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like a monstrous boy hunting beetles. He uprooted whole trees of apples and figs and pears, shaking them into his basket. Along the way he snacked on dogs and cats, on chickens and gryphons and gnomes.
    Every person and every animal lived in fear of Collosso. Even the birds kept glancing around, watching the far horizon, for at any moment the giant might appear. He could stride across a hill, or come sweeping through a forest like a farmer through a field of wheat, crushing the trees to make a path. The people set out offerings of fruit and bread and butchered sheep, hoping to keep Collosso away from their homes and farms. But it never worked. So every three or fouryears, someone would stand up in a village square and announce that he was setting out to kill the giant. He would hold a pitchfork in the air and ask, “Who will come along?” But always he would end up going alone, never to return.
    Collosso laughed at those men who came to kill him. He never squashed the giant-slayers, but took them alive and kept them in his toy box, to amuse himself with at night. He was so big and powerful that nothing could scare him. Thirty years he lived without a twinge of fright, without a single thought of danger.
    Then, one night in midsummer, a black storm rose in the mountains.
    It began at midnight, with a rumble of thunder no louder than the purring of a cat. But an hour later it was shaking people from their beds with a terrible din and a roar of wind.
    From end to end, the sky flashed silver. Bolts of lightning cracked the clouds apart, shot toward the ground, and set the forests aflame. Sparks flew half a mile high, and the colors of the fire shone in the clouds, until it looked as though the air was burning. Animals ran in shrieking herds, deer and wolves together, rabbits and foxes side by side.
    Through it all, Collosso slept. The flashes of lightning lit his enormous face, making black shadows round his eyes and mouth. Thunder boomed through his castle, and smoke flowed in through every window, and down in their cages the slaves were screaming. The toys were screaming too. But Collosso didn’t stir, though it seemed the end of the world had arrived. He snored softly in his bed as the storm passed over.
    It was the final roll of thunder that woke the giant. Thestorm had swept a hundred leagues to the south, and the sound was so faint that a pine cone falling in the forest could have drowned it out. But with that tiny noise, Collosso sprang up in his bed. Six tons he weighed, yet in a flash he was upright. His heart, the size of a mule, kicked wildly in his chest. For the first time in his life, Collosso was terrified.
    Far below his castle, the forests crackled as they burned. Trees exploded with puffs of yellow flame, and a blizzard of sparks whirled through the sky. Collosso stood at his window, pale as death in the shifting colors of the flames.
    Somewhere in the land, beyond the mountains and the forest, beneath that final thunderbolt, a boy was breathing his first breaths. Collosso knew it as surely as he knew anything. A giant-slayer, that night, was born.

    “Gee, who was it?” asked Dickie. His iron lung wheezed and hummed. “What was his name? The giant-slayer?”
    “Don’t be a stupe,” said Carolyn. “It was Fingal.”
    Laurie looked at the girl through the mirror. She didn’t mind if Carolyn listened to the story. She didn’t even mind that the girl tried to seem bored and pained, as though she wasn’t really listening at all. But it bothered her very much that Carolyn had guessed so easily that Fingal was the giant-slayer. So Laurie changed her story.
    “Well, it wasn’t Fingal,” she said, as though the thought were crazy. “It was the
son
of Fingal.”
    “Gosh!” said Dickie. “What was his name?”
    “Jimmy.”
    Carolyn put on a petulant, doubting look. “Jimmy the giant-slayer?”
    “Yes, that’s right,” said Laurie.

    Jimmy was born in the thunderstorm. The same clap of thunder that