In the Oak Forest lived a wolf who didn’t eat rabbits or goats. He ate questions.
The small ones served as an appetizer:
“Why do ants walk in a line?”
The difficult questions were the main course:
“Where does time go once it’s gone?”
And before going to sleep, he always had a hot question:
“How does a seed know which way to grow?”
The animals were delighted. When a question bothered them, they only had to leave it in front of the cave.
“Why should I share?” asked the squirrel.
Yum! The wolf ate it.
“What have I done to make the turtle sad?”
Yum!
“Could we cross the river another way?”
Yum, yum!
After a while, there were no questions left in the forest.
The squirrel didn’t share, but neither did she wonder why the others didn’t invite her. No one discovered what was saddening the turtle. And since no one could imagine another way to cross the river, they all continued taking the same three-hour detour.
The wolf, on the other hand, was so full that he could barely leave his cave.
A young hare, Brisa, went to see him.
“Why do you eat the questions?”
The wolf opened his mouth, but the question was so fresh that he couldn’t swallow it.
“Because… I don’t know what to do with them.”
“You could chew them without swallowing them,” Brisa suggested.
They tried it with a new question:
“How could we help the turtle?”
The wolf chewed it slowly. The question split into ideas: listening to her, visiting her, asking her what she needed.
The next day they chewed the question about the river. Out came a walkway, a rope, and a boat made from a hollowed-out log.
The wolf discovered that questions were much more nourishing when shared.
He opened a kitchen in the forest. On the door was a sign:
“Bring a question. Ideas for everyone will emerge.”
And he only ate the useless ones, like:
“Why are the wolf’s ears so big?”
Although, before swallowing it, he always replied:
“To hear questions like this one.”
