The Frog Carried the Scorpion Across the River

The frog came off the mud with a scorpion sitting on its back.

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A man was standing on the bank and saw it push out into the current, so he stopped to watch, because a frog carrying a scorpion is not a thing a person walks past. The scorpion did not sting. It rode with its tail folded over itself and let the water go by underneath, and the frog kept its head up and swam a straight line for the far side. Neither of them looked at the man at all.

"That one is prepared to perform its mission," he said, out loud, to nobody.

The frog put the scorpion down on the far bank. The scorpion went off into the grass, and it did what it had been carried across to do, and then it came back to the same landing and got on again, and the frog took it home the way it had brought it.

The wailing started while the frog was still in the water. It came up out of the city behind him, that particular noise a street makes when the news has gone door to door, and then the words came with it: a scorpion has bitten so-and-so, and he is dead.

Nobody Called a Witness

A king of flesh and blood can exile a man, or shut him up, or fine him, or have him flogged, but he needs two men to stand up and say what they saw before he can lay a hand on anyone. The Holy One does not strike on testimony. The Holy One strikes directly, which is why the same verse can say I have crushed and I will heal in one breath (Deuteronomy 32:39), the wound and the remedy coming out of the same hand.

So there was no court by that river and no bailiff on that bank. There was a green thing swimming, and a thing with a tail riding on it, and a man who happened to be standing there and understood what he was looking at a little before the city did.

The Man Digging in the Beit Shofarei Valley

Some distance from all that, another man was digging in the Beit Shofarei Valley, and the sun was doing what the sun does to a bare head.

There was a shrub growing near where he was working. He pulled some of it, twisted it into a wreath, and put the wreath on his head, and then he went back to his digging with green leaves over his hair and thought no more about it.

A snake came at him.

He hit it, and he kept hitting it until it stopped moving, and then he stood over it breathing hard, a man with a spade who had just killed a snake and was pleased about it. Then he wiped the blade on his leg and went back to the hole he had been digging.

The Charmer Wanted to Know Who Killed It

A snake charmer came along the valley and stopped at the body.

He crouched down to it and turned it over and looked at it for a while without saying anything, the way a man looks at work done in his own trade by somebody else. Then he straightened up. "I wonder who killed this snake."

"I killed it," the man said.

The charmer turned his face toward him and did not answer, because he had just seen the wreath. He knew the shrub. He knew what it did, and he knew what a man who had killed that particular snake bare-handed should look like by now, and this one was standing there upright with dirt on his hands and a crown of leaves on his head, and none of it added up unless the leaves were doing the work.

"Truly," the man said again, "I killed it."

Lift That Off Your Head

The charmer asked him a question that was not about the snake. "Could you lift that shrub off your head?"

"Yes," the man said, and he lifted it off.

Then the second question, in the same flat voice. "Can you touch that snake with this stick?"

"Yes," the man said.

He walked over to the dead snake with the stick in his hand and the sun now on his bare scalp, and he never got to touch it, because his limbs came off him where he stood. He went down in pieces in front of a man who had asked two questions and already known both answers.

The venom had been in him the whole time. It had been in him from the first strike, waiting, held off by a handful of leaves he had picked because his head was hot. The snake had done its work before it died; the shrub had simply been standing between the work and the man, hour after hour, while he dug and while he boasted, until he was invited to take it off and did.

The wreath lay in the dust where he had dropped it. Still green.