The Boy Who Stole the North Wind

Tam was the last one in the village still outside when the cold came down. He had been sent to shut the henhouse latch, and he had done it twice, because the first time his fingers were too numb to tell. Now he hurried home along the lane with his hood pulled low.

Halfway past the mill, the snowdrift by the wall moved. Tam stopped. Snow did not move on its own.

Then a boot pushed out of it, and a hand, and a voice said, muffled and cross, “If someone could see fit to pull, I would be grateful.”

Tam grabbed the hand and heaved. The snow let go all at once, and an old man sat up in the drift, white from cap to cuff, shaking powder from his beard.

“You are very small to be so strong,” the man said.

“You are very old to be out in this,” said Tam.

The old man laughed, a dry sound like branches. “Fair. I was walking south for the winter and the storm walked faster.” He climbed to his feet and brushed himself down, and the snow slid off him as if it had been waiting to.

“Come to our fire,” Tam said. “My gran has soup.”

The old man looked at him a long moment. Then he reached into his coat and brought out a small sack, grey and soft, tied with a knot of red thread. It was no bigger than a fist.

“I have nothing else to give,” he said. “But this will keep you warm better than soup. Untie it only when you truly need it, and never indoors, and never for long.”

Tam took it. The sack was warm, and it weighed almost nothing. When he looked up to say thank you, the lane was empty, and the snow had already begun to fill the old man’s footprints.

***

That night the wind screamed around the house, and the fire in the hearth burned low. Tam’s little sister cried with the cold. His gran wrapped her in every blanket they owned and still she shivered.

So Tam took the sack from under his pillow and carried it out to the yard, where the wind was loudest.

He untied the red thread. The knot fell open easily, as if it had been waiting.

Out of the sack came warmth. Not a flame, not a spark, but a moving breath of air, soft as a cat’s fur, and it curled around him and did not burn. It smelled of summer hay.

Tam carried it inside, and the sack did not go out. The cold room filled with gentle heat. His sister stopped crying. Gran put down the blankets and stared.

“Where did you get that?” she asked.

“An old man in a snowdrift,” Tam said. “He said it would keep us warm.”

By morning, word had run down the lane. The baker’s fingers were too stiff to knead. The widow at the end of the row had frozen pipes. Tam walked from door to door with the sack, and the wind inside it warmed each house in turn, quietly, like a hand on a cold cheek.

People followed him. Children ran ahead to knock on doors. Someone brought bread, and someone brought a fiddle, and the lane filled with the smell of rising dough.

“You have a summer in your pocket,” said the baker, laughing, and Tam laughed too.

He liked the way the whole village looked at him now. He liked it a great deal.

For three days the sack behaved. On the fourth, it began to hum.

Tam woke to a sound like bees in a jar. The sack sat on the hearth and shivered, and the fire shrank from it. He put his hand on the cloth and felt the wind turning over inside, restless as a dog before a storm.

“Sit still,” he told it. The humming got louder.

At supper it rattled the pots. During the night it rolled off the shelf and knocked the water bucket over. Tam lay awake, listening to it breathe.

In the morning Gran found him holding the sack shut with both arms. She sat down slowly on the bench beside him and folded her hands.

“Tell me what it’s doing,” she said.

“It wants out. It pushes at the corners.”

“And you’ve been pushing back.”

Tam nodded. His arms ached from it.

Gran looked at the fire for a long moment. “My mother knew a woman who caught the rain in a bucket,” she said. “She kept it under her bed to water her beans in August. It went well for a year. Then one night it came down all at once, through the floor, through the ceiling, and the woman stood in her kitchen up to her knees.”

“That’s a story,” Tam said.

“It’s a warning. Wind and rain don’t belong in sacks. Stolen weather always finds a way out, and it doesn’t care whose roof is under it when it does.”

Tam held the sack tighter. “Then I’ll hold it myself.”

Gran stood up and touched his hair. “You can’t hold a whole wind, lad. It’s bigger than you are.”

That night the humming turned to a low growl. Tam lay with the sack under his blanket, and the growl went on and on, like something counting.

