Once upon a time the world was covered in forests. People lived in these forests happily until one dreadful day a war started.

The people in one particular forest were badly persecuted by their enemy. Most of their trees were cut down and the people died in great numbers as they could not survive without the bounty of nature. By the end of the war only one man survived, called The Hunter.

The kind people from all over the world felt sorry for the Hunter. They decided to send him to the very best forest in the world known as the Holy Forest. It was for him to look after and live in peace with the forest animals for the rest of his life.

The Hunter was very pleased and quickly set to work building himself a timber house in a clearing. The forest animals watched from their hiding places and wondered how the Hunter had been allowed to live in their Holy Forest. One day the Hunter walked out with his axe and started to chop down trees. He chopped and he chopped all day long until the clearing was very much bigger. The forest animals who lived in those trees ran away to their friends and family and hid in fear.

As the months and years went by, the Hunter carried on chopping down trees until there was only a tiny part of The Holy Forest left. The animals were hiding anywhere they could find but could not avoid the bullets from the hunter’s gun.

They could not understand why he hated them, so they sent the largest of the bears to warn him to stop – and fight him if he refused. The Hunter did not want to talk with the bear so the bear scratched his face very badly and blood poured out. The man grabbed his gun in a rage and shot the bear dead.

Now the forest animals were very frightened and hid in their burrows and up in the trees. In a rage The Hunter shouted that he was going to kill every living creature and that was all their fault for sending the bear. He took out his axe and cut down the remaining trees, shooting the forest animals one by one for they had nowhere to run.

The kind people of the world had been watching the Hunter all this time. Although they protested at what he was doing, they never stopped him. When they saw that the Holy Forest was gone and the ground was littered with the bones of the forest animals, they were shocked.

They could not understand how someone who lost his own people’s forest could destroy another one gifted to him in peace, especially one so holy. When they asked him he flew into a rage and accused them of being friends of the bear who cut his face and he pointed to his scars. His sense of self righteousness knew no limits and his eyes flashed anger and hatred at them.

So they walked away, and it started to rain on the once Holy land and the Hunter had no animals to hunt, no kind friends to look after him and only a wasteland in his memory.

He realised then that he had done exactly the bad things that had been done to his people without knowing what he was doing. ‘Bad things happen to make us wise,’ he thought, ‘when all the time I blamed others. Now I understand my actions were filled with fear and hatred but it is too late’. And the Hunter laid down his gun and collapsed. He had broken the sacred law to only do as you would be done by, and to break this law in a holy place was an end of honour for his fallen people and himself.