Moominland Midwinter (2 page)

Moomintroll made himself comfortable under the kitchen table and began to chew. He read Snufkin's letter once more.

After that he stretched out on his back and looked at the square wooden clumps under the table corners. The kitchen was silent.

'Cheerio,' whispered Moomintroll. 'Sleep well and keep your pecker up. First warm spring day,' he said, slightly louder. And then he sang at the top of his voice: 'You'll have me here again! You'll have me here, and spring's in the air, and it's warm and fair, and we'll be here, and there we are, and here and there in any year...'

He stopped short when he caught sight of two small eyes that gleamed out at him from under the sink.

He stared back, and the kitchen was silent as before. Then the eyes disappeared.

'Wait,' Moomintroll shouted, anxiously. He crept towards the sink, softly calling all the while:

'Come out, won't you? Don't be afraid! I'm good. Come back...'

But whoever it was that lived under the sink didn't come back. Moomintroll laid out a string of biscuit crumbs on the floor and poured out a little puddle of loganberry syrup.

When he came back to the drawing-room the crystals in the ceiling greeted him with a melancholy jingle.

'I'm off,' Moomintroll said sternly to the chandelier. 'I'm tired of you all, and I'm going south to meet Snufkin.' He went to the front door and tried to open it, but it had frozen fast.

He ran whining from window to window and tried them all, but they also stuck hard. And so the lonely Moomintroll rushed up to the attic, managed to lift the chimney-sweep's hatch, and clambered out on to the roof.

A wave of cold air received him.

He lost his breath, slipped and rolled over the edge.

And so Moomintroll was helplessly thrown out in a strange and dangerous world and dropped up to his ears in the first snowdrift of his experience. It felt unpleasantly prickly to his velvet skin, but at the same time his snout caught a new smell. It was a more serious smell than any he had felt before, and slightly frightening. But it made him wide awake and greatly interested.

The valley was enveloped in a kind of grey twilight. It also wasn't green any longer, it was white. Everything that had once moved had become immobile. There were no living sounds. Everything angular was now rounded.

'This is snow,' Moomintroll whispered to himself. 'I've heard about it from Mother, and it's called snow.'

Without Moomintroll knowing a thing about it, at that moment his velvet skin decided to start growing woollier. It decided to become, by and by, a coat of fur for winter use. That would take some time, but at least the decision was made. And that's always a good thing.

Meanwhile Moomintroll was laboriously plodding along through the snow. He went down to the river. It was the same river that used to scuttle, transparent and

jolly, through Moomintroll's summer garden. Now it looked quite unlike itself. It was black and listless. It also belonged to this new world in which he didn't feel at home.

For safety's sake he looked at the bridge. He looked at the mail box. They tallied with memory. He raised the lid a little, but there was no mail, except a withered leaf without a word on it.

He was already becoming used to the winter smell. It didn't make him feel curious any more.

He looked at the jasmine bush that was an untidy tangle of bare sprigs, and he thought: 'It's dead. All the world has died while I slept. This world belongs to somebody else whom I don't know. Perhaps to the Groke. It isn't made for Moomins.'

He hesitated for a moment. Then he decided that he would feel still worse if he were the only one awake among the sleeping.

And that was why Moomintroll made the first tracks in the snow, over the bridge and up the slope. They were very small tracks, but they were resolute and pointed straight in among the trees, southwards.

CHAPTER 2
The bewitched bathing-house

Down by the sea, farther to the west, a young squirrel was skipping aimlessly about in the snow. He was quite a foolish little squirrel who liked to think of himself as 'the squirrel with the marvellous tail'.

As a matter of fact, he never thought at all about anything for very long. Mostly he just had a feeling about things. His latest feeling was that his mattress in the nest was getting knobbly, and so he had gone out to look for a new one.

Now and again he mumbled: 'A mattress,' to keep himself from forgetting what he was looking for. He forgot things very easily.

The squirrel went skipping this way and that, in among the trees and out on the ice, he stuck his nose in the snow and pondered, looked up at the sky and shook his head and skipped along again.

He came to the cave on the hill and skipped inside. But when he had got there he wasn't able to concentrate any longer, and so he forgot all about his mattress. Instead he sat down on his tail and began to think that people could just as well call him 'the squirrel with the marvellous whiskers'.

Behind the great snowdrift at the opening of the cave somebody had spread out straw on the floor. And in the straw stood a large cardboard box with the lid partly raised.

'That's strange,' said the squirrel aloud, with some surprise. 'That cardboard box wasn't here before. Must be something wrong about it. Or else this is the wrong cave. Or I might be the wrong squirrel, but I wouldn't like to believe that.'

He poked up a corner of the lid and put his head inside the box.

It was warm, and it seemed to be filled with something soft and nice. Suddenly the squirrel remembered his mattress. His small, sharp teeth cut into the soft stuffing and pulled out a flock of wool.

He pulled out one flock after the other; he soon had his arms full of wool and was working hard with all four paws. He felt extremely pleased and happy.

Then all at once someone was trying to bite the squirrel in the leg. Like a streak of lightning he whizzed out of the box, then hesitated for a moment and decided to feel more curious than scared.

Presently an angry head with tousled hair appeared in the hole he had bitten in the wool.

'Are you all there,
you
!?!' said Little My.

'I'm not sure,' said the squirrel.

'Now you've waked me,' Little My continued severely. 'And eaten half my sleeping-bag. What's the great idea?'

But the squirrel was so beside himself that he had forgotten his mattress again.

Little My gave a snort and climbed out of the cardboard box. She closed the lid on her sister, who was still asleep, and went over and felt the snow with her paw.

'So this is what it's like,' she said. 'Funny ideas people get.' She squeezed a snowball and hit the squirrel on the head with her first throw. And then Little My stepped out from the cave to take possession of the winter.

The first thing she accomplished was to slip on the icy cliff and sit down very hard.

'I see,' Little My said in a threatening voice.
'They
think they'll get away with anything.'

Then she happened to think of what a My looks like with her legs in the air, and she chuckled to herself for quite a while. She inspected the cliff and the hillside and thought a bit. Then she said: 'Well, now,' and did a jumpy switchback slide far out on the smooth ice.

She repeated this six times more and noticed that it made her tummy cold.

Little My went back into the cave and turned her

sleeping sister out of the cardboard box. My had never seen a toboggan, but she had a definite feeling that there were many sensible ways of using a cardboard box.

As to the squirrel, he was sitting in the wood and looking distractedly from one tree to another.

Not for the tail of him could he remember in which one he lived, nor what he had gone out to look for.

*

Moomintroll hadn't come very far south when darkness was already creeping under the trees.

At every step his paws sank deep in the snow, and the snow was not in the least as exciting as it had been.

The silence and the stillness of the wood were complete. Only now and then a large sheaf of snow came thumping down from a tree. The branch from which it had fallen rocked a while, and then all was lifeless again.

'The world's asleep,' Moomintroll thought. 'It's only I who am awake and sleepless. It's only I who have to wander and wander, day after day and week upon week, until I too become a snowdrift that no one will even know about.'