The Little Dinosaur's First Snow

Far in the north, where the summer is short and the winter night lasts for weeks, there were dinosaurs too. They were smaller than the ones from the warm valleys and had thicker feathers, almost like fur, but otherwise they did exactly what every other dinosaur in the world did: they ate, they slept, they argued about the best spot, and they kept an eye on the young.

Kap was one of the young. He had hatched right at the beginning of spring, and all through the short summer he had seen only one colour around him: green ferns, green needles on the branches, green water in the shallows and green moss on the stones. Nobody had told him it was ever otherwise, so Kap simply thought that this was how the world was and how it would always be.

Then it turned colder. The leaves on the low bushes went yellow and came down within a few days. The birds left for somewhere southward in whole flocks, one after another, and for a week the sky was full of them, and then it was empty. Kap's herd began moving down into the valley, closer to the hot springs, where the ground stays warm even when the air nips at your beak.

One morning Kap came out of the hollow he slept in and stopped mid-step. Everything was white. The rocks, the bushes, the fallen tree by the water, even his own footprint from yesterday — all of it covered in something cold, soft and completely silent. The valley looked as if somebody had put a blanket over it in the night and left without waking anyone.

Kap had no word for it, because nobody had told him one yet. He touched it with his beak. It was cold and it stung a little. He touched it with a foot — and the foot went down into it up to the ankle, quietly, without any crunch at all. Kap pulled it carefully back out and saw that a shape of his foot had stayed behind in the white, exact down to every claw, as if somebody had drawn round it from underneath.