Posted by Friday on November 16th 2008 to
General The Fable of the Lake Monster
Once upon a time, in a far off land, there was a large and beautiful lake. It had a number of villages along its shore.
The lake was the source of everything the villagers needed. It provided water for drinking, cleaning and bathing; fish and shellfish to eat; mud and reeds from which to manufacture buildings, rope and cloth; it attracted wildlife which could be hunted for meat and leather.
There were many such lakes throughout the land, each with villages beside it whose inhabitants depended upon the lake for their basic necessities.
And every lake contained a monster.
The lake monsters varied in size, shape, color and level of aggressiveness, but they all had one common characteristic: they were sustained and nurtured by the villagers of their native lake.
The most common manner in which villagers cared for their monsters was to throw a certain percentage of their food catch into the lake on a regular basis. The monsters, being omnivorous, would greedily eat anything: fish, fruit, vegetables, poultry, venison, even stray cats. Occasionally, a monster would come out of the water and feed directly on its own villagers. Some people found this horrifying, but most were pragmatic and accepted it as a necessary aspect of life beside a lake. Most villagers actually felt a great deal of affection for their lake monster, taking pride in the belief that theirs was the biggest, strongest, most intelligent and fearsome of any lake monster to be found anywhere. Children were taught to love their monster, to sing songs about it and tell stories about when it was just a baby monster. There could be no greater sacrifice to one’s community than to actually be eaten by the monster.
Every village was ruled by a Council of Elders. Their job was to oversee the feeding of the monster. The Elders, or their assistants, would gather up all of the food donated by the villagers and drop it into the lake at regular intervals. Serving on the Council of Elders was considered highly prestigious. It took a lot of time, effort and paperwork to ensure that a monster’s nutritional needs were met, and to make sure that every villager was paying his fair share. The food donations were too important to be left to the discretion of the villagers; therefore, the Elders put uncooperative villagers in the stockade as a form of motivation.
Jo was a resident of a small village on the shore of Lake Rika. He was born there, and spent most of his life there. Within Lake Rica, there lived a particularly crafty monster called Sammy, which swam back and forth ceaselessly under the water. Its body was so huge, its mere passing could capsize small boats. Although primarily a water creature, Sammy had wings and, on occasion, sprang forth from Lake Rika and flew off to a village beside another lake to consume villagers. For some reason, Sammy seemed to find them tastier. Or perhaps he was intelligent enough to realize that, by eating another lake’s villagers while leaving his own alive to feed him, he could wind up with twice as much to eat.
For a time in his childhood, due to poor local fishing conditions, Jo and his family had gone to live in a village on the shore of a distant lake very far away. There were numerous lakes between the two which it had been necessary for Jo’s family to rest at while making the journey. Jo had thus learned at a young age that Lake Rika was not the only lake in the world; and that Sammy was not the only lake monster. But Lake Rika was still the largest and most beautiful, and Sammy the most awe-inspiring of monsters.
As a child, Jo loved Sammy, just as the other children did. He looked forward to the annual celebration of Sammy’s birthday, when the whole village was festooned with lights and images of lake monsters (to be honest, no one was entirely certain the exact date of the monster’s birth, but the event was generally accepted to have occurred mid-summer and was celebrated at that time). He hoped that when he grew up, he could be one of the ones to be eaten; that would certainly make his parents very proud.
As an adult, Jo became an accomplished fisherman, and made a good living fishing on the lake and selling his catch in the village. Over a period of years, he earned the money to build his own fishing boat, as his parents had done before him, and his parents had done before *them*. He dutifully turned over the exact number of fishes that the Council of Elders dictated was necessary to sate Sammy’s appetite each month. He knew that everyone had to pay their share, and that Sammy was magnificent and would always protect the village from harm.
