that there must be a far different kind of beauty in the Garden of Eden.
“Oh, why did Eve pick from the tree of knowledge? Why did Adam eat the forbidden fruit? It should have been me, and then it wouldn’t have happened! Sin would never have come into the world!”
He said it then, and he said it now that he was seventeen years old. All he thought about was the Garden of Eden.
One day he was walking in the forest. He walked by himself because that was his favorite pastime.
Evening came. Clouds gathered, a rainstorm came up, and rain fell as if the whole sky was a floodgate with water gushing from it. It was as dark as it usually is at night in the deepest well. Sometimes he slipped in the wet grass, and sometimes he tripped over the bare rocks that stuck up from the rocky ground. Water poured off everything, and there wasn’t a dry thread on the poor prince. He had to climb up and over big boulders where the water was seeping out of the thick moss. He was ready to drop, but then he heard a strange whistling sound and saw in front of him a big cave, all illuminated. Right in the middle was a fire so big you could cook a stag on it, and that is exactly what was happening. A magnificent stag with huge antlers was on a spit and was slowly rotating between two felled spruce trees. There was an elderly woman, tall and strong, like a man in disguise, sitting by the fire, and throwing on one log after the other.
“Just come a little closer,” she said. “Sit down by the fire so you can dry your clothes.”
“There’s a bad draft in here,” the prince said and sat down on the floor.
“It’ll get even worse when my sons get home,” the woman answered. “You’re in the Cave of the Winds now, and my sons are the four winds. Do you understand that?”
“Where are your sons?” asked the prince.
“Well, it’s not so easy to answer a stupid question,” the woman said. “My sons are out on their own. They’re playing ball with the clouds up there in the sky,” and she pointed up into the air.
“I see,” said the prince. “You talk a little tougher and are not as mild as the women I’m used to.”
“Well, they must not have anything else to do then. I have to be tough to keep my boys in check. But I can do it too, even though they are pretty stiff-necked. Do you see those four sacks hanging on the wall over there? They are just as afraid of them as you were of the belt in the woodshed. I can fold the boys up, let me tell you, and put them in the sacks without further ado. They sit there and can’t get out to gad about until I say so. But here’s one of them!”
It was the North Wind who breezed in with freezing cold surrounding him. Big hail stones hopped around on the floor, and snowflakes swirled all around. He was dressed in pants and a jacket of bearskin, and a hood of sealskin covered his ears. He had long icicles hanging from his beard, and one hailstone after another rolled down the collar of his jacket.
“Don’t go right over to the fire,” the prince shouted. “You can easily get frostbite on your face and hands!”
“Frostbite!” The North Wind laughed out loud. “I love frost! What kind of a whippersnapper are you, by the way? How did you get to the Cave of the Winds?”
“He’s my guest,” said the old woman, “and if you’re not satisfied with that explanation, you’ll go into the sack. You know what to expect!”
That helped, and the North Wind told where he’d come from and where he’d been for almost a whole month.
“I’ve come from the Arctic Ocean,” he said. “I’ve been to Bear Island with the Russian whalers. I sat and slept by the tiller when they sailed out from the North Cape. Once in a while I woke up to find the storm petrels flying around my legs. It’s an odd bird. It flaps its wings once quickly and then holds them out unmoving and coasts.”
“Don’t be so long-winded,” said the wind’s mother. “And then you came to Bear Island?”
“It’s lovely there. What a floor to dance on, flat as a plate! Half melted snow with a little moss, sharp rocks, and skeletons of walruses and polar bears were lying there. They looked like the arms and legs of giants, green with mold. You’d think that the sun had never shone on them. I blew a little of the fog away so a shack became visible. It was a house made of a wrecked ship and covered with walrus skins. The flesh side was turned outward—it was red and green, and there was a live polar bear growling on the roof. I went to the beach and looked at the bird nests, looked at the little featherless chicks who were shrieking and gaping, and then I blew down into the thousand throats, and that taught them to close their mouths. Furthest down the walruses were wallowing like living entrails, or giant worms with pig heads and teeth two feet long!”
“You tell a good story, my boy,” said his mother. “It makes my mouth water to listen to you.”
“Then the hunt started. The harpoon went into the walrus’ breast so steaming blood was like a fountain on the ice. Then I thought about my own game and blew up the wind, and let my sailing ships, the peaked mountainous icebergs, squeeze the boats inside. Oh, how people whimpered and how they wailed, but I whistled louder! They had to lay the dead walruses, chests, and ropes out on the ice. I sprinkled snow flakes on them and let them drift south with their catch on the encapsulated boats, there to taste salt water. They’ll never return to Bear Island!”
“So you’ve done bad things then,” the wind’s mother said.
“Others can talk about the good I’ve done,” he said, “but here comes my brother from the west. I like him better than any of them because he smells of the sea and brings a blessed coldness with him.”
“Is it little Zephyr?”1 the prince asked. “Yes, certainly it’s Zephyr,” the old woman answered, “but he’s not so little any more. In the old days he was a lovely boy, but that’s past now.”
He looked like a wild man, but he had a crash helmet on so he wouldn’t get hurt. He was holding a mahogany club, felled in an American mahogany forest. Nothing less would do!
“Where did you come from?” his mother asked.
“From the primeval forests,” he answered, “where thorny vines make fences between each tree, where water snakes lie in the wet grass, and where people seem unnecessary!”
“What did you do there?”
“I looked at a deep river and saw how it came rushing from the mountains, became spray, and flew towards
