Atondido Stories
The Virtue of the Cocoanut
One day a man took his blow-gun and his dog and went to the
forest to hunt. As he was making his way through the thick
woods he chanced upon a young cocoanut tree growing in the
ground.
It was the first tree of this kind that he had ever seen, and it
seemed so peculiar to him that he stopped to look at it.
When he had gone some distance farther, his attention was
attracted by a noisy bird in a tree, and he shot it with his blow-
gun. By and by he took aim at a large monkey, which mocked
him from another treetop, and that, too, fell dead at his feet.
Then he heard his dog barking furiously in the distant bushes,
and hastening to it he found it biting a wild pig. After a hard
struggle he killed the pig, and then, feeling satisfied with his
success, he took the three animals on his back and returned to
the little plant.
“I have decided to take you home with me, little plant,” he
said, “for I like you and you may be of some use to me.”
He dug up the plant very carefully and started home, but he
had not gone far when he noticed that the leaves had begun to
wilt, and he did not know what to do, since he had no water. Fi-
nally, in despair, he cut the throat of the bird and sprinkled the
blood on the cocoanut. No sooner had he done this than the
plant began to revive, and he continued his journey.
Before he had gone far, however, the leaves again began to
wilt, and this time he revived it with the blood of the monkey.
Then he hastened on, but a third time the leaves wilted, and he
was compelled to stop and revive it with the blood of the pig.
This was his last animal, so he made all the haste possible to
reach home before his plant died. The cocoanut began to wilt
again before he reached his house, but when he planted it in the
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