Before+They+Came

By: Taylor L P7
 * "Davi, Davi! Come on Davi, we're gonna start without you if you don't hurry up!" Yara shouted.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," Davi yelled back as he rolled his eyes at his little sister. Davi and his friends turned from their game of futebol and went to join the rest of the village children around the fire. After everyone was seated and paying attention the storyteller began his story.

"As most of you may know, I am not originally from this tribe. I came here when I was young, almost 50 summers ago. I was lucky to have been accepted here since there was barely anywhere else I could go.

"Back then this place was much different. Everywhere you turned there was thick vegetation that traveled for miles in every direction. In that vegetation lived animals that you wouldn't even dream up now. There was an animal with three toes on each leg that climbed through the trees very slowly and was covered in hair and sometimes even moss. In the rivers there was a large fish like animal, called a dolphin, with pink skin and it would breath out of a hole on the top of their head."

"What happened to those animals?" a little voice said, cutting through the silence.

"Well, they're gone now, extinct."

"Well why did they leave?"

"Silly girl," the storyteller replied and rubbed the head of Yara, "they didn't want to leave. They didn't have a choice. The loggers forced them to go away."

"Storyteller?" Another young voice cut in," Who are the loggers?"

"The loggers are people who came to our beautiful forest and cut it down..."

"Well why would they do that?"

"For money. You see, a lot of the trees we used to have here were very valuable to people like them. They would come, cut down the trees, and then go and sell them. Now if you quiet down I will finish my story.

"The government tried very hard to protect us but nothing they could do would work. So Thiago, the medicine man of your tribe when I first came, decided to go and take matters into his own hands. He went to an area where he knew the loggers were and tried to reason with them. Mercilessly, they kidnapped him and no one knows where they took him.

"This sent the tribe into chaos. Thiago had only taught half of the cures he kneew to his intern. People started getting sick and no one knew how to cure them. But that wasn't the worst part. Half of the cures that the intern knew couldn't be used because the loggers had destroid the plants in which they come from. Then the food shortages started happening. The loggers had been destroying the plants and animals that the tribe used for food. All of the animals that were not destroyed started going deeper into the jungle to get away from it. This forced the tribe to leave the area behind that they had known for as long as they had lived and move deeper into the jungle. Between the sicknesses, the food shortages, and the moving, over half of the tribe perished that winter.

"I was one of the lucky ones who survived. Eventually, the tribe started to regulate itself again. New cures were found to cure sicknesses and they were able to build a whole new village, which you live in today. The government was finally able to stop the loggers, but they still had a huge impact. For example, over 80 percent of the forest was destroyed. We now live on a special reservation that is heavily guarded as to prevent this from ever happening again. And that is the story of how the past became the present."

One by one the children finally pulled themselves out of the trance and left for bed. As the last embers of the fire went out, Davi finally left. He had sat there for hours, imagining what it would have been like to see the three toed animal and the dolphin. He imagined running through all of that forest and he pictured the loggers. He stayed up for hours that night, thinking off what it would have been like before They came. ||