Sleepy Bear's Puddle

Oscar was the only bear on the whole hillside who could fall asleep standing up. Mid-step, mid-sentence, even mid-sneeze — down went his chin, and off he drifted. Everyone else on the hill thought this was a very fine trick indeed.

This morning, after warm rain, the hillside was covered in wildflowers, all nodding and dripping. Oscar wanted just one thing: to find the best puddle and have a good, long, splashing sleep in it, the way he did every year when the flowers came out.

He found one. Round as a plate, blue as the sky sitting in it. Oscar flumped down beside it, sighed a happy sigh, and closed his eyes.

"Oi," said a voice. It was Pip the wren, hopping along the puddle's edge. "You might want to hurry that sleep along. Sun's out. Puddles don't wait."

Oscar cracked one eye. The puddle did look a little smaller than before. He curled up tighter and tried again to sleep. But the sun climbed, and the puddle shrank, and shrank, until it was hardly bigger than a leaf.

"Shrinking!" said Oscar, sitting bolt upright. He tried scooping more rain in with his paws — splosh, splosh — but the sun drank it faster than he could pour.

He tried lying very still, hoping stillness would make it last. It didn't.

Then Oscar noticed something. Just downhill, in the shade of a fat old thistle, sat another puddle — cool, shadowed, untouched by sun.

"There," he mumbled, already stumbling toward it. He flopped down in the shade beside it, and this time nothing hurried him.

Pip watched him go still, chin dipping, paws sinking into cool mud.

"Typical," she chirped, fluffing her feathers — but she stayed on her branch above him anyway, keeping watch, while the shaded puddle rippled softly under one snoring bear.