The Girl Who Wanted to Catch the Wind

In the floating sky-city of Cloudholm, where everything is built high above the clouds by clever craftsmen called windwrights, there lived a small and very determined girl named Wren. Wren loved the wind more than anything else in the whole world. She loved the way it tugged and played at her hair, and the way it filled the great white sails of the sky-ships and carried them off between the clouds, and the way it hummed and whistled softly through the misty towers all through the night. And one day Wren decided, with all the fierce determination in her small heart, that she wanted to keep some of it. Some of the wind. All for her very own.

"If I could only catch the wind and shut it up safe in a box," she said to herself, "then I could open the lid whenever I liked, and I would have the wind with me forever and ever."

So Wren set to work, for she was not a girl who gave up easily. First she built herself a sturdy little box out of wood, climbed to a breezy ledge, and snapped the lid shut fast on a strong gust of wind. But when she carried it home and opened it up again later, the box was quite empty and still. The wind had slipped away out through all the tiny cracks between the boards.

"No matter," said Wren. "I shall try again." Next she built a box of clear glass, and sealed every edge tight with wax so that nothing at all could escape. She ran right up to the very highest terrace of the city, scooped up a great swirling armful of rushing wind, and clapped the glass lid down as fast as she could. But when she held the box up and peered eagerly inside, the air just sat there, flat and grey and lifeless. Trapped inside the box, the wind was not the wind anymore, not one bit. It was only... still air. All the rushing, tugging, whistling, singing life had gone right out of it.

Still Wren would not give up. She tried a box of hammered silver, with a lid that latched. She tried a round jar of baked clay, stopped with a cork. She even tried weaving a tiny delicate cage out of silk thread, as fine as a spider's web. But every single time, it was exactly the same. The very moment she caught the wind and shut it away, it stopped being the wind at all. At last Wren sat down on the cold stone of the terrace, tired and cross and dangerously close to tears, surrounded by all her empty, useless, failed boxes.

And that was when the old windwright found her — the oldest and the wisest craftsman in all of Cloudholm, with a kind lined face and hands gone rough and strong from a whole long lifetime of building sails. He eased himself down to sit beside her, and he looked slowly at all the boxes scattered around her, and he understood at once exactly what she had been trying to do.

"You cannot ever catch the wind, child," he said gently. "No one in all the history of the sky has ever managed it, and no one ever will. For the very moment you trap it and shut it away, you lose the one thing about it that you loved. The wind is only the wind for just so long as it is free."

"But then how can I keep it?" Wren asked him, her voice small and miserable. "How can I ever have the wind with me, if I can't catch it?"

The old windwright smiled a slow, warm smile. He reached back into his workshop and brought out something and placed it carefully into her two hands. It was a kite — a beautiful kite of bright painted cloth stretched over light slender wood, with a long tail of coloured ribbons. "You do not keep the wind by trapping it, little one," he said. "You keep it by dancing with it. Here. Come and see."

He led her out into the very middle of the wide open terrace, and he showed her how to let the string run out through her fingers, and all at once the kite leapt up and up into the bright sky. And in an instant the wind rushed in and filled it, and caught it, and tugged at it, and sent it soaring and swooping and diving and climbing high overhead — alive, rushing, whistling, singing, everything about the wind that Wren had ever loved and never once been able to keep inside any box. And all the while, right through the taut and trembling string, she could feel it — the whole living, pulling, dancing strength of the wind itself, tugging and playing at her very fingertips.

Wren laughed out loud with the pure joy of it. She ran along the terrace with the string in her hands, and the kite danced and swirled in the air above her, and the wind was hers at last — not trapped, not stilled, not shut away and spoiled, but playing with her, wild and free and utterly joyful.

"I have it!" she cried out, spinning as she ran. "I have the wind! And it's still the wind — it's still really, truly the wind!"

"That is the secret, child," said the old windwright, watching her run with a twinkle in his eye. "Some of the most wonderful things in all the world can never, ever be owned, or caught, or shut away in a box. The wind. The song of a bird. A warm and sunny afternoon. If you try to trap them and keep them, they only wither and die in your hands. But if you let them stay free, and dance along joyfully with them for as long as they last — why, then they are truly yours, wholly yours, in the only way that such wonderful things can ever belong to anyone at all."

And so Wren flew her bright kite up and down the terraces until at last the sun went down in gold and rose behind the towers of Cloudholm, laughing the whole time, holding the entire free and living wind at the end of one single string — and from that day on she never once wished for a box again.