The Story "Tell us a story, Auntie Amber!" chorused the children, using the familiar title they called troop leaders whether they were strictly related or not. Amber normally wouldn’t be supervising a school troop at her age, but once a year the younger elves took turns filling in for the elders who went off on council duty for two weeks every summer. Amber and her troop had had a full day. They had gone to see the flower fairies, watching them weave the intricate patterns of Queen Anne’s Lace and goldenrod which would soon trim the fields and meadows of the forest’s edge and had visited a bluebird’s nest, practicing the birds’ language and learning about their way of life. It was now late afternoon, just before the children went home, when they were through with their lessons and could relax and choose their activity. Sometimes they played games or read or chose to rest for a bit. Today they were in the mood for a story. Amber smiled. "Well, one of my favorite stories when I was troop-age is the one about the little elf boy and girl and how they caused pearls to be created during the time of the dinosaurs. It’s been handed down through the generations ever since," she said. "Oh, tell us, Auntie!" said the children eagerly. They gathered around her, happily munching on the dandelion seed cookies she passed out, as Amber began her story. Elves, according to their history, were formed from the first basic elements of the earth soon after its creation. They have been here through all the ages since, including that of the dinosaurs. One day in the middle of dinosaur times, a young elf boy named Picolo and his sister Tala were out in the forest near where they lived gathering needles from the conifer trees that made up most of the woods back then. To the elves of that time, conifer needles were what dandelions are to present-day elves, forming a major part of their diet and livelihood. Now, elves got along quite well with dinosaurs, except for the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Most Tyrannosauruses thought of themselves as the kings and masters of the entire planet and didn’t tend to get along too well with anyone, including elves. The children’s bags were full and they were crossing a small clearing on their way home, when they heard a noise in the distance. It sounded like thunder at first, but it quickly got louder until a minute later they saw a whole herd of duck-bill dinosaurs trampling directly toward them in a panic through the clearing. Picolo and Tala didn’t have time to get out of the way, so they ran up the nearest tree as far as they could. Unfortunately the shaking and rattling below dislodged them and they both fell out of the tree directly onto the tail of one of the last duck-bills to go by where they hung on for dear life. Looking back, they saw a huge Tyrannosaurus chasing the herd, his mouth open in a tremendous roar. Picolo and Tala could only hang on as the herd ran through the clearing and out onto a vast, broad plain where the children had never been. In alarm, they noticed that the Tyrannosaurus had managed to separate one of the duck-bills from the herd, in fact the very one they were on, and was pursuing that one. The duck-bill ran as fast as he could when he saw the Tyrannosaurus coming after him, but the bigger dinosaur continued to gain. "Hurry up!" cried Picolo. "He’s getting closer!" "I know that! And now I’ve lost my friends! Oh, what am I going to do!" The duck-bill looked around, but his herd was nowhere in sight and the Tyrannosaurus was heading straight for him. "Well, we’ve got to do something! He’s going to catch up to us in a minute!" cried Tala. "I know, I know! And I don’t want to be somebody’s dinner! But my friends are gone and I don’t know what to do! Help me! Think of something!" said the duck-bill. "Well, don’t keep going straight!" said Picolo. "There’s a river up ahead! Try to double back and go into the forest! You’re a lot smaller than he is, so he’ll have a harder time going through the trees and you can lose him." "But I don’t know if I can reach the forest now--oh, I do wish he’d stop roaring, just for a minute! I can’t think with all that noise behind me!" moaned the duck-bill. He kept running toward the river, the Tyrannosaurus in hot pursuit. They reached the bank and the duck-bill stopped. "Excuse me, but I don’t think that’s the best thing to do right at the moment," suggested Picolo. The duck-bill began wringing his paws helplessly. "Oh, me! I just remembered I can’t swim! What am I going to do? I’m a goner for sure!" Tala looked at the river and saw some stones. They were slightly below the surface, but they extended a little way out from the shore almost to the other side. "Look! Those stones!" she cried, tugging at her brother’s sleeve. She and Picolo both concentrated as hard as they could, using the telekinetic ability that developed in elves as they grew. Elf children were taught to save this ability strictly for emergencies, so as not to grow too dependent on it, but Picolo and Tala figured this situation qualified. With a great effort, they managed to pull most of the stones barely above the surface. "Hurry! Get on them and get to the other side!" cried Picolo "What? How?" asked the duck-bill, for duck-bills, although nice, weren’t too smart. "The stones are just big enough for you!" cried Tala. "That means they’re too small for the Tyrannosaurus! He’ll lose his balance and fall and we’ll be able to get away from him!" "Good idea!" cried the duck-bill and jumped on the first stone as fast as he could, the Tyrannosaurus right behind him. The duck-bill jumped from one stone to the next, several times nearly losing his balance, but managed to get to the other side. The Tyrannosaurus was so furious to see his prey escape that he dashed out after them and of course lost his footing on the