The Geese Bring the Colours Home
On the day the geese were due back, Dot the hedgehog laid her supper table eleven times.
The table was outside her house, because thirty geese do not fit through a small round door. Dot had built it from every plank in Hollow Meadow that nobody was sitting on. She laid it with the acorn cups on the left, and then on the right. She laid it with the big plates at the ends, and then in the middle. Once she put a pebble on every plate with a name scratched on it. Then she took them all off again, because the only goose whose name she knew was Big Martha, and twenty-nine pebbles that said GOOSE looked rude. The eleventh time, she stood back with her paws on her hips and said, “Perfect.” Then she moved one spoon.
It was her very first supper party, and she was worried, all the way down to her spines, that nobody would find it.
Here is why.
Every autumn in Hollow Meadow, when the first cold came, the animals rolled up their colours like wool. They gave them to the geese to carry south, so that winter would not fade them. The squirrels took hold of a loose end at the tips of their tails and wound and wound. When they stopped, they were grey all over and holding a ball of red. The red ball smelled faintly of toast. Nobody knew why, least of all the squirrels. Rosie the rabbit rolled the pink off her nose into a ball like a cherry. The green came off the grass and the blue came off the pond, and those were the biggest balls of all, and it took six rabbits to roll each one. Mr. Mole gave his brown. It was the smallest ball in the bundle, the size of a pea, and he was very proud of it.
“Small,” he said, “but very good brown.”
Dot gave the blue of her front door. It was the only blue door in the meadow, and she was proud of it too.
All the balls went into a net on a long string. She was the loudest goose anyone had ever met, and the kindest, and she had led the flock south and back for ninety years. Before she took the string in her beak, she said what she said every autumn.
“Ninety years,” said Big Martha, “and never dropped a drop.”
Every spring the geese brought the colours home, and everybody said thank you, and the geese flew off to rest on the top field. Nobody had ever asked them to supper. Dot thought somebody should. So as the flock rose up honking, she ran along underneath and shouted, “Come to supper when you’re back! All of you! It’s the blue door!” Big Martha’s beak was full, so she dipped her head, which in goose means yes.
It was only when the geese were three small marks in the sky that Dot went home and saw that her door was grey.
Of course it was. Everything was. All winter long, Hollow Meadow was as grey as a pencil drawing: grey grass, grey pond, grey squirrels, and a grey Mr. Mole, who complained about it to anyone who stood still. Rosie went about with a grey nose and kept it hidden behind one paw, so she had to hop on three legs, which was slow. And every morning Dot looked out at the grey meadow and her grey door and thought, they will never find it.
So on the day the geese came back, Dot had a plan. She would stand on her roof and wave her tablecloth, which was the only white thing in Hollow Meadow, and Big Martha would see it and remember.
The trouble was the wind. It was a spring wind, which means it had not made up its mind. It came in gusts. It turned Rosie’s ears inside out.
“There!” said Rosie, pointing with the paw that was not on her nose.
There they were, over the far hill, in a long untidy V. At the front flew Big Martha, with the bundle of colours swinging from her beak.
Mr. Mole climbed to the top of his molehill. “Have you got my brown?” he shouted. “It’s the small one! Don’t squash it!”
Dot waved the tablecloth with both arms. Just then the wind took one enormous breath, and the tablecloth went out of her paws, across the meadow, and down, exactly, over Mr. Mole.
“IS THAT MY BROWN?” said the tablecloth.
Now, a goose cannot laugh with her beak shut. Big Martha had never needed to know this. She looked down at a tablecloth on a molehill, shouting about brown, and she laughed the biggest honk of her life.
Out fell the bundle. It turned over and over in the air and landed in the middle of the pond.
Plop.
They fished it out with a rake. When it came up on the bank, everybody went quiet.
It was not a bundle any more. It was one great soggy knot the size of a wheelbarrow, with every colour in Hollow Meadow wound through every other.
Mr. Mole, who had got out from under the tablecloth, found a bit of brown and pulled. A fistful of green came out instead. He tried again and got more green. “I have never been green,” he said, “and I don’t intend to start.”
Rosie took hold of a pink end and tugged, very gently. The knot went tighter. She tugged harder, and it went tighter still and squeaked, the way wet wool does.
Big Martha landed and went all round the meadow honking sorry. “Sorry, Mole! Sorry, Rosie! Sorry, squirrels! Sorry, pond!” She sat down by the knot. “Ninety years and never dropped a drop,” she said. “And now look.”
The rest of the flock went up the hill to rest their wings, calling back, “Supper at sundown! The blue door!”
Dot looked at her grey door. She looked at the sun, which was already halfway down the sky. She looked at the knot. Then she looked over her shoulder at her own back, which was spines from top to bottom, like a hairbrush.
“Everybody stand back,” said Dot.
She curled up tight and rolled, slowly, into the tangle and out the other side. When she uncurled, three long ribbons were caught in her spines, a red and a gold and a green, each one separate and smooth as brushed hair.
The squirrels took the red and sniffed it. “Still toast,” they said.
“Again!” said Rosie. So Dot rolled again.
She rolled through that knot twenty times, and then twenty more. Every time she came out, more colours streamed off behind her, reds and golds and greens and pinks, until she looked like a maypole that had gone for a walk. Everybody ran alongside her and took what was theirs. The rabbits laid the green out over the grass, and the meadow went green from the pond to the hedge. Big Martha took the pond’s blue, because she owed the pond most of all, and let it run in gently at the edge.
Rosie got her pink. She smoothed it onto her nose and took her paw down for the first time since autumn, and hopped round in a circle on all four feet, just because she could.
Mr. Mole got his brown last but one. It had come out as a ribbon about as long as a whisker. He held it up to the light.
“Small,” he said, “but very good brown.”
Dot got her blue last of all, because she had been doing the rolling and everybody else had been doing the taking. She stood up dizzy and damp, with one blue ribbon caught on her very last spine. She laid the end of it at the bottom of her door and smoothed it up and over, and the blue went into the wood the way rain goes into the ground.
The sun touched the top of the hill. The door was blue.
The rest of the geese came down at once, all twenty-nine of them, straight to the blue door, and sat along the table with Big Martha. Dot did not move a single spoon.
Big Martha stood at the end to make a speech. It was mostly honking. Dot understood about one word in five, but the words were “thank you” and “hedgehog” and “best” and “sorry, pond,” and that was plenty. At the end Big Martha lifted her head up high.
“Ninety years,” she said, “and never dropped a drop.”
Then she thought about it, and laughed so hard she had to sit down. This time there was nothing in her beak to lose. “Ninety years,” she said, “and one drop. Into a pond. In front of everybody.”
When the plates were cleared, one thing was left on the bank of the pond: a stripe of bright yellow, about as long as a door is wide. Nobody claimed it. The squirrels said it wasn’t theirs. Mr. Mole said his was brown, thank you. The sun had its own.
So Dot painted it over her doorway.
And from then on, Dot’s house, with its blue door and its yellow stripe, was the easiest house to find in all of Hollow Meadow. Every spring the geese came down to it first and stayed to supper. And Dot never again laid the table eleven times.
She got it down to nine.