The man rolled over and, looking up at the sky, saw that the earth in turn had rolled off of himself. The man stood and shook his head, to clear the dirt from his ears and the darkness from his eyes.

As the life of morning was bright and he was from the dark, the man was temporarily blind while his vision re-calibrated. He could see, but all he could see was white, so he closed his eyes, at which point all he could see was black, which was not distinguishable from seeing only white. He tried blinking his eyes rapidly, seeking something between black and white, but he could find nothing gray. Here we come to the moral of the story: in life sometimes there is no compromise. Unfortunately this moral comes too early in the story and has nothing to do with the plot. Faced with the choice between having a story that presented a useful moral lesson and a story that made sense, the author came up with one that did neither, but then, as you now know, in life sometimes there is no compromise.

...

The man's eyes eventually adjusted. The newly restored vision demonstrated its precision by revealing the finest details of his surroundings. He could see trees, and would have seen the forest had it occurred to him to see one. He could see the sky, even though the sky was empty. He could even make out the ants that moved across the surface of the soil. It was not merely because there were many ants that he was able to see them - for it was not as is the case with water which is invisible when present only as single molecule - he could, when he tried, discern individual ants on the sand.

Nonetheless, he was not concerned with discerning an individual ant, just as a drowning man cares not about a single molecule of water. He was however, like the drowning man, worried about the larger phenomena: the cumulative ant impact, and the unequaled sum of their multiplicity. He was carried away by the extent of ants.

He saw, you see, that there was an army of ants and this army of ants was dragging away his shadow. He knew ants were supposed to be strong but to carry a shadow seemed beyond the strength of even the strongest little specimen. The shadow, after all, was firmly plastered onto to a heavy planet. Yet the ants were taking his shadow.

The man, not wanting to suffer a future without a shadow, decided he could not let the ants steal it. So he followed them, keeping pace by placing his footsteps into those of the stolen shadow. At the same time he tried to count the ants, for if he knew how many there were he could develop a plan for stomping and crushing them, but there were too many to count, so he just followed to see where they were taking him.

Yes, of course he did consider tackling his shadow, diving to pin it to the ground, but he knew this would be pointless. In the past, whenever the man had tried to capture his shadow by wrestling it to the earth, it had always slipped away as soon as he was on top of it.

...

The ants, meanwhile had been marching without rest.

"How much longer are they going to make us walk?" One ant asked another.

"I heard that we will march until we reach sunlight."

"We have been marching all night."

"It is still dark, so obviously it has not yet been all night yet."

"This isn't night," said a third ant. "It is a solar eclipse."

...

Meanwhile, a snake watched a strange dark creature slide across the ground. The creature moved gracefully, gliding without hesitation over every object it passed, skimming the earth more perfectly than even the snake itself could do. "What variety of snake are you?" The snake called out as the shadow approached. But the shadow, being completely flat, lacked the lungs to speak with any volume.

The snake noticed something irregular attached to the tail of the approaching shadow. It wondered if this was an adaptation for signaling that the shadow was dangerous, and the snake was about to ask the shadow if it was a species of rattlesnake, but then the real snake realized the real situation: it was not a rattle but a man. "Watch out! the snake hissed, a human is trying to step on you!" The shadow did not appear to hear.

Instead the shadow came right at the snake, and then, without stopping to ask permission, crawled directly over the snake. It was a strange experience for the snake, and felt entirely different from what the snake thought it would feel like for a snake to snake across a snake. It felt not slimy or scaly but steppy, as if the shadow had tens of thousands of feet, each foot as small as that of an ant.

As the shadow passed, the snake realized it was drawing the human directly towards it. "Maybe that shadowy snake intends to shake his pursuer off onto me," it thought "I don't want your human," the snake yelled. Fortunately the shadow pulled the man's foot away at the last minute, sparing the snake from being tread upon.

...

It was a harrowing experience for the man to keep up with his shadow, for he had to take care with every step to make sure his foot aligned with that of his dark leader. At one point the shadow nearly stepped right on a snake: but just as the foot was about to come down on it, and as the man was accepting this fate, the shadow shifted its step slightly to the left, sparing the snake and the man.

...

The ants dragged the shadow over a small, steep ridge.

"Such a slippery slope to scale," one of the soldiers said.

"Such a scaly slope to summit," said another soldier as it neared the top. I have never seen a ridge like this before.

"If you have never before seen like this, you should see more consistently. I myself always try to see using the same method. If you always see the same way then when things change you can recognize it immediately." The captain of the ants said.

"Was that a snake we just surmounted?" Asked another of the soldiers.

"It could not have been a snake. I saw not even the shadow of a snake."

"Well of course you wouldn't see a shadow: we are already in shadow. Nothing is shadier than the shadow of a human."

"Not even the shadow of a snake?"

"Of course not, the snake shadow resides only in the imagination of humans."

The captain spoke again. "Straighten up your ranks and stop thinking so crookedly. Obviously snakes don't have shadows."

"Why not?"

"They just don't." The captain who felt uncomfortable discussing cosmology, could not give a reason. "How can you expect me to explain the sun's choices, ask the sun if you must know why it does not make snake shadows," he said, and he started to point up to the sun, but to his consternation he could not find it in the sky. "Fine, if you must know, its because the sun is afraid of snakes. Didn't you notice that it is hiding?"

One of the soldiers spoke up. "Snakes have shadows but keep them to themselves."

...