small stones and fell into the river. He roared and hollered, smashing everything in his path and spraying water everywhere, until he floundered into an area of fast-running current and was swept downstream. As the duck-bill and the two elves stood catching their breath on the other side, they heard weak cries ecoming from under the water, "Help! Help us!" Going over to the water’s edge, they saw a large bed of river oysters that had been badly damaged by the Tyrannosaurus’s rage. Most of them had been knocked out of their places, some of them had been totally crushed, while others were alive but in bad shape, their shells dented and broken. "Help us, please!" cried the oysters. The duck-bill started to scoop them up into shallow water, but stopped when he saw his herd in the distance. "My friends! I’ve got to go now," he said. "Wait! What about them?" asked Picolo, pointing to the oysters. "We’ve got to help them." "I’ve got to get back to my herd! That Tyrannosaurus might come back! Good-bye for now! Thanks for your help!" The duck-bill hopped back across the stones to his herd which was waiting on the other side and they all ran off across the plain. "Wait! What are we supposed to do? We don’t even know where we are--" called Tala, but the duck-bills were already disappearing into the distance. "Help us, please! We’re dying!" cried the oysters. Picolo and Tala set about to do what they could for the poor creatures. They carried the oysters to a small, quiet stream off the main river and ground some nearby rocks of soft limestone into a powder which they mixed with water to form a paste. They invested this paste with certain elf properties of healing and then spread it over the damaged shells, packing it into the broken places. They worked at it for several hours, until the oysters were safely set up in their new home. "Well, that will help," said Tala finally. It will take a few days, but the paste will bind your shells together and heal them. Just stay here away from the main current for awhile and you’ll be fine. I’m sorry we can’t fix you up right now, but we don’t have enough experience to do that at our age." "Thank you ever so much!" replied the biggest oyster. "I’m Shelby, the ruler of this group. You saved us! How can we ever thank you?" Picolo looked around and saw it was rapidly getting dusk. "I don’t know how we’re going to get home," he said. "We’ve never been out this far." "You’re forest elves, aren’t you, from the conifer forest across the plain?" asked Shelby. "That’s right." Picolo explained about the duck-bill and the Tyrannosaurus. "We couldn’t do anything except hang on and be brought out here with them." "There’s an offshoot of this river a little way down from here that runs through the conifer forest," said Shelby. "You can just build a little raft from some of these river reeds here, turn right at the first stream and you can float almost to your doorstep." "We live on the other side, but we’ve got some friends who don’t live too far from that stream," said Tala. "Once we get into the forest we’ll be okay, except that by then it will be too dark for us to find our way." "Can’t you use the moon?" asked Shelby. "It’s full tonight." "As long as we’re on the plain, yes, but the forest is very deep and the moonlight doesn’t even reach through a lot of it. We won’t be able to make our way through it over the river. Elves use a wood mushroom that glows in the dark to make lanterns, but we don’t have any with us and it doesn’t grow out here. Picolo and I have been looking around and we haven’t found anything else we could use." Shelby looked thoughtful. He stroked his beard as he glanced at the rising moon whose beams were beginning to sweep the earth. "Maybe we can help you there," he said. "Go ahead and build your raft and we’ll take care of the rest." The children gathered some reeds and water plants and soon had a sturdy little raft that could ride the current. Meanwhile, the oysters who were able to opened their shells wide to catch the rays of the moon that were shifting down through the water. When their shells were full of moonlight, they closed again and pressed down on the beams to condense them. They did that several times, until the moonlight had congealed into hardened chunks. They rolled these around and chomped on them for awhile and finally ea ch oyster opened its shell to reveal a round ball of silver-grey, glowing with the radiance of its parent orb in the sky. Picolo and Tala caught their breath and each picked up a ball. "They’re so beautiful!" said Tala. "They will light your way for you. We had to seal the outside with some of our juices to keep the moonlight from escaping and the balls from being used up before you’re ready, so we made you a removal solution that you’ll have to rub over them before you can use them. We made you some extra balls so you’ll have enough," said Shelby. "Thank you so much!" said the children. They started off down the river, the pearls stored in a simple reed basket they had hastily constructed, and quickly reached their forest stream. Once there, the pearls softly lit their path all the way home. "Ever since that time, oysters and clams have continued to produce pearls for us to use as lanterns in remembrance of the elf children who helped their ancestors. Some oysters make their pearls entirely of moonlight and others like to mix in tints from the sunset, so we have a choice of colors. Humans, by the way, think pearls are hard gemstones that last forever. They don’t know about the moonlight inside or how to reach it. That’s an elf secret," concluded Amber. The children sat quietly around her for a minute, thinking about the story they had just heard. Then they went whooping off home, proud to be members of the race that was responsible for the creation of pearls.
Copyright © 2000 Jacquelyn Wilson |