Once there was a boy who found himself living alone in a very harsh place. Every day the sun would scorch the land and make the air taste like fire. Every night there was a downpour of rain that smelled of death. The boy soon became very sad and decided the best thing to do would be to live in a dark cave where the rain and sun could not reach him. It was dark in the cave, and the darkness soon began to frighten him.
The boy was very sad and still as he sat at the entrance to his cave. Before too long a stranger came upon the boy and asked him why he was sad. The boy explained how the sun hurt him and made it hard to breathe during the day, and he told him of the rain that smelled like death. The stranger thought this was a very tragic thing, took pity on the child, and offered to help him. He offered the boy a small seed and told him to eat it. He said that if he ate the seed, the sun would stop shining so brightly and the rain would not smell so bad. The seed smelled very strange, but he eagerly took it and ate it anyways.
That night, after the stranger had gone, the boy became very sick, and he vomited up the seed onto the ground. He was very tired after this and fell asleep for many days and nights. When the boy woke up he found that outside his cave, where he had been sick, there now stood an enormous tree. It was unlike anything the boy had seen before. The boy found that the tree provided shade and made the sun stop hurting him. The boy also learned that at night, the leaves of the tree would grow very large to soak up all the rain and make it so the terrible smell was gone. The boy was very happy that he could now live under this tree.
But as time went on the branches of the tree began to wither, and the leaves started to turn brown then fall off. More and more sunlight and rain pierced down through the tree and reached the boy. He was afraid the tree was dying. To the boy’s relief, the stranger found him again. When the stranger saw the condition the tree was in, he offered the boy another seed. The boy quickly accepted, but this time, before he could eat the seed, its smell and the memory of being sick from eating the previous seed made the boy feel dizzy and light headed. He lost his strength and fell to the ground. The seed fell out of his hand and into the dirt.
The boy awoke the next day. The stranger was nowhere to be found, and the tree was still withering away. The boy looked around for the seed to maybe try and eat it again. To the boy’s surprise, the seed had buried itself in the earth, and was now a small sapling. The boy knew that saplings eventually grew into trees, but he did not know how long it would take to make a tree out of this small shoot. The boy decided he must care for the sapling. As the days went on, the seedling grew slowly but steadily. The old tree continued to slowly die as well. More and more of the sun reached down to the boy. Less and less of the rain was soaked up by the leaves. The pain and the smell caused the boy to become sad again, but this time he knew he must endure it for the sake of tending to the new tree.
For many weeks the boy endured the pain and the smell as he helped the sapling grow tall. The boy knew that if he could hold out long enough, this new tree would protect him from the sun and the rain. He waited and waited. Eventually he began to notice that the sun did not hurt him as much as it used to, and the smell did not bother him quite so much. As the days went by and the boy tended to the tree, he eventually began to think that he would not need the tree after all. During the day the sun was bright, but the boy’s skin had become tough. The light no longer caused him pain. At night it would still rain, but the boy could hardly smell death on the air any more. By the time the tree was fully grown, the boy had no need of its protection.
The boy decided to leave the tree behind and seek what adventure could be found in this harsh land. He hoped his tree would remain for anyone that might need to rest under its protection some day.
Weary Birds 