Seduction of a Princess

Chapter Five: Tale of the First Wolf

Hoozah! Finally finished translating an awful lot of Dutch. There are a lot of proverbs used in this chapter that I hadn't been able to translate (or translated wrongly--if so, please tell me so I can learn from my mistakes ;D), but I'm satisfied with the outcome nonetheless.

This is Terrance's first (yes, there will be more!) story: about "the First Wolf". I hope you like it :).

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          “Once upon a time, back in those days that animals still could talk, there was a forest. This forest was not too far from a village. And every day, people of the village entered the forest to gather fruits and to hunt.

          “Now it isn’t a lie if I tell you that the animals in that forest, the wolves, the deer, the rabbits and foxes, they all were sick and tired from being hunted. All of them demanded the humans be driven away. All of them wanted the humans be killed. But the problem was, they could not work together. Yes, of course, a pack of wolves might work together to find food, but there was no cooperation between all the different species, and who could blame them? After all, what rabbit would trust a fox, and what deer would trust a wolf?

          “But because of this simple truth, none of the animals were able to work together against the humans. And after a while, nobody wanted to. Most animals thought the humans were a force of nature, and couldn’t be beat. They only cared about surviving, fleeing faster than the animals around them. Other animals, that were slightly braver, were stupider too. They thought they might be able to scare off the humans on their own—scare them so badly, they would never set foot in the forest ever again. Those animals were never heard of ever again.

          “And lastly, there were those animals that were both brave and smart. One of the wolves, for example. He was very large and very strong. His coat was blacker than the night, and his razor-sharp teeth whiter than the full moon. He was the leader of the pack, and encountered people every day. He’d like to kill them all, snap all of their necks, but he knew he would never be able to do something like that. Not even with his whole pack. The people had bows and arrows, and swords and spears, and all the wolves had were their teeth.

          “But luckily, this wolf wasn’t just smart, he was also idealistic. He did not want any one animal to die by the hands of humans, so called a meeting to which every single animal of the forest was invited. Of course, they did not want to come at first, suspecting it was a trap of the bigger predators. But the black wolf made it well known that any predator that would even so much as lure at this meeting would feel the sting of his teeth.

          “So they met, all of the animals, in a large meadow in the forest. Everybody was present, from squirrel to woodpecker, from falcon to the one large bear that inhabited a cave somewhere deep in the woods.

          “The black wolf took the centre of the stage, a spot where everybody was able to get clear view of him. ‘We all suffer under the hands of the humans,’ he spoke loudly and listened to the approving mutters of the crowd. ‘We are all hunted by their weaponry and have no ways to defend ourselves from them. We’re all sick and tired of this. We all want to keep those humans out of our forest. But how do we go to accomplish this? Does anyone have an idea?’

          “The animals looked from one to another, curious to see if even just one of them had a plan. For a long time, it was silent in the meadow. None of the animals knew how they could get rid of the people. Of course, the black wolf had expected as much, and wanted to continue his speech when a beautiful voice called: ‘Wait a moment!’