Unnatural Creatures

“Yes,” said the North Wind, “there is a mirror there. A wizard so great and so old and so terrible that you and I never need worry about him placed it there a year and a day ago. I blew him there myself in return for a favor he did me a million years past, for it was he who made this cave for me by artful and devious magic.”

“We have come to take the mirror back,” said Jack.

The North Wind laughed so loudly that Amos and the prince had to hold on to the walls to keep from blowing away. “It is so high and so cold up there that you will never reach it,” said the Wind. “Even the wizard had to ask my help to put it there.”

“Then,” called Amos, “you could help us get there too?”

The North Wind was silent a whole minute. Then she asked, “Why should I? The wizard built my cave for me. What have you done to deserve such help?”

“Nothing yet,” said Amos. “But we can help you if you help us.”

“How can you help me?” asked the Wind.

“Well,” said Amos, “like this. You say you are really the North Wind. How can you prove it?”

“How can you prove you are really you?” returned the Wind.

“Easily,” said Amos. “I have red hair, I have freckles, I am five feet, seven inches tall, and I have brown eyes. All you need do is go to Hidalga who owns the Mariners’ Tavern and ask her who has red hair, is so tall, with such eyes, and she will tell you, ‘It is my own darling Amos.’ And Hidalga’s word should be proof enough for anybody. Now, what do you look like?”

“What do I look like?” demanded the North Wind.

“Yes, describe yourself to me.”

“I’m big and I’m cold and I’m blustery—”

“That’s what you feel like,” said Amos. “Not what you look like. I want to know how I would recognize you if I saw you walking quietly down the street toward me when you were not working.”

“I’m freezing and I’m icy and I’m chilling—”

“Again, that’s not what you look like; it’s what you feel like.”

The North Wind rumbled to herself for a while and at last confessed: “But no one has seen the wind.”

“So I had heard,” said Amos. “But haven’t you ever looked into a mirror?”

“Alas,” sighed the North Wind, “mirrors are always kept inside people’s houses where I am never invited. So I never had a chance to look in one. Besides, I have been too busy.”

“Well,” said Amos, “if you help get us to the top of the mountain, we will let you look into the fragment of the mirror.” Then he added, “Which is more than your friend the wizard did, apparently.” Jack gave Amos a little kick, for it is not a good thing to insult a wizard so great and so old and so terrible as all that, even if you or I don’t have to worry about him.

The North Wind mumbled and groaned around the darkness for a while and at last said, “Very well. Climb on my shoulders, and I shall carry you up to the highest peak of this mountain. When I have looked into your mirror, I will carry you down again to where you may descend the rest of the way by yourselves.”

Amos and Jack were happy as they had ever been, and the North Wind roared to the edge of the ledge, and they climbed on her back, one on each shoulder. They held themselves tight by her long, thick hair, and the Wind’s great wings filled the cave with such a roaring that the fires, had they not been maintained by magic, would have been blown out. The sound of the great wing feathers clashing against one another was like steel against bronze.

The North Wind rose up in her cave and sped toward the opening that was so high they could not see the top and so wide they could not see the far wall, and her leaf-matted hair brushed the ceiling, and her long, ragged toenails scraped the floor, and the tips of her wings sent boulders crashing from either side as she leapt into the black. They circled so high they cleared the clouds, and once again the stars were like diamonds dusting the velvet night. She flew so long that at last the sun began to shoot spears of gold across the horizon; and when the ball of the sun had rolled halfway over the edge of the sea, she settled one foot on a crag to the left, her other foot on the pinnacle to the right, and bent down and set them on the tallest peak in the middle.

“Now where is the mirror?” asked Amos, looking around.

The dawning sun splashed the snow and ice with silver.

“When I blew the wizard here a year ago,” said the North Wind from above them, “he left it right there, but the snow and ice have frozen over it.”

Amos and the prince began to brush the snow from a lump on the ground, and beneath the white covering was pure and glittering ice. It was a very large lump, nearly as large as the black trunk of the skinny grey man.

“It must be in the center of this chunk of ice,” said Jack. As they stared at the shiny, frozen hunk, something moved inside it, and they saw it was the form of lovely Lea, who had appeared to them in the pool.

She smiled at them and said, “I am glad you have come for the second piece of the mirror, but it is buried in this frozen shard of ice. Once, when I was a girl, I chopped through a chunk of ice to get to an earring my mother had dropped the night before in a winter dance. That block of ice was the coldest and hardest ice any man or woman had ever seen. This block is ten degrees colder. Can you chop through it?”

“I can try,” said Jack, “or perhaps die trying. But I can do no more and no less.” And he took the small pickax they had used to help them climb the mountain.

“Will you be finished before breakfast time?” asked Amos, glancing at the sun.

“Of course before breakfast,” said the prince, and fell to chopping. The ice chips flew around him, and he worked up such a sweat that in all the cold he still had to take off his shirt. He worked so hard that in one hour he had laid open the chunk, and there, sticking out, was the broken fragment of mirror. Tired but smiling, the prince lifted it from the ice and handed it to Amos. Then he went to pick up his shirt and coat.

“All right, North Wind,” cried Amos. “Take a look at yourself.”

“Stand so that the sun is in your eyes,” said the North Wind, towering over Amos, “because I do not want anyone else to see before I have.”

So Amos and Jack stood with the sun in their eyes, and the great blustering North Wind squatted down to look at herself in the mirror. She must have been pleased with what she saw, because she gave a long, loud laugh that nearly blew them from the peak. Then she leapt a mile into the air, turned over three times, then swooped down upon them, grabbing them up and setting them on her shoulders. Amos and Jack clung to her long, thick hair as the Wind began to fly down the mountain. The Wind cried out in a windy voice: “Now I shall tell all the leaves and whisper to all the waves who I am and what I look like, so they can chatter about it among themselves in autumn and rise and doff their caps to me before a winter storm.” The North Wind was happier than she had ever been since the wizard first made her cave.