“Enoch … Enoch … come on son, it’s time to get up.”
“Okay Mom, just five more minutes …”
“I had one more stone to roll before I would beat those town boys at their own game. I lined up my shot and just as I was about to make it …”
“Enoch, you need to get up and do your chores. Come on, son.”
“Okay, okay …” Realizing the game was just a dream; I stretched my arms and legs, and then opened my eyes and tried to focus.
The room was pretty dark, “Where was my window, my furniture … my stuff?”
Then suddenly I felt my bed lift up from behind me and tilt to my left. I quickly looked around, “What is going on? My whole room moved!”
“Huh? Wha—where am I?” I said out loud.
“It’s alright, this is your first time waking up on the ark,” my Mom’s voice again filtered through the morning fog in my head.
Then things began to look familiar, “Oh, yeah, that’s right …”
Memories of the last days, weeks and months began to flood back into my mind, the work on the ark, the fire, the townspeople attacking Grampa, the animals arriving, the rains and flooding and finally the door of the ark closing on the outside world the Lord had decided to destroy.
“Ok Mom, I’m going.”
I got up, dressed, washed, grabbed a chunk of bread from the table and headed up toward the large pen with the netting containing all the birds that came with us on the ark. I have to feed them and clean out their pen.
There was singing and wild calls coming from the top of the ladder I had to climb to get to the upper level. I really like all the birds, feeding them isn’t too bad. It’s the cleaning up after them that’s yucky.
I grabbed a couple of buckets and filled them with the different kinds of food the birds liked and went into the pen. When they saw me with the food, the sound of all the birds got so loud I nearly had to cover my ears.
Looking up into the branches of the trees my Pop and uncles had brought in and mounted to the walls of the pen, I saw many of the birds moving to the lower branches. They seemed eager to eat.
It’s a good thing I looked up because one of the birds was dropping something yucky. I just barely got out of the way in time.
After cleaning out the pen and putting out the food, I sat on the bench inside the enclosure and thought for a while. “This is going to get boring real fast if this is all I have to do every day,” I said to myself.
I had asked Grampa how long we were going to be on this trip. But, the only answer I could get from him was “The Lord will let us know when He is done out there. Just be patient, Enoch.”
So, I decided to explore the Ark.
The first thing I did was to walk all the way from end to end on the deck my birds were on. I had already done that topside (that’s what we call the top deck of the Ark where you could go outside) but, I didn’t want to stay out there because it was still raining.
But, I wanted to see everything.
So I walked and walked and walked, each day I went to a new and lower level.
I looked and looked and looked. I had never seen so many different kinds of animals in all my life. A lot of the animals were new to all of us and we didn’t know what to call them. Many had come from very far away and many were very strange.
I wanted to see them all, even all the creepy, creeping things, no matter how long it took.
One night at supper, we talked about what I was doing.
“What did you see today, Enoch,” Mama asked.
“I saw the monkeys and the antelope and the . . . um . . .striped horses,” I said.
Papa laughed and said, “Those are called zebras son.”
Then he spoke up in his stern voice, “I don’t want you going down to the lowest levels son. The big cats and other very large, dangerous animals are down there. They may be safe enough but, I don’t want you to take any chances. Do you understand me?”
“Yes Papa,” I said.
There were still lots of other parts to explore that I hadn’t seen yet. And, there were lots of animals yet to see.
Every day for several weeks I went out and looked and explored. I was having a great time until one day when I was going down to one of the lower levels where we kept the larger animals.
“Hmm, here’s another ladder going down, I don’t remember seeing this one before.” I thought to myself. Down at this level, the cages were much larger than the ones higher up.
“Wow! I bet the really big animals are down here. One more level won’t hurt …”
Steve's Story Place 