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| Quail from Wikipedia |
A great bird hunter lived with his wife in the Fowl Forest. When the man and his wife first moved to the forest, they thought it was a beautiful place to start a family. Before starting work on building their new cabin, the hunter decided to fetch some easy game from the nearby creek. He ventured along the edge of the creek for only a few minutes before he encountered a wild flock of quail. He knew that these birds could be easily harvested with a simple net. He manufactured the net from some of the wild grasses and thatch from the brush piles nearby.
The net was quickly tossed over the covey. It was expected that some of the quail would escape, and in the violent thrashing of their wings at least two-thirds of the winged dinner escaped. The hunter was happy with his catch, and hiked home proudly to help his wife prepare their delicious dinner.
The next day started much life the one before, and the hunter decided the quail would be an easy catch for him again. He packed his net and roamed over to the creek once again. The capture was not nearly as smooth this time. The quail appeared to work in unison, and tossed the net off within seconds. He only managed to corral one of the fowl by catching it out of the air. He sulked through the rest of the forest in an attempt to find more prey, but to no avail.
His wife gave him a kiss and wished him good luck on the third day of his hunt. Luckily they saved some of the first day's catch or else they would have gone to bed hungry. The man happened upon the covey once again. As he prepared for his ambushed, he noticed that the quail all were watching him this time. One of them had its wing up in the air much like a general does to signal a charge. The hunter was perplexed by this, and decided it was best to slightly change his course of action. He engineered his net so that it was weighed down substantially burdensome stone weights. He approached the quail again and tossed his net. He was ecstatic about the catch he was about to have, filled with so much excitement that he did not notice the group of quails catching the net in mid-air and dropping it upon him. The quail then proceeded to pin down the hunter under the confines of the net.
The leading quail peered through the net with a pleading look in his eye. Words were obviously not exchanged, but the hunter understood everything completely. The hunter nodded his head in concession. He was then freed from his own trap, and the quail quickly escaped the scene. The hunter decided it was best to never hunt these creatures ever again.
Author's Note:
I wrote a modified version of this story: Quarrel of the Quails. I decided to tell the story from the perspective of the hunter instead of the quail The other significant change was that I made the quails work together to "defeat" the hunter. In fact, in my story, there was really no quarrel between the quail at all.
Jeremy, I really liked your story. I like how you decided to switch the perspective from the quail to the hunter. I think you did this well and I would have thought the original story was like that anyways. I think the backstory in the hunter at the beginning helped give more depth to the hunter and made him less of a bad guy in the story for hunting these quail. Also, I thought it was nice how the quail let the hunter go after making sure he understood their pain. Great work!
ReplyDeleteJeremy, this was quite the interesting story. I liked the perspective change from the original story and reading this from the hunters point of view was quite interesting. As a hunter I can't imagine what I would do if a covey or grouping of ducks worked against me. There were a few grammatical mistakes that I saw but if read through it once more you should be able to catch and adjust most of them. Overall great job on this piece.
ReplyDeleteHey Jeremy. Great job with the assignment this week. It's always nice to read something that flows nicely both structurally and in terms of content, and your retelling of The Quarrel of the Quails certainly does both of those things. I enjoyed reading the story from both sides, and I think it was a wise choice for you to write this augment from the perspective of the hunter. Overall, good job! The end of the semester is almost here!
ReplyDeleteJeremy, you did a wonderful job with this story. I felt drawn in at the first sentence. I liked how you changed it from the original into a more interesting perspective from the hunter. This point of view really helped established what happened in the story much more clearly than I understood it before. I noticed a few grammatical errors but other than that, great job!! Looking forward to your next story.
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