Thursday, April 3, 2008

Random Writing Challenge #15

Carol issued another Random Writing Challenge, I decided to write it from another viewpoint. The first line is what I had to write it off of. Why am I getting so green lately?

She was too tired to lift her head. She felt stupid, she should have known better. But she was so hungry and tired of eating the same, old, dried out prairie weeds.

The morning started out beautiful. Even though she lost her mother and brother to the poison oats the night before, she also gave birth that same night to 3 beautiful babies. She named the girl after her mother, Keelee, the boys after her brother and father, Akicita and Hoksila. she had lost her father to the poison the week before and her babaies father two weeks before. Just when she felt as if her world was slowly dying around her, then she has the babies. Life was beautiful this morning.

She woke to the sun streaming down the hole that now, only she lived in. She heard the chatter of the few that were left in the colony. they were saying that it was a fat man in an orange vest that comes around. Run fast when he comes and don't take anything from him. She had no milk left for her babies and they awoke. She didn't want to leave them and wished again for her mother to be here and teach her how to be a mom. But deep in her blood, she knew, her maternal instincts kicked in.

She crawled to the surface and noticed a few measly weeds far away. That would not be enough. Somewhere in the mindless gossip she heard others talk of a snake that has been lurking. In the neighbors abandoned hole there was a pile of oats that made her stomach growl. She heard her babies cry and ran over to the oats. She surprised herself by eating them all at once.

She hurried back to her babies and realized that with each step her feet begin to drag. She knew then, she had done the same as her mother, brother, husband, and father. She had eaten the poison. Now her babies would grow without her. Or die.

Unless she nursed them while she could. Then they would take the journey with her where the prairie is green and her parents awaited, dancing. She slowly made it over to them and lay by her babies to feed them.

I wrote this story because prairie dogs are the enemy around here. Ranchers pay Indians to poison them and gun freaks shoot them for free. I doubt they will ever be endangered but you never know. when my brother and I was younger he saved one at a sundance one year from a terrible beating by a bunch of kids. Risking his own ass getting beaten, for the sake of a prairie dog. He named the prairie dog Peteyful because he was pitiful. Today he kills them for fun. What a shame, I hope he reads this.

1 comment:

josie2shoes said...

Dana, I love the perspective of this story. Too often we tend to look at other living things, including people, as nuisances. We forget that everyone and everything has its story and its purpose. Life is sacred. I will think of this story again the next time I see prairie dogs standing tall.