The Dinosaur Who Could Not Roar

In the valley past the bend in the river there lived a small dinosaur called Rys. Everyone in his family could roar, and not in a small way either. His father roared so that cones dropped out of the trees and birds went up off the branches three bends downstream. His mother roared more quietly but for much longer, all in one breath, without a single gap in it. Even his big sister roared quite respectably already, and she was not yet three springs old. Only Rys did not roar at all.

When he tried, what came out was a squeak. A thin, very short squeak, like a bird that has landed on a branch and is about to leave it. Rys practised in the morning the moment he woke and practised in the evening when the others were asleep. He drew breath all the way down to his tail, straightened his neck, opened his mouth as wide as it would go — and every single time exactly the same thing came out. A thin little squeak, and then a silence in which the squeak seemed smaller still.

«It will come in time,» his mother said, every time she saw his face. «Or it might not,» said his sister, but she said it without unkindness; it was simply how it looked to her. In the end Rys stopped practising where the others could hear. He went down to the river instead, to the flat grey stone by the bend, where the water was loud enough that nobody could hear him from there, and he tried on his own.

Down by the river Rys found out one thing he told nobody about: his squeak carried further over the water than he had thought. When he squeaked on that flat stone, sometimes a bird answered him from the far bank — not because it understood anything, but because it had heard. Rys thought this was very poor comfort, and he usually forgot about it again the same day.

One morning the fog came into the valley. Not the ordinary morning kind that lifts before breakfast, but thick and white as milk — the kind where you cannot see your own feet, and you only notice a great tree when your shoulder has already hit it. The grown-ups walked right round the nest, counted everybody one by one, and said that nobody was going anywhere today.

So everybody stayed by the nest — everybody except little Nuta. Nuta was the youngest in the whole herd and did not yet understand what staying put means. And it is hard to blame her: a yellow butterfly came through the white, the only coloured thing that morning, and Nuta simply went after it. She vanished into the whiteness so fast and so quietly that nobody had time even to turn round.