Tupek and the Storm

Tupek was a small dinosaur with a green back and a very long tail. He lived with his mother and his grandmother in a valley by the river, where the ferns grew taller than he was and the horsetails were as thick as his foot. He liked almost everything there was to like in that valley: bathing in the shallow water at the bend, the warm stones in the afternoon, a breakfast of young leaves, and the way his grandmother talked about the times when the river ran somewhere else. There was only one thing in the world he did not like.

He did not like storms. When the sky went dark in the middle of the day, Tupek looked for the biggest leaf he could find, slid in underneath it and sat there hunched up until it was all over. The leaf did not help much, because thunder can be heard through every leaf in the world. But under it Tupek felt at least a little smaller, and when you are smaller it is somehow easier to hide.

That afternoon the air went thick and heavy, as if somebody had covered the valley with something large. The dragonflies flew low over the water and stopped chasing each other off. The ferns went so still that not one frond moved. Even the river was rushing more quietly than usual. His grandmother lifted her head from the water, looked towards the hills and said only one word: «Coming.» Tupek began at once to look about for a suitable leaf.

The first flash went right across the sky, from one hill to the other, and for a moment the valley was as white as noon. Tupek shut his eyes. He counted to three in his head, and then the thunder came — the kind that shook the ground under his feet, shook the water in the puddles, and brought the drops down off the ferns. Tupek pushed himself deeper in between the stems and began to squeak very quietly, although he did not want to at all.

His mother sat down beside him on the wet sand. She did not tell him not to be frightened, because she knew that this sentence has never once helped anybody in the history of the valley. She waited for the next thunder to pass and then said something quite different: «Would you like to know where that storm is now?» Tupek did not want to know anything whatsoever and would happily have stayed under the fern until evening. But he became the smallest bit curious, so he opened one eye.

«When you see the flash, start counting,» said his mother. «And stop exactly when you hear the thunder.» Tupek did not understand what good that would do anybody, but he was good at counting, so he tried. He waited with one eye open until it flashed over the hill again. One. Two. Three. Four. Thunder. «Four,» said his mother, and nodded. «That means the storm is still a long way off, somewhere out beyond the hill, and not here at all.»