Page 9 - Fables volume 2

The Dung Beetle’s Epiphany

Job: that’s what it is, muttered the dung beetle, backpedaling her
precious ball of nutrients across a hot, dusty dirt road. She had to get
it—and herself—out of the way before another oxcart came creaking
down the ruts like a juggernaut. The increasing difficulty of doing
what she had to do had turned it into an onerous chore. And she had
begun to wonder and to question.
Certainly her patience had been tried. Twice that day she had lost
the fruits of her labor: once to a cunning rival waiting at the bottom
of a furrow for her to lose control of the tumbling ball on the steep
decline; the second time a black shadow warned her just in time of a
crow’s attack, sending her scuttling deep beneath an overhanging
clod. The bird had abandoned its vicious pecking probe only when a
passing oxcart drove it away, at the same time mashing flat her pellet
of manure. A similar escape from an avian predator had earlier cost
her a middle leg, further impeding her rate of speed and ability to
fend off her sisters.
Why, she now asked herself, must these terrible torments be hers
to bear? Others had an easier life. Deposited in perfect dung balls
their eggs hatched in profusion. She had the worst luck of any beetle
she knew. And that on top of what must already be a difficult
incarnation, a life sentence of walking backward, proboscis to the
ground, unable to see anything but the path behind. No limit on
reviewing the past, she thought bitterly, while anything nasty might
be waiting in the immediate future.
I cannot help going on, she realized. My nature demands a narrow
range of behavior: I shall not decide suddenly to fly like a bird or
wriggle like a worm. But now my mind is not at peace, owing to all
my misfortune. It would help me to understand where I fit into the
cosmic order—if there is one; if not, I must cope with the alternative,
a chaos of unpredictability and the inexplicably uneven distribution
of pain and loss. Therefore, as I keep the ball rolling I am also
turning over possibilities.
She first considered the idea that she deserved her apparent fate.
Had she done something wrong for which she was being punished?

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