“Every desert has to have a camel!” Or so Murchad had thought. Yet, he’d been wandering this particular desert for over two days, and had not seen even one footstep.
Not that he expected to. The fierce scouring winds constantly sculpted and rescultpted the land. A house built one day could be a pile of sand the next.
Yet Murchad trekked on, in search of the elusive beast that he knew must be out there. Sure… he knew that he was making a rather blunt generalization. But then again, he’d never seen a desert without some variation of the camel. Granted, many claimed that there were hundreds of deserts without camel-like animals, especially on some of the more barren planets, but Murchad had another saying. “Those aren’t real deserts! Real deserts are defined as having sand, camels, and oases. Everything else is just a “wilderness.”
If this were a “real desert,” however, he’d have to change his generalization slightly. The only thing close to a camel he’d found was an unusual brown sack lying in the ground a mile back. He couldn’t seem to get it open, so now he was dragging it around with him.
As he neared a sand-filled valley that crackled and baked under the midday sun, he stumbled upon an immense patch of some strange plant. It was a woody plant, with roots so deep that he couldn’t begin to budge it. Somehow, it kept a constant one foot above the sand level, growing taller every time it was buried. The thing that he noticed most about it, though, was its defense system. Small quills were shot out of yellowish buds that poked through his clothing and into his skin. As he fled the grove in a hasty retreat, he wondered what on earth the things were designed to protect against. The wondering was short lived. Looking on in amusement at Murchad’s situation was the largest creature he’d ever seen. Though 30 feet tall, Murchad had found his camel.