Once upon a time a mouse found an enchanted sword. It was small and fit his little paws perfectly. He took the sword and used it to defend himself and other mice from their enemies, from cats and owls and dogs and snakes. He slew a great tomcat, and became the most famous mouse of all time. He was the first hero he mice had ever had, but when they spoke of him, they always spoke of the sword as well.
‘Oh, the Hero and his amazing Sword’, they would say, or ‘Thank the great God that the Sword came to our Hero’. The hero himself began to think very ill of this. He grew angry that the credit for his feats was shared with the sword, as if his own bravery and cunning were only a minor part of his own accomplishments.
One day he took the sword and thrust it deep into a cobblestone of flint. “I am done with the sword, for a hero needs nothing but his own bravery and intelligence,” he proclaimed.
He strode away from the crowd of stunned mice and found the largest of the feral dogs that plagued the mouse community, and he slew it with a toothpick. He climbed into the high trees where the owls nested, and he drove them out of the forest one by one. He sought the snakes in their underground tunnels, and tied them into knots.
When he returned from his quest, the other mice seemed enthralled by something going on in the clearing. A handsome young mouse had wrapped his paws around the handle of the enchanted sword and was heaving mightily at it, trying to release it from the heavy stone. As the hero approached, the young mouse pulled the sword free and held it above his head in triumph.
The hero watched as all the mice cheered the new young hero, and then we walked quietly out of the clearing.
The Hero of Mice, and his Sword by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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