As he got a bit older, Jo began to become aware of things in the village that he had overlooked before. It wasn’t exactly true that everyone paid their share to feed Sammy; some people did, but some didn’t. Not only that, but the Council of Elders was actually taking some of the food that was collected from villagers like Jo and, instead of giving it to Sammy, was giving it to other villagers instead. This didn’t seem quite fair to Jo. Some of the recipients of donated monster food seemed truly needy through no fault of their own, but others appeared to simply be personal friends or family members of the Elders. A large number of them, it was difficult to tell how or why they were needy. The village was quite large; no one villager personally knew everyone who lived there. Jo certainly didn’t have time to get to know them all; he was too busy fishing. But still, he had a pretty good life, despite the “voluntary” lake monster feeding regulations; he ate well, was in good health, had a sturdy fishing boat… why rock it?
Sammy’s feeding forays to distant lakes became more frequent (or maybe Jo just started noticing them more than he had when he was younger). It started to really get to him. He thought of the mothers and fathers who lived on the shores of other lakes and how they must feel when Sammy ate their children. It seemed very wrong. The Council of Elders praised Sammy for his feeding frenzies, saying that he was doing the distant villagers a favor by ridding them of excess children and that they’d thank the people of Lake Rika for it once they had calmed down a bit. Jo seriously doubted this was true.
Jo knew what had to be done; the Council of Elders needed to be reformed! They were the ones who decided how much food was given to Sammy; how much of each type of food needed to be donated by different village producers (X fish, Y oranges, Z venison steaks). They were also the ones who decided which villagers got to take some of the monster haul and eat it, rather than making a donation themselves. If Jo could only get the *right* villagers appointed to the Council, then the collection and distribution of monster fodder would finally be handled in a logical and fair manner.
After a few years of working with like-minded villagers trying to get the right people on the Council of Elders, Jo started to question the efficacy of his plan. For one thing, the Council of Elders in his village was only one of many; it didn’t have much control, ultimately, over how much Sammy got fed, since every village had its own Council, and every Council was feeding the monster. For another, the Council of Elders had a monopoly on village policy, and could therefore change the rules at will if it looked like Jo actually had a decent shot at getting appointed to the Council or convincing a seated Elder to make any sort of sensible change in Sammy’s dietary planning. Meanwhile, the times when Sammy rose out of the water to feed were very unsettling, and were causing more and more ill will between the peoples of Lake Rika and the peoples of other lakes (the ones Sammy kept eating). The Council of Elders of Sammy’s village had no control over this at all. It all seemed like a bit of a fool’s quest.
More years went by, and Jo became acquainted with a very small group of radical villagers who proposed a quite shocking idea: Sammy was not magnificent. In fact, Sammy was a terrible drain on the energy of the village and its inhabitants. He ate an increasingly large portion of the food; his care absorbed the time and energy of some of the best minds in the village, people who might otherwise have been devising innovative new ways to catch fish, or teach the children, or design more energy-efficient mud huts. A very few villagers said that there was something inherently *wrong* with people feeding a monster. Villagers don’t need a Council of Elders. Monsters don’t deserve to be fed.
Jo had trouble swallowing this. Living without a lake monster was not an option, was it? All villagers needed a lake monster, just as every lake monster needed villagers. To question this was the most unspeakable of heresies. And besides, Sammy wasn’t nearly as bad as a lot of other monsters Jo had heard about. Some monsters were truly cancerous, eating such a large percentage of their villagers’ food that the villagers themselves starved to death as a result… or eating so many of the children that villages lost entire generations of citizens, with almost no one left to keep the gardens growing, the fish nets filled, and to take care of the elderly. Surely his own Council of Elders was doing good and necessary work; without them, how would Sammy get fed? If anything were to happen to Sammy, perhaps an even worse monster would move into the lake to take his place.
After months of thinking about this, Jo came to the realization that it was true: villagers *didn’t* need a Council of Elders. Feeding a monster did not make sense. Gaining control of the Council of Elders, which was appearing increasingly unlikely as it was, wouldn’t solve the ultimate problem: what to do about Lake Rika’s man-eating lake monster.
