Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson

alike. One of them turned her head and called distantly: ‘Another night…’
    Moomintroll sat down on the sand. She had spoken to him. She had promised to come back. There would be moonlight for many nights to come if only it wasn’t cloudy. And he would make sure not to light the hurricane lamp.
    He suddenly realized that his tail was freezing. He was sitting on the very spot where the Groke had sat.
    *
    The following night he went down to the beach without taking the hurricane lamp with him. The moon was on the wane now, the time when the sea-horses would soon go and play somewhere else. This he knew, and felt it instinctively.
    Moomintroll had the silver horseshoe with him. It
hadn’t been an easy matter getting it back. He had blushed and behaved terribly awkwardly. Moominmamma had taken the horseshoe off its nail without asking why he wanted it.
    ‘I’ve rubbed it with silver-polish,’ she had said. ‘Look how nicely it’s come up!’
    No more than that, and in quite an ordinary voice, too.
    Moomintroll had muttered something about giving her something to replace it and taken himself off with his tail between his legs. He
couldn’t
explain about the sea-horse, he just couldn’t. If only he could find some shells. She would certainly like to have shells rather than a horseshoe. It would be a simple matter for the sea-horse to bring up a few of the largest and most beautiful from the bottom of the sea. That is, of course, if sea-horses cared about other people’s mothers. Perhaps it would be better not to ask.
    She didn’t come.
    The moon went down and no sea-horses came at all. Of course she had said ‘another night’ and not ‘tomorrow night’. Another night could be any night. Moomintroll sat and played with the sand and he was very sleepy.
    And of course the Groke came. She came over the water in her cloud of cold like somebody’s bad conscience, and crept up the beach.
    Moomintroll suddenly became incredibly angry.
    He backed up to the alder bushes and shouted: ‘I’ve
no lamp for you! I’m not going to light it for you any more! You shouldn’t come here, this island belongs to my father!’ He walked away from her backwards, turned and started to run away. The aspens round him trembled and rustled as if there was going to be a storm. They knew that the Groke was on the island.

    When he was back in his bed, he heard her howling, and it seemed much closer than before. ‘I hope she doesn’t come in here,’ he thought. ‘As long as the others don’t know she’s there. She carries on like a fog-horn… I know somebody who’ll say I’m being stupid, and that’s the worst thing of all.’
    *
    At the edge of the thicket Little My lay listening under a low-lying branch. She pulled the moss tightly round her and whistled thoughtfully. ‘Now he’s got himself into a nice mess. That’s what happens if you start making a fuss of the Groke and imagine you can be friends with a sea-horse.’

    Then she suddenly remembered the ants and laughed heartily and loudly to herself.

The Fog
    ACTUALLY, Moominmamma hadn’t said anything terrible and certainly nothing that should have made Moominpappa feel annoyed. Nevertheless Moominpappa couldn’t for the life of him remember what she had said. It was something about the family having quite enough fish.
    It had started by her not admiring the pike enough. They hadn’t got any scales, but anyone could see that it was a pike of over six pounds, well – five anyway. When one catches one perch after the other just because one wants to provide for one’s family, it’s quite an event to catch a pike. And then she had made that remark about having too much fish.
    She had been sitting as usual by the window, drawing flowers on the window-sill. It was quite full of flowers all over. Suddenly Moominmamma had said, not
looking at anyone in particular, that she just didn’t know what to do with all the fish he caught. Or was it that they hadn’t any more jars