Once his feet reached the bridge, he tip-toed across it with the excitement that you might have if you knew you were doing something you weren’t supposed to be doing. He remembered that Momma had warned him of the dangers that lay across the bridge, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself from crossing. — Creak — creak —  went the boards on the Old Wooden Bridge, as he softly walked to the other side, and then scurried along the outer edge of the wild grass field, until he came to the edge of The Dark Forest.

He stood there for a few brief minutes, though it felt much longer to him. He was still thinking about his mother’s warning voice and all the times she had gone over the rules with him:

“You are never to cross that bridge, or go near that field, or ever enter that forest, do you understand?” she would say.

“Yes, Mommy,” he would reply, because he did know the rules (though he did not always believe the stories).

That day, however, he disobeyed, as his curiosity had gotten the better of him. With thoughts of his mother’s words trailing off in the back of his mind, and the sun still at an afternoon high in the sky, he took his first step into The Dark Forest. Nothing changed right away, and it didn’t even seem very dark, so he kept moving, slowly and carefully through the tall plants and trees. There were trees as far as he could see ahead of him, so far that the forest seemed as though it might never end. But very far in the distance, he saw the colors of the forest change, and something darker up ahead.

He came nearer and nearer to the place where the colors of the forest changed, only to find that what he saw was not part of the forest at all, but a great range of hills that ran as far as he could see. The hills were too steep and high to climb over, so instead he walked along the bottom to see where they might lead. Suddenly he came upon a cave in the side a hill. He waited to hear any noise from the cave, but nothing made a sound, so he stepped into the front of the cave and waited for his eyes to adjust to the lighting.

There, as he moved along the cave wall toward the back of the opening, he saw a large egg on a small pile of straw. It was quite unlike any egg he had ever seen. Chicken eggs were much smaller than this one. In fact, this egg might have been the size of a full-grown chicken!

Why was it out here all alone in this cave? He wondered what might be in the egg and why it had been left by itself. He figured the best thing to do was to help out, so he quickly decided to grab the egg and head back the way he came, tracing his footsteps back through the forest and around the edge of the field, back across the Old Wooden Bridge, all the way to the barn. Just as the sun was setting, he quietly opened the little barn door and found a place to hide the egg…