Turtles and hares have ongoing contests to see who can get where quickest. Hare racing ahead then getting distracted or tired or lost, turtle plodding ever forward, never resting and always always getting there in the end. Sometimes turtle gets there first; sometimes hare manages to keep up the pace and gets in a resounding win. It is all good natured fun, and a nice way to pass the time.
Spider watches with interest.
“You two! Hey, you two! I’ve a great idea, you seam about even running without loads, but I reckon, right, that if you had to carry anything then turtle wins outright, I mean, he’s just built for that. What do you reckon Hare - in a race carrying something fairly light, like some of my webbing, you still think you could beat Turtle?”
Hare, a proud feckless little critter, obviously disagrees. A sometimes fast and sometimes slow argument grows between the two. Spider waits adding more threads to the two piles he has either side of him.
Eventually the race is on. Over to Murder’s Field with equal bundles of web.
It sticks to turtles head, and gets in his eyes. It spreads a further unpleasantly gooey layer of fluff over hare’s normally pristine fur. It’s not fun, but there’s generations worth of hare and turtle races behind the pair. Each just needs to do better than the other.
Hare wins by quite a lot, mainly because he really wants to get cleaned up and the sooner he’s done carrying this load the quicker he can get a bath. Partially because turtle was blinded by strands early on in the race so went a long slow way around.
On their return to the woods, Spider finds them again.
“Another race! Again, again! Turtle was blinded; it wasn’t fair, race again next week! We need to know who’s strongest and fastest.”
Spider has a deal going on with the local murder of crows. He gives them web threads to help with their nests and they didn’t eat him and they even leave a few sickly flies for him to eat after they’ve had their fill. Not a fair deal, but crows have never been fair, and they do like to feather their nests, or at least encourage others to feather their nests for them. Or at the very least encourage others to encourage others to feather nests for others.
