Old Man Hood casts his gaze

Old Man Hood

After a week of brooding, the Old Man shrugged off his ethereal cloak and cast his imperious gaze across the valley floor.

Humans blithely played out their laughable, petty dramas.  A piteous sight. 

When first they came, although they were fewer, their struggles had more meaning.  Which band of flea-bitten apes would spear the salmon that thrived in the rivers at his feet?  Which would summer in his highland meadows?  Back then, they settled such issues with sticks and stones. 

They do it differently now.  They've abandoned the sticks and stones in favor of obscure and meaningless rituals.  Elections?  The people kept their leader?

New leader, old leader... who cares?  The Old Man has seen them rise and fall over the last 20,000 years.

In this blink of his eye, they are numberless.  In the next, they'll go the way of the giant sloths and the three-toed horses and the wooly mammoths.

And he'll still be gazing out across the valley floor, toward the unconquerable vastness of Pacifica, by whom he is rendered as inconsequential as the flea-bitten tribesman that gazes upon him even now from the top of dead little Tabor.