Bertha

Bertha's seeds are locked in a wooden vault no tooth in the forest can crack — except one. Only the agouti, with its chisel teeth, can gnaw through the cannonball pod; it eats some nuts and buries the rest, and the buried ones become Bertha's children. It is the oldest contract in the Canopy Throne, and she honors it to the nut. When a young agouti came last spring demanding better terms — more nuts, fewer burials — Bertha listened from fifty meters up and laughed like rain. "Renegotiate with the pod," she said. "It has held its terms for a million years." The agouti gnawed, buried, and ate, as agoutis do. Bertha's emergent crown flowered on schedule. Some partnerships are not negotiated; they are grown. The court, which respects height above all, respects this more: the tallest tree in the room, owing everything to a rodent.