the greedy giant

Once upon a time at the very beginning of the world a baby arrived on earth. No-one knew where he came from, maybe an angel brought him, but there were no other people around to ask this question anyway, he was the only one.

He was very small at first and he ate little plants and drank water from a stream and the animals brought him milk and other good things to eat. He was happy then, he played in the sun and splashed in the puddles when it rained and it was good.

He was always hungry though and as he ate he grew, and as he grew he ate more and more and he was still always hungry. He ate whole trees for breakfast, he made huge nets to catch all the fish in one lake for lunch, he caught whole herds of buffalo and mountain goats for dinner and he was still hungry and he was still growing. He got so big that he could cover miles with one step and was higher than a mountain and still he grew.

There was no end to his hunger; it was like a hole inside him that he couldn’t fill, no matter how much food he ate. When he had eaten everything there was to eat in one place he would move onto the next and start there. He lay on the ground and scooped whole forests into his mouth or he put his face into the sea and drank the water and ate all the fish that came with it. Nothing was safe from his appetite.

The time came when he had traveled the entire world and had eaten everything there was to eat. There was nothing left. He began to get very hungry, he ate rocks and earth but these didn’t fill him.

He shouted at the sun “Give me more food!” but the sun didn’t answer and this made him angry.

He shouted at the clouds “Give me more water, I am thirsty!” but the clouds didn’t answer and this made him angrier.

He pounded the earth with his fists and scraped the last little plants into his mouth but it was never enough.

He shouted to the sky “I am stuck here, and there is nothing to eat!”

Days passed and he got weaker and weaker from the lack of food. He lay on the ground and thought about his life.

“Why did I eat everything at once” he thought “I saved nothing and now I will die”

He lay there for many days, unable to move and as he lay there he got closer to death.

He opened his eyes one day and there in front of his face was a tiny blue flower. His first thought was to eat it and he stretched out his hand to take it and put it in his mouth.

He stopped and thought “This flower is too tiny and too fragile and if I eat it there will be no more. It is too tiny; it will not save me from death”

He curled his hand around it to protect it from the wind and when it rained he made sure it got water. He began to love the flower, its colour, its smallness, its bravery in such a huge world and he wondered that he had never looked at the world properly before. He cried from sadness of all that he had missed.

“I was so busy eating I never looked at what I was eating” and he remembered the yellow eyes of the goats and the silver of fish and the greenness of grass and the shade of a forest. All gone.

He closed his eyes “I deserve to die” he thought

He felt a cool hand on his face then and when he opened his eyes a beautiful figure was standing in front of him. “I am the guardian of the earth” she said and her voice was sweet and soft.

“You must hate me” said the giant

“No” said the beautiful woman “You have learned to love the earth in your last moments and I have come to give you a second chance”

“How?” asked the giant “I am dying and I need too much food to live here”

“You don’t need to be hungry anymore” she said and she took the giants hand and pulled him upwards. When he looked down he saw his body still on the ground and he was scared.

“Don’t be frightened” the woman said “you don’t need your body anymore. Will you help me guard the earth from harm and help all the living things to grow on it?”

The giant felt truly happy for the first time since he was a baby.

“Yes,” he said “but I thought I ate everything?”

“No” said the woman “You missed a lot, there are seeds in the soil and fish in the sea and animals still walk the earth, but we have much work to do”

The giant began his work and he works still protecting the small things of the earth from harm. His body became a huge mountain range and hidden in its valleys are the rarest and most precious things the giant wanted to protect.

© cliodhna quinlan

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