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by Rick Walton
Where did all the elephants come from?
It happened like this...
Long, long ago there was a caterpillar.
One day the caterpillar wrapped itself in a cocoon, and in the spring, out from the cocoon came...
a helicopter.
The helicopter flew off into the sky, flew far away, until it came to a mountain top, where it landed and let out...
a sandwich.
The sandwich sat there on the mountain top for many years. It could do nothing else, for sandwiches don't have legs.
One day a lone hiker found the sandwich. He opened it up, and there inside was...
an umbrella. He pulled out the umbrella and opened it up, and out fell... a kitten. He took the kitten home to his children. "A horse!" said the children. They had never been to school, and they thought all animals were horses. They ran out to the barn and brought back the curry comb and began to brush the kitten. With the first stroke, out from the kitten's hair came...
a seed. A small seed.
"Look! A baby horse!" said the children. "And it's not moving. It must be dead."
So they buried the seed and held a funeral for it. There was much weeping.
The following spring a small green twig sprouted from the ground where the seed had been buried. By summer the twig was as tall as the hiker. By fall the twig was a tall, tall tree, full of broad, green leaves.
In the late fall the leaves fell. And there, in the top of the tree, was...
an elephant.
"Look! In the tree!" said the children. "It's a horse!" They shook and shook the tree until the elephant fell.
They tried to catch it.
After the hiker had dug his children out of the ground, they all pitched in and built the elephant its own room off the barn.
They took very good care of the elephant. Every day they washed it and combed it. And every day they fed it six hundred blueberry bushes.
In return the elephant helped out around the house. He pulled the plow in the spring, and the wagons the rest of the year.
And once a week he would go into town and give the children rides. People would come from millions of miles away to see this wonderful new creature that had come from a tree.
And every year the elephant tree grew new leaves, and every year in the fall, out fell a new elephant.
And that's where all the elephants came from...
...that one tree, that came from a seed, that came from a kitten, that came from an umbrella, that came from a sandwich, that came from a helicopter, that came from a cocoon, that came from a caterpillar.
So now you know.
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