Long ago, when I was in high school, I heard the following story about how people in Scandinavia used to kill marauding wolves.
I have no idea if it's apocryphal or historically accurate -- but it's a disturbing metaphor for our nation's slide into self-destructive imperial warfare.
More below the fold.
The story goes as follows.
Way back when, before the invention of guns, wolves were plentiful in Scandinavia -- and largely unafraid of people. A marauding wolf could kill animals, children, even adults, especially in winter when food was scarce. Killing one with the weapons at hand (bow and arrow, spears) wasn't easy, nor was trapping them.
Here's how they killed wolves. They would dig a hole a foot or two deep into the snow and put a big, sharp knife in it, blade sticking straight up. Then, they'd pour blood on the knife, fill the hole in with snow, and pour blood on the snow. Then they'd leave.
The hungry wolf would smell the delicious blood and find the bloody snow. Thinking that there must be a bleeding or dead animal in the snow -- yum! -- it would start licking and digging through the bloody mess. By the time it had gotten a foot or two down into the snow, the wolf's muzzle and tongue were getting pretty numb from the cold snow.
And at about this time, too, the wolf had reached the blistering cold, bloody knife. It would lick the blade, which usually would hurt, of course -- but the wolf's numb tongue couldn't sense the pain. But what it did sense was the smell of warm, fresh blood. Thinking it had found its prey, the wolf would lick more and more enthusiastically, cutting its tongue to shreds, producing ever more fresh blood.
The hungry wolf would bleed to death, greedily pursuing its bleeding prey -- which was, of course, the wolf itself.
As I said above, I don't know if this story about the knife in the snow is true. But this method sure seems to work with oil in the sand.