A Fairy Tale

The Three Little Pigs
the Letterboxing Version

Once upon a time (March 4th, 2005, to be exact), a timber wolf was reading the Woodland Telegraph and happened upon an article about the hobby of Letterboxing. The article was not very clear, as many of them aren't, but the idea intrigued him and he decided to look into it further. After finding Atlas Quest on the internet and reading the tutorials and glossary, he thought he would give it a try. He created a profile for himself, using BigBadWolf as his trailname. Then he printed out some clues and went out and found a couple of letterboxes that were in the forest nearby. He loved it so much that he carved his own signature stamp immediately and spent the next several months happily hunting letterboxes.

Then came the fateful day a few months later (July 9th it was). With backpack full of Marvy markers in one paw and clues in the other, BigBadWolf set out for the Fairy Tale Forest Preserve to hunt for the notorious "Building Materials" letterbox series. Very shortly after starting on the trail, he came upone a house made of straw. It was in ruins. The door was completely gone and the rest of it was a shamble. Nevertheless, he managed to find the letterbox in the rubble. He stamped into the log, and inked the box's stamp. Just as he was huffing and puffing on the stamp to moisten the ink, around the bend came three little pigs, laughing and jostling each other. They stared in horror at the wolf with his lungs full of air and the wreckage in front of him. He started to try to explain, but they ran away squealing.
The wolf shrugged his shoulders, rehid the box and moved on.

It was a considerable hike to reach the spot for the second letterbox and by the time BigBadWolf reached the top of the hill, he was quite winded. Little did he know that just ahead of him on the trail were the three pigs. The little pigs saw him come over the hill huffing and puffing and thought he was chasing them. Before he could call out to them, they fled in terror. Since there was nothing else he could do, the wolf found the second letterbox and stamped in; all the while trying not to let the thought of Muggles ruin his entire day.

The last box was the hardest and it took BigBadWolf a long time to figure out the clue. Just as he was about to give up, he spotted a suspicious configuration of bricks covered with ivy on the edge of a ravine at a heading of 137* from a round stone the size of a bowling ball. (Don't ask how a wolf knew what a bowling ball was.) He clambered up a slope and was feeling around the bricks (it was an old broken chimney) for the letterbox when some of the bricks tumbled, smashing a front and back paw as they fell. The poor wolf howled in pain. He hopped around on one paw huffing and puffing on his sore fingers for a minute then sat down in frustration. This hadn't been the best boxing day for him. Suddenly he felt that he was not alone. Slowly turning around, he saw three pairs of eyes peeking out from behind a dead tree.
"Please, come out." He said. "I'm not going to hurt you. And I could use the help finding this last letterbox before it gets dark."

Then, with many interruptions (they were little pigs, after all), BigBadWolf proceeded to explain to them what he had been doing that day and to tell them all about letterboxing. The little pigs helped him find the box in the chimney and he taught them how to be extra careful when putting the box back so that it would be safe for the next boxer that came along. He wrote down a couple of websites and they planned to keep in touch. Of course, the three little pigs went squealing "Whee! Whee! Whee!'' and doing their happy dance all the way home.

Now the 3LittlePigs and BigBadWolf are friends and go out on many wonderful letterboxing adventures together, even though the pigs prefer Postal Letterboxes because they are too fat to do much hiking.

The End

Originally created for a postal ring once upon a time. Not my best stamp.