Wild, Wild Den of Chaos

WARNING: The following post is of a graphic nature. It shows the life and death struggle of grains in the Den of Chaos. It is raw, unedited footage. Those with weak stomachs or who are on low-carb diets would be well-advised to find some other site to visit today.

A polar bear, I understand, can smell a dead whale from 20 miles away (who couldn’t?!).

Sharks, I’ve heard, can smell a drop of blood in the water from up to a mile away.

And a wolf can find its own pack from over a mile away, using nothing more than the schnozzle $DEITY gave it.

The Denizens, likewise, have an amazing sense of smell. For example, they can not only smell bread baking, but can, using nothing more than their little schnozzles!, guesstimate how long it has been out of the oven and whether or not it is ‘just cool enough’ to be cut, buttered, honeyed, and put on plates for Denizen consumption.

They’re wily, these predators. The Eldest, leader of the pack, first approached the prey, precisely twenty minutes after being removed from its pans.

“Mommy,” she said disarmingly, circling the cooling rack with glinting eyes. “What is that delicious aroma?” (Yes. Eldest really talks like that.)

The next thing I knew, a mob of Denizens were swarming the kitchen. “What’s that smell? Is that bread? Is the bread ready? Butter! Honey! Butter! Honey!!” Even Captain Adventure began banging the table yelling, “BABA MOH! BABA MOH!!”

I’m not sure what it means exactly, but suspect it loosely translates to, ‘get me some buttered bread now, woman!’

Before the camera could even be brought to bear (or indeed before this rather commonplace event struck me as needing any kind of documentation)…one of the twins met a grisly end:



The predators wasted little time getting down to business. The young ones go after the soft innards first…



…while the middle ones take a more systematic approach (note the casual cruelty with which the foreground Denizen has torn the bread into smaller pieces, for easier devouring):



And the oldest and most experienced?



Not only devours the bread down to the crumb, but leaves the scene of the crime before a camera can be put upon her.

The surviving twin faces a doubtful future. For there are sandwiches to be made for dinner, and toast for breakfast. It is unlikely it will survive a full twenty-four hours, let alone the week it would take for it to die a natural death in the blender and come back in the next life as meatloaf binder or casserole topping.

Fortunately, the circle of grain-life is in little danger of extinction. Fifty pound sacks of flour and two pound bags of yeast are plentiful in the wilds of Costco, ensuring a nearly endless supply of bread-stuffs for the Denizens.

And that’s it for this episode of Den Kingdom. Tune in next week, to see a batch of cookies decimated before they have even left the sheet…