06.24.08
A Story in Economics: Introduction
There once was a small tribe of hunter-gatherers who lived deep in the marshes of Far Craggonia. They found wild plants to eat, caught fish through agility and patience, and survived day by day as best as each Cragg family unit could provide for itself. Hard times were hard, and good times were tolerable at best. However, the primitive people of Far Craggonia did not mind this life, for it was the only one they had ever known.
Sometimes luck permitted a family of Far-Craggonians to fill their bellies before the day was done. They then devoted the waning twilight to, yes, the traditional pursuits of an indigenous tribe — dancing and singing and storytelling — but also to a unique game played by the young Cragg males. These backwards people had a true passion for catching every sort of wild animal, to keep simply as pets.
Traditionally, the poor Marsh Squirrel or Red-Shelled Turtle would escape from captivity before long. The Craggs were not known for their cage-building skills. The occasional outcome, however, was that the Far-Craggonian family would have a bad week of hunter-gatherer-ing and would dine on Squirrel Kabobs and Red-Shell Soup. It was never said that sentimentality was a trait of the Craggian people.
Now, it should happen one fateful year that three adolescent males, all of whom had just survived their twentieth flood — and were thus Men in the eyes of the tribe (floods happening once or twice per year) — had caught particularly large fish to eat, on the same day. This left them to do as all teenage males do when left idle – brag and fight and dare each other to do idiotic things. What else should their boasts turn to, but the favorite game of Far-Craggonians? One of the boys, a smallish youth who desperately wished to prove himself to his larger compatriots, declared (quite foolishly) that he would bring home the most fantastic pet the tribe had ever seen. He was not believed.
The normal response of a thirteen-to-sixteen year old male to being “called out” on a boast is to mutter resentfully and to work on coming up with more plausible lies. This youth, though, was not quite normal. (We’ll call him Eddie, as his real name does not transliterate well to English.) Eddie was unnaturally stubborn and little-inclined to believe the judgments of others — pigheaded, if you’ll forgive foreshadowing via pun — so he resolved to go hungry the following day and search for the greatest pet ever found.
He found nothing that day, or the next half-day. Soon, overpowering hunger decided to end Eddie’s quest. It was on the third day that sheer chance and dumb luck led Eddie towards his tribe’s future.
Eddie was desperately hungry after skipping a day and a half of his already-lean diet, and was still stinging from his failure. This drove him to do something unwise: he set out for a berry patch in the early hours of morning. The marshy bogs of Far Craggonia were blessed with a respectable selection of berry bushes that provided some meager fruit almost year-round. The catch involved in reaping this small bounty was that a particularly mean pack of wild boars also resided in this particular stretch of swamp. Those boars simply adored fresh fruit. It was well-known among the tribe that the boars preferred to dine early and sleep through the afternoon, so the women and children would tend to wait and then collect what fruit was still uneaten. The alternative of course was to possibly stumble upon foraging swineflesh of violent temperament.
It could be said that Eddie gambled with fate and won, or that he merely felt the invincibility of youth and the desperation of hunger. Either way, his morning trip to the berry patch turned out roughly as expected. A large, hungry sow was stripping the bushes of every trace of fruit. Perhaps an older and more experienced Cragg tribesman would have climbed a tree to wait for the sow to move on, but Eddie was young and optimistic and had the sudden stirrings of a rather clever idea.
For those who don’t know, boars and pigs can reproduce at a truly prodigious rate. In the wild, in such a climate as Far Craggonia (and to a lesser extent, Near Craggonia) possessed, there is perhaps a 70% chance that a given adult female wild pig will be raising a litter of piglets. Eddie decided that a piglet would be an incredible pet, and likely delicious if it came to that. Here was his chance to prove those other young men wrong, and finally earn some respect. He set about to pull a fast one on that fat sow.
The rest of the tale is passed on through the tribe’s oral history. The story that Eddie later told to the tribe about capturing the sow’s offspring is likely to have contained more fabrications than truth — did he really fight off a 500 lb behemoth with sharpened stick and thrown rock? — but the undeniable truth was that there, in plain sight of the tribe, was not one, but two half-grown piglets in a rough pen. Eddie was famous.
One of the young pigs was a male, and the other a female. By complete luck the next few months brought an unusually steady supply of food to Eddie’s family. This was doubly fortunate: it gave those young pigs the chance to survive uneaten, and it meant there were actually enough unwanted tablescraps to raise two smallish half-domesticated pigs. This breeding pair would serve as the Adam and Eve of a long line of swine. It would also serve as the catalyst for converting the people of Far Craggonia from being economyless hunter-gatherers to being property-owning herdsmen, with all the requisite social upheaval involved in such a cultural revolution.
The story of those trials and triumphs will follow soon.