๐ป๐๐ ๐จ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐ป๐๐๐ ๐ซ๐๐๐๐ ๐ผ๐ ๐บ๐๐๐๐
โ One day across the lake where echoes come now, an animal that needed sound came down. He gazed enormously, and instead of making any, he took away from, sound: the lake and all the land went dumb. A fish that jumped went back like a knife, and the water died. In all the wilderness around he drained the rustle from the leaves into the mountainside and folded a quilt over the rocks, getting ready to store everything the place had known; he buriedโthousands of autumns deepโthe noise that used to come there
Then that animal wandered on and began to drink the sound out of all the valleysโthe croak of toads, and all the little shiny noise grass-blades make. He drank till winter, and then looked out one night at the stilled places guaranteed around by frozen peaks and held in the shallow pools of starlight. It was finally tall and still, and he stopped on the highest ridge, just where the cold sky fell away like a perpetual curve, and from there he walked on silently, and began to starve
When the moon drifted over that night the whole world lay just like the moon, shining back that still silver, and the moon saw its own animal dead on the snow, itโs dark absorbent paws and quiet muzzle, and thick, velvet, deep fur
After the animal that drank sound died, the world lay still and cold for months, and the moon yearned and explored, letting its dead light float down the west walls of canyons and then climb its delighted soundless way up to the east side. The moon owned the earth its animal had faithfully explored. The sun disregarded the life it used to warm
But on the north side of a mountain, deep in some rocks, a cricket slept. It had been hiding when that animal passed, and as spring came again this cricket waited, afraid to crawl out into the heavy stillness. Think how deep the cricket felt, lost there in such a silenceโthe grass, the leaves, the water, the stilled animals all depending on such a little thing. But softly it triedโโCricket!โโand back like a River from that one act flowed the kind of world we know, first whisperings, then moves in the grass and leaves; the water splashed, and a big night bird screamed
It all returned, our precious world with its life and sound, where sometimes loud over the hill the moon, wild again, looks for its animal to roam, still, down out of the hills, any time. But somewhere a cricket waits
It listens now, and practices at night. โ
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