The man could not hear what the ants were saying, but then he wasn't really trying since he didn't know that ants could talk. Besides he was too busy worrying about what the ants had planned for his shadow. "I hope they don't tear it apart and each take away a piece." Something like that had happened once before, when he had gone walking in the countryside and come across a field of tall grass. He had looked out at the swaying stems and seen that his shadow was spread out across countless blades of grass, with the little bits dispersed and dancing recklessly in the breeze. When the wind briefly died down, letting his shadow momentarily came back together as one, the man had quickly stepped back, pulling the shadow away whole. Unfortunately this time it wound not be so easy, especially if the individual ants - each with a portion of his shadow - started running about and mixing up the pieces.

Then the man had an irrelevant idea. "Maybe," he thought optimistically, "they are planning a trip to the beach and are bringing me to shade them from the sun. The beach would not be so bad." He had not, however, brought any sunblock, and given the circumstances he doubted the ants would have brought any to lend. The man wondered if skin cancer would be as bad as having his shadow torn apart.

"Hey ants, what do you have against the sun anyways? Sure it is bigger than you, but so is everything else."

...

The captain of the ants turned to one of his platoon leaders. "Did you hear that?"

"No."

I said, "what is our status?"

"Still looking good. The human has not broken free of the shadow."

"Excellent."

"I admire the brilliance of your plan. It never would have occurred to me that we could capture a human by its shadow."

"That is why I am in charge and you are not. Now tell your men to march faster if they ever want to see daylight again."

...

The man, as though fleeing the sun, pursued his shadow across the earth. In time he saw that they had come upon an anthill, so he stopped to see if the ants would release his shadow now that they were home. He watched as the ranks filed into their tunnels, him standing tall on their hill while they poured down into it, and though for a brief moment he thought he felt a slight pull from his shadow tugging him down, he figured that it was just fatigue from chasing ants all afternoon. So as the ants trailed into their home, the man thought about taking a nap.

...

The ants dragged the shadow into their hill, squeezing it through tight tunnels to the chamber, deep and sacred, of their queen. Here they gained an audience with her highness and paid their respects, though they did not bow or curtsy because an ant brain cannot figure out what a bow or a curtsy would entail for a species with three pairs of legs.

"We have brought you a human." The captain said to his queen.

"A human? Excellent work! Though I thought humans were bigger than that."

"Bigger than what?"

"That." The queen said, gesturing towards a particularly unparticular direction. The queen, you see, lived in a hole in the ground, and had never seen an actual human. She had heard of humans, but no one had dared mention that they were thousands of times larger than her majesty. So when the captain said they had brought her a human, she assumed that it must be very small, and was too embarrassed to admit that she could not see it.

"Is that the largest human you could get? Go back out and get me a larger one, at least one big enough for me to see."

"What?" The captain asked. "Oh, I am sorry your highness, I did not explain properly. This is not the actual human, merely its shadow. The human is attached to the other end of the shadow. We are currently developing a strategy for bringing the human itself into the nest."

"Hmph." The queen said. "Of course I knew the human was still outside, and I am still certain it is not large enough." Yet the queen was still confused, for she could not discern the shadow in the dark tunnel. "It is unseasonably dark," she said. "Could someone bring a light so I can get a better look at that shadow."

...

The man watched the last of the ants disappear, then he studied his shadow, which was resting on the ant hill. He still felt drawn to join it for a nap on the anthill, but instead he turned away and headed back to that place where he had been before he was at this place.

...

The snake meanwhile was slithering, but not self-assuredly, because it couldn't match the shadow's superior slithering technique. It was very low, and feeling so, when it heard the man coming back.

"Don't even think of stepping on me." The snake said, but the man kept coming, and once he was closer the snake saw that the shadow was now chasing the man.

"That's it, get him," the snake called out to the shadow.

...

The man didn't hear the snake, and the man didn't see the snake, and would have been afraid to taste the snake, and presumably wasn't aware if he smelled a snake, but he nonetheless stopped near the snake. He stopped because the sun had dipped down from its heights in the sky and was now looking the man directly in the eye.

"Did you see that?" the man said to the sun, "those ants tried to steal my shadow."

The sun didn't answer.

"Well, if you were worried, don't bother. I still have it, see?" The man turned and pointed to his shadow, and when he did the shadow pointed out how much larger it had become.

"Oh! Thanks," the man said to the sun. "I wasn't asking for more shadow, but this will help. There is no way the ants can carry off my shadow now that it is so big." The sun bowed but did not answer.

...

The snake, at this time, was watching the other snake grow.

"Amazing," the snake said. "Truly impressive, how do you do it? I too am long and flexible, but I could never stretch myself like that. I really must know your secret, as I am a busy snake, and being longer would enable me to be at two places at once."

The shadow though, like its uncle the sun, was too arrogant to answer.

So the snake, the scaly snake not the shady snake, just watched as the shady unscaly snake, stretched out across the soil.

"Careful," the real snake said. "That seems like long enough. You wouldn't want to break, or snap back and hurt yourself. Watch out! Now you have stretched too thin."

But the warning came too late, for the shadow stretched until it disappeared.

Since some say humans are snakes, one could say that some snakes are humans, and therefore prone to human sentiments: an example being the tinge of satisfaction the snake felt at seeing this demise of its superior rival.

...

The man meanwhile had seen the sun turn red. The red was not from anger or embarrassment but from fatigue from having to make shadows all day. The sun was therefore making preparations to lie down to rest.

At the same time the man saw his shadow stretch out further. It kept growing longer and larger, until finally it covered the entire forest. As it grew, it also grew darker and darker, until it was completely gone.

The man was tired too, for like the sun he had been up all day making shadows. So he reclined as well and let the earth roll back over him.