Storytelling for Week 10: The Giant Mysterious Beast

There was a giant mysterious beast that lived behind a fence at the end of long dirt road.  A group of neighborhood children often wandered down this road to play but would never get close to the fence that contained the giant beast.  The legend was that the man and the beast would capture and eat anyone who trespassed onto their property.  No child was brave enough to creep up to the fence to peek through the cracks to see what this beast was.  The children could only hear the heart stopping roars that came from behind the fence. 

(Dirt Road: Pixabay)

            One day a group of the neighborhood children headed down the dirt road to play a game of hide and seek.  A little boy climbed way up high to the top of a tree to hide from his friends.  While he sat there waiting for a chance to climb down and run to base, he noticed dirt stirring from behind the fence.  His curiosity overwhelmed him and he decided to move along the trees until he could see over the fence.  As he made it to the tree closest to the fence, his friend who was the seeker spotted him.  Startled by his hiding spot being revealed, the boy in the tree fell over onto the other side of the fence.  With a loud thud, his friends gasped and ran to the fence to peek through the holes. 

            They heard the infamous roar of the mysterious beast along with heavy footsteps.  They climbed the tree from which their friend had fallen in hopes of reaching down to rescue their friend in danger.  How were they going to get the boy out of the fenced yard before the giant beast ate him?  Was it true that this beast was a man-eating beast?  They began to tie their shirts and socks together to make a rope for their friend to grab on to.  As they hurriedly knotted the clothing together, they watched in despair for the giant beast to appear.

 The boy who had fallen heard the beast coming toward him and coward in the nearest corner behind a pile of trash. He tried to stay as quiet as possible but his panicked breathing could not be silenced.  He could see his friends rope getting longer and longer.  Only a few more knots and the rope would be long enough for him to grab and climb up to safety. As he sat waiting in fear, he noticed that he was surrounded not by trash but by shoes the size of children’s feet, stained with blood…

(Pile of Shoes: Wikipedia)

Author's Note: The original story, The Giant Dog, came from the Eskimo Folk Tales Unit.  The original story is about a man and his wife who have giant pet dog that eats people.  The dog would sneak away eating the inland dwellers and bring back their legs to his owners.  It is a pretty graphic story so I decided to not write a very detailed story.  The giant dog also made me think of the Sandlot movie.  In this movie a giant dog lives behind a fence and the children have to retrieve a baseball from it.  It turned out to be a nice dog but I wanted to stick with the original story and have the giant animal really be a child eating beast.  I left the end of the story untold for the imagination of the reader.

Bibliography:

Eskimo Folk-Tales by Knud Rasmussen with illustrations by native Eskimo artists (1921).