User:BatArieh/be bold

The Bear and the Elephant: A Fable
The following is the Fable of the Bear and the Elephant, originally written by Carrie Wallestad on October 12, 2022.

Once upon a time, a black bear and an elephant lived in the Hoh Rainforest of Olympic National Park in Washington, USA. The bear really wanted some honey, but she didn't know where to find any. She told her problems to her friend, the elephant.

"I can help you look for honey!" declared the elephant.

The bear scratched her head. "How can you find honey? You cannot climb trees."

The elephant smiled and said, "Simple! I can use my long trunk to reach high into the branches to smell for the honey."

The idea pleased the bear very much! So the two friends walked from tree to tree. The elephant lifted his trunk and smelled around the highest branches, searching for honey.

Around the corner, a common raccoon with a bad case of insomnia was out for a midday stroll. Running into the unlikely pair, she cried out, "An elephant! What are you doing here?"

The elephant, surprised by this ungracious exclamation, stood dumfounded, his trunk still raised into the branches of the bigleaf maple under which he stood.

The bear, seeing his friend was at a loss of words, explained, "Good raccoon, I am having trouble finding any honey, and dear elephant has offered his assistance in searching for a hive among the branches of the tall trees of the forest.

Shaking her head, the raccoon replied, "It is not what the elephant is doing, but where he is doing it that has me confused. You see, elephants are indigenous to the continents of Africa and Asia .  One would not expect to find an elephant in North America, unless it was living in a zoo or a circus, of course."

Finally lowering his trunk, the elephant responded, "Oh, but you see, I am an Asian elephant, and am perfectly at home in the rainforest."

"I see," the raccoon said, drawing out her words and still wearing a perplexed look under her mask. "But the last native Proboscidea in this hemisphere went extinct over 10,000 years ago.

At that moment, a pileated woodpecker landed in the branch that the elephant had recently been sniffing. He glanced from one to another of the trio, only slightly surprised to see the raccoon out at this time of day. Then, locking eyes on the elephant, he queried, "My, my, who do we have here?"

The bear, feeling defensive of his friend, crossed her arms and stated with some authority, "My friend, the Asian elephant, who of course belongs in a rainforest, is helping me search for honey." The woodpecker began to giggle and then to chortle until he laughed so hard that he rattled his beak through the maple's moss-covered bark. When he had finally gained his composure, the bird cleared his throat, clearly struggling to keep his laughter under control. "Don't you know that elephants are scared of bees? At the sound of one hive, they run in fear !"

The elephant shook his head, "Oh, no, you must be mistaken! We elephants are scared of mice."

The raccoon, despite her middle-of-the-day drowsiness, scuttled up the trunk of the maple to look the pachyderm squarely in the eye (for she was too small, of course, to look him in both eyes at once). "Are you certain of that?" she asked, her paw hovering dangerously close to the wiki page's edit button.

"Of course I am sure!" the elephant trumpeted in frustration. "I am an elephant, after all! And elephants never forget!"

This declaration sent the giddy woodpecker into another bout of branch pecking.

Waving to get the elephant's attention once more, she asked, "So, where are your citations?"

The elephant stammered, having no excuse to offer. Sighing, the raccoon pressed the edit button. And with that, the elephant, along with all of his un-cited claims, disappear from the article.