How the Ant Reader got his name

The learned owl peered down from her sleeping perch. She was disturbed by something called insomnia.

"Sleep, it is not overrated," she said.

Her years had taught her one thing: the basics in life have a hold on the soul of an owl. Eating, sleeping, and reading. Oh - and thinking about what one has read. Not to forget that. Hunting in her roost, she dug up yet another tattered volume and prepared for a few hours of reading.

This was a story whose ending she knew, but one whose way it got there she rather preferred to most. (Hence, the books' worn edges, which were made so by a full and affectionate enjoyment of the contents therein.)

The night air, busy with the comings and goings of many smaller winged creatures, buoyed her senses. It was a nice night for an evening, she concluded, and a nicer night still for another good read. The book was propped up against a y-shaped branch. Very convenient! Time had made the tree just so. No one could have asked for a better reading device.

This last item was a common subject of polite chit chat she shared with her neighbors. And they would offer back that there were, fortunately, still places to hide their food. Others spoke of the weather, others their feathers or fur. Chit chat was increasingly rare, but formed part of the code of the forest: watch your tail and have a nice thing to say.

Owl was in the middle of the third paragraph on page 95, where the author described the hues of a grape harvest: "golden bails of hay painted the yellow land. They lightened the muddy feed troughs of the horses who labored in the fields and farms. Purple lilacs and lavender, a mix of greens - and always the blue sky, and always the sunset..." It was the part about the sunset that always charmed owl. The passage always had a somniferent effect upon her - do you think this time was different? No.

In her owl dreams, she climbed the sky and dropped on magic prey, tearing and biting at them. Her body shook about on the branch so that eventually her book lost its place, came out of its perfect crook on the branch where it had been so cleverly propped, and fell. It fluttered down and stopped once it reached the ground where it came to rest on a countless number of leaves, face open on pages 53-54.

***

About 8 a.m., an anteater, named for its culinary habits, sidled by. Now as you all know, an anteater delights in ants. In its delight, it feels about ants the way humans feel about money: the more they can suck up, the better. Anteater tromped by, as I said, at 8 a.m. in his bare feet, pulling his tail this way and that as he trundled along. In his path, as you might have imagined, was Owl's book. This was the same book that had dropped from above and wasn't retrieved due to the state of deep slumber in which the owl found herself.

"What a lot of ants!" exclaimed Anteater upon seeing the tiny black rivulets of text on pages 53-54. "There's my breakfast."

He set upon the ants, but noticed a peculiar thing: they moved really slowly.

"What kind of ants are these?" he asked himself. Could they be dead ants? he wondered. (Not his favorite.) He was prepared for a feast, but something just wasn't right...

Owl, as though tapped on the wing by some unseen force awoke and looked down. She could not believe her two eyes. Of all the things that should never happen, this was at the top of the list. "Or am I dreaming?" she suddenly hoped. "If so, this is surely a nightmare!"

But no, she wasn't dreaming. A creature was licking her favorite book. Its long tounge was flicking all over the delicate paper, causing irreparable damage to same. Lest you think Owl was slow to descend from her perch, I will quickly clear up this erroneous conclusion. Accompanied by her tremendous shadow, she whooshed down aggressively. Owl grasped the injured book and flew it up to safety. And Anteater did not know what had become of his meal.

Though wet and dirtied, now Owl's book was back on her branch with her entire collection. In a moment, once her heart calmed, she knew she needed to go down to the forest floor to give that anteater a talking to -- to teach him a lesson.

Anteater was not far from the tree. He swept the ground with his tounge, conducting a thorough investigation of the area:

"Those dead ants seem to have been blown out of range." he thought to himself as he went along. He could not quite make out the scene around him, which was beyond his strength of vision.

When Owl had recovered her nerves, she came down to the anteater, who was slow in more than one way.

"Stupid animal," she muttered in her flight. The wind caught her words and whisked them away. When she alighted on the ground a few inches from the anteater, her voice grew out of her chest.

"You're a stupid animal!" she said.

Anteater looked up with a befuddled gaze every now and then, partly from confusion, and partly poor eyesight. He was not accustomed to being attacked in this way, and his heart balled up inside at the insult. He was already having a bit of a bad morning of his own, due to no breakfast. He didn't understand what had brought on such a brawl.

"Wha-whaaa-t did you sa- saa-aay?" he tried meekly, in search of more input from his assailant.

Owl was impressed with the sincerity of Anteater's befuddlement, and prided herself a good judge of character. With her native understanding of when it was appropriate to modulate her sharp tounge, she moved to a gentler tone of voice.

"I was pointing out to you that your experience here in the forest has narrowed your grasp of the world. Your stomach seems to do more thinking than your mind," she returned, pleased with her utterance.

