In a country that had no name because it had no borders, lived an old man who lived at the side of the road and made whistles. Making whistles was all he ever wanted to do. Each time he made a whistle and tested it, playing out its tune, he would make a present of it for a boy or girl who passed his small house.

He was famous for his whistles whittled with love.

One day, when he had fallen asleep in a late afternoon nap, the sun warm on his chest where his hands were folded, a man passing by stole the old man’s knife that was lying there on the porch. How sad the old man was that his only knife was gone. How sad the children were when no whistles were being made. In town someone said the birds had stopped singing, that the forest was a dark and dismal place that could frighten any soul. Soon the leaves began to fall in the forest. And then the snow fell.

All that long winter, the old man tried to remember how it was, the way it was, when he made whistles and why he had no big dreams and no thoughts of grandeur. Happiness, he found, controlled him and his life. His house was a small house and once the forest behind his house had been thick and heavy with trees. Now it was sparser because of all the whistles he had whittled out of its trees. It seemed boys and girls everywhere played his whistles. But the thinning forest still promised nice shade for spring and would again be a fine place to walk. He was convinced of that all winter long.

Like a crocus popping out of the ground, spring came leaping and early. With the light of each new day coming upon the birds, they’d begin to whistle and send out signals to their friends. Each morning the man sat on his rocker on the porch and listened to them. Very closely he listened, picking up every sound that came out of the forest, every peep and every chirp, and every new sound. There was no bird’s song that he did not hear. After listening a while, he would settle on a sound or a song that best suited him for the day. That’s when he used to set off for the forest to find a piece of wood to whittle a new whistle, to capture that sound forever, when he had his trusty knife.

“Oh,” he’d think, “perhaps those days would never come back.” He would get sadder by each minute, as he remembered how it used to be. In the forest, there used to be a kind of magic in his search for the right piece of wood. Without fail that he’d find the right piece. It could be sitting in its place as a nice branch on a maple tree or it could be a strip of oak that lightning had driven away from its home at the top of a tree. Now and then it was the shape of a piece of wood that caught his eye instead of his ear. But it was always the right piece. And he had always given away the whistles that he made, with birds’ music in them.

Oh, how he loved the songs the birds whistled, and he could tell practically which day of the year it was, or the day of the season, because of the birds that stayed or the ones that already had journeyed far away. Some of the birds would end up way down in the other end of the world and would be gone for months. Some little red birds stayed all year long, singing songs for the old man. He loved the ones who stayed as well as the ones that traveled.

There was still glory in their music, but a full sadness sat in his heart, while he was without his knife, sadder each day he that could not whittle.

Then one bright morning, a new knife was on his porch. It just appeared on the deck. The old man did not know who left it. Some people said it was the mayor who left it in darkness. But that same morning the old man suddenly heard a bird calling from the forest. Out he went and found a piece of wood exactly as he thought it should be. The newly whittled whistle caught the new birdcall perfectly and the old man hung the whistle on his fence.

He was back in business, or so he thought.

But a strange thing had happened: now all the boys and girls knew what had happened, why the old man had been so sad, and none of them took the new whistle away from its place on the fence beside the old man’s little house at the side of the road.

Next day the old man heard another special bird, found a special piece of wood and made another whistle. That one too he hung on his fence. But no one took it. The children saw it, but none of them took it. The old man was sad, but making whistles was what he always wanted to do, so he kept at it. The birds kept calling and he kept making whistles and he kept hanging them on his fence. And still, nobody came to take his whistles.

Day after day, for the longest time, he heard the birds and made his whistles and hung them for the boys and girls. Each night he was sad inside his new happiness. But he knew he would never stop making whistles. Birds were beautiful when they sang, and his whistles were beautiful when they were played and somehow someone would come along to play lovely tunes on the small shafts of wood.

Soon there were hundreds of whistles hanging on his fence and not a single one had been taken. No boy or girl ever tried to play one or blow air into the mouthpiece or even tried to finger the little air holes. Not a single boy or girl tried one out. “Happiness,” he thought, “might not be the answer after all.”

And it was late that following winter, that the old man became sick and lay in his bed and the mayor and some other people came out from the town when they heard about his trouble. And the old man told them his life had been a good life, and he had no regrets, except that he wished the boys and girls would come to take his whistles off the fence. “But even if they don’t,” he said, “he had been happy making his whistles.”

And then, late in the afternoon, the wind began to blow from the edge of the forest. It blew quick and steady down the road and along the length of the old man’s fence. The old man and the mayor and the other people suddenly heard the most marvelous sounds they had ever heard, magical notes of every range imaginable, a music to be remembered forever.

And the old man who made whistles all his life closed his eyes, as he heard music coming from the strangest organ ever played.

To read Part IV, see Fables, Fairy Tales, and Folklore – Part IV