The Song the River Learned

• 3 minute read
• Ages 5-9
• Bedtime Stories

A river came down out of the hills making a great deal of noise about it.

Up there it was all rock and drop and hurry. It crashed and roared and threw itself down ledges, and it was extremely pleased with the sound it made, which could be heard from a long way off.

"Listen to that," it said. "There is nothing quieter than a river that has stopped moving. Noise is the whole point."

Down onto the flat

Then the hills ended and the land went flat.

And the river slowed right down.

It could not crash any more because there was nothing to crash off. It spread out wide and shallow and went along at a walking pace between low banks, and the noise it made was almost nothing at all: a small continuous sound, more like breathing than anything else.

The river was ashamed of this for a long time.

What happened on the flat

But things began to happen on the flat that had never happened in the hills.

Reeds grew, which they could not do in fast water. Then birds came for the reeds. Fish that could not have held their place upstream lived here in numbers, and turtles, and a family of otters.

A village put itself on the bank. Then a second one further down. Children learned to swim in the shallow part by the bend, and women washed clothes on the flat stones, and in the evening people came and sat by the water simply because it was a good place to sit.

Nobody had ever sat beside the river in the hills. You could not have heard yourself think.

The evening sound

One evening a very old woman sat on the bank with a grandchild who would not settle.

And she said, "Listen to the river."

The child listened.

And that small continuous sound, which the river had been ashamed of for years, went into the child the way that sound does, and slowed everything down, and after a few minutes the child was asleep on the old woman's shoulder.

The river heard the whole thing.

It has never gone back to the hills, and it does not talk about the crashing any more, and every evening now it does the thing it turned out to be for.