Rue and the Humming Stone — Under the willow bank, Rue shook an empty reed on a string. It made no music at all. Read the full story →
Under the willow bank, Rue shook an empty reed on a string. It made no music at all. She wanted one smooth pebble to tuck inside it, just one, so her nest would chime when the evening wind came. The best pebbles waited upstream, past the cold stepping stones where the creek whispered hush-hush over its own secrets.
Rue hopped out from the mossy bank. The first stone chilled her webbed feet. The second wobbled and splashed her belly with water that smelled like rain and clay. On the third, she heard a sound—not from above, not from the reeds, but below her toes. Hmmmm. She bent close. A crack in the flat rock held a tiny blue shell, and inside it trembled a bead of water, ringing like a glass bell.
“My chime!” Rue peeped, then stopped. One small sound was lovely, but the creek had hidden a whole song. She carried the shell back, not to keep in her nest, but to hang from the low willow branch. At sunset, every duckling came to hear it hum. If you follow the curled ripples around Rue’s stone, you might find where the hush-hush song began.
