Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson Page A

warm spring day you'll have me here again. Don't start the dam building without me.
    S NUFKIN.
    Moomintroll read the letter several times, and suddenly he felt hungry.
    He went out in the kitchen. It too was miles and miles under the earth as it were and looked dismally tidy and empty. The larder was just as desolate. He found nothing there, except a bottle of loganberry syrup that had fermented, and half a packet of dusty biscuits.
    Moomintroll made himself comfortable under the kitchen table and began to chew. He read Snufkin's letter once more.
    After that he stretched out on his back and looked at the square wooden clumps under the table corners. The kitchen was silent.
    'Cheerio,' whispered Moomintroll. 'Sleep well and keep your pecker up. First warm spring day,' he said, slightly louder. And then he sang at the top of his voice: 'You'll have me here again! You'll have me here, and spring's in the air, and it's warm and fair, and we'll be here, and there we are, and here and there in any year...'
    He stopped short when he caught sight of two small eyes that gleamed out at him from under the sink.
    He stared back, and the kitchen was silent as before. Then the eyes disappeared.
    'Wait,' Moomintroll shouted, anxiously. He crept towards the sink, softly calling all the while:

    'Come out, won't you? Don't be afraid! I'm good. Come back...'
    But whoever it was that lived under the sink didn't come back. Moomintroll laid out a string of biscuit crumbs on the floor and poured out a little puddle of loganberry syrup.
    When he came back to the drawing-room the crystals in the ceiling greeted him with a melancholy jingle.
    'I'm off,' Moomintroll said sternly to the chandelier. 'I'm tired of you all, and I'm going south to meet Snufkin.' He went to the front door and tried to open it, but it had frozen fast.
    He ran whining from window to window and tried them all, but they also stuck hard. And so the lonely Moomintroll rushed up to the attic, managed to lift the chimney-sweep's hatch, and clambered out on to the roof.
    A wave of cold air received him.
    He lost his breath, slipped and rolled over the edge.
    And so Moomintroll was helplessly thrown out in a strange and dangerous world and dropped up to his ears in the first snowdrift of his experience. It felt unpleasantly prickly to his velvet skin, but at the same time his snout caught a new smell. It was a more serious smell than any he had felt before, and slightly frightening. But it made him wide awake and greatly interested.
    The valley was enveloped in a kind of grey twilight. It also wasn't green any longer, it was white. Everything that had once moved had become immobile. There were no living sounds. Everything angular was now rounded.
    'This is snow,' Moomintroll whispered to himself. 'I've heard about it from Mother, and it's called snow.'
    Without Moomintroll knowing a thing about it, at that moment his velvet skin decided to start growing woollier. It decided to become, by and by, a coat of fur for winter use. That would take some time, but at least the decision was made. And that's always a good thing.
    Meanwhile Moomintroll was laboriously plodding along through the snow. He went down to the river. It was the same river that used to scuttle, transparent and

    jolly, through Moomintroll's summer garden. Now it looked quite unlike itself. It was black and listless. It also belonged to this new world in which he didn't feel at home.
    For safety's sake he looked at the bridge. He looked at the mail box. They tallied with memory. He raised the lid a little, but there was no mail, except a withered leaf without a word on it.
    He was already becoming used to the winter smell. It didn't make him feel curious any more.
    He looked at the jasmine bush that was an untidy tangle of bare sprigs, and he thought: 'It's dead. All the world has died while I slept. This world belongs to somebody else whom I don't know. Perhaps to the Groke. It isn't made for Moomins.'
    He hesitated for