the devil's bridge
Have been in the car quite a lot in the last few days. I’ve lived in places where you really need a car and then I’ve lived in places where public transportation makes having a car unnecessary, and I much prefer the latter. But I’m no Luddite. As I stumble through life, I’m in awe at what marvels have been accomplished by earlier people. Many people would list recent technological advances as mind-blowing, but I often haven’t even gotten round to appreciating them because I’m still pondering the things that were built long ago. Such as the devil’s bridge that’s pictured above.
The legend is that there was a peasant tired of walking all the way down to the valley on one side and then back up the other. He made a deal with the devil where the bridge would be finished overnight if the peasant agrees that the devil gets the soul of the first living thing that crosses the bridge. The peasant tosses and turns in the night worried that someone’s going to lose his soul on account of his selfish pact.
Early the next morning, the devil’s standing on the opposite side of the bridge as the peasant arrives and it dawns on him that he’s going to be the first one to cross and lose his soul. In the last possible moment, he picks up a stick and throws it as far as he can toward the devil. The peasant’s dog fetches the stick and the devil is furious that he’s lost the soul he was expecting to collect.
You know the obvious question, right? What about the dog’s soul? The legend has it that the devil storms off in a furious state, but why wouldn’t he be as happy with that dog’s soul as the peasant’s? In his position, I think I’d have more use for the dog’s soul. Really.
Anyway, I know it’s a fable…not sure what its telling was supposed to teach to its listeners, but there it is. Maybe the point was that you could beat the devil if you thought of a solution quickly. Or if you treated your dog as if he was dispensable, you’d be able to get ahead in life.
You all know this is an incredibly dog-friendly blog, so we’re not going to mindlessly swallow this nonsense. This blog has even been called a Dachshund Blog, which I’m beginning to think wouldn’t be such a bad thing. How would a Dachshund handle this scenario? He’d definitely go running after the stick. No question. Devil be damned, as it were.
And you can say a lot about a Dachshund, but you could never accuse him of lacking soul. My suspicion is that whatever the devil does with the souls he’s won in such trickery, he’d be a bit overwhelmed by the over-sized Dachshund soul that he unexpectedly got his hands on.
I’ve often said that I can’t work tumblr properly. If I were good at tumblr, I’d go locate a cartoon of the devil wrestling a Dachshund. Can any of you locate one of those?
