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A Friend in Need

By Benita Sen; Illustration by Sudheer Nath

It happened not very long ago. But when you're a snail, days move at snail's pace, too. So, if you were to ask our friend the snail when this happened, she'd tell you, it was y-e-ars ago...

Well, to get on with our story. In the shade of a cool, damp log, snoozed a shy snail. She wasn't alone in her cosy home, oh no. She had company. There was a slug the snail called Cousin Glug because, you see, snails and slugs are part of the same family. Now, since they both lived on land, they didn't know, of course, that they had other cousins in the ocean!

Fancy that, perhaps they could have gone visiting cousins oyster and octopus, had they been wiser! Anyway, under the log, there lived a family of greedy woodlice who spent the day munching the wood of their log home. No one called them by any good name because they made such a maddening din, gnawing into the branch, that the other residents were rather cross with them.

Cousin Glug called our snail Sister Slither - Slith, for short - because she left a silvery wet trail. Slith was too polite, of course, to tell him that he did the same, it's just that he didn't look behind him when he moved!

Slither snoozed through the day in the shade of the fallen branch. She knew she was safe there from hungry birds that watched the ground with beady eyes. And when the day went to sleep taking most of the birds with her to dreamland, Slither crept out and twitched her two eye-stalks nervously to check if all was safe.

Then, she inched her way along, stopping by a juicy stalk. Munch, munch, munch. Sleeping all day made her hungry! Cousin Glug joined her, and it was a bit of a race. He waited for Slither to halt by a stalk and overtook her.

"Snail's pace!" he laughed, looking back at poor Slither trying to catch up. Slither waited her chance. At the next plant, as Glug dug into a juicy leaf, she took off. A few steps down, she laughed, "I'd heard of a sluggish creature. Now, I've met one!"

That bothered Glug. He had never learnt to take a joke and so, he thought out ways to run down Slith. "Imagine moving around with your home on your back!" he giggled.