Fifteen old tales of how things came to be, told in a soft Scottish voice: how the whale came by his narrow throat, how the camel came by his hump, how the first letter was ever written, why the sea tastes of salt, how a hundred eyes came to rest in a peacock's tail, and why there is a man in the moon. These are the patient answers people gave, long ago, to the oldest question of all: how did the world get to be this way? Each story is a little slower, and a little simpler, than the one before, until the last few are hardly stories at all, spring returning to a northern forest, and a snowbound wood where the only sound is a fox's far-off call.
The stories
- 1:23 The Counting of the Whales 12 min
- 14:50 The Young One Who Asked the River 12 min
- 27:51 The Girl Who Drew the River 13 min
- 42:04 The King and the Boastful Butterfly 13 min
- 56:08 The Hare Who Counted the Crocodiles 12 min
- 1:09:14 The Flute Player and the River King 12 min
- 1:22:44 The Leopard Who Learned the Color of Shadows 12 min
- 1:36:08 The Idle Camel and the Well of the Djinn 13 min
- 1:50:35 The Little Plant and the Lonely Mountain 12 min
- 2:03:21 The Quern That Knew How to Stop 12 min
- 2:17:00 The Watchman with a Hundred Eyes 13 min
- 2:31:39 The Basket at Dusk 12 min
- 2:44:37 The Woodcutter Who Forgot the Quiet Night 11 min
- 2:56:59 The Slow Visitor at the Edge of the Clearing 12 min
- 3:10:00 The Pond That Was Only Holding Its Breath 13 min
Retold from
- Japanese Fairy Tales, by Yei Theodora Ozaki
- Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling
- Old Peter's Russian Tales, by Arthur Ransome
- The Book of Nature Myths, by Florence Holbrook
- The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling
- Walden, by Henry David Thoreau