Sometimes when we’re headed to snooze-land Delilah will catch me off guard with a request to tell her a story, this is something i came up with word-for-word on one of those occasions.  


Once, in a very dark forest, where the trees were very tall, 
where their tops hugged the night-sky like children to their folks, 
lay a tiny log cottage in a very quiet valley, 
where there lived a rugged old hunter and his overly boisterous son.

They would set out every morning with their rifles and knives,
and return every evening with their quarries and hides.  
On one particular cool spring morning the hunter and his son
went out into the woods, just as they usually do.

The hours passed, they hadn’t caught a thing
the woods were unusually quiet, especially for this time of year.

They came to a lake so blue you couldn’t see your own reflection,
there across the waters the young-boy pointed, “Look father, a little fawn & a doe!”  
The father steadied the boys eager hand and said,
“Care, boy, the woods do not take kindly to the cruel, besides
the young do not carry much meat on their bones.”

Whether he was too frustrated to pay attention or the rustling of leaves in the wind simply drowned out the noise, the boy paid no heed.

He raised his rifle steady and true,
he shot the pretty fawn as it’s mother fled to the woods.  

————

His disappointed father dragged him straight home to bed
said, “If I have anything to do with it you will never hunt again!”

That night he tossed and turned, 
the wind blew strong, 
and the room crept with strange noise. 
“Tap, Tap, Tap”, like the sounds of hooves on the floor, 
the very scared boy shut his eyes so tight he could barely tear them back open.

When he did however, everything was calm, 
there was nothing strange at all, except the little acorn in his palm. 
A carving on it read, “swallow me whole and you can have anything at all.”
He hurriedly swallowed it and wished, “make me the greatest hunter of them all, so I can prove my father & all of the silly creatures of these woeful woods wrong.”

His chest seemed to glow, before he slipt back to sleep. 

The next morning the boy woke, naked and lying on the forest floor.
Actually, he wasn’t naked at all, he felt strangely warm, he was covered in fur!
It seemed the woods had tricked him, he was in fact the greatest hunter in the woods, but the greatest hunter in the woods was not human, he was a fox!

And now across the way he spied a familiar face with his new keen sense,
it was his rugged old father, staring down his sights! 
It seemed the hunter thought his son killed by a wolf in the night 
and had tracked him to this very spot, with vengeance on his mind!

With a loud bang the woods livened and silenced all at once,
as the boy-fox passed quietly, in a pool of his blood.