OWLS Barn Studio

The Bear Who Forgot How to Sleep

It happened on the first cold night of winter, when every other creature in the forest was tucking itself away.

Bramwell the bear made his bed of leaves and pine needles, just as he had every year since he was a cub. He turned around three times. He yawned an enormous yawn. He closed his eyes.

Nothing happened.

He lay there, listening to the silence of the sleeping forest. A rabbit snored softly nearby. A hedgehog whistled through its nose. The deer breathed slow and steady as the tide.

Bramwell’s eyes stayed wide open.

“I seem,” he said to no one, “to have forgotten how.”

He tried counting snowflakes. He counted four hundred and eleven before he lost his place. He tried thinking of very dull things: mud, puddles, the colour beige. He tried humming, very low, the way his mother used to hum.

Still nothing.

After a while, he wrapped himself in his patchwork quilt — a gift from the badgers, made of old blankets and warm memories — and went to sit beneath the old oak tree to think.

A little mouse came and sat beside him. Her name was Mossie, and she was very small but not at all shy.

“Can’t sleep?” she asked.

“I’ve forgotten how,” Bramwell said sadly.

Mossie thought about this. “When I can’t sleep,” she said, “I think of one good thing from the day. Just one. Then another. Then usually I’m asleep before I reach ten.”

Bramwell tried it. He thought of the first thing: the way the frost had made the grass look like it was made of glass this morning. That was a good thing. Then: the smell of the last autumn blackberries, sharp and sweet. Then: Mossie sitting beside him right now, very small and very kind, in the cold dark.

He got to seven before his eyes grew heavy.

He got to eight — the sound the snow made when it fell, which was almost not a sound at all — before his head drooped.

He did not reach nine.

Mossie tucked a corner of the patchwork quilt over his paw, patted it once, and scurried off to her own warm nest beneath the roots.

Bramwell slept through all of winter, deep and warm and very well. And when he woke in spring, the first thing he did was find eight more good things — just to be ready for next year.

The End.

~ OWLS Barn