Saturday 9 March 2013

The Tree Bears story episode 1


Here is the first instalment of one of the stories I used to tell the kids on the way to school .  It is kind of designed for parents to tell, and for most ages of kids to get a little something out of.  I had a 2 year old, who liked the three bears, a 6 year old who liked the three bears and school stuff, and a 10 year old who liked surreal unexpected stuff.  Although the younger ones didn't understand all of it they liked hearing a story and I presume it helped their vocabulary.  Anyway they never complained.

 The story of the tree bears

Once upon a time, there were three bears, a Mum, a Dad  and a young bear, commonly known to his friends as Bear.  They lived in a cottage in the woods, as bears do, and had porridge for breakfast every day.  They made furniture for the other bears round and about.  They had a very successful berry picking business that Bear helped with before school.  They were a bit traditional really.  But in a good way.

One lucky day, after he had finished his berry round, Bear found a 50p on the way to school and decided to buy a new plastic glider with it.  He went into Acme Toys on the way home and chose a plane with a shark painted on the front.  All the way home he threw it along the lane and ran to catch up with it.  After many throws his arm began to get tired and when he threw, it landed to the side of the path in a tree and stuck there. 

Bear climbed up the tree and was most surprised to find that there was an x box controller on the branch next to the plane.  He picked it up and it lit up.  Automatically he pressed A.  The tree shot up into the air at a terrific rate until in a few moments Bear couldn’t see the ground.  He found pretty soon that he could steer the tree using the controller so he settled himself comfortably into a fork between two branches and started to take a bit of notice of his surroundings. 

He saw at once that he was somewhere very different from his own lane where he had climbed the tree.  For a start the ground was nowhere to be seen even when he craned his neck out between the leaves.  Secondly the clouds which he passed through tasted of peanuts which was very disconcerting.  All at once he spotted something in the distance - a green mass that quickly resolved into what he could only call a wood. 

Bear steered the tree towards the wood, slowing down as he approached, so as not to hit it.  It didn’t’ really help because the trees in the wood turned towards him like a shoal of jellyfish, their roots trailing out behind their billowing leaves.  Soon Bear found that his tree was entangled in the wood and he couldn’t get it loose, no matter how he manipulated the controls.  Vines and creepers grew into his tree and it was soon swimming along with the rest.

Bear put the glider and the controller in his school bag and walked into the wood.  There was not much danger that he would fall, he won the school prize for tree climbing most years, although he usually got very low marks for food tech as he often got fur in his cooking.  He walked through the leaves looking for anything which might explain how he could get home, as he was beginning to feel rather hungry.  As he was walking he began to find that the branches were broader and flatter.  After a few more minutes he heard voices and came out into a clearing where the light was brighter and the leaves less dense.  In the clearing were fifteen or twenty bears sitting round on branches and having some sort of picnic.  At one side of the picnic area there was a cloud under a tree branch.  Every so often the cloud was moved along a bit and Bear could see that where it had been there were white things hanging from twigs.  He walked out into the clearing, and there was a sudden silence.



To be continued!

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