Dream of the Prairie Dog

All the prairie dog wanted was to get up to the clouds. They looked so mouth-wateringly succulent. The thing was a ground-dwelling creature, however, and the sky was inaccessible.

It had to get up there. The food down here was bland and dry – the same old fruits and nuts, day in, day out, with no variety. If he could just get up there and have a nibble, a taste, of those gorgeous white fluffy balls, he would be sated.

He set to working out how to get into the sky. He wondered if he could use a piece of grass as a springboard to launch himself heavenward. He found a promising blade that looked strong enough and grew at just the right angle. He took a running jump across the prairie and leapt at the blade, but it just bent under his weight and he landed in an undignified heap.

He then asked the Higgs Boson if he could have all his mass taken away, so he would have no weight and could float up into the firmament. But the Higgs Boson was unable to comply, being both a theoretical sub-atomic particle, and without even the slightest glimmer of sentience.

He then asked a graviton if he could be imbued with anti-gravitational properties, but this scheme was doomed to failure also, due to the reasons given some moments ago for the Higgs Boson.

The prairie dog saw aeroplanes flying overhead, and saved long and hard to charter a flight. The only thing he was capable of saving were fruits and nuts, which were not a legitimate currency as far as the aviation industry were concerned. So even with a hundred nuts, he found hiring a private plane impossible.

He made a lot of friends amongst his own kind with his stash of nuts, and they offered to help him. They would make a prairie dog pyramid, balancing on each other's backs and forming a great organic triangle, up which the prairie dog could scamper to the sky. The co-ordination required to achieve this, and the feat of balancing it demanded, were quite beyond the capabilities of these simple rodents, and all they managed to achieve were pyramids three prairie dogs high, and no higher. They always came tumbling down in a pile, and never made it even one-thousandth of the way up to the clouds.

The prairie dog had run out of ideas, until one day, a thunderstorm came. He had the brainwave of riding a lightning bolt up into the heights, if only he could predict where a lightning bolt might land. Fortunately, there was an isolated tree that bore the brunt of lightning strikes – a blackened, charred stump, which was still tall enough to attract the electrical discharge. The prairie dog climbed the blasted, twisted tree and sat at the top. The rain lashed down and he looked up through the murk of the stormy day to the great black clouds above. He would have to be careful not to get struck himself, so he stayed alert, looking for any bolts that might come rocketing down.

He didn't have to wait long. A zig-zagging line of blazing white raced down to meet him. He dodged it just in time and it crashed into the top of the tree. The prairie dog leapt through the sparks and fire and grabbed hold of the slippery, hot lightning, and pelted up it as fast as he could. His paws were singed, but he ignored the pain, and in no time at all, he was up in the roiling clouds. The lightning bolt dissipated just as he alighted from it.

All was black and wet and thundery. He'd made it. He sat on an outcropping of grey fluff and sniffed its tangy ozone scent. His nostrils crackled. His mouth gaped wide as he went for a bite, but something in the corner of his eye made him pause. The surrounding clouds were looming closer, brooding black and grey and enormous as cities. The prairie dog quailed and hunkered down, suddenly scared. They gathered around and the wind ruffled his wet fur. Before he could jump back down to the prairie, the clouds enveloped him, eating him alive, and when they had passed by, there was nothing but a new cloud, tiny in comparison to the behemoths that surrounded it. But this one wasn't grey; it was red.