The anti-Council villagers tried to spread their ideas by making colorful signs and banners. They wrote new anti-monster songs and stories, and talked to everyone they came into contact with about their radical ideas. It was a very hard sell; the vast majority of villagers had been taught from earliest childhood that lake monsters were a necessary part of life, and that Sammy was a particularly benevolent lake monster.
A handful of anti-Council villagers tried innovative methods of getting their message across. Some threw rocks at the monster. A few of them charged full-speed ahead directly into Sammy’s open mouth and hung out in his belly, for days or even weeks. (As long as Sammy didn’t chew them, this didn’t seem to harm them.) However, it was not very comfortable or interesting sitting in a lake monster’s gut (not to mention the stench…). But these villagers seemed confident that this would help to demonstrate to people that Sammy was not a net positive for the village. Jo had his doubts about the efficacy of this plan, too; if villagers were unfazed by having their *own children* eaten by a lake monster, he didn’t think that seeing a few strangers jump into the monster’s mouth was going to help much. It certainly didn’t hurt Sammy any, and it really seemed to annoy the Council of Elders, as well as some of those who were attempting to take control of it in order to reduce the monster’s diet.
Jo’s head was so preoccupied from thinking about all of this, he was having trouble focusing on his fishing. Sometimes it just seemed easier to hang out in the corner pub, drinking ale until closing time, to blot it all out. He knew that he not only needed to catch enough fish to feed himself and his family, and to pay his share of the monster’s feed (which he only paid at this point to keep himself out of the village stockade), he also needed to make sure he had enough fish left over to trade for dried oranges and venison to get through the winter when the edges of the lake froze over, which would make fishing impossible.
There were disturbing signs of a coming shortage of fish, and of the reeds from which fishing nets were woven. Jo wasn’t sure how he would manage if he became unable to fish. He did have a small garden, and was brushing up on his deer hunting skills, but still, it wouldn’t be enough if the fish stopped biting. There were credible rumors that the Council of Elders, as well as the Grand Council located in the swamp down at the foot of the lake, were making plans to increase the monster food ration by a lot. Jo knew that if things got really bad, and there were a large number of needy villagers screaming to the Council that they needed more fish to eat, the Council would simply take whatever Jo had managed to put away for the winter in order to redistribute it (unless he managed to hide it somehow). They might even take his boat, making it impossible for him to catch any more fish. He didn’t even want to think about the “Peak Fish” theory some villagers were talking about.
Jo spent some time researching lakes other than Lake Rika, wondering if there were any without monsters (or at least with very small, weak ones that didn’t eat much). It didn’t look too promising, though. Almost all charted lakes had monsters, and the villages on the shores of the few that didn’t were highly selective about letting new villagers move in. Jo couldn’t really blame them! Not only that, but the Council of Elders of his own village had contacts throughout the land, and found ways to enforce the voluntary donation of lake monster rations by all citizens of Lake Rika, even if they no longer lived on the shores of that lake.
It seemed to Jo that there were a limited number of options for a hard-working villager who’d had the lake monster scales removed from his eyes:
1) accept the status quo, keep feeding the lake monster, keep his head down and his eyes on his boat, and pray that the fish kept biting
2) continue trying to gain control of the Council of Elders, and if successful, thereby have some small say in the makeup of Sammy’s diet
3) stop contributing to the monster’s rations, and see how long it took the Elders to throw him in the stockade, take his fishing boat and all of his winter savings
4) find a way to convince a great number of other villagers that it’s not right to feed a monster and get them to stop. It wouldn’t take much of a reduction in Sammy’s food tribute for him to feel it. He would undoubtedly get angry… very angry. The Council of Elders would feel threatened. What would happen then, Jo couldn’t even imagine.
Jo took his boat out on the lake, with the nets pulled in, just to get away from the village and think about it all.
to be continued…..
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