Stories From The Old Attic | Page 8

Bird down toward the rocky beach. In a few minutes they
reached a low spot near a weeping willow, where several of the large

fish grabbed Chirpy Bird and threw him onto the shore.
"Now fly away and leave us alone," one of them said. And leave them
alone he did.

Man
Somewhere in a deep, tropical jungle lived a tribe of natives with
extremely odd behavior. Generations ago the tribe had in some obscure
fashion contracted a parasite which induced a seemingly permanent
delirium in each native, and which was passed on to subsequent
generations. The delirium increased with age, and most of the adult
natives showed it by eating dirt, sleeping on dunghills, pummeling
anthills with rocks even as the ants bit them severely, and jumping out
of trees onto their heads. This last maneuver caused the natives to
stagger around senseless for days, or simply to lie unconscious and
bleeding in the sun and rain. All these symptoms together prevented the
natives from caring for their personal lives, and so they lived in
deplorable squalor, with their huts falling apart, and their children and
themselves half starved and wholly naked.
Another odd effect of the mental distraction was an unnatural craving
for firewood. Unlike the other natives in the area, the members of this
tribe collected--and stole, and cheated and betrayed for--log upon stick
to pile next to their huts, even though in twenty very cold years they
couldn't use half as much as they already possessed. A few natives had
been crushed to death by collapsing woodpiles; many more had died
from fighting over decidedly unimpressive old branches.
One day a doctor came from the East to the village, and he immediately
recognized the symptoms of the disease (a common one) for which he
carried the cure. He went gladly and confidently to the chief of the tribe
and announced his ability to remedy the ills of the people, expecting to
be praised and welcomed for his offer of help. To his surprise, however,
the chief rebuffed him with contempt and asserted boldly that there was
nothing at all wrong with his people, that they had always acted that

way since he could remember, that it was the human condition, and that
they were all perfectly happy. Then, after ordering the doctor to leave
immediately, the chief jumped out of a tree into the tribal latrine and
was unavailable for any further discussion.
Substantially taken aback but firm in his resolution, the doctor decided
to take his offer directly to the natives. Most received him with laughter,
contempt, or violence; many ignored him; a few beat him up; some said
he just wanted to get at their firewood; most said they, like the chief,
felt fine. But a dozen or so natives came to him privately where he had
been tossed into the bushes after his most recent beating, and asked him
for the medicine.
"We are somehow not really happy living like this," they said, "even
though it is the way of the world." The doctor gladly gave them the
medicine, and in a few days they began to show remarkable signs of
recovery. No longer desiring to eat dirt or jump out of trees, these
natives corrected their diet, improved in health, and began to apply
themselves to such activities as making baskets, repairing their huts,
caring for their children, and gathering food. Some even began to
question the wisdom of collecting stacks of wood more than twenty
feet high.
Such wild, unusual, and anti-social behavior did not go unnoticed by
the other natives, who quickly ostracized the cured natives from the
tribal camp, calling them enemies of the current system. And even
though many of the delirious natives began to suspect that the cured
natives were somehow better off than they, and that there might be
more to living than sleeping on dunghills and finding new trees to jump
out of, resistance to the cure was strong. First, almost all the educated
and respectable people--the chief and his council--spoke against it, and
the example of their sophistication and wealth (the chief's woodpile
was ninety feet high) was very strong. Many others, from the gossips to
the wise man, said that the old way was right, and that the tribe had
always behaved that way. There were few real individuals in the tribe,
so that even though scores would have been glad to try the cure, they
were afraid to stand against the rest and did what everyone else was

doing, which was nothing.
The witch doctor had a stronger argument against the new regimen. He
pointed out that the cure was harder to take than the cures he dispensed.
The Eastern doctor's cure was painful, and though many of the witch
doctor's cures caused vomiting,