I decided to honor the form and limit the amount of descriptive details and “rabbit-tracking” I allowed myself. But of course, that leaves me well short of the word-count requirement of posting to this website, so I am making up the rest of the words like this. 

I chose to write a fable this week for a couple of different reasons: First, the official title for a writer of fables is “fabulist.” If you tell me that doesn’t make you want to immediately run to your desk and write a fable of your own so you can add that title to your resume, well I just frankly don’t believe you. 

Second, the purpose of a fable is often to expose (through anthropomorphism and symbolism) the all-to-human propensity to try and see things through the lens of our own wishes, as well as by promoting a good quality by presenting its opposite. I thought this was the perfect format to celebrate this week’s theme of “arigata-meiwaku.”

Since I still have about two hundred words to make up before I can post, here is a fact about fables that I learned during a course on children’s literature that I took recently: Have you ever noticed that sometimes the moral attached to a fable doesn’t seem to match the story properly? I noticed that quite a lot when I was growing up, and always assumed I was “too dumb” to “get it.” I would spend an inordinate amount of time trying to twist the story around in my mind until it matched the theme ascribed to it. But as it turns out, I might have been right all along. 

You see, fables as we know them now are the work of many compilers throughout the ages. When they were first written, or told (since they came first from oral traditions), fables didn’t have explicitly stated morals at the end, the way we are used to seeing them presented now. Those “morals” were added later by different compilers, which is why sometimes you can find two different “morals” attached to the same basic fable. Often, it can seem almost as if the compilers were simply reaching into a fishbowl and grabbing the first moral they could get their hands on, and then tacking it on to the end of whichever fable they happened to be working on at that moment. That is an exaggeration, of course, but not by too much, if we’re being honest. 

Collections of fables first started to appear around 300 BC, with some important compilers including Phaedrus, a Roman freedman who worked in the first century AD, Marie de France in the twelfth century, and perhaps most famously Jean de la Fontaine in the seventeenth century.

Well, that just about rounds out my word count, so I will leave you here. I hope you enjoyed my silly little story, and I hope that you will have a fantastic weekend. 

The Fabulist, signing off.