Nori the Nervous Narwhal

Deep in the cold blue sea, where the water was so clear you could see all the way to the bottom, there lived a young narwhal named Nori.

Nori had a beautiful spiralling horn that twisted out in front of her, long and pale and a little bit glittery when the light caught it just right. All the other narwhals had one too, but theirs didn't seem to cause them any trouble at all.

Nori's caused her a great deal of trouble.

She worried about it constantly.

She worried she might accidentally poke a fish. She worried she might get stuck in the sea plants. She swam with her head tilted to one side, trying to keep the horn pointing safely away from everything, which made her go around in small circles a lot of the time.

"What are you doing?" asked her cousin Pip, swimming past.

"Just being careful," said Nori, tilting even further.

Her mother found her one afternoon floating in a corner of the cove, looking miserable.

"Come with me," her mother said.

They swam out to a wide open part of the sea where the afternoon sunlight came slanting down through the water in long golden shafts. Her mother turned gently and began to swim — and as she did, she let her horn glide through the water in slow, beautiful arcs.

Tiny glittering eddies of light spun off the tip in spirals, trailing like ribbons through the dark blue water.

Nori stopped swimming and stared.

"Your horn," said her mother softly, "was not made for poking. It was made for this."

Nori turned her own horn slowly through the water. A tiny ribbon of light appeared.

She moved it in a gentle figure of eight. Two ribbons.

She laughed — a bubbly narwhal laugh — and began to swim in wide, swooping circles, leaving trails of light spinning in her wake.

"There you are," said her mother.

And Nori swam all the way home with her horn pointing straight ahead, bright and proud and perfectly itself.