A Short Story M


What I will learn:


This story is taken from a collection of ten short stories called Tales of the Peculiar by the US author Ransom Riggs. It is a tie-in to his fi rst novel, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The author says that Tales of the Peculiar was saved by the children in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children when the house in that book was burning to the ground.


The story is colour-coded in eight sections. Appoint eight readers, each to read one section.


beginning and ending, setting,


confl ict, hero, villain


features of a folklore story


‘The Tale of Cuthbert’ BY RANSOM RIGGS


1


Once upon a peculiar time, in a forest deep and ancient, there roamed a great many animals. There were rabbits and deer and foxes, just as there are in any forest, but there were animals of a less common sort, too, like stilt-legged grimbears and two-headed lynxes and talking emu-raff es. These peculiar animals were a favourite target of hunters, who loved to shoot them and mount them on walls and show them off to their hunter friends, but loved even more to sell them to zookeepers, who would lock them in cages and charge money to view them. Now, you might think it would be far better to be locked in a cage than to be shot and mounted on a wall, but peculiar creatures must roam free to be happy, and after a while the spirits of caged ones wither, and they begin to envy their wall-mounted friends.


This was an age when giants still roamed the earth, as they did in the long-ago Aldinn times, though they were few in number and diminishing.1


And it just so happened that one of these giants lived


near the forest, and he was very kind and spoke very softly and ate only plants.


2


His name was Cuthbert. One day Cuthbert came into the forest to gather berries, and there saw a hunter hunting an emu-raff e. Being the kindly giant that he was, Cuthbert picked up the little ‘raff e by the scruff of its long neck, and by standing up to his full height, on tiptoe, which he rarely did because it made all his old bones crackle, Cuthbert was able to reach up very high and deposit the emu-raff e on a mountaintop, well out of danger … then, just for good measure, he squashed the hunter to jelly between his toes.


1


That is not to say giants disappeared altogether, they simply stopped walking the earth. Read the tale ‘Cocobolo’ to learn what became of them.


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