This is the famous tale of that young fellow, the lupine-screaming little gent, and what, precisely, ended up happening to him. I’m not saying this is the real story.
I’m not saying anything.
“It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep may be.”
_________
You likely know the story of the boy who cried wolf.
If you do not:
There was a boy, a shepherd. We don’t know the era. We’ll say 1873. Don’t ask why.
He was bored, they say. So one day, one long, slow day watching the sheep chew cud, he began to cry, “Wolf! Wolf!”
There was no Wolf.
But all the town came, to save the sheep and the boy.
Possibly not in that order.
Then the boy repeated his cry, once, twice, three more times, perhaps. Eventually, the townspeople stopped coming.
That’s when the Wolf really DID appear.
* * *
That story’s just a fable.
That poor boy called Wolf, and nobody came…and the Wolf was real…and…
…would they come if OTHER people cried Wolf? Perhaps not.
Did they associate the lie with the boy, or with the circumstance?
That is, did they know that Wolves are real, but the ones the boy discussed were lies?
Or do some of them think, perhaps, that there simply are no Wolves?
Especially the younger ones. Which isn’t the fault of the younger ones. Who knows how long this Wolf-hoax has gone on? When would they have a chance to find out if creatures of fang, fur, and faux-hominidry are real and not merely cryptozoological?
They wouldn’t.
The boy who cried Wolf was a fool, destined, if he persisted in his idiocy to be eaten by Wolves for having taken adventage of the credulity of others.
Unless.
Unless the boy was not so foolish, not so self-centered, not so dreamy-minded. (And why did one or another of his wolves tend to go missing so often?)
Not unless they boy was, in fact, the Wolf.
And wanted none to believe in the Wolf.
So he curated his cries for help… at inconvenient times, in moments when he knew the grumpiest would be on watch. He spaced them out just enough to be annoying, not quite enough to be predictably consistent.
Oh, surely there were no Wolves, just one lying boy.
No Wolves.
No Wolves at all.
Surely just a boy.
Not a hungry and incorrigible Wolf.
Not a Wolf busy encouraging you to believe that there are no Wolves.
Whyever would a Wolf do that?
My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
I write books. You should read them!
