The Spotless Leopard
a quite unusual tale from
The Lost Forest
by Rachael Long
Copyright 2012 Rachael Long
Smashwords Edition
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The Quite Unusual Tale of
The Spotless Leopard
Contents
In which a group of trees form a forest
and a leopard loses her spots.
Involving in order of appearance:
a hyena, a lost explorer, a passing polar bear
and a Baboon prince...
In which everyone lives happily ever after
until the next morning...
The Spotless Leopard
Once upon a long ago or twice upon a short ago and perhaps even thrice upon a time for the mice, there stood a group of trees on the African savannah. The trees all knew each other but never spoke because they were very spread out: one here, one there, another further over there…and oh yes, that one too, over there...far in the distance.
Instead of talking the trees passed messages written on leaves using unemployed vultures. This was fine for the trees but the leaves were not entirely happy. Especially when the vultures turned vegetarian and started eating them! The leaves would often rustle away to each other, mostly complaining that leaves never got a good deal in stories, as in most stories involving trees, the leaves often got left out – as indeed they have with this one now.
However, before the leaves were entirely written out of the story, the trees used them to send one more message to each other, using a sailor who was dangling from the neck of a passing albatross…
The trees had grown tired of being bumped against and chewed by the elephants. We must join together and form a forest, they decided. Slowly over many years and one or two anthills, the trees shuffled across the savannah until they came together as a small wood.