This was quite a mouthful for Anteater, who was not accustomed to the elevated speech of birds, but he decided the best thing to do was to appologize.

"I'm not very bright or astute," he said. "I like ants, you know. I've never been up where you live, but I got a postcard from someone from there, or somewhere near there anyway. You know what, though, I must say that my stomach is empty now, and I must find some ants to eat. I saw some here a little while ago, and then a big wind suddenly came along and blew them away."

Owl got the picture. Anteater had bad vision, and couldn't tell the difference between the book and an ant colony. Here was a challenge she decided to take on: how to enlighten a myopic anteater whose mind seems trained on nothing but feeding his belly?

Anteater was looking a bit weary, so Owl decided to let him wander, but wanted to send him off in such a way as to leave the door open for what seemed to be just the right thing to do. "Say, I rather like you, anteater, she said. I don't know how to find ants, but I think you'd better go find some breakfast, but come back here later today. I'd like to invite you for a visit."

"Okay. That sounds like a good idea," said the anteater, who was eager to be released. He wasn't fond of words before he had an ant or two.

"Alright, then," said Owl. "Save a few ants for our visit. We can have our afternoon meal together."

So Owl said farewell to her newly found friend, and flew up to her place on the branch above. "I'm going to teach Anteater how to read!" she declared.

She spent a good part of the morning looking through her books for something easy to start with, then remembered that she might still have her very first book of ABC's that her mother had given to her before she knew how to read.

Once she located it, she laughed aloud with amusement. There on the very first page it said: A is for Ant. Beside the big A and the little a was a very large drawing of an ant. "Wait until anteater finds this book. Will there be anything left of it? "

At 4 p.m. Anteater found himself at Owl's tree, peered up with squinted eyes, and called out.

"Owl!"

Owl was putting together a lesson plan in her mind, and after a moment looked down with pleasure to see her unsuspecting student there on the ground. Soon, the two were chatting over ants and berries.

"Here's a book I brought for you," said Owl, opening the book and turning its pages so Anteater could see the pictures and words.

"What do you use it for?" said Anteater.

"Well, this one is a book of the alphabet. Do you know what the alphabet is? "

Anteater thought hard for a moment as though trying to remember somebody's name. "No," he finally returned.

"Well, it's quite a wonderful thing, really," said Owl. "It lets us put what we'd like to say in a safe place so we can come back to it after we've said it and enjoy it some more."

"What kind of things can you say?" asked the Anteater.

"What do you want to say?" returned Owl.

"How about, I am an anteater. Can I say that?"

"You just did, didn't you?" said Owl.

"I did?" said Anteater.

"Well, we didn't write it down yet, but we can."

"Writing? Is that what a book is?"

"Well, when you want to say something, you can give it to someone so they will know your thoughts. That's what a book is: it's writing. And when you look at the writing that's called reading. " explained the Owl.

"You're very interesting," said Anteater. "Can I see your book?"

Owl let Anteater flip through the pages.

"What does this say, Owl?" he asked, pointing to the X-page of the alphabet book.

"That says X is for Xylophone."

Anteater seemed satisfied with the answer. Owl took the book and held up the first page really close for Anteater to see.

"And this one," she said energetically "says A is for Ant."

"It does?" Anteater said quizzically. Do they write books about ants?

"Well, I guess they do. Would you like me to teach you how to read about ants?"

"I think so." said Anteater. "Maybe I can know where they hide. Do they write about those things?"

"I might have a book about that," she replied.

"Oh, good then. I'd like to read about Owls, too," said Anteater. "You're a good sort of creature, I've decided. You help out."

Owl beamed inside.

"Well, let's start with the alphabet, then," she said.

The two sat close and spent most of the night going backwards and forewards through Anteater's first book. As that day turned into the next and the days went by, Owl opened up a new world for Anteater, who got in the habit of sitting under Owl's tree with one of Owl's books in his lap. He didn't yet know what the lines said, since he was just starting out, but it made him feel a wonderful feeling inside. He called it his seeking-after feeling because that was the name anteaters gave to the feeling they got when they went looking for ants.

He was filled him with a new kind of excitement. He was proud of himself. Here he was, a fully grown anteater learning to read. It was fun to think about the adventures ahead. He and Owl could travel together to the written world. It was really close, and they could be home for lunch.

It was during those days of their friendship that Owl began to call Anteater by his new name. And now, my friends, you have read the whole story of how Antreader got his name.

 

 

Sites of Related Interest

Anteater
Bartholomeus Anglicus, "On the Properties of Things": Owl
State of the Art, Transforming Ideas for Teaching and Learning: To Read
The Outreach and Technical Assistance Network

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