Time passed, and slowly - as the earth became spherical and began to spin around and also circle around the sun, the Stick Creatures were joined by frogs and other amphibians. That beach became awfully crowded, but nobody - except for a few adventurous stick souls - was adventurous enough to begin moving into the forest. There were scary beings in that forest. So, they began making sand dwellings. Some of the Stix dug down and made underground tunnels with rooms in them, with entrances and exits. Stix aren’t very flexible so they had to make very large tunnels in order to enter, crawl, and exit. Others built sand and rock structures that resembled igloos. (The rocks were the sticks that hadn’t made it to the water in time….see last episode.) Actually, they were the very first igloos. Much much later, the Inuits learned all about igloos from the Abominable Snowmen - and then copied them - using snow, of course, rather than sand.
If you were able to time travel, and also able to climb up the highest swamp tree to get a good view of the beach, all the Sticks would look alike. However, there were many different tribes - and each tribe tended to Stick together, for the most part: The Maples were - on the whole - pretty conceited because they had sweet sap running through their veins. They stood around the beach with their branches bent on their hips, and scoffed at the other sticks. The Ash tribe didn’t bother taking the Maples seriously. They were simply too hip for that. Also, the Ashes were too busy playing Ring around the Rosy to really even Notice the Maples. The Pines were all in love with various sticks in other tribes, and mooned around Pining like crazy. The Apples told jokes and laughed a lot. The Elms were a sad bunch - they had the unfortunate ability to see into the future. There were many more tribes too.
So many tribes, only so much space, only so much food to go around. At that point the Stick Creatures were still eating fish and plankton. You’ll recall from the last entry that they had to return to the swamp waters every 3 hours. That’s when they’d hydrate their bark, as well as eat. But you can imagine….as time went by and millions of Stix trudged into the water every 3 hours, finally there weren’t many fish left. Things were beginning to become complicated.
