myth for katniss

There was something moving in the swamp. The fisherman detected it out of the corner of his eyes. But every time he tried to look directly at it nothing would be there, and the reeds swayed, the redwing blackbirds were silent. The frogs were still.

The fisherman was used to this life. Even when it was the dead of winter, he would find a deep sections of the swamp, and cut the ice and drop a line into the water. He had what he needed. Before he lived alone, he was part of a group, he was one of the people whose skills was to see things that were barely there.

You probably know how difficult of a task this is. One day he just missed the writings of a wolf pack. The following day he missed a cub whose mother was hunting at the stream, and one of the team was nearly killed.

“I have forgotten how to see.” He thought to himself. And the final day, he realized he had missed the most important thing. When he woke in the morning his people had left him as they had lost their faith in his ability, that was so many years ago he sometimes struggled to remember the faces of his brothers and sisters. All he had now was the swamp, and this is what he would often tell the swamp. The swamp knew his story well. He told it many times - how he had been left there.

Now, some creature had moved into the swamp - some creature he might once have been able to detect. You can look at a thing your whole life and never see it. This fisherman lived for many decades in the swamp and he couldn’t even remember when exactly this creature had shown up, really. Or had it been asleep this whole time, and was just waking up now?

One day he took his boat out. It was July, on the quietest and warmest of days, when he felt one with the swamp, when he could have submerged and become the very landscape itself. He dropped a line into the water, and realized that he could see the movement of the creature, or, as he was beginning to realize, the creatures. They were swarming in the water, rushing in a purplish cloud, ever faster, ever more wild. The fisherman grew terrified and brought up his line and with it came a small wet being, like a water rat. “Don’t be afraid,” the rat said. This was the first time anything in the swamp had every spoken to him. “We have been listening to your stories, but we think they are getting boring. Tell us other stories, will you? Tell us stories from other times and other places. Tell us stories about us too. We like to hear our names called.”

And this is how the fisherman tells stories to the katniss. He’s probably still there now, and the katniss grew big green ears from the bottom of water so it could listen. And now, if you call them by their name, one thousand water rats will emerge from the swamp and ask you to tell them a story. But only few know what that name is.