***

It burst before dawn.

The sound came first, a crack like a frozen pond splitting. Then the sack tore itself apart in Tam’s hands, and the wind went up through the ceiling in a white whirl, taking the thatch with it.

Tam was thrown against the wall. Snow poured in through the hole above. Outside, the lane was full of noise, a shrieking that was almost a voice, and shutters flying, and the widow screaming for her goat.

He stumbled to the door. Roofs were peeling off the houses like bark. A sheet of thatch cartwheeled past him and vanished into the dark. Somewhere a shutter banged and banged against a wall, and the baker’s sign swung wild on its hook.

“Inside!” Gran shouted, dragging him back. “Stay by the hearth!”

The wind found the storehouse. Tam heard the door tear loose and the sacks of grain split open, and the flour went up in a white cloud that stank of the whole winter’s bread. Apples rolled down the lane like brown marbles. The fiddle from the feast night skittered past the window and broke on the well.

All night it raged. Tam sat with his sister against his chest and his arms around her, and the house shook, and the cold came in.

By grey morning it was gone. The lane lay deep in snow and scattered with grain and broken wood. Tam stood in the doorway and looked at what his summer had done. The baker came out of his ruined shop and looked at Tam, and said nothing at all, and that was worse than shouting.

Gran put a broom into Tam’s hands. “Not one word,” she said quietly. “Sweep.”

Tam did not sleep. He took his coat from the hook while the house was still dark, and he left the broom leaning by the door. Outside, the lane was white and the wind was still out there, low and muttering behind the hill.

He walked toward it. The snow took his feet to the knee, then to the waist.

At the edge of the village, in the lee of a stone wall, the wind kept a circle of bare ground. The old man sat in the middle of it as if it were a summer afternoon.

“You came back,” the old man said. “Most don’t.”

“How do I put it back?” Tam said. His voice shook, and he let it.

“Back where?”

“In the sky. Where it was. I’m sorry.”

The old man looked at him a long time. “The sack isn’t yours to keep,” he said. “You know that now. But sorry is not a trick either. You can’t say it to get something. You say it because it’s true.”

“It’s true.”

“Then go out to open ground and open the sack. Tell the wind what you did. And let it go. All of it. Even the warm part. Especially the warm part.”

Tam’s hands went cold in his pockets. “But it’s winter.”

“It is,” the old man said. “It always was.” He stood up and brushed the snow from his coat. “You’ll have to be cold for a while. That’s how it goes.”

Tam wanted to argue. Instead he nodded. The old man nodded back, and the circle of bare ground filled with snow, and there was nobody sitting in it anymore.

***

Tam climbed the hill past the last cottage, where the snow lay deepest and nothing stood between him and the sky. The sack hung at his belt, heavy and warm and pushing.

He set it on the snow and put both hands on it.

“North Wind,” he said. “I took you out of the sky because I was cold. I set you on my house like a dog on a chain. I made you do things you never wanted to do.”

The sack swelled and strained. Tam held on, and he did not let go, and he did not stop.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Go home.”

He pulled the cord.

It came out like a horse from a stable. It lifted Tam’s hair and knocked him flat and rolled him twice down the slope. Snow flew up in a bright white curtain. Somewhere below, the shutters rattled and the lanes rang with the sound of it, and then the wind climbed, and the hill was quiet.

Tam lay in the snow and looked at the sky. The clouds were breaking up. The cold was enormous and honest and clean.

“Well,” he said to nobody.

He carried the empty sack down the hill.

By afternoon the village was out in the lane with shovels and brooms and a rope for pulling. The baker nailed a board across his window with a crooked smile. Gran gave Tam a hammer and did not say a word, only nodded once, and that was better than shouting.

It was a long winter. They ate thin bread and shared it. But the roofs went back on before the next snow, and the storehouse filled again by spring, and the lane was always full of people carrying things for each other.

Tam kept the empty sack folded under his bed. Now and then he took it out and held it to his ear. It was just cloth. He liked it that way.