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The original story:- written by 
On the fifth day of their trek in the forests of Upper Italy, the boys finally reached their campsite. Immediately throwing down their heavy shoulder luggage.
Neigel wiped the sweat from his brow with a blue-red-white striped scout cloth, as he had done countless times before, so that by now the cloth was worn and faded, a sign of his challenges. Just like his once dark blue shirt and the shirts of the other boys had long since seen better days, but that was how it was supposed to be.
Walter tossed him his sleeping roll, which Neigel quickly caught and then threw himself with it onto the soft forest soil. The others came panting after them and, exhausted but happy, after some banter about who should look for the firewood, they began to set up their place. The heavy fabric pods for their spacious tent were hoisted onto the appropriate brackets, Mark and Vincent, the other scouts, doing so in routine fashion.
"Soon it will be your baptism!", Neigel called out to Vincent, the youngster, and everyone laughed in joyful and comradely anticipation, as Vincent was the only one who had not yet received his name. Neigel, who had been christened "Surfboard", had to endure his baptism in the form of remoulade and mustard in his hair and had been given things to eat that he would never have eaten in his life had it not been part of the ritual.
"Eh really, guys, don't mess with me!", Vincent replied, but of course knew full well it would come to exactly that. Earning the name was a mixture of fun and seriousness. Oddly enough, at home, one failed to pull off this form of character wisdom and slyness. But even though Vincent anticipated his initiation, he also was a bit hesitant.
There were only four of them who had hiked up to the hill this time and they would meet the rest of the group again in a few days. Surfboard, as the oldest and in charge of the small flock, turned to his comrades as they sat around the cosy crackling fire and hungrily gobbled down their dinner, the obligatory tinned ravioli and Vienna sausages. Still chewing, he said, "Tomorrow two of us are going down to the next village. We urgently need new provisions. Who volunteers?"
Walter, who was called "Ram", was the first to speak up: "Me in any case, I have to shit so badly, no one will believe me!"
"And may the Ram have some flowered toilet paper?" interjected Mark, aka "Please", who couldn't understand how anyone could crave sanitary facilities when the whole point of their venture was precisely to escape from pleasant civilisation. "Say, can't you do your business among the trees like any normal pathfinder, are you a real woodsman or a sissy from the city?"
"Shut up, Please! You don't know how it tears your guts apart if you can't poop!"
Vincent was holding his girth in laughter because Surfboard had pulled his trousers halfway down, pretending to press and then giving up exhausted. With his shorts still down, Surfboard dropped to one side and shouted, "Done, good old battering Ram, you shall have the pleasure of an enamelled toilet bowl again! I'm guessing that Please doesn't want to join, so Vincent and you are going to the village together."
"Next time I'll stay at the camp, I promise," Vincent, still chuckling, got immediately excited by the prospect that he would probably meet girls in the village.
Girls, after all. They had it better on their hiking trips anyway. Once, a group of eight had managed to stay at a local's place, a farmer had opened a barn for them and on another occasion, according to Vincent, a teacher had even invited them to spend the night at his house, including dinner.
"Hellooh, good evening, kind sir, I'm a girl, tinkle, tinkle. Can't you let us in, we're starving and dying of thirst here in the wicked hard world," Please mimicked what he meant by girlishness. "
Remember when we were chased away by that crazy guy who set his dog on us?"
"Shoosh, yeah, that's right, or when we got lost in the bog and came out at a wind turbine where the workers looked at us like aliens?"
So the evening passed in cheerful chit-chat and during night they slept peacefully.
The next morning, Vincent and Ram having already set off down into the valley more than two hours ago, Please and Surfboard spent their morning in relaxed silence.
Surfboard, who was cutting a stick for a piece of grilled meat and whistling a tune, was interrupted by his friend: "Shht! Listen, do you hear something? That can't possibly be the boys."
Surfboard put down his carving and both looked in the direction from which they heard sounds. From the undergrowth they saw a figure coming in their direction. It waved at them from a distance.
In approaching them, they realized a man, already a bit aged, conspicuous about him was his rather run-down appearance, but in another way he seemed even elegant, with a hat on the already gray curls protruding under it and dressed with a walking stick. "Good day, buona giornata, young gentlemen!" he called to them. Eyes shining bright.
The air burst with a cacophonous sound; the song of a million insects. The noise echoed, unmistakably, from the path the man trod towards them. The hairs on Surfboard's arms stiffened, his danger-instinct, honed by his years as an orphan in the social system, was on full alert.
“Please, let me do the talking, okay?” Surfboard warned, holding the naturally polite boy back with an outstretched arm.
Please nodded, and stepped back. Surfboard returned the man’s greeting,
“Hello,” he called. “Why are you alone up here on the mountain? Why were you walking in the forest rather than on the safe path between the trees?”
The man halted his staccato gait. His hat perched at a precariously jaunty angle as he tilted his head to consider Surfboard’s questions.
“I’m here killing beetles.”
“Why are you killing beetles?” Surfboard asked, his curiosity, reluctantly, engaged.
“Because they’re killing my trees.”
“Your trees?”
“Yes, the spruce trees that I need for my violins.” Surfboard stared at the man with incredulity.
“Where did the beetles come from?”
“The wind blew them in.”
Despite his background, Surfboard was a gregarious boy, seldom at a loss for words, but he was stumped. He stared at the stranger as if he were an alien. He felt his fingers draw up, unwittingly, into the shape of a goat’s horn, the traditional sign used by generations of Italians to ward off evil spirits.
The stranger’s startling blue eyes glinted with humor.
“If you’re from around here, you boys should remember the incredible wind storm of 2018. It destroyed many of my trees and let the beetles in.”
Surfboard was still wary, but he felt his guard lower.
“But, that doesn’t tell us why you’re killing beetles, does it?”
“These beetles eat my trees, they multiply by the thousands each and every day. Anyway, I don’t believe I’ll need to kill them, personally, anymore.”
The man noted the talking boy’s blue eyes and reached into his backpack to find the tablecloth and goodie bag he’d prepared for just this kind of encounter.
**************************
Fabio was a master craftsman, he made soundboards. Resonant, lyrical soundboards that could only be fashioned from the finest Italian spruce.
There were millions of spruce trees, but there were very few trees in the world that had the exact fibre to carve a perfect violin. The “violin” trees grew on the dark side of the Dolomite mountains, in an area called Paneveggio where Fabio had opened his musical instrument factory years ago, when he was a young man.
Even among these majestic trees that grew tall and straight, only a handful were good enough for soundboards. The growth rings had to be symmetrical and absolutely evenly spaced for the wood to have the right timbre to produce immaculate, harmonious sound. It was even rumoured that the famous Stradivari had used only these trees to make his instruments.
Then the wind came…
The storm of 2018 decimated the trees on the outskirts of the copse on the mountain. Letting enough light in to bring the beetles, by their millions. The Entomologists and experts had arrived…they’d tried almost everything possible to blight the beetles that were destroying the most famous trees on the earth. They built traps, but there simply wasn’t enough man power to clean out the traps daily and re-bait them.
They were fighting a losing battle.
Then Fabio had a dream.
The portent gave him a birds-eye-view of himself meeting a mighty boy-child. A child who led an army of boys. The boy in his dream had blue eyes, similar to his own, which meant that he would come from the North. In his dream, Fabio witnessed the complicated, and sometimes totally ridiculous initiation ceremonies this army of boys held to bring new members into the fold. The dream foretold that when he came across the child leader, he would find only 2 members of the army, but that there were thousands of soldiers in the child’s army. More than enough boys to clean out and prepare the beetle traps everyday.
In the dream Fabio saw the child army, standing at attention, ready to go to work, singing their mantra “Be Prepared.”
Fabio knew it was just a dream, but yet he went out and did his chores in the forest everyday, just hoping…
Notes: - This area in Italy does indeed exist and the story about the beetles, the rare wood and the storm is true.
The Scout’s motto is “Be Prepared.”