A hungry jackal is startled by a booming drum and discovers that fear can be full of imaginary teeth. A retelling about curiosity, verification, and how panic shrinks when you step closer.
Wind threaded through the scrubland and turned a torn goatskin drum into a voice larger than the night. The jackal, whose ribs counted his meals for him, froze at the first thunderous boom and considered the mathematics of retreat. He knew the stories that travel faster than feet: of demons who live in hollow trees and kings who tax the darkness itself. But hunger has its own religion, and tonight it preached investigation. He crept forward one paw at a time, stopping whenever the drum barked across the plain, and used the old technique of the cautious—naming what he saw. There was the dry grass whispering; there was the broken fence complaining; there was the moon, a coin no one had managed to spend. The drum revealed itself only when a wind-swollen gust pushed a thorn branch aside. It was strapped to a pole from a festival so long past even the ants had lost interest. The boom was emptiness throwing its voice.
The jackal stood there and laughed softly at the engineering of his own fear. He pawed the goatskin, sniffed the ring of rope, and then—because curiosity should pay for its keep—gnawed the knots loose to see whether anything edible hid beneath. A lizard scurried out, indignant and alive. The jackal’s supper was meager, but the lesson was heavy enough to require balance. On his way back to the thorn thicket he practiced a new gait: not arrogant, just a little taller, as if his spine had learned it could carry questions instead of only instincts.
Days later he found two cubs whimpering at the edge of the same plain as the wind began again. He led them toward the drum and let them feel the boom travel through the ground to their narrow chests. “If a sound is big,” he said, “make your eyes bigger than your ears.” Together they circled, touched, and finally kicked the old festival relic over. It rolled downhill and settled in a wash of moonlight that turned terror into furniture. From then on the plain kept its wind, the drum kept its silence, and the jackal kept a new habit—stepping toward the scary thing first, so every step afterward could be smaller.
