"Alas," thought the starving tick.

The hammer's handle was made of food - a stale carrot to be more precise - but was in no danger of being compromised by either the lead boar or the tick. I suppose, then, that in this context the hammer's handle was not made of food after all: for there was no one present who would have considered it as thus.

However incongruous to the fact that it was composed of lead, the boar did possess hair - and not lead hair as one might reasonably assume. The hair was genuine animal hair, but with its origins solely in the substance of the boar's own body; and it was upon one of these very hairs that the despondent tick was perched, bemoaning its hunger. Being merely a tick, it could not fathom the irony of its situation, but it was in no doubt that something was horribly amiss. "Hungry, hungry, hungry," it muttered to itself; clinging stubbornly to the strand of hair beneath it, and even more stubbornly to the expectations this strand had engendered.

The boar said and thought nothing. It neither took notice of the inquiry directed towards it by the carrot-handled hammer, nor did it offer any sympathy to the poor, shriveled tick that it had inadvertently deceived. It regarded these things, itself and everything around it as no more than subtle fluctuations in a vast, underlying vibration from which all matter and awareness arises.

"Toc toc toc," intoned the hammer once again, and despite the apparent indifference displayed by both of its companions to this assertion, both knew with absolute certainty that it was true.
M9b(5)