The Gloom and the River

Long ago, before the village had a name, the river used to sing.

It began as a spring high in the hills, a single bright drop that would not stop bubbling. It ran down through the ferns, round the mango trees, under the roots of the great figs and out to the sea, and all along the way it hummed. The frogs knew the tune. The otters knew the tune. The capybaras hummed it through their noses while they grazed. And the gators, who have lived beside rivers for longer than anybody, knew every single note.

Then one grey autumn, the river went quiet.

Nobody saw the Gloom arrive. It did not march in or crash down. It seeped, the way cold seeps under a door. First the puddles went dull. Then the reeds drooped. Then one morning a puddle by the path sat up, wobbled, and grumbled at a passing duck. That was the first Sludge Blob.

After that the Gloom was everywhere. It rolled burrs along the paths like angry little wheels. It crept into beetle shells and made them sticky. It settled on the boars of the jungle so that they forgot they had ever been friendly, and charged at anything that moved. Even the gentle animals went cross and snappy, and nobody could remember why.

The young gators wanted to fight it. "Bite it! Whack it! Chase it back to wherever it came from!"

But the oldest gator in the valley, whose scales were as green-grey as river stones, shook her head.

"You cannot bite the Gloom," she said. "It is not a monster. It is a muddle. Under every Sludge Blob there is a puddle of clean water. Under every grumpy boar there is a boar who wants to go home and roll in the mud. The Gloom just sits on top, like murk on a pond. So we will not fight the creatures. We will calm them."

So that is what the gators did. When a Sludge Blob came wobbling, they tapped it, and splashed it, and kept at it until the murk let go. And the blob burst into clean water and a scatter of leaves, and was a puddle again. When a boar charged, they held their ground until the Gloom shook loose, and the boar blinked, snorted, and trotted home.

It was slow work. It still is. But each calmed creature makes the valley a little brighter, and every reed bed planted in the shallows cleans a little more of the river.

The old gators say that when the last of the Gloom is gone, the river will sing again. Some say they can already hear it, very faintly, on quiet mornings by the water.

Listen next time you're there.