The Longest Wait

A Story for All Ages by Aaron McEmrys

This story is about the darkest, and then the lightest, chapters in the long history of the Snorris. For those of you who have never met one, Snorris are kind of like a cross between a penguin and a pigeon. They are pretty big, for birds, about the size of your average human three-year-old.

Snorris love to nap, and the most startling thing about them is the incredibly loud snoring sound they make whether they are actually asleep or not, which is how they came to be called Snorris.

They are lazy birds, and when they aren’t asleep the thing the Snorris love most is laying on their backs in the broad meadow under the dense eider-berry bushes, nibbling away at the sweet purple berries above them.

One spring morning, after the mother Snorris had all laid their eggs in the community nursery, the whole village awoke to an unexpected sight. There, amongst all the speckled eggs they were accustomed to – was an enormous, truly enormous, egg. It was bright blue with a pearlescent sheen. If you looked closely the blue egg seemed to swirl with a color and light all of its own.

Nobody knew what to do. It didn’t look like one of their eggs, but there it was, right there in the community nursery. They took turns sitting on it just like the other eggs, even though they needed to climb a small stepladder to get up on top of it.

Time passed, and soon all the other eggs hatched into lovely young Snorris. But the giant blue egg did not hatch.

The mother Snorris gathered around and put their ears up against the shell. Nothing. Tap, tap, tap, with their beaks…and still nothing.

Meanwhile, all was not well in the eider-berry meadow. The S’nives had come. The S’nives are like rats with very long sinewy legs. Their have small but very sharp teeth and their skinny necks are so long and flexible that they have the disconcerting ability to turn their heads all the way around without moving their bodies.

S’nives will eat just about anything, but their favorite thing to eat is whatever somebody else loves most. They didn’t particularly care for eider-berries, but they loved the look of confused suffering on the faces of the Snorris as they greedily gobbled up all the berries, leaving nothing but scraps for their big bird-bodied neighbors.

Many Snorris wanted to pack up in the dead of night and go away to a new meadow, but there was one big problem: the great blue egg still hadn’t hatched.

The Snorris argued far into the night. Some wanted to move, leaving the egg behind for the S’nives to make an omelet out of in the morning – while others wanted to stay and wait for the egg to hatch in its own sweet time – even though that meant being bullied by the awful S’nives until then.

Finally, Old Wanda, the Great Grandmother of all the Snorris, waddled forward. “Now I’ll admit I love eider-berries more than most, but this egg is our egg, strange as it may be, and we can’t leave it. Imagine if we’d been left behind when we were helpless little eggs.”

“And remember, Junior” she said to a young Snorri who was most eager to leave the egg behind, “you were a very late egg, weren’t you? I had to sit on your for days after your sisters and brothers hatched! And you, Jeannie – you came early. And we had to crush up eider berries one by one and squirt them down your gullet for weeks.”

“You can all leave if you want to, but I will stay and look over this egg come what may.”

The Snorris suddenly felt ashamed of themselves. And so it was settled, the Snorris would stay.

The next few weeks were awful. Day after day, exhausted Snorris gathered around the great egg, hoping it would hatch. But there was nothing to be done except to wait, and to take turns climbing up the ladder to sit on top of it for warmth.

But early one morning, just as the S’nives were sitting down for their huge berry-breakfast, the egg finally hatched. Unfortunately no one was there to see it, as the S’nives insisted that every single Snorri be present to help serve their breakfast.

So words can scarce describe what happened when an enormous, bright blue, pearlescent baby dragon landed in the middle of the meadow with a clumsy thump.

“Mommy? Mommy? Where are you Mommy?” it said through foot-long, razor-sharp teeth. “I hatched Mommy, see, I did it all myself!”

A profound and utter silence filled the meadow.

“There, there, little one,” said Old Wanda gently as she waddled forward and rested a tender grey wing on the dragon’s snout. “We’re so glad to see you. Welcome to the world!”

The dragon grizzled its snout into her warm feathers and signaled its happiness with a friendly snort of smoke and fire that singed more than a few of Old Wanda’s feathers.

Presently the young dragon raised its head and looked around curiously, and the Snorris, recovering from their shock, gathered ‘round their new hatchling in welcome.

Meanwhile the S’nives, as you might guess, took this opportunity to slink away from the meadow as quickly and quietly as possible, and they’ve never been heard from since.