Strange Winds

There was a strange wind today. It whipped about the road, thrashing the tops of trees, and ripping cabbage heads from their patches and sending them tumbling into the road. It violently tugged at the coattails of schoolchildren and gentlemen and almost toppled the pillbox hats of proper ladies strolling down the street.

A woman living in the Scottish countryside opened her door and immediately had to hold onto her veil. "A very strange wind this is," she muttered. "A very strange wind indeed." It almost peeled every petal off of the flowers in her window boxes and set to kicking about the produce in her vegetable garden. "I better phone Gardenia," she said, shaking her head and re-entering the house.

Oceans away, a magician named Gardenia steps outside of his study to measure the wind. "Forty leagues away and it still finds me," he says wryly, smiling. He steps back into his butter yellow house to look for some graph paper and a book on meteorology. A tap comes from his windowpane. "One moment, please," he calls to the entrance. The tap comes again. "I'm coming," he shouts back there. "Just one moment." The tap comes yet again, more insistent this time. "I said, one moment," he replies irritably. That's when he realizes that the tapping is not coming from where he is standing on the bottom floor, but from the upper floor of his manor. A tree branch, perhaps? He thought. But no. His spine and skull were tingling. This was something out of the ordinary. Dropping his books, he races up the spiral staircase to the upper floor, bursting into his library. There. The tapping WAS coming from the window, and it WAS a tree branch, but there was something else there too. Something small and soft and fragile. The magician cranked a lever to open the window and his jaw dropped at what he saw. A basket with a thin blanket was hooked onto the tree branch outside. The wind was indeed making the trees tilt and pitch violently, but it was the basket that was making the tapping noise. Gardenia lifted the basket off the branch and carefully maneuvered it inside. Whatever was inside the basket was magical, he could feel that, and it might react badly if accidentally bumped against any of the magical objects he had in his library. Unfortunately, in spite of the man's best efforts, the basket did bump into something, but it didn't explode or send off sparks. It cried instead. A baby? the magician thought. But it was a very strange cry. A plaintive mewing more than the wail of a human baby. Gardenia set it down upon his desk and then carefully unwrapped the blanket, praying to the gods for protection in case whatever it was attacked him. It WAS a baby. But not a human baby at all. It was a ferret. Whew, the magician thought, leaning against his desk and wiping off his brow from relief. He didn't know why this infant ferret had been brought to him, but he was sure the answer would reveal itself later. Closing the window, he took the basket downstairs and began research on how to take care of ferrets.

It was only too bad he didn't see who had snuck in through the window right before